Black Sun

Synopsis: Hugues De Montalembert was a French painter and film-maker who in 1978 was blinded when two intruders who broke into his New York apartment and threw paint stripper into his face. He wrote a bestselling autobiography, La Lumière Assassinée (1982), translated as Eclipse, and here he talks about the experience and his response to it.

Narrated by Montalembert with images and music provided by British musician and film-maker, Gary Tarn, Black Sun is above all a thought-provoking meditation on life itself. Recalling Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) in which the British director recounted the experience of losing his eyesight as a result of AIDS by means of an audio track accompanying a blank blue screen, Tarn's approach is less demanding for the audience, its manipulated imagery providing a kind of visual correlate to Montalembert’s ruminations. A fundamental characteristic of Montalembert’s experience is that he continues to “see” visual sensations despite the absence of visual stimuli. Thus, for the first half of the film Tarn gives us blurred, distorted images that perhaps might be taken as approximating Montalembert's vision but which seem more to be a self-sufficient play of abstracted shapes and colours, and, in contrast to the total blackness which we might assume, intended to be generically representative of the subjective experience blindness or near-blindness. In the second part of the film, in which Montalembert describes his solo overseas trips, the visuals become naturalistic, presenting what Montalembert might have seen had he been able.

The treated visuals are in themselves beguiling and, combined with Tarn's ambient soundtrack, highly effective in generating a contemplative space for the narration. Whilst not given to personal revelation and at this remove quietly accepting of his condition, Montalembert (who is married to artist Lin Utzon whose father designed the Sydney Opera House) is an articulate and an evidently strong-willed person whose reflections on his condition, in effect inviting we the audience to contemplate the gift of sight, are well-worth listening to.

 

 

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