black sun
henri michaux
a film by
delphine seyrig
produced by
maureen fazendeiro o som e a fĂşria, norte productions
“I am writing to you from a distant country. We have here, she said, only one sun in the month, and for only a little while. We rub our eyes days ahead. But to no purpose. Inexorable weather. Sunlight arrives only at its proper hour. Henri Michaux “I am writing to you from a distant country” in Selected Writings by Henri Michaux originally published in Lointain intérieur © Editions Gallimard
synopsis
technical informations
Glimpses of the solar eclipse of march 20, 2015 in Lisbon. A letter from elsewhere recounts life in a distant land.
2019, Portugal-France, 7’
“Underscored by French film legend Delphine Seyrig’s evocative recitation of a Henri Michaux poem, Maureen Fazendeiro’s film is a mysterious, multi-textured and philosophical portrait of eclipse spectators in Portugal.” Andréa Picard
original title: sol negro / soleil noir shooting support: 16mm screening copy: DCP image: color/b&w, 4:3 sound: stereo spoken language: french subtitles: english, portuguese, spanish
screening
Wavelengths 2: Sun Rave Saturday, Sept 7 — 6:30 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox Cinema 3
director’s note Black sun is the expression often used to name an eclipse of the sun, a moment of inversion where day becomes night and light becomes dark. The momentary disappearance of the sun - source of light, life, and color - has given birth to innumerable beliefs in the history of mankind, most of them relating the astronomical event with the imminence of a human or natural catastrophe. A black sun is a strangeness that cradles the restlessness of its witness. In this short film I used the technique of visual and sound collage, mixing images that we shot in 16mm on a solar eclipse day; tinted archives of landscapes dating back to the early years of cinema and color experiments; a self-portrait of
the earth, in sound, sent into space for possible extraterrestrial or future human intelligences; and a radio archive of a poem by Henri Michaux read by French actress Delphine Seyrig, which speaks of a distant and strange country. The whole is a small poetic variation on the distant, a diptych on seeing and hearing, a game between inside and outside the frame and an almost science fiction movie. Black Sun is my first film entirely made in Portugal, the country I came to live in 2014. A few months after my arrival, I received an invitation to make a film commissioned from France. In March 2015, I gathered a small team, borrowed a camera and, using leftover 16mm black and white film, shot the total eclipse of
the sun, visible at 67% from the Lisbon astronomical observatory. Or rather, I filmed it’s observers: men, women and children gathered to watch the visible movement of the earth and moon around the sun. That day I collected a series of portraits of amazed spectators. I was interested in the possibility of causing a collision between a collective experience and an intimate experience. It was the starting point of a film that would draw something of our relationship with the visible and the invisible, with the real and the fictional, through a game of resonances and echoes between images and sounds from distant places and times. A few weeks later, the commission was
canceled and I had to stop editing. I then began a collection of visual and sound material that would complete the images I had filmed. At the same time, I began working on another project in which I was particularly interested in archeology, this matrix of stories of lost civilizations reconstituted from their remaining fragments. When in 2019, thanks to a support for post-production, I was able to resume the editing interrupted almost four years earlier, it was now about the archeology of a film from the fragments collected over time. I came back to this poem by Henri Michaux that speaks of an imagined
country where the sun only appears once a month, an event that arouses a certain excitement in the inhabitants of that country. Composed of extracts from letters written in an intimate tone, this prose poem describes a country oscillating between the credible and the strange. I then worked looking for common points and discrepancies between the poem and the images I had filmed, fetching images and sounds from archives to make the archeology of a world perhaps vanished, perhaps yet to come, perhaps imaginary, with areas of darkness and where each viewer can have a space to explore. “Michaux’s poem is for me about that feeling of not beeing quite from here,
nor quite from anywhere else.” This is Delphine Seyrig’s introduction to the poem she chose to read to the radio in 1985. And it is certainly the same reason that led me to return to that poem to dialogue with the images filmed upon my arrival in Lisbon. Maureen Fazendeiro.
about the director
filmography
Maureen Fazendeiro was born in France in 1989. She studied Art, Literature and Cinema at the Denis Diderot University – Paris VII. In 2012, she joined Independencia, where she was in charge of the publishing of books about cinema. In 2014, she concluded her first film, Motu Maeva. It premiered at FID Marseille, won awards at Doclisboa and Valdivia among others, and has been screened at film festivals, museum s and cinematheques around the world. She works with film medium and is a member of L’abominable, an artist-run film laboratory based in Paris. Since 2016, she is working as scriptwriter for Miguel Gomes’s upcoming film, Selvajaria, and has been preparing her first featurelength film, As Estações. She lives in Lisbon.
[2019] Sol Negro // Black Sun 7’, Portugal, France [2014] Motu Maeva 42’, France
credits
contact
A film by Maureen Fazendeiro based on a poem by Henri Michaux read by Delphine Seyrig
DISTRIBUTION AND PROMOTION Salette Ramalho Agencia - Portuguese Short Film Agency +351 965 356 467 agencia@curtas.pt
PHOTOGRAPHY Nicolas Rey, Pedro Pinho SOUND António Pedro Figueiredo EDITING Pedro Filipe Marques, Maureen Fazendeiro SOUND DESIGN Miguel Martins GRADING Marco Amaral PRODUCERS Luís Urbano, Sandro Aguilar, Valentina Novati
get film materials and presskit: www.agencia.curtas.pt
PRODUCTION (PT) O Som e a Fúria www.osomeafuria.com PRODUCTION (FR) Norte Productions www.norte.fr