Of the many documentaries playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, Gary Tarn's Black Sun defies the traditional documentary moniker. While it is about an artist, French painter and filmmaker Hugues de Montalembert who was made blind in1978 after a brutal attack, the film is not a biography. While it deals with issues of blindness, Black Sun is hardly a social issue film. Tarn, a composer by trade, is a first-time filmmaker who traveled the world collecting images to match Montalembert's narrative. The overall effect, not unlike the documentary work of Chris Marker, is less journalistic and more philosophical, and the brunt of Montalembert's memoir takes one beyond the traditional epistemology of vision into a surprising inquiry about the morality and ethics of seeing. The film will be playing this week at the Tribeca Film Fetival. Worth seeing.

# posted by Peter Bowen @ 4/30/2006 07:30:00 PM

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Just saw the film tonight -- really great. Fascinating in its use of images and sound; it's a movie about a blind man re-discovering the world, and the film compensates for its use of images by depriving us of the sounds that normally accompany those images. As you begin watching it, you try to form connections between the images and the voiceover but you eventually surrender to what is often simply the filmmaker's intuitive visual flow.
# posted by  Scott Macaulay @ 5/02/2006 10:22 PM  

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