Dark Matters – A Global Night Shift. Lecture by Thomas Taube

Dark Matters – A Global Night Shift
From Tokyo to Kabul and beyond. One Night, Eight Cities. 

In Dark Matters (2015), Taube approaches the remote state of a distant night, by investigating and collecting various evening experiences and their atmospheric perspectives. He conducted a series of interviews with night watchmen from around the world who shared their observations and personal experiences. It resulted in a series of stories about the night as a state, a shelter, a danger zone and a place of darkness. Taube succeeds in distilling the individual responses and feelings and translates them into simple and strange pictures played by a single protagonist. The character developed from this hybrid personality is one that cannot be fully grasped. The sense of darkness and loneliness places everything under the spell of self-observation and elevation.

The film plays the aftermath that lies beyond the conventional or mystical encounters that one may experience in the shadow world. The night becomes the state of the figure; the darkness has penetrated their existence and now both have formed the nature of the isolated protagonist.