Ulisses.
“A Noite” is a tale of two solitary lives, which have no communication between them. It is this solitude that sometimes takes on the dimension of the night.
The night is dark. The mother is dark, in this film
The whole Universe can be dark when one is alone and abandoned.
There are childhood memories of nightmares, which come when we get to the time to sleep and to wrap ourselves in our lives and dreams.
When this sleep doesn’t come, it seems that the darkness is eternal, and that the day will never come.
We stay in shadows and solitude, with fantasies and fears, and small noises and silences accumulate.
In the technique used in this film, so that some light could get in, I had to scratch away the darkness of the paint that covered the plaster plates.
The play of light and shade forms every image. This was solitary work, in a room that was painted completely black. Ironically, there was a strange parallel between the solitude, the isolation, and the darkness that the tale speaks about, and the solitude and isolation of the black part of the films.
Each image is filmed and destroyed to make way for the next image. Shade follows light continually.
At the end, the only record of the thousands of designs is the film itself, and the final design that remains in each plaster plate.