NIGHTFALL

Rights Information
Year
2005
Reference
F89227
Media type
Moving image
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Rights Information
Year
2005
Reference
F89227
Media type
Moving image
Categories
Video Art

‘Nightfall’ Sriwhana Spong, 2005

Wes Craven's
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

GLEN (CONTD)
You ever read about the Balinese
way of dreaming?

NANCY
No.

GLEN
They got a whole system they
call 'dream skills'. So, if
you have a nightmare, for
instance like falling, right?

NANCY
Yeah.

GLEN
Instead of screaming and getting
nuts, you say, okay, I'm gonna
make up my mind that I fall
into a magic world where I can
get something special, like a
poem or song.
(grins hopefully)
They get all their art literature
from dreams. Just wake up and
write it down. Dreamskills.

He stops, seeing the look on NANCY's face. Our ZOOM is much
closer now, a wide medium, and still coming in on the kids.

NANCY
And what if they meet a monster
in their dream? Then what?

GLEN
They turn their back on it.
(grins hopefully)
Takes away its energy, and
it disappears.

NANCY
What happens if they don't do
that?

GLEN
(shrugs)
I guess those people don't
wake up to tell what happens.

NANCY
Great.

‘Nightfall’ was the 2005 Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award winner.

Sriwhana Spong’s Nightfall – screened at last year’s Place, Ground, Practice New Media Arts Exhibition – cuts the shackles with triumphant modesty. Rather than grappling with cultural identity as some deathless bloodrite, she orbits it with a fascination that feels morbid and inevitable. There’s no book beating, no breath-of-God, no lines drawn in the sand; only an uneasy hum that throbs into a scrapbook miasma of contradictory impulses. Ever the utilitarian, Spong shot the film in her own backyard, but it ends up contradicting that implied spatial comfort: sights emerge looming and stillborn in the night like planets, the camera caught in a stupor that’s half-sleepwalk half-seance. And like the soundtracked “Here Comes My Baby” by Cat Stevens, starved here to a metallic death rattle, Nightfall pushes into a realm where kitschy familiarity starts to violently turn in on itself: In the liminal nightspan, traditional Balinese offerings evoke only a deathly non-presence (in one instance, I mistook threaded cigarettes for a network of bones). But those quick to cite The Blair Witch Project shouldn’t set their watch by formal trappings; if there’s any real horror here, it’s that of spiritual abandonment, and the fear of being subsumed by a mytho-otherness. In other words, nothing that's gonna be solved by sticking your head under the sheets.—DL www.lumiere.net.nz/reader/item/358