Review: The Darkness of Day

Over the years, I have been lucky enough to see a handful of short, experimental films by the San Francisco filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt. Active since the early 1980s, Rosenblatt makes films almost exclusively with found footage, reworking benign and mostly anonymous old images to make powerful new ones about our emotional states, or, in other words, who we really are. For me, Rosenblatt's more recent films like Prayer (2001) and Phantom Limb (2005) are the most touching, and his newest film, The Darkness of Day -- which premieres March 30 on HBO2 -- joins them. It's another of his mini-masterpieces.

This one focuses on the mystery and tragedy of suicide, which had touched Rosenblatt's life in more than one way (he elaborates during the opening and closing titles). Though that subject matter already sounds like a huge bummer, Rosenblatt approaches the material slowly and finds a measure of beautiful sadness in it. A male narrator reads from the real journal of a suicidal man, with such thoughts as "I can recognize beauty but am no longer moved by it," while a female narrator recounts the details of several other, real-life suicides, including Ernest Hemingway's. This approach allows viewers to meditate upon these ideas, finding the holes between ultimate despair and elusive passion.

By some odd and slightly disturbing coincidence, the same evening I watched The Darkness of Day, I watched another short film, Michelangelo Antonioni's Tentato suicido, which he had contributed to the anthology film Love in the City (1953) and covers much the same ground. Antonioni is widely considered one of the finest filmmakers of all time, and yet his approach to this sensitive material is positively ham-fisted compared to Rosenblatt's. I'll leave you with that. You need to see The Darkness of Day because it's better than an Antonioni film. And once you see it, you'll be glad you did, and you may even find yourself with a new will to live.