Are you drawn to the light?
If you're reading this, chances are you're tangled up in an endeavour of post-secondary learning and have your own personal, particular relationship with the search for knowledge and truth, whether that's in mathematical formulae or in philosophical axioms. I'm a "words and stories" guy myself, but I've always felt some admiration (and a little envy) for the more concrete mysteries of the natural sciences, and how they provide a virtually infinite amount of *data* to discover.
Identifying, naming, cataloguing, categorizing, investigating, and recording: these acts can familiarize us with the world, change the unknown into the known, and reveal organization in what seemed disordered. In a word, they are enlightening.
In Michael Gitlin's short film The Night Visitors, this symbolic relationship between light and truth is palpable in nearly every shot. In its first moments, a bright glowing cylinder lights up a nocturnal landscape as snippets of narration discuss the wonderfully complex taxonomy of moths.
However, what we see crowding into the glow isn't a flurry of tiny wings, but people, dressed in warm clothes and peering into the light to see what it's lured. Right away, there's a sense of some deeper ecology at play here, one based in facts and names instead of nutrients and energy: the light draws the moths, the moths draw the scientists, the scientists draw the filmmakers, and here we are at the end of the chain, drawn to the pretty pictures of the film screen.
And damn, these really are some pretty pictures.
To pull back a bit and give some context, The Night Visitors is a film about moths. Through breathy narration, interview clips, and onscreen text the film provides a wide array of perspectives on how the moth fits into our world, from a brief stint as a silk-spinning cash cow, to an omen of death in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Sphinx," to a swarming nuisance and terror of clothing wardrobes everywhere.
None of these are given specific priority over another, and it seems Gitlin is intent on showing just how many different kinds of connections we have with these little critters. If there's one thing that the film looks at up close, it's the moths themselves.
I can't really adequately put into words just how gorgeous this film’s moth-photography is. The electric-blue spots of the Giant Leopard Moth (Hypercompe scribonia), the vibrant orange fur and alien antennae of a just-metamorphosed Cecropia (Hyalophora cecropia), the absolutely stunning pink-and-yellow aesthetics on the Rosy Maple Moth (Dryocampa rubicunda), and the teal scales of the aptly-nicknamed Green Marvel (Acronicta fallax). By the light of the moon, Gitlin even renders the dull brown wings of the humble Azalea Sphinx (Darapsa choerilus) into a sublime art piece.
In the end, I can't help but feel there's some tension between the two goals of The Night Visitors. On one hand there's a thematic pulse of demystifying the world through understanding, or as the film puts it, "careful observation [turning] an ill omen into a collection of facts". At the same time, the downright alien beauty of these moths seems to resist that kind of understanding, their distance from us becoming one of their most entrancing qualities.
I'm happy that Gitlin's able to shed some light on these creatures, but I'm just as grateful for what he chose to keep shrouded in darkness.
ReFrame Film Festival will screen The Night Visitors on January 25th 2025 at 12:00pm at Market Hall. Tickets can be found here.
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A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
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