THE FOURTH WATCH
JANIE GEISER
•
9m 44s
The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last watch before morning was called the fourth watch. In the hours before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent film figures occupying the flickering space in a mid-century house made of printed tin. Their presence is at once inevitable and uncanny: a boy turns his head in dread; the eyes of a woman look askance; a sleepwalker reaches into a cabinet that dissolves with her touch; hands write letters behind ephemeral windows. The rooms reveal themselves and fill with impossible, shadowed light. It is not clear who is watching and who is trespassing in this nocturnal drama of lost souls.
"A small masterpiece of the uncanny brought about through beautifully controlled use of superimposition and scale and a cross breeding of 'incompatible' species of texture and (cathode) light. Glacial blue poltergeist-somnambulists, melodramatic stars and damaged children from silent films emerge at night into a tin dollhouse opening up invisible envelopes of space, commingling with hypnotic chiaroscuro cast by trembling sunlight.” - Mark McElhatten, Views from the Avant Garde [New York Film Festival]
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