Soon It Will Be Dark

What does it mean to inhabit or occupy a landscape or a frame? To conjure up time? These are deceptively simple questions that the artist Isabell Heimerdinger gives us an opportunity to ponder in her film Soon It Will Be Dark. The context is a stretch of coast, a tropical place where, dotted in the background, a few old, dilapidated colonial buildings survive. A patch of countryside, half-village, half-forest, bordering the sea, and where our gaze falls on a man as the days go by, while he busies himself with his task – from one spot to another, conscientiously clearing the land around the buildings with a machete in the luxuriant undergrowth of a dense forest of majestic trees. Measured, considered, precise and respectful movements… In frames arranged like paintings attentive to the slightest detail, to the infinitesimal quivering, Heimerdinger reproduces a life in synchrony with the elementary cycle of day and night, and makes palpable the air and the space. The film becomes an exercise in contemplation, caring for these repetitive actions like crossing the landscape in a pickup truck, a tracking shot slipping between the land and the sea into the ellipse. The atmosphere is totally serene, indifferent to the outside world that would threaten its fragile equilibrium – the party heard from afar, or these televisions with their indistinct babble. And not forgetting the murmurs of omnipresent nature, buzzing, and peopled with birdcalls. And without a word, the film kindles our senses and our hearing with a lingering gaze both sensual and minimalist on the world, becoming one with time and place, like this man who is so much part of the landscape that he blends into it. (N.F.)