The Mark of the Brief Night: Immanent Loss and Responsibility

Abstract

This paper turns towards a film that you could not have seen and will never see: The Mark of the Brief Night, part of the web-based and installation film project Seances (2016) by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, and the National Film Board of Canada. Seances generates never-to-be-repeated short films by algorithmically combining scenes from a database of reimagined lost silent-era movies recreated by Maddin.

The uniqueness of The Mark of the Brief Night, emphasised by its imminent loss, highlights the indelible role of the spectatorial process in the actualisation of film as lived phenomenon, at the same time raising questions regarding the virtual (ideal) being of film before and beyond its concrete actualisation. I am arguing that any cultural trace, just like The Mark of the Brief Night, makes sense (where sense is understood both as a vector between the ideal plane and actuality and as a surface effect that denies the identity of the actual with itself) only inasmuch as it becomes part of embodied processes of individuation. Turning towards the role of the other in the dynamic of individuation, the paper proposes that spectatorship constitutes a stringent and much-neglected ethical responsibility in contemporary cultures.