I See a Darkness

I See a Darkness is a film essay probing the complex historical relationship between photography, cinema and science. The film builds on Waugh and Daly’s previous films which have screened internationally (from Abbas Kiarostami: the Art of Living to The Art of Time), drawing on material often overlooked or hidden: shadow archives, neglected cultural narratives in film, art and literature, disappeared or challenging areas of knowledge.
I See a Darkness reaffirms Trevor Paglen’s rallying cry: “It’s imperative for other artists to pick up where [Harun] Farocki left off, lest we plunge even further into the darkness of a world whose images remain invisible, yet control us in ever-more profound ways.”

I See a Darkness takes as its point of departure the impact of Irish-born Lucien Bull's chrono-photographic experiments on the interwoven developments of image-capture aesthetics and science throughout the 20th century.
Bull, born in Dublin in 1876, was made director of the prestigious Institut Marey in Paris in 1914 and President of the Institute of Scientific Cinematography in 1948. The film explores how new technologies of vision were from the outset aggressively instrumentalised by the military-industrial complex for its own ends, as the 20th century quest for an aesthetic ‘sublime’ in still and moving images collided with the scientific discovery of an ‘atomic sublime’.
The atomic shadow photographs found in Hiroshima and Nagasaki surely testified to, in Akira Lippit’s words, “a form of total photography that exceeded the economies of representation, testing the very visibility of the visual.” For Sylvère Lotringer, the problem (as posed to Paul Virilio in ‘Crepuscular Dawn’) becomes: “[is] the apotheosis of science the apocalypse of science?”
Questions are raised about the streamlining of cinematographic technologies in the 20th century by scientific rationality and the value of looking again at experimental practices and ways of thinking sidelined as a result. A mapping of the often contentious fusion of artistic and technological representational models of our world, with their complex political ramifications, emerges, pivoting on three iconic figures whose lives and work intersected in compelling ways: Lucien Bull, Harold E. Edgerton (MIT Professor and Engineer), and oceanographer and conservationist Jacques Cousteau.

A new perceptual paradigm related to high-speed photography (Bull), atomic science (Edgerton) and the undersea world (Cousteau), is revealed, using rarely seen photographs and archival footage alongside extensive new film work shot in the Institut de Cinématographie Scientifique and Conservatoire des Techniques Cinématographiques, Paris, the MIT Edgerton centre, MIT photographic archives, the Nevada Nuclear test site, and Death Valley. Contributors include leading cultural thinkers, film archivists, scientists and writers Akira Mizuta Lippit, Jimena Canales, Jonathan Crary, Susan Schuppli, Ben Marcus, Laurent Mannoni, Alexis Martinet and Edgerton Center Director J. Kim Vandiver.

I See A Darkness ultimately questions what was disappeared in the ‘progressive’ narrative of image-capture technologies, especially considerations of the non-human and animal, and gestures towards what Jean-Christophe Bailly reminds us of when he writes: “the world in which we live is gazed upon by other beings, that the visible is shared among creatures, and that a politics should be invented on this basis, if it is not too late.”