Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark28 Images
To some people, the night is a place of refuge – darkness is worn like a cloak, offering asylum and repose. To others, the night is a time for ecstasy and “animal urges”, when their true selves are allowed to shine. Then there are those who depend on the night for their livelihood, or as a space to exercise vital forms of personal and political expression. This multifaceted nature of the night is summed up in a quote from the US artist Djuna Barnes, which served as a guiding light for the new book Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark: “The nights of one period are not the nights of another. Neither are the nights of one city the nights of another.”
Edited by Shanay Jhaveri, Night Fever brings together film and photography from an international, cross-generational cohort, with newly commissioned essays and texts on works by the likes of Sofia Coppola, Derek Jarman, Gaspar Noé, Chantal Akerman, Kenneth Anger, Albert Serra, Mike Leigh, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. These sit alongside images by photographers including Myriam Boulos, Kohei Yoshiyuki, and many more, which trace humanity’s evolving relationship with the night alongside changes in culture, politics, and technology, which see our geography increasingly electrified.
The collection of artists, photographers, and filmmakers in the book are described as a “fellowship of nightwalkers” who “explore what it means to inhabit the night as corporeal, sentient, feeling beings”. Beginning in the 1960s and leading up to present day, the work featured in Night Fever also explores the technological developments that made it possible to document the activities of night stalkers, or present them in new ways, via photography and cinema. Jhaveri points out that the two mediums are rooted in the effect of light on film, so have a strange and sometimes paradoxical connection with the night, but are ultimately “inextricable” from our understanding of life outside of daylight hours today.
Take a look at some highlights from Night Fever in the gallery above, and read more about the book in our interview with Shanay Jhaveri below.
Some photos in the book deal with the night very literally. Others are more metaphorical, or depict the night’s aftermath. Where did you draw the boundary lines when curating this work?
Shanay Jhaveri: I was very keen that Night Fever highlight a multiplicity of experiences of the night, which can exist simultaneously, and even unfold concurrently. The threshold of the night, its liminal edge, is ever-changing dependent not only on actual conditions of light and darkness, but also the tenor of the sociopolitical environment. Accordingly, the book includes work that uses the duration of a single night as [its] structuring principle, as well as works that are made over a succession of nights, or those which are not made at night at all, but evoke the night or find traces of it in the following day.
For many (often overlooked) individuals, the night is a time of purpose and work. How is this reflected in the films and photographs?
Shanay Jhaveri: This is explored from many different perspectives. David Goldblatt’s images of exhausted workers commuting in apartheid South Africa, or Dhruv Malhotra’s [photos] capturing daily wage labourers sleeping outdoors in construction sites and makeshift settlements across the city of New Delhi. Genevieve Yue’s essay ‘Night Work’ spotlights the labour of women as cleaners, and Sukhdev Sandhu discusses Molly Dineen’s Heart of the Angel, [in] which she spent months talking to London Underground workers who were worried about their livelihood.
While all of these works centre around the body of the labourer, either at work during the night, or tired finding their way home, Martina Mullaney’s haunting images focus on shared mattresses. [They are] about the trace of the body, about homelessness, loneliness, precarity.
There is another type of work the night is associated with, sex work. Exploring the night as [a] gendered space is one of the principle concerns of the book, highlighted through a series of photographs made by Rut Blees Luxemburg. Erika Balsom’s essay on Variety (1983) and Simone Barbès ou la Vertu (1980) talks about women who work at porn cinemas and their solitary journeys. Paz Errázuriz’s images of trans-identifying sex workers during the Pinochet regime in Chile getting ready for the night speaks to their resilience and vulnerability.
Some have a more ambiguous, maybe even a spiritual relationship with the night. How does this come through in the work?
Shanay Jhaveri: Night Fever acknowledges without a doubt the night as [a] space where the ‘rules’ of the day can fall by, and where a range of impulses are explored. Shiv Kotecha in his evocative essay “Of Feral Heart” explores the semi-private, nocturnal manoeuvrings of three cinematic characters, as they slink away from lovers and neighbours to fulfil a host of animal urges. Or we have Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series The Park, where he would photograph people having sex in public spaces, the work speaking to – as Simon Wu puts it – ‘the morally suspect position of the photographer as transgressor into an enclave, a witness and a voyeur’.
Political freedom and activism are historically associated with the night. How does this show up in the book?
Shanay Jhaveri: This is another recurrent and major theme. You see it addressed directly in Mosa’ab Elshamy’s photographs of street protests and celebrations in Egypt. Another register is seen in essays by Shelly Kraicer on Wang Bing’s film Ta’ang, about the night time movements of Rohingya refugees, or Iggy Cortez’s essay [in which] he discusses how the night’s darkness makes physical boundaries appear less rigid.
Jean Ma builds her contribution around Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (2015). In this film, an [epidemic sleeping sickness] conveys the disorientation, unreality, and helplessness of post-coup Thailand. At the same time, sleep also hints at the hope of awakening to a future different from the present.
Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark is out now.
