An Infinite Night

In his video An Infinite Night, Geoffrey Garrison presents a fictitious B-movie remake of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Arabian Nights. He shifts the story from The Thousand and One Nights to a science-fiction scenario featuring a dystopian American society – a society that has turned negative – yet only several of this film’s scenes even exist.

The video starts with photographs of the Chihuahua Desert in Texas, which Garrison uses as the setting for the film. Two voice-overs discuss the making of the film, introducing individual scenes. The aesthetic expectations, previously built up by image, music, and dialogue, stand in contrast to what are minimalist film scenes, each of which takes place in an empty room; they are primarily characterized by dialogue critical of society and the experiences of the protagonists. In between scenes, the two narrators continue to add to the plot of the film. This results in a separation of the individual elements of the film, so that viewers have to assemble them into a whole in their imaginations.

The levels of reality are also blurred, since Pasolini’s film is told from different perspectives by the narrators, who, along with the protagonists, reflect on the theme of the film presented in the video. On all levels, there is an awareness of the appropriation of the source material. The presentation of the story thus breaks through all limitations, whether narrative, visual, or logical. It becomes an endless tale, An Infinite Night. (Frederik Ohlms)