Hours of Glass

Apparently floating through the air, the camera travels from Dark Sky Park in Denmark to an abandoned observatory in Istanbul, via the expressionist architecture of the Einstein Tower near Berlin, to arrive at the cyber unit of a telecom company. The time-lapse filming emphasizes the patience and slowness with which the skies are observed, and human communications are plucked from the air. But the watcher is being watched, and the full-spectrum camera that’s used to do this gives the images an alien glow. On the soundtrack we hear a sonic interpretation of the cosmic background radiation, the electromagnetic radiation released by the Big Bang. This means we’re listening to the echo of the ultimate metaphysical phenomenon, the beginning of everything. At the end, however, fragments of dialogue emerge, taken from The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller about a surveillance specialist who records a murder by chance and feels complicit in the deed. Suddenly a single human life becomes as big as the universe. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)