Brent Green | A Brief Spark Bookended with Darkness

A love letter to his wife: that is the apparent line of Brent Green’s A Brief Spark Bookended with Darkness. His voice is quivering but also surging with passionate energy. There is a «world on fire» outside, war, suffering, incoherence, but «I hold you close» – says the voice – «I hold you close, like some idiot doctor that loves the sound of your heart, and lungs». The agitated and dissonant music stops when we see the simple drawing of the couples embracing in bed. Later it returns with a crescendo of different sound elements (noise, music, voice, chant), with a generative progress in the visual animation through figurative patterns that directly stem from the woman’s pulsating heart. Fusions and transformations replace the initial divide between the inside and the outside.

Brent Green’s animated cinema has the flavour of the silent cinema of the beginnings, with intertitles and flickering lights. Just like this cinematic genre, it has the fundamental virtue of exhibiting the grammar of cinema itself: we perceive the sounds, the images, the words as distinct entities that contribute to a composition where the real thread is the emotional line of poetry. One has really to experience a film like A Brief Spark Bookended with Darkness to understand how the multiple and the unique coexist, how the fragile and the powerful conflate.