A Whole Night

Akerman said about this film: "I want the viewer to feel a physical experience through the time used in each shot. Such a physical experience, in which time unfolds within you, in which the time of the film enters you." It is not just time, space, and subtle gestures of unknown and unrecognized protagonists that the viewer is more sensitive to thanks to the absence of any narrative attention. Even one's own imagination, experience, or empathy must come into play and not every viewer is capable of that due to conventional films that "think" for us, "feel" for us, and "live" for us. A nearly perfect synthesis of the general and the specific - and we do not have to be Hegelians to see this as the culmination of (film) history. Unfortunately, history, and the history of film, never ends, so someone may have already surpassed or will surpass Akerman, but until then, for me at least, the film is brilliant in that it contains everything and nothing - each specific story is at the same time a fragment of a unique relationship between two unknown individuals and a fulfillment of the general human experience. It encompasses everything that can be said about the experience called "love," yet it cannot say anything specific about any particular love of any couple. Yet at the same time, we feel that every general statement and abstract description of love would shatter against the specificity and inevitability of any specific piece of this film mosaic. (2015-03-19)