From sax-happy jiggabooing to circumscribing a heart of darkness, cinema – now drawing on post-centennial breath – has pretty much run the racial gauntlet. Which means those colonised by the camerastare can sigh happy for the time being (just as long as all that King Kong reverb doesn’t kill whitie). But the price of peace comes strung up between a rock and a hard place, spinning political strife into Bunuelian hubris: artists fallen to the wayside continue to either shitgrin and bear it, or bite the hand that feeds them – not that anyone on the market end could give a fuck either way.

Sriwhana Spong’s Nightfall – screened at last year’s Place, Ground, Practice New Media Arts Exhibition – cuts the shackles with triumphant modesty. Rather than grappling with cultural identity as some deathless bloodrite, she orbits it with a fascination that feels morbid and inevitable. There’s no book beating, no breath-of-God, no lines drawn in the sand; only an uneasy hum that throbs into a scrapbook miasma of contradictory impulses. Ever the utilitarian, Spong shot the film in her own backyard, but it ends up contradicting that implied spatial comfort: sights emerge looming and stillborn in the night like planets, the camera caught in a stupor that’s half-sleepwalk half-seance. And like the soundtracked “Here Comes My Baby” by Cat Stevens, starved here to a metallic death rattle, Nightfall pushes into a realm where kitschy familiarity starts to violently turn in on itself: In the liminal nightspan, traditional Balinese offerings evoke only a deathly non-presence (in one instance, I mistook threaded cigarettes for a network of bones). But those quick to cite The Blair Witch Project shouldn’t set their watch by formal trappings; if there’s any real horror here, it’s that of spiritual abandonment, and the fear of being subsumed by a mytho-otherness. In other words, nothing that's gonna be solved by sticking your head under the sheets.—DL

» When Night Falls / artnews.co.nz