The first Doc Talk of Spring 2024 featured a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Michael Gitlin to discuss his film The Night Visitors.
THE NIGHT VISITORS is a movie about moths. Through a critical lens that is by turns social and personal, the film closely considers these underknown creatures. The small hours of the night are threaded through with a sense of mortality and loss. Moths, with their trembling and exquisite impermanence, provide both a kind of solace and a focal point around which the desire to know can be organized. The film looks at moths as aesthetic beings and as carriers of meaning, aiming for a deep encounter with the beauty and incommensurability of the profoundly other.
Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Adriana de Lucio (Media Studies ’24) and Johann Yamin (Media Studies ’24).
Michael Gitlin makes work about some of the intricate conceptual and ideological systems out of which ways of knowing the world can be constructed. His films have screened at numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the London Film Festival, and the Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Gitlin’s experimental documentary, THE NIGHT VISITORS, premiered at the 2023 New York Film Festival. Gitlin was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. His work has also been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His 16mm film, The Birdpeople, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies at the School of Media Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement.
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