***/****
directed by Betzy Bromberg
by Alex Jackson A Darkness Swallowed is an experimental film consisting entirely of extreme close-ups of fossils, skins, rocks, and water droplets. There is a brief passage of voiceover in the beginning and a full-length soundtrack, but that's it as far as narrative cues are concerned. The film is supposed to be about the "nature of cellular memory" and "the physical traces that memories leave behind on and inside our bodies, and on and inside the earth." I had a considerably more banal philosophical question on my mind while watching it: I saw things in these shots, things like faces and animals and such–do I see them because they're there and I'm meant to see them, or do I see them because I'm trying to assign order where there isn't any? You go in thinking that a film like this is going to ask you to work harder, but really it's asking you to work less. It's very much a passive experience, you just look at the screen and let it wash over you; the questions are ultimately secondary to the visceral experience. A Darkness Swallowed is wallpaper, but it's very nice wallpaper. When she introduced A Darkness Swallowed to the audience, filmmaker Betzy Bromberg mentioned that she has to hold a day job to pay the bills. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to discover that this day job is in the movie industry (she served as an optical supervisor on such films as Lady in White, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Bram Stoker's Dracula) instead of in a bank or at an accounting firm or something. Part of the pleasure of A Darkness Swallowed is in its homemade quality: Bromberg shot it in Academy-ratio 16mm and you sometimes get the feeling that you're watching "In Search of… with Leonard Nimoy". I mean that lovingly. What I like most about Bromberg's aesthetic is that she doesn't try to beautify ugly things, she thinks they're beautiful enough just being ugly. That's comforting, I think, and kind of wonderful. In the interest of full disclosure, I wouldn't want to see A Darkness Swallowed every day of my life. When all's said and done, it's still not the real thing. But I feel fortunate for getting to experience it even just this once. It's really groovy, man.
