The Darkness of Day

By 2011, there are few subjects that haven't been explored in cinema. And if you ask most people, they'll tell you everything has been done already. As personal as films can get, how many subjects are really taboo and uncomfortable for audiences to endure? "Politics and religion" have been a staple "no-no" conversation to engage upon for as long as I can remember. Ironically and contrary, most media tends to be about one or both. But one subject still gets shunned most from peoples' capacity to handle no matter how the subject is approached.

Suicide.

Attempt to discuss suicide from any direction and you will sacrifice the life of the conversation. Those other controversial discussions will polarize, but suicide has no advocates, not even the practitioners. And why should anyone defend self-extinction? Fundamentally, human beings are involuntary designed to protect ourselves; Thrust at another's eyes and see them flinch. The inability to discuss or tolerate such a decision is unfathomable to most living. Zero reason or excuse to console or reprieve. There is no scarier villain in literature or darkness in man.

Jay Rosenblatt's film The Darkness Of Day is a 26 minute film composed of found 16mm film discarded in the 1980s when schools cleaned out their closets for the change to video. The images are accompanied by journal entries of suicides, quotes, and related information from history. The movie doesn't ask questions and there are no answers to gain. Like suicide itself, the documentary is bleak and without closure. Not without merit, the film challenges the viewer to accept the most horrible of horrors. If nothing else, the message one may obtain is a sense of affinity, even if it be despair and futility. Suicide is a lonely and solitary act, but affects all those around. Though the sufferer's pain promises finality, it continues on in those who love and mourn.

The film starts and due to no immediate narration and the only information is to be read, the idea of taking found footage utilized to the perverse subject, appears gimmicky. Once journal entries are spoken, the film gains it's weight and intensity and the correlating images are surprisingly complementing considering the context. I commend the non-condemning objective "voice" the picture speaks from. Most illnesses have people suffer from something not of them: This documentary is about people victims of themselves. There is a suicide hot line listed at the end of the film: I think the number should have been listed before rather than after the credits for those seeking help. By the time the credits role, the help maybe too late, particularly considering most viewers don't stick around for title cards.

Possibly due to the film's short length, but it felt too brief. I wanted the film to dig deeper, but since the dead can't speak but via the words they leave behind, there is no catharsis. The story could be expanded upon in a split way, i.e. Full Metal Jacket. The second half to this film could comprise responses of those who suffer at the lose of a loved one via suicide. While watching, I was reminded of HBO's Autopsy, except these dead indict themselves. The brevity of the piece may concede to the subject matter: Without victory, who could stomach much more than the time stamped.