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A Darkness Swallowed
(Betzy Bromberg, US, 78 min., 16mm, 2005)
A personal investigation of cellular memory, a bio-metaphysical musical.
“Los Angeles-based experimental filmmaker Betzy Bromberg returns to the screen with her latest gem, a Darkness Swallowed , a 78-minute meditation on the evanescent traces of memory and loss. At once her most elliptical and also her most overt work in a career that spans nearly 30 years and more than a dozen dazzling films, a Darkness Swallowed opens on a pair of faded photographs showing an old dented car, one with a child standing beside it and the other without. Speaking in voice-over, Bromberg references a past event, one that will forever haunt her although it occurred before her birth. The film then sinks downward, dipping below the surface of the rational world to mine the seemingly infinite layers of the past stored within the fleshy entrails, chalky bones, sinewy spider webs and gnarled ligaments of both the body and the Earth… Dedicated to the filmmaker's mother, the film is also a gift to us, a reminder of cinema's organic basis in chemistry and light, and of its ability to take us deep inside.” - Holly Willis, LA WEEKLY
