Sunset to Sunrise (1969)

Synopsis

Partially inspired by James J. Gibson's The Perception of the Visual World (Boston, 1950). Made by aiming a 16mm camera in a slow spiral across the sky. Unlike the aesthetic overfitting we find in much putatively hallucinatory art, Graham here reduces things to a usefully predictive basement reality: the alteration of one’s sense of time. A quote from Diedrich Diederichsen on Tony Conrad’s Yellow Movies might also be apt here: “In the early psychedelic avant-garde, if one wishes to save this word for once from its present reduction to a few formal motifs in pop music and poster design, there existed thus a very specific alliance between the critique of capitalism and mysticism that had to do, among other things, with an evocation of a different temporality.” Here, in one simple gesture.

Release Date: 1969-01-01

Runtime: 4 minutes

Director: Dan Graham