After the end of the night comes the day - VERKSMIÐJAN Á HJALTEYRI (summer 2020)

After the End of the Night Comes the Day
30.05 – 19.07 2020 
Open 14:00-17:00 and by appointment. 

To Werner Herzog, cinema must seek to attain “illumination”— particularly through hypnosis— as he reiterates in his Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema, Lessons of Darkness (1999). According to Herzog, truth is a construct and a path through hallucinations, magic, and dreams, all of which function as operative tools. His conception of “anthropological cinema” strives for an open approach to anthropological reality by breaking down the walls that separate categories such as objectivity, identity, naturalism, reason, fiction, and documentaries. Indeed, for him, cinema constitutes the twentieth century’s instrument of vision as well as a realistic fantasy, a fluid universe in which time is also fluid.

Herzog has conceived a kind of aesthetic platform that gives cinema the allegorical mission of attaining profound truth through the “creation, stylization, and operation of the imagination.”

Such is also the aesthetic platform illustrated by the films presented in the exhibition After the End of the Night Comes the Day. These works in motion define unfinished trajectories and flights and fragments of ephemeral illuminations.

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