Franco, I asked Gary Tarn about your head-scratching moment. It's great to see that he wanted me to reply to you - first, he said how glad he was that you cared so much for Black Sun and then explained:franco wrote:Half of the time when I was watching this, I had tears in my eyes. This is easily the most beautiful and enthralling "documentary" I have ever seen.
Nevertheless, I wonder whether Tarn is consciously avoiding an obvious illustration of the narration by showing Korean characters when Hugues talks about Chinese airport officers. Does the sequence make anyone ponder? It threw me into a head-scratching moment, wondering whether the director wanted to show Chinese characters but all he could find were Korean ones. Then I decided not to nitpick.
Regarding the comment about Korean characters : We are so attuned to temporal and descriptive association between sound and image that if there is any kind of slew, it can be unsettling.
The method for constructing the film was to collect images, often without any real consideration of how they might be used later; travelling with a camera. I remember being in New York, late one evening after a Chinese meal (funnily enough), and outside in the street was a pair of little billboards of the type that have a continuous roll, so the image changes every 20 seconds or so. And they were this curious collection, so I shot a roll of film in single frame mode (quite fun now to watch that sequence frame by frame, which is how it was shot - it's almost a mini film in itself). And much later, when I had edited the narrative, and I was playing with sequences, I put that roll up, and for me, it just kind of clicked. So I don't worry about it being Newark airport, and not Singapore, and Korean rather than Chinese characters. I was trying to pull at these links, to loosen them a little, if you will.