Sylvain George’s essay “What the Night Sees” delves into the political darkness of the film trilogy Obscure Night, unveiling a cinema of the “Black Carnival” where borders fracture and exiled bodies reinvent their presence beyond the logics of erasure. Through a reflection on the Oceanocene—conceptualizing exile and the human and non-human condition through the fluidity of flows—and Profane Childhood—a figure that disrupts established categories—the work transforms the screen into a battleground of perception, where the visible is sabotaged to reveal the silent insurrections of the invisibilized and those whom the State seeks to banish.

Published on the occasion of Sylvain George’s programme at the ICA, London, 4-6 April 2025, curated by Elizabeth Dexter. The event is a prelude to a book on the filmmaker’s work to be published later this year by Rab-Rab Press, including contributions by Jacques Rancière, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Françoise Vergès, John Gianvito, Leslie Kaplan, Ben Rivers, and many others.

Designed by Ott Kagovere, the essay is offset printed as A2 poster in 500 copies.

“There are images that accompany the order of the world and reinforce it, and others that fracture, disturb, and make it tremble at its foundations. Some films do not narrate, they fracture. They do not simply observe: they unsettle, displace, and sabotage. They do not produce meaning, they produce trouble.

In Obscure Night, the night is not just a physical darkness; it is a political darkness. It is the darkness of Fortress Europe, which hunts, repels, and erases; the darkness of security discourse, which reduces exiled bodies to statistics and strips them of any singular existence. But if this night is a territory of control, it is also a field of insurrection. For through silhouettes that appear and disappear, through the interplay of shadow and light sculpting each frame, the film makes another form of presence emerge, irreducible to the logics of erasure.”