The Moon is Risen
The Year 68 in 6 Books in 6 Films
This film reflects the substantial enrichment of media and imagery which Darboven’s art has undergone since the late 1970’s. A meditation on her visual and geographical environment, it intercuts three different sequences, each with very different soundtracks: scenes of a lively carnival with attendant noise; filmic explorations of the Hamburg-area town in which the artist lives, set to Handel’s "Fireworks Music"; and interior shots of Darboven’s wunderkammer-like house and studios, accompanied by her own music, derived from the calendrical counting that is a consistent thread in her work.
This is a filmed version of one of Darboven’s major early works, in which the calendrical dates for the year "68" of any century are rendered into tables and grids of numbers in various visual formats. All the pages of the resulting six notebooks of notations in pen and ink are here filmed in a neutral, "minimal" style parallel to the experiments in minimal cinema by such contemporaries as Michael Snow, Walter de Maria, and Andy Warhol.