Let me begin with a hypothesis: that the cinema, more effectively than photography or painting, allows us to experience the two-way passage between day and night. This is an obvious result of cinema’s status as a medium operating in time. The cinematic night, at any given moment of its representation, will always be at one point in transitions enacting the arrival of the night or its dissolution. This temporality of the cinematic night is one of the challenges facing those who attempt to define a cinematic nocturne.
