Photophthalmia

Photophthalmia

1975, Germany, 16mm, colour, sound by Anthony Moore, 28 min.

He borrowed the title from medicine: Photophthalmia. The term denotes the damage done when too much light enters the eye. Nekes dedicated this film, which he produced himself, to the discoverer of the cinematographic principle, Joseph Plateau, who gazed into the sun for too long while researching into persistence of vision, the after-images on the retina, Plateau went blind. Nekes also dedicated the film to Arthur Gordon Pym, whose tragic Arctic expedition was given literary expression by Edgar Allan Poe.

Morgen Mannheimer