Nighttime
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NIGHTTIME
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2026
MICHEL LORAND — HANNE DE BACKER (baritone saxophone)
4K color film, 2.0 aspect ratio, stereo/5.1 sound, 52 min.
Nighttime grew out of a desire to film memory as it takes shape while simultaneously fading away.
Improvised music possesses a singular quality: it emerges in the moment and immediately disappears. Yet it leaves an imprint, a more or less precise memory that influences what comes next.
Nighttime is structured around the free improvisations of baritone saxophonist Hanne De Backer. The film follows a simple yet rigorous protocol: a five-minute musical motif is performed and recorded, then played back in the following shot through a floor-standing loudspeaker that remains visible on screen throughout the film. With each new sequence, the musician improvises from her memory of what she has just heard. This process is repeated until five successive layers of sound have accumulated. Then, gradually, these layers disappear one by one, bringing the film back to a final solo in which the memory and forgetting of the ten preceding musical passages continue to resonate. The loudspeaker visible on screen thus becomes a character in the film: the repository of what has been played, a machine that preserves and returns the past.
Through this remarkably simple device, Nighttime explores the persistence and disappearance of sound in memory. The film offers a sensory experience in which time, listening, and repetition become the very materials of cinema: making audible the memory of sound itself. Each improvisation is both a new creation and a transformed memory of the one before it. The layers of sound accumulate like strata of memory before gradually eroding.
Rather than telling a story, Nighttime seeks to create an experience of listening, inviting the viewer to perceive the subtle transformations of memory, repetition, and time.
