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All Through the Night

Michael Robinson

2008 00:04:24 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3DV video

Description

A charred visitation with an icy language of control: "there is no room for love". Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.

— Michael Robinson

"The work combines scenes from a 1950's Soviet version of The Snow Queen and footage from the 2004 feature The Day After Tomorrow. In completely different idioms, both films tackle grand themes: the Roland Emmerich blockbuster revolves around the impending end of the world brought upon by natural disaster and the adaptations of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale recounts the archetypal story of love’s triumph over evil. In Robinson’s film, scenes from the former are manipulated in digital editing to become an almost unrecognizable, darkly wavering, prismatic cityscape, alternating with animation snippets of a little girl and boy in struggle with the villainous queen. All Through the Night contains no original footage and no nature photography, thus composing a completely interior, psychological landscape reminiscent of a dream that is sweet and ominous at the same time. In that sense it is emblematic of Robinson’s approach as a whole, combining far-flung imagery that doesn’t cohere in any conventional narrative or stylistic way but creates its own, oneiric logic."

— Henriette Huldisch, Aurora: The Infinite Measure, Fall 2008

This title is also available on Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

About Michael Robinson

Michael Robinson (b.1981) is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience. Borrowing the formal skins of structural film, the emotional cues of pop songs and employing a woozy toggling of public and personal memory, his work strives to cultivate new resonances between seemingly disparate elements, harnessing the surface connotations of specific landscapes, television shows, texts, songs and sounds as psychological triggers, ripe for reconfiguration.

Robinson’s films and videos have screened internationally in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, cinematheques, museuems and galleries. His work has been discussed in publications such as Cinema Scope, Artforum, and Art Papers, and he was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000's by Film Comment magazine. He holds a BFA from Ithaca College, an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Wexner Center for the Arts.