So-called ‘light orbs’ are a mysterious phenomenon observed in photographs taken at night or underwater. Some interpret them as manifestations of spirits, angels or ghosts, or perhaps of the portals through which these travel, while scientists explain them as photographic artefacts of the backscatter or retroflection of light from airborne, otherwise invisible particles of dust or of water. In his latest short film Yield to its Gaze, writer/director Anders Elsrud Hultgreen uses his own recordings of this phenomenon over a crepuscular lake as a springboard for something more contemplative and mesmeric.
“Places within the mind echo as landscapes,” Hultgreen whispers in his voiceover for the short. These words may as well serve as a manifesto for the filmmaker. For with his features Dawn (Morgenrøde, 2014) and Devonian Fever Trip (2019), and his shorts The Pyramidical Silence (2012), The Perpetual Progeny (2015) and even Septichexen (2023), Hultgreen has proven to be a wrangler of landscapes, repurposing real locations to his own narrative or archetypal ends, often with little more than a voiceover to transform these geographies into art. Certainly in visual terms, Yield to its Gaze is all liminal landscapes, reflective watery surfaces and strange lights on the horizons, with only Hultgreen’s voice to guide us towards transcendence.
“Breathe in slowly,” Hultgreen says, “Breathe out gently.” It isas though he were acknowledging that his own interventions are an act of hypnosis. “Look at the light” he continues, There is no lamp. There is no fire, no moon, no star.” His suggestion that the light (and its reflection) which we see in the distance is “a hole in the world through which something looks back from a place that has always been there, a place beyond language, beyond memory, beyond names, beyond time, beyond space” catches us in the cinematic act of peering into the dark for a sign – of ourselves, of the world, of truth, and of god(s) – all mediated through the light that cameras require, and sometimes themselves create, for their operation.
Hultgreen’s final injunction, “Close your eyes,” involves a paradox – indeed an observer’s paradox – marking both the literal end of our rôle as viewers, and the beginning, perhaps, of introspection, as we consider our own place in this mystery of the natural world. The electronic score – part drone, part free jazz – enhances the overall sublimity, as that distant light, like a projector in a theatre’s shadows, invites the imagination to bring meaning, even flickering enlightenment, to the blankness in the dark.
strap: Anders Elsrud Hultgreen’s mesmerising short contemplates spectatorship, alterity and mystery in a trick of the light
