Jour Sombre

When filmmakers use existing footage as a raw material for their work and subject it to, for example, physical and chemical processes, the original material’s narrative remnants resist deformation and abstraction, thereby producing a new subtext.
This is the case with Johannes Hammel’s three-part Jour Sombre. He employed home movies shot in the 1950s and ’60s, of trips into the mountains, hikes across a glacier, alpine huts and lakes.
We see groups of people spread out across the alpine landscape, in the background the dazzling white of the sun’s bright reflection from a glacier. Binoculars are pointed upward. At the...