The work Black Sun (2005) by Sue de Beer consists of an initially confusing and seemingly loose narration that is divided into several chapters with titles. However, the chapter entitled “Night of the World” appearing towards the end of the piece provides the missing thread of the storyline and allows the viewer to structure the roughly chronological plot differently.

The setting of the film is the inside of a house that recalls a typical New England home, much like in the novels of Hawthorne or Poe. This setting is then replicated within the exhibition space, and it is here that visitors watch the split-screen projection while sitting on armchairs like those seen in the film. By watching the film, the viewers accompany the protagonist through three stages of evolution.

The scenes do not follow a linear sequence. Instead, they repeat, foreshadow, and flash back to themselves, sometimes even presenting the viewer with new performers. The film is virtually devoid of any dialogue, the only verbal communication being a few monologues extracted from novels by the American writer Dennis Cooper.

The chapter entitled “Night of the World” appears in the third and last part of the video, shortly before the end. Its title alludes to its setting and ambiance, which are essential to understanding its crucial scenes. Derived from Hegel, the leitmotif “Nacht der Welt” was taken up again by Slavoj Žižek to describe the character of the contemporary subject. In “Night of the World,” de Beer establishes a connection between contemporary subjectivity and the theme of “Depression and Melancholia,” as discussed in the book Black Sun (from which de Beer derived her own work’s title) by French literary theorist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva.

In her book, Kristeva argues that the cause of depression lies in the “denial of negation,” that is, the refusal to accept the loss of oneness with the mother (the always already lost object of completeness). In normal development, the child ­accepts the loss and is guided into the symbolic world, that is, the world based on language. The depressive, however, subconsciously avoids this process and clings to the fantasy of oneness.

The main chapter of de Beer’s work takes place in the mother’s bedroom. It is not clear whether the mother is dead or absent, as the viewer sees only a brief flash of a motionless figure propped up in her nightgown. The first and youngest alter ego of the protagonist sneaks into the mother’s room and slips into her role: she puts on her negligee and a dark wig, and styles her hair with the grooming utensils lying on her mother’s bedside table.

Frequent flashbacks to earlier scenes and the two other alter egos disrupt this scene, whose unreal and asynchronous character is further enhanced by means of camera and lighting techniques. The images repeatedly switch between past and future, and the actions of the “little one” are doubled by those of the two other older performers, their characters thus overlapping. One early scene in which the “little one” dances to a pop song is also spliced in again later, distorted and in slow motion, creating an eerie resuscitation. However, that apparition is then brought to an abrupt end.

Žižek says that the path to becoming a subject lies exclusively in traversing the Nacht der Welt, that is, returning to point zero and acknowledging the impossibility of wholeness. From this perspective, de Beer acknowledges the loss of her mother (and of completeness) by means of the girl’s play in the film, and is thus able to mourn this loss and turn to her own desire. The artist herself has indicated that Black Sun is her most personal work.

The last scenes of the film shows the oldest protagonist—more or less the same age as de Beer—in an airplane. This image constitutes the essence of Black Sun, the idea that we can never look directly into the sun. At best, we can observe it as mitigated by the sunspots it leaves on our retinas. Similarly, recognition can never be expressed directly, but only experienced indirectly. In her work, de Beer enacts this dilemma. She herself traverses the “night of the world” and echoes this with the doubling of the room in which she forces her viewers to experience the very same schism.