All Through the Night

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