#2374

Enter the dream of Lillian Gish and let it guide you toward the meaning of Night Hunter.

Night Hunter is a 2011 American animated short film written and directed by Stacey Steers. The 16‑minute experimental work blends animation, collage, and silent‑era film appropriation, featuring the image of actress Lillian Gish recontextualized into a surreal, dreamlike narrative. The film is noted for its handmade construction, consisting of more than 4,000 individual collages, and for its unsettling atmosphere drawn from myth, allegory, and archetype. Wikipedia

In this handmade film, composed of more than four thousand collages and shot in 35mm color, the actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role. Night Hunter evokes a disquieting dream scape, drawn from allegory, myth and archetype. IMDb 6'6

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LINK https://youtu.be/Y6fX430Gt5o

Night Hunter: Lillian Gish and the Dream‑Logic of Stacey Steers

Stacey Steers’ Night Hunter resurrects Lillian Gish not as the fragile ingénue of silent cinema, but as the beating heart of a handmade dream. Built from thousands of collages, the film places Gish inside a domestic world that behaves like a subconscious: rooms that shift, insects that intrude, objects that pulse with symbolic life. Steers has said she is drawn to silent‑era actresses because their faces carry emotional clarity, and recontextualizing them allows her to explore female interiority in ways early cinema never permitted. Her motivation is not nostalgia but transformation — to free these women from the roles they were once confined to.

The title Night Hunter names the logic of the world Gish inhabits. It is not a person but a cycle: the worms and moths that appear as if summoned by instinct, the bird‑woman Gish becomes, and the snake that ultimately consumes her. Every creature hunts, and every creature is hunted. The title describes this nocturnal ecosystem, the predatory rhythm of a dream where instinct overrides narrative.

One of the film’s most startling moments comes when Gish holds an egg to her chest in a gesture that echoes breastfeeding. It is not maternal in the human sense; it is instinctive, creaturely — the tenderness of a being protecting what it has made. This is where the film brushes against Kafka, not through imitation but through shared psychic territory: a metamorphosis that unfolds without explanation, a body becoming something it never asked to be. But where Kafka ends in isolation, Steers creates a symbolic ecology. The worms and moths are the diet of the creature she is becoming; the snake is the inevitable predator of that creature. The final devouring is not punishment but completion — the dream consuming its dreamer.

Steers has spoken of her films as explorations of psychological terrain, places where identity dissolves and reforms. In Night Hunter, she compresses an entire mythology of creation, instinct, vulnerability, and dissolution into sixteen minutes. The film feels longer because it expands inside you. It is a beautiful nightmare, and in its shadows, Lillian Gish becomes something silent cinema never allowed her to be: a mythic being with her own instinct, her own hunger, her own fate.

If you’ve followed Lillian Gish through this dream, let its shadows linger a moment longer before you return to the waking world.If you’ve followed Lillian Gish through this dream, let its shadows linger a moment longer before you return to the waking world.

NOTES:

Lillian Diana Gish[a] (October 14, 1893 – February 27, 1993) was an American actress best known for her work in movies of the silent era. Her film-acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912, in silent filmshorts, to 1987. Gish was dubbed the "First Lady of the Screen" by Vanity Fair in 1927 and is credited with pioneering fundamental film performance techniques. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Gish as the 17th-greatest female movie star of classical Hollywood cinema. READ MORE: Lillian Gish - Wikipedia

Stacey Steers was born in Denver, Colorado. She is known for her animated films, based on process and composed of thousands of hand-made figures on paper. Her most recent work employs images taken from early film sources, from which she constructs original and experimental narratives. Each frame is first composed of complex paper collages assembled from fragments of printed engravings, antique illustrations, or drawings; then she photographs each collage on 35mm film in a delicate handcrafted process.

Steers's animated short films have been widely screened in the United States and abroad, and have received numerous awards. Her films have been included in the Sundance Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, and in Europe in those of Locarno or Rotterdam, among others; her works have also been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and at the New York MoMA.

source marypickfords Jan 23