Night And Day | Arena Time Machine | Regent Street Cinema

16th January 2018

Night and Day is a completely new cinematic experience. Sourced entirely from the unique treasure trove that is the archive of Arena, the world’s longest running arts documentary series. It has no beginning, no middle and no end, simply the time you choose to start watching, how long you stay watching and the time you choose to leave. Its narrative is simply that of night and day itself, edited to a precise audio visual experience of the times and date on which its screened.

The Arena archive provides an inexhaustible supply of scenes from all over the world and protagonists who range from ordinary people to some of the most famous of the past century – Mandela to McCartney, Amy Winehouse to Catherine Deneuve, Johnny Rotten to Antonioni.

Drawn exclusively from Arena’s archive of over 600 films, Night and Day is edited to link the time in the film to the time in the location of the screening – if it’s dawn on the screen, it’s dawn outside the cinema.

Night and Day has screened as a continuous television presentation, tailored to each time and place, at the Telluride Film Festival; on screen at the Cambridge Film Festival for 24 hours; as an art infiltration all over the City of Cambridge; as part of an exhibition of the story of Arena at the University of Brighton and as a 24 hour installation at the Carroll Fletcher Gallery, London W1 and at New York University.

This free screening will run for 8.5 hours in perfect sync for the afternoon, evening and night-time. Audiences are encouraged to come and go as they please.

How to watch… Think Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. After shopping she has time to kill before her assignation with Trevor Howard at the station. She decides to take in a film. She would almost certainly arrive halfway through the film, watch till it starts again and leave at the point where she might say, ‘this is where I came in.’ ‘This is where we came in’ is not an observation available for Night and Day, any more than it would be for the day itself. However it would perhaps more satisfactorily fulfil Celia’s needs in the afternoon.

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