Not Blacking Out, Just Turning The Lights Off is concerned with processes of dissolution and exchange, asking what happens along the frayed edges of subjectivity as it meets, or attempts to meet another. The film stalks liminal states of exhaustion and sleep, we see bedrooms and the paraphernalia of intoxication, alongside X-rays, skin and globular liquids, sequences which build a heightened sense of inside and outside, the tender and the forensic, the sensual image and its abstraction.
The soundtrack includes a reading by Judith Grahn of her poem ‘Plainsong: From an Older Woman to a Younger Woman’. It is an incantation of the spirits passing between two same sex lovers of different ages reflecting on mortality and desire as something physically, and emotionally, transmitted. The film also includes a modulated edit of The Incredible String Bands’ folk-hippy classic ‘A Very Cellular Song’, the track evoking the sense of cosmic unity when experiencing LSD.
