Night and Day

Description

This year’s Mel Novikoff Award winner, the BBC series Arena, celebrated its 40th anniversary of arts programming in 2015, with Night and Day. Co-created and directed by Anthony Wall, the series’ longtime executive producer, the film is a distillation of four decades of filmmaking into a 24-hour “visual experience,” broadcast in real time, encompassing an entire day from morning to night. This special presentation of Night and Day is not simply a more condensed version of the original exhibition – it runs nine hours  – but will include footage unique to its San Francisco premiere. Viewers choose when to arrive and how long to stay, designing their own individual experience. SFFILM is pleased to present this stunning work, as a free exhibition in the YBCA Lobby Gallery as a complement to the screening of James Marsh’s Wisconsin Death Trip (1999) that will accompany the April 20th Novikoff Award presentation. The longest-running arts series of its kind, the winner of nine BAFTAs, Arena has produced hundreds of hours of programming over the years, a wide-ranging survey of the arts that encompasses Frank Sinatra to the Sex Pistols to Brian Eno; Charles Dickens to Dylan Thomas to Salman Rushdie; and Orson Welles to Clint Eastwood to Akira Kurosawa.

This is a free gallery program. Viewers may come and go throughout the day. 

Watch the film with special San Francisco footage: sffilm.org/nightanddaySF

Co-director Emma Matthews

Emma Matthews is primarily a film editor who began her career as an assistant editor on Looking for Langston (1989). Long associated with the Arena TV series, among the other works she has edited are Dance of the Wind (1997), London Orbital (2002), and a 2014 episode of The South Bank Show (1978- ).

Co-director Anthony Wall

In an association going back nearly 40 years, Anthony Wall has been a director, series editor, and executive producer of Arena (1975- ). For his work on the series, he has received nine BAFTA nominations, winning three; three Royal Television Society Awards; and a Grammy. Says Wall of Night and Day, “I’ve always wanted to find a documentary that never needed to end, and I think I’ve found it. The extraordinary thing is, you take a sequence that has a predetermined intention, and you cut it up and put it in a different place and time, and it has a whole new meaning.”

Film Details