Jazz of Lights

While we are intimately familiar with the inner world of his wife, the ethereal Anaïs Nin, we know far less about the imagination of her husband, financier by profession and artist by calling, Hugh Parker Guiler—better known under his artist name, Ian Hugo. Born in Boston, raised in Puerto Rico, educated in Scotland and New York, a fateful encounter with the muse of all muses, a wedding in Cuba, and the early years of their life as a couple in Paris. Living a double life—banker to meet material needs, artist to fulfill his deepest aspirations—Ian Hugo first devoted himself to printmaking, a practice he would pursue throughout his life, before turning to filmmaking. As the Second World War approached, the Nin-Hugo couple left Paris to settle in New York. In 1947, Anaïs Nin secretly (and illegally!) married the young actor Rupert Pole, leading a double life of her own between New York and Los Angeles. Yet she and Hugo remained deeply connected, and the author took part in the cinematic experiments of her still banker-husband.

Jazz of Lights is Hugo's second film. Shot in Times Square, it anticipated the rise of American experimental cinema and notably influenced Stan Brakhage. A work of heightened sensitivity, a visual phantasmagoria, an ephemeral stream of sensations, it brings European Surrealism into contact with American materiality. Filmed without a fixed plan and edited like a musical composition, its superimpositions, tonal shifts, colours, and bursts of light dissolve into one another, creating an urban symphony tinged with mysticism. And who do we glimpse cutting through the crowd like a prophet bearing a secret message? Moondog—the celestial composer known as "the Viking of Sixth Avenue."

Moondog, Anaïs Nin, a soundtrack by electronic music pioneers Bebe and Louis Barron, and the most famous banker-artist exploring the phantasmagoric signs of American civilization contained within Times Square.

What more could one ask for?

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director