This morning Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn revealed that director-writer Paul Schrader has “found a wild, unprecedented workaround” to restore or reconstitute the “mangled” theatrical cut of Dying of The Light (which I hated) and “into the movie he intended all along.”
It’s called Dark, but the only way to see it is to request a viewing at the UCLA Film Archives in Los Angeles and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. It can’t be commercially streamed for the usual commercial infringement reasons.
Dark was “literally assembled out of fragments ripped from the theatrical cut and transformed into a kind of post-modern collage that’s closer to the filmed installation art of Douglas Gordon (24 Hour Psycho) than a cohesive narrative,” Kohn writes. “Originally 94 minutes, it now runs just over 70, and the climactic showdown has been replaced by an abstract light-and-color show as Nicolas Cage‘s character completes his descent into madness.”
I’ve been a reborn Schrader-ite since seeing First Reformed about three and a half months ago.