CITY OF BRASS
Antoine Galland, the 18th-century French orientalist and archaeologist who first introduced One Thousand and One Nights to the Western world, finds himself trapped inside the labyrinthine architecture of “The City of Brass”—the very tale he is translating. As the line between scholar and story dissolves, Galland is plunged into a feverish, nocturnal reverie where the ancient fable manifests around him as a living, breathing reality.
Within this dreamscape, Galland re-enacts the central dynamic of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad through the specter of his own wife. Bound by a quiet, aching longing for her, he projects his deepest desires and anxieties onto the mythic framework of death, storytelling, and survival. His wife becomes both the captive and the captor, the teller of stories and the subject of his obsession—a woman he must continuously conjure through narrative to keep from losing forever.
Blending historical reality with mythology and European romanticism, the film is an evocative meditation on the act of translation as an act of love, grief, and self-delusion. In wrestling with the phantom of Shahrazad, Galland discovers that every story we translate is ultimately a mirror of the heart’s unfulfilled longings.
The film was shot over two days in Chicago.
24 min (2oo2)