Waiting up to Meet the Wolf
Anthony Carr

Waiting Up To Meet The Wolf is an experimental three channel short film contemplating the rapid decline of dark skies. Coalescing the past, present and future, the film weaves personal memories of the dark from the artist’s childhood and adult life, with the short-lived history of the 19th century’s once ubiquitous Moonlight Tower. These towers, alongside other social and technological changes helped shape attitudes towards darkness, which has had and continues to have huge ecological consequences. Darkness is important to all flora and fauna on our planet, we need the dark to function as much as we need sunlight. We try our best to eradicate it, but instead, our responsibility should be to preserve it in the same way we preserve and protect other habitats.   

Shot on black and white 16mm, the film has been hand-processed using experimental eco-reversal techniques which reflect the subject matter, from developing in charcoal to flashing the film with light from a car headlight. The relevance of using charcoal is two-fold; materially connecting the film to both the carbon electrodes in the original towers and to the history of photography and its use by the Lumiere Brothers’ Autochrome technique of the same time period. The film’s length is also significant, with 6 mins 40 secs or 6,400 frames of 16mm film, equivalent to 160ft which was the height of the original Moonlight Towers in Victoria (BC), where the film was made. Embedded with various levels of symbolism – most obviously the moon – the film includes the presence of unwanted light, meaning it owes its very existence to that which it laments.

Carr’s film presents an overlooked, surface-level reality that shapes our daily lives yet remains under-acknowledged. Its quiet urgency reveals how the erasure of darkness is already happening around us: an encroachment that demands attention before it becomes irreversible.