Glass Hour: film by Clare Langan (16mm film transferred to DVD with Surround Sound)

Composition for Irish Visual Artist Clare Langan's film "Glass Hour".

‘Clare Langan’s post-apocalyptic trilogy of films, Forty Below,1999, Too Dark for Night, 2001 and Glass hour, 2002, individually and collectively offer us visions of a future in which the forces of nature appear to have overwhelmed the human hold on the planet. The causes of environmental catastrophe are never specified, but there is no doubting the fact of catastrophe. In the most recent film, Glass hour, a hapless, vulnerable figure is glimpsed moving through a simmering, volcanic landscape. There is no straightforward linear narrative, but a cumulative, compelling sense of a huge, industrialised environment being engulfed by a vast lava flow. All this is conveyed in the form of shots of molten, seething terrain, of abandoned and crumbling factory installations – and of what looks like a domestic structure bursting spontaneously into flame as the lava approaches.’ Aidan Dunne 2003