"The more the personality disappears in the twilight of mood, so much the more is the individual in the moment" – Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or.
In 1962 you encounter some giants of the old studio system in vigorous if melancholy twilight (a mood that resonates with the Brooklyn Academy's brilliantly selected series, The Late Film, last spring).
I think of spy fiction set in Europe — by John le Carré, Alan Furst, Charles McCarry — as being dark in ambiance and mood: twilight scenes, drizzle, disappointed characters with their best years and opportunities behind them.
Aaron Katz's film "Quiet City" is punctuated with images of New York at twilight that cast a mood of reflective melancholy reminiscent of the loneliness at the heart of Edward Hopper paintings.
Considering how revolutionary Surrealist photography was in the years before World War II, what with its double-exposing, montaging, solarizing and other techniques, it may seem paradoxical that nostalgia would be the mood suffusing "Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography and Paris" at the International Center of Photography.
The big-eyed, big-eared wolf that menaces Red and her granny has been turned into a werewolf, and an alarming lycanthrope-hunting cleric (played by Gary Oldman at his most unfettered) has been added, but the basics of the story remain intact, and Ms. Hardwicke, of "Twilight" fame, keeps the mood properly somber and hushed.
That fit the mood of the "Twilight" actress Kristen Stewart, slouching front row, while Salma Hayek, fresh from Oliver Stone's movie "Savages," provided Latin glamour.
The musical material is cut from familiar fabric, but it's striking that the composer forgoes the expected bustling conclusion and instead delves into a mood of deepening twilight and unending night.
