One of a number of short films Bas Jan Ader made after he moved from Amsterdam to Los Angeles in 1963, Nightfall is related in subject to several films Ader made in 1971, all "starring" himself as the protagonist/victim. Nightfall’s combination of absurd humor and pathos are typical of his work. (This same combination of the heroic and the absurd is found in the work of William Wegman, another early conceptual artist working in southern California during these same years.) There is a quasi-religious sanctity to the opening moments of the film that is almost immediately belied by the Marx Brothers-style antics of Ader lifting, supporting, and eventually dropping (or is it throwing down?) the weighty block, thereby blotting out the string of lightbulbs on the floor below. As critic Jan Tumlir has pointed out, Ader thus “appears to symbolically extinguish all the enlightenment currents that power the proverbial lightbulb of ‘Idea Art.’” The film immediately zigzags again between the sobriety of Ader standing upright in the shadows and then struggling anew to lift and support the block. The gravitas of his Sisyphean task is undermined by its absurdity.
