Wesley Shrum, Louisiana State University;
Gregory Scott, Depaul University

Posted: September 7, 2015

Light Years (5 min film) was made for UNESCO by 4S and Ethnografilm to launch the 2015 International Year of Light.

Since the beginning of modern cinema, viewers and critics alike have been transfixed by light contrasted with darkness.  This interplay of light and dark was typical of film noir, a metaphor of good and evil in plots that featured crime, detectives, and mystery.  We celebrate this genre through a salute to Augustin-Jean Fresnel, the inventor of a lens for lighthouses that was later used for movie and theatre lighting.  Light Years features serial murder and a star-studded group of suspects over a half-century of film.  Whodunnit?  Ultimately, we learn that the Fatal Fresnel Lens has incinerated five cameras that recorded their own demise.