Hans Jürgen Syberberg's new film is at once the most minimal, and yet one of the most ambitious works from the director of Our Hitler. Die Nacht is a marathon, one-woman show, the woman being the marvelous actress and tragedienne Edith Clever, best known here for her roles in Peter Handke's The Left Handed Woman and Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O. She delivers an elegant, eloquent, unforgettable monologue, alone on a stage of glittering black sand and accompanied by the occasional Syberbergian prop. And behind her voice and movements is, of course, the textural voice, like an everpresent shadow, of Syberberg, whose sad nocturne this is, a swan song for Europe drawn from such diverse sources as Goethe, Holderlin, Kleist, and the Indian Chief Seattle, as well as Syberberg's own reflections on his childhood in Pomerania. The "musical monologue" incorporates, equally, Bach ("The Well-Tempered Clavier") and Wagner ("Tristan and Isolde," "Parsifal"). Appropriately, the film is shot in austere black-and-white and sublimely lit by Xaver Schwarzenberger (Veronica Voss). Die Nacht was first performed as a two-day stage piece in Nanterre, outside of Paris; the film premiered in Germany on the forty-year anniversary of the end of World War II and of National Socialism.