The City Dark

Ian Cheney moves to New York. Looking up, he can hardly see a star. That absence puts a question to him. The question is this: what do we lose when we lose the night. He sets out on a journey after that question. He goes to the brightest and the darkest corners of America. Along the way he talks with people from different fields. Astronomers tell what light does to the sky. Cancer researchers look at the health side of it. Ecologists tell of the effect on living things. Philosophers open up another side of the relationship. The account moves along with footage of the night sky. Cheney’s American documentary of 2012 is put together as an introduction to the science of the dark, and it runs eighty four minutes.