By: Valerie Milano (Hollywood Today) 3-26-11

Jay Rosenblatt, director of "The Darkness of Day"

Artist and filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt has created a new documentary film for HBO, “The Darkness of Day”, which will air Wednesday, March 30. Although the subject is often taboo and painful, he has created this “meditation” from discarded 16mm footage, journal entries and moving music.

 With the advent of video, school districts and other film libraries we had no need for old black and white films, which were recovered and spliced together by Rosenblatt in an effort to explore the raw sadness, despair and hopelessness of depression and suicide from a different, possibly more compassionate perspective.

 The haunting b/w images are paired by the artist with actual journal entries, memoir readings, newsreels, home movies and intimate music.  For 27 minutes the viewer is immersed in the imagery of the depths of sadness and darkness with the voice-over reading excerpts of journal entries of a depressed man, the story of an elderly couple and their suicide note, the phenomenon of the Hemingway family. And though this may sound all too much to bear, Rosenblatt creates an artistic and serious venture into the ultimate desire to escape.

And there are those left behind to carry on, with questions and doubt. What did they miss? Should they have known? There are, of coarse, no answers.

Whatever your personal views are of taking ones own life, this documentary is posed from a creative and non-clinical vantage.  Rosenblatt puts a little history and personal glimpses into seemingly strong people who have survived tragedies but lose their struggle to live one more day, and succumb to depression.