The City Dark, a new documentary by Ian Cheney has the deceptively modest goal of exploring just one tiny aspect of “human progress”—the use of artificial light to conquer the night. Ostensibly The City Dark is about light pollution, that is, light spilling into places we don’t want or intend it to go: the night sky, natural animal habitat, our very bedrooms What the film actually achieves is much greater than its initial grasp, as The City Dark paints a provocative portrait of a species caught up in a difficult coming of age, at once realizing our tiny place in a huge universe while growing ever more self-absorbed and intoxicated with our own power to re-engineer our reality.  (more…)