Un soleil difficile examines the multiple uses of the metaphor of transparency, and the changes it has undergone in Modernity. In the 1920s, in glass architecture, transparency was, amongst other things, a symbol of a positive social transformation—a radical political emancipation, even —before undergoing rapid evolution and transfiguration, eventually nurturing a fair share of the dreams of objectivity, optimization, fluidity, acceleration and hygiene so characteristic of our modern world.

Through the meaning, the paradoxes and the imagery that USD mobilizes, transparency now informs not only contemporary ethical and political representations but also industrial aesthetics, architecture, communications, as well as abstract algorithmical and statistical machines. Using these perceptible evidences, USD and the exhibition to which the film belongs seeks to identify, in a world wearied and disoriented by all that persists under the name of “crisis”, what the concept of transparency can tell us about the dreams of opacity and the nightmares that haunt our time.