User:Aitantv/Slow Action, Ben Rivers

Slow Action (2010) dir. Ben Rivers. 16mm film, Stereo sound, 00:45:00 duration.

• written with sci-fi writer Mark von Schlegel. Rivers was filming at the same time and Von Schegel has no idea about what is being filmed. There are casual overlaps between the text and image but nothing so clear.
• "Rivers chose these locations for different reasons, both cinematic and scientific. For example, his decision to film in Lanzarote was inspired by Werner Herzog’s 1971 film Fata Morgana. As Rivers had commented, Slow Action ‘was made in the shadow of this film’ (Rivers 2010, accessed 23 May 2015). However, the sites were also chosen for their geographical isolation and reflect Rivers’s interest in biogeography – the study of how species and ecosystems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by inhospitable habitats. In Slow Action Rivers also imagines the ecological future of the earth; with sea levels rising to uncontrolled levels within a few hundred years, earth’s geography is continually changing, perhaps leading to landmasses becoming removed from one another and creating new archipelagos" (TATE SYNOPSIS)
• Shot on anamporhic 16mm - responding to sci-fi films from the 70s - the choice of scope broadening the landscape and minimizing the human figure
• dissonance/disjunction between text and image and sound.
• "Utopia is a no place. It can only ever be approached."
• "we are our own visitors and ghosts

+ a dream-like nostalgic effect to have the found sound, voicover and imagery flowing in and out of time with one another.

• the grainy, textural quality of 16mm lends the footage an archival quality - a certain believability. It appears to perhaps come from the past but the content envisions utopian futures after sea-levels rising. With that nostalgic, archival frame perhaps the viewer takes the position of an alien visitor who has found archival footage of a remote past.