The Rare Event
Ben Russell, Ben Rivers
2017
France
49’
Four films share one horizon: cinema can be a portal into a different, ever-multiple, ever-unfolding reality. In Against Time, we experience time as a fragmented phenomenon. In La Prospettiva (1653), Baroque illusionism unveils perspective and human fragility. In The Rare Event, Russell and Rivers document a discussion between Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Povinelli, Gayatri Spivak and Étienne Balibar, among others, which slowly becomes a portal into another time-space altogether. Finally, in Another Earth, the words of Zadie Smith: “Time is not what it is / But how it is felt.”