30 minutes into Jem Cohen’s new film Little, Big, and Far, the viewer watches a mostly vacant mall parking lot slowly descend into darkness. For most of this remarkable sequence, we don’t see the eclipse taking place, just the effect, its look akin to the then-imperfect, day-for-night aesthetic of mid-century Hollywood films. The sensuousness of this scene is a reprieve from the film’s otherwise academic milieu, though we still come away learning something. This cosmic rarity does more than envelop a fortunate sliver of the world in anachronistic darkness, it also brings people, arriving from all over the world and just around the corner, to gather outside storefronts, near parked cars, underneath tents; they share food and advice on how best to view this phenomenon. At the same time, Eleanor (played by filmmaker Leslie Thornton) reads in voiceover an email to her astronomer husband, Karl (Franz Schwartz), in which she recounts a meeting with a diner waitress who was curious about Eleanor’s profession (she’s a cosmologist) and the big questions that drive her research. Eleanor remembers she offered the waitress a metaphor: we can’t see the wind, but we know when it’s in the trees. The same assumption applies to the cosmos, whose invisible, dark matter and energy are nevertheless powerful forces on our universe.
Cohen probes questions of interconnectedness in this scene and others throughout his hybrid docu-fiction; questions about cosmic expanse emerge in sharp relief to ones about terrestrial minutiae, all asked by deeply curious people with an implicit but shared melancholy for a world precariously balanced on the edge of catastrophe and loss. Karl’s younger friend, Sarah (filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland), updates him on her life, a budding romance with a handsome astronomer, Mateo (Mario Silva), and her professional preoccupations. The epistolary nature of Sarah’s dialogue, like Eleanor’s email, is instructive about the film’s interest in relationships. Also instructive is Karl’s response, which, to Sarah, isn’t a letter of his own, but a remark to himself (“Always happy to hear from Sarah”); in the case of Eleanor’s email, it appears to merit no response at all — even technology sometimes can’t bridge the divides of geography.
One reason for Karl’s detachment is his professional limbo — his museum job in Austria is unfulfilling, and a future gig is in question — which only compounds his existential melancholy about the state of the universe. His absentmindedness defines his way of moving through the world on the ground. Crowds seem alien to him; he weaves in and out of a military demonstration and underground metro stations, trying to remain unseen. Even when he’s sitting right next to Sarah, as he does later in the film on a trip to Greece, he can’t seem to pay attention. One wonders to what extent an old man, whose concerns are so far away, can relate to Sarah’s, so doggedly earthbound as they are. He looks at the ground, as if to look for what Sarah sees, but a distant glaze forms over his eyes, and Sarah’s voice fades away. Perhaps that’s our answer.
If there’s a thesis to be found in Little, Big, and Far, Sarah expresses it perfectly. In one of her letters to Karl, she argues that melancholy is interesting; despair is not. Karl once remarked he was slow to political action in his youth; only the unthinkable alternative — no change at all — prompted him to join the crowds and chant. But while the crises of a luminous night sky increasingly blotted out by artificial lights, of museum culture dominated by the paradox of life and death, mediation, and direct experience, and of imminent ecological collapse make it easy to despair, the solutions are not so clear-cut.
This isn’t to say Little, Big, and Far is gloomy. Cohen is guided chiefly by a sense of wonder, childlike, curious, yes, but also informed by lifetimes of experience that imbue natural phenomena with value in different ways, with the melancholy Sarah identifies that is in direct opposition to despair. Karl stays behind in Greece, hoping to find the darkest island in the country from which he can view the unmediated night sky in quiet, rapturous solitude. His wanderings are mostly quiet affairs, punctuated by chance encounters with locals who tell their own stories of the cosmos. When he’s alone, on his back, eyes upward, one can almost hear the wailing, chaotic and controlled, of Alice and John Coltrane’s Manifestation beckoning him into the swirl.
DIRECTOR: Jem Cohen; CAST: Leslie Thornton, Sarah Jessica Rinland, Franz Schwarz, Mario Silva; DISTRIBUTOR: Grasshopper Film; IN THEATERS: July 11; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 1 min.
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