Lost Paradise: four parallel worlds between Utopia and Oblivion

Slow Action (2010) A film by Ben Rivers. Colour, Black and White, 16mm anamorphic, 45 mins.

Part documentary, part science fiction, Slow Action (2010) is a haunting creation of a world all at once familiar and alien. Somewhere between utopia and oblivion, Slow Action by British filmmaker Ben Rivers’ explores life in four marginal worlds on island societies of the Pacific. The film continues on Rivers’ exploration of alternative existence, surveying imagined lands that seem to survive as if lost ruins of a fallen modern civilisation.

British filmmaker Ben Rivers’ film notes his inspiration of master German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana (1971), which Herzog had conceived as a ‘mirage’ and shot in the Sahara. The film blended documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. In Slow Action, we see Ben Rivers’ evoking similar themes previously explored in Fata Morgana.

Shot on 16mm anamorphic film, Slow Action was filmed at different sites around the world. The film incorporates footage from strange and deserted places such as Gunkanjima, an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan; the beautiful island of Lanzarote; Somerset in England; and Tuvalu – one of the smallest countries in the world with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific.

In Slow Action, Rivers applies the idea of island biogeography – the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat – to a conception of how the Earth might be in a few hundred years. A voice-over narration weaves in a tapestry of information and facts around the images. We feel something of a wandering outsider, in search of unchartered territories, somewhere between myth and reality.

Slow Action takes us into a world of post-apocalypse, or post-civilisation. We meet masked tribesmen, living in the middle of the forest. Traveling across space and time, we experience day and night on the forgotten islands, where ruins and human activity confront each other. It’s an existence tensing between belonging and emptiness, hope and fear, community and isolation, man-made and nature.

Is this a mirror of our future? A Lost Paradise? These are some of the questions Slow Action seems to contemplate. Perhaps they are scenarios of one of the many possible futures, ones which could approach more quickly than we think. This year’s report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlights the urgency of the decisions, actions, and solutions that need to be urgently implemented if dangerous climate change is to be avoided in the 21st century. There is no doubt that delay could potentially lead to irreversible and catastrophic effects on our environment, from impacts on water resources and agricultural productivity, acceleratation of sea level rise, not to mention the cataclysmic consequences for millions of people worldwide.

Slow Action casts a haunting vision of what could await.

Text Sophie Pinchetti