Afghanistan-born, New York-based filmmaker Jem Cohen’s essayistic docufiction Little, Big, and Far connects, as its title suggests, tangential details with cosmic musings. The lyrical sprawl, which ruminates on how we are to read and classify a world in crisis, screened in the International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Reel in Nyon. A work of quiet melancholy, its nevertheless infused with the director’s characteristic, infectious curiosity, driven by the impulses of a collector who records and gathers moments of strange wonder from everyday life.
Cohen, who has four prolific decades of work to his name, is known for his anti-corporate ethos and his collaborations with musicians, and for richly associative films, such as 1996’s Lost Book Found, on the revelations of a New York pushcart vendor and a notebook of mysterious listings. These assemblages are organised like tuning forks, to seek patterns in the chance constellations of memories, and from the urban environment with its proliferation of stories. In his concern with the climate crisis, and an Anthropocene age in which species extinction has accelerated, Cohen widens his lens in Little, Big, and Far from cities and the workings of capital to the starry galaxy, and a gnawing existential anxiety over what humanity’s uncertain future means for our relics of the past.
It’s not the first time museums as sites of contemplation and connection have featured prominently in his work — in Museum Hours (2012), a woman adrift in Vienna who is facing a family death strikes up a friendship with Kunsthistorisches Museum guard — but in Little, Big, and Far, life’s big questions of transience and mortality take on an even vaster scope. This epistolary weave of letter exchanges on outer space, science and significance, voiced by experimental filmmaker friends in performed roles, feels more impersonal and intangible than some of his prior cinematic wanderings. But it has a haunting quality, in taking stock of reality’s fabric as a cataclysm looms, that remains hard to shake after the credits end.
Karl (Franz Schwartz), a 70-year-old Austrian astronomer, is re-evaluating his life and the nature of his work in a changing (perhaps even dying) world. The film opens with him putting on a record, which he considers, in its orderly chaos, his astronomy soundtrack: Cosmic Music, an album by spiritual jazz pioneer Alice Coltrane in collaboration with her husband John, released after John’s death. Karl also acts with a degree of spontaneous improvisation, as he takes off to an island after a conference in Greece, seeking a sky dark enough for star-gazing. We hear snippets of missives exchanged between him and his wife Eleanor (Leslie Thornton), a cosmologist who has been in Texas, where she heard a hotel waitress compare dark matter and the dark money that investment types believe makes the world go around. In a car park outside a mall, locals have gathered to watch a solar eclipse. Despite the professional credentials of its letter-writers, the film is as much an ode to street-corner observation as it is to elite knowledge, suggesting simply paying attention is enough to tap into the universe’s poetry and marvels.
Karl also shares reflections with a younger colleague, Sarah (Sarah Jessica Rinland), a museum consultant, who describes the undertow of panic that has been rippling through her profession in an era of accelerated species extinction and biodiversity loss. As we observe dioramas of taxidermied wildlife, glowing softly in the darkness, we are invited to consider whether museums are becoming cemeteries of mourning. Sarah has formed a relationship with Mateo, an Ecuadorian astronomer she can mull quantum uncertainty with, who takes her to see the Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey.
Despite the film’s epistolary latticework of shared searching, the conversations stay largely conceptual rather than personal. But there is enough beauty and romance in its science to buoy the film with a sense of quiet awe throughout, with space agency satellite images of comets and vistas of starscapes recorded by the Webb space telescope immersing us in the universe as a naturally breathtaking sight. The end credits pointedly declare that no CGI or AI was used for phenomena “seen in the world, filmed by cameras” — a kind of plea from Cohen, with his old-school, DIY ethos, for the survival of raw authenticity, and belief in the night sky’s signs.
Director, Screenwriter, Cinematographer, Editor: Jem Cohen
Producers: Paolo Calamita, Jem Cohen
Sound: Jem Cohen, Lesley Shatz
Production companies: Little Magnet Films (Austria), Gravity Hill (United States)
Sales: Little Magnet Films
Venue: Visions du Réel (International Feature Film Competition)
In English, German
122 minutes
