Now, At Last (Ben Rivers, 2018) (Patreon)

British experimentalist Ben Rivers has produced some highly unusual films in his career, but nothing in his filmography prepared me for Now, At Last. A duration-based work that reminded me somewhat of the gallery-based structuralism of Tacita Dean and Sharon Lockhart, this latest film is just under 40 minutes long, and could be said to constitute a kind of sly in-joke regarding the so-called "slow cinema movement."

Now, At Last is a portrait of a sloth. Mostly black and white, it consists of a medium shot of the sloth climbing from the base of a tree up to the middle of a large branch, where it proceeds to hang upside down. In the second half, Rivers breaks up the space to provide sequential close-ups of the sloth, culminating in an ECU of the creature staring balefully at the lens.

At two points during the film -- once when the sloth reaches the middle of the branch, and the other time about 15 minutes before the end -- the image changes to color. The sloth is jacketed in radiant color separation, as if it is being projected in some sort of 3D process or has been shot in three-strip Technicolor and the registration is way off. During these sequences, the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" plays in its entirety. ("Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much...")

Rivers has frequently engaged in filmic portraiture, but usually he has trained his camera on fellow humans. Films like Ah, Liberty!, This Is My Land, and Origin of the Species focused on the meticulous movements of men. As far as I am aware, this is Rivers' first foray into animal locomotion. Of course, as fauna goes, sloths have a particular symbolic connection to humans. They represent one of our deadly sins. Is slow cinema an unhealthy indulgence? Are we, the slow cinephiles, lethargic creatures, coming down from the trees once a week to poop? 

I feel so seen.