Against Time (Ben Russell, 2022) (Patreon)

Ben Russell's latest film is in part an expansion of his 2020 film What Distinguishes the Past, which was featured in this year's edition of Media City. That film, inspired in part by the death of Russell's friend Jonathan Schwartz, is an elaboration of techniques Russell has used in earlier films, Trypps #7 (Badlands) and YOLO (2015). In those works, Russell indeed moved "against time" by running the image in reverse, capitalizing on film's unique plasticity and returning certain actions to their apparent origin. In Against Time, after a green introductory screen, Russell gives us a fireworks display in an Eastern European town, depicting the colorful blasts as they retract into single points of launch. The audio reverses the explosions, resulting in a sonic "thupp" that suggests an event being sucked into a black hole.

That introductory section is scored with what sounds like a karaoke version of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." But after that, Russell takes us inside a club or a theater, where we watch fog collect on an empty, blue-tinted stage. Eventually a headless DJ appears behind the decks, scratching gently on the turntables -- another way of reversing performative time. Using superimposition, Russell moves us out of the club and into a forest. From here, Against Time ventures once more out into the world.

The second part of the film, signaled by a red screen, consists of a long tracking shot taken from a car window, moving us through a tunnel and onto a highway in Russell's adopted home, Marseille. As the unbroken shot continues, Russell begins another set of superimposed images, most of them consisting of close-ups of a baby. It's hard not to see a Brakhage reference here, since the combination of the young seer with the plenitude of the seen resembles part four of Dog Star Man. But soon, this tracking shot, a continuous band of time, breaks down into something entirely different.

Various images and sounds start pulsing toward us, in twos and threes, using a frame-by-frame alternation that is quite different from Russell's usual editing schemes. A filmmaker who has typically favored the Bazinian long take, Russell ends up bombarding us with a series of seemingly quotidian images with a combinatory, "third eye" approach that recalls Rose Lowder and especially Scott Stark. This footage, which appears to reflect Russell's daily life in Marseille, is shuffled and intercut, resulting in a throbbing, perceptual present, multiple fleeting moments rushing into one another and obliterating a sense of before and after. 

If the first part of Against Time is an attempt at reversal, the desire to somehow undo the death of a dear friend, the second part explores an altogether different way of managing existence and mortality. By heightening our experience of the mundane, Russell tries to reinvigorate it through Brakhage's "untutored vision," and then finally turning physical memories into something electric and uncontrolled, a machine against forgetting. This is new territory for Russell, and the result is one of the best films he's made.