For one night only, experimental film director Ben Rivers’ latest film project The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers is screening at the REDCAT Theater in downtown Los Angeles. The director will be present for a post-screening conversation.
With a title lifted from Paul Bowles’ 1947 short story “A Distant Episode,” and set in modern day Morocco, this lyrical, demanding, but rewarding Sky announces from the start that takes that it’s a film about filmmaking, and then makes clear that it’s not a masturbatory or single take on its subject. It begins as something of a “real” documentary on the making of director Oliver Laxe’s film The Mimosas, and then at roughly the halfway mark shifts into a loose adaptation of the Bowles story, with Laxe “playing” a director who abandons his film mid-shoot and takes off for a one-man trip across the desert. He’s taken captive by a group of men, dressed up in ceremonial garb, and sold off as a dancer.
“The Sky Trembles…,” by Ben Rivers. Photo by Yuki Yamamoto
Rivers is far from didactic but certain themes and critiques emerge powerfully. The film’s tackling of the nature and processes of creativity, the longstanding practice of foreigners (particularly writers and filmmakers) dropping into Morocco seeking “inspiration” and material and then conducting themselves as vampires of sorts, the fears and seductiveness of the “Other,” and fears around the fallout of colonialism, all spool out in poetic form.
The film is elliptical, pulling the viewer in on the strength of often breathtaking images that gird the (unforced) text and subtexts of the narrative. Local people are filmed in gorgeous close-ups. Landscapes – whether an endless expanse of white sand being crossed by a lone traveler, or the grey rocky terrain against which a man stands and sings – are simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, giving testimony to nature’s endless means and methods of creativity and self-expression, and signaling something foreboding within the beauty.
Monday, December 7, 8:30 PM. REDCAT Theater (Downtown Los Angeles)
