The Rare Event

The Rare Event is a 2018 Swiss-British-French[note 1] short experimental docufiction film directed and co-produced by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, commissioned by the LUMA Foundation.[1][2] Described as "a playful take on what seems like a serious documentary on structuralist philosophy,"[4] the film appears to document a three-day forum attended by many notable intellectuals and artists gathered to imagine and discuss the possibilities of Résistances, an unrealised sequel to Jean-François Lyotard's 1985 exhibition titled Les Immatériaux, shadowed by a man (Tuomo Tuovinen) dressed head to toe in a green lycra full bodysuit, allowing him to act as a human greenscreen displaying extraneous images by artist Peter Burr,[5] set to "a haptic surround sound mix"[6] by sound designer Philippe Ciompi.[1][2]

The Rare Event
Directed byBen Rivers,
Ben Russell[1][2]
Produced byLuz Gyalui,
Ben Rivers,
Ben Russell[1][2]
CinematographyBen Rivers,
Ben Russell[1][2]
Edited byBen Rivers,
Ben Russell[2]
Production
company
Distributed byLux[3]
Release date
  • 16 February 2018 (2018-02-16) (Berlinale)
  • 5 May 2018 (2018-05-05) (Alchemy)
Running time
48 minutes[1][2][3]
CountrySwitzerland, UK, France[2]
LanguageEnglish and
French[2] (English subtitles)

Synopsis
Jean-Luc Nancy in 2006

In a Parisian recording studio, a gathering of thinkers, critics, curators, and artists, is taking place, an inaugural three-day "forum of ideas" focusing on the manifold possibilities of "resistance" (in the philosophical sense), after the unrealised follow-up to a 1985 exhibition by Jean-François Lyotard, Les Immatériaux.[1][2] Lyotard's conceptual project was concerned with "the obverse side of communication: noise, distortion, and magic."[6] The philosophical conversations are observed from the periphery by a man dressed in a green lycra bodysuit which covers his head and face. He participates in an interview with the theorist and filmmaker Manthia Diawara.[7] After a while, the Green Man's form begins to change, displaying "extraneous images",[5] accompanied by "haptic" sounds such as the creaking floorboards of the studio, often "deferred and delayed in time, a "parallel event" taking place alongside the forum,[6] and "a portal that joins all dimensions into one."[1][2]

Other persons who participated in the symposium and who appear in the film include:[1] Etienne Balibar, Federico Campagna, Timothy Morton, Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Povinelli, Gayatri Spivak, and Dorothea Van Hantelman, as well as:[2][8] Philippe Parreno, Boris Groys, Albert Serra, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Actor Tuomo Tuovinen was the Green Man.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Background, theory, and themes

Tasked with documenting the three-day "forum of ideas", directors Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, who have frequently collaborated on films, directly intervene in the philosophical discussion by "gesturing toward the promises of Lyotard's conceptual project" through their inclusion of the Green Man,[6] a "surrogate" for the absent Lyotard,[7][9] who died twenty years earlier in 1998.

In 1985, Lyotard and design theorist Thierry Chaput co-curated the exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou's Centre de Création Industrielle in Paris.[10] Lyotard mentioned the possibility of a sequel exhibition in his seminars, provisionally titled Résistances, which would supposedly have conceived resistance in terms of "noise, distortion, and the dimension of experience that resists both consciousness and language".[11] As Lyotard's surrogate, the Green Man steers the viewer towards an abstract, digital cosmos, providing a "comic counterpoint to the group's serious-minded deliberations",[7] literally wandering in and out of the discursive space and toward "other dimensions of sensibility and experience."[6] The film is both a documentation of the event – a symposium in the field between art, philosophy and politics – and a transgression of it.[12]

Tara Judah suggests the extraneous images and sounds of the film act as an interrogation of the terms in discussion, "brilliantly illustrating the apex of communication and interruption", realised in the form of the "strange yet familiar digital landscape" from artist Peter Burr: "The entire piece is a questioning of filmic modes such as causality, correlation, systemic expression, the presence of absence and, ultimately, Lyotard's interpretation of the Kantian sublime."[5]

Production

The Rare Event is something of a departure for Rivers and Russell, whose collaborations are usually associated with the outdoors, as they share a fondness for "far-flung locales and life on the fringes" and, while they have made challenging films before, on subjects such as ethnography and post-colonialism, their films' intellectualism is usually "subsidiary to their aesthetic and visceral experience". As such, the film at first seems "a bit of an anomaly," finding them "locked inside a Parisian recording studio, filming dense theoretical discussions between highbrow luminaries".[7]

In a "gently flippant move," the directors dressed an actor, Tuomo Tuovinen, in a bright green full body suit and had him either sit amongst the speakers or walk around the room, the suit acting as a greenscreen for the addition of visual effects.[7]

Filming and visual effects

The film is shot on the filmmakers' characteristic 16mm film and processed as HD video,[3] "for the most part in lengthy, roving handheld shots that slowly revolve around the circle of speakers and dedicate more attention to textures and gestures – the battered faux leather of the chairs' backs, a shirt's intricate floral pattern, a speaker scratching his nose – than to the seminar itself."[7] The "kinetic digital magic" which plays on and around the Green Man is courtesy of US-based artist Peter Burr.[1][2][6] At various moments, discordant 3D graphics irrupt into the analogue fabric of the image: endlessly spinning geometric shapes that either float in mid-air or on the body of the Green Man.[7]

Sound

The images' focus on the minute is reflected aurally,[7] with a soundtrack aided by an immersive 5.1 surround sound mix by Philippe Ciompi,[1][2] the sounds often deferred and delayed in time,[6] affording "as much prominence to the creaks emitted by the studio's wooden floor as it does to the words spoken by the intellectuals gathered upon it." Since The Rare Event presents clips from across the symposium's three days, it's not possible to learn much from the wide-ranging discussions.[7]

Release and reception

The Rare Event had its world premiere at the 68th Berlinale,[2] in the Forum Expanded section, at the Akademie der Künste,[13] on 16 and 17 February 2018.[14] It has been paired at a number of other film festivals with other shorts. At the Cinéma du Réel Festival on 24 March, and at the Images Festival in Toronto on 14 April (its North American premiere),[15] it was shown with Kenneth Anger's 1969 short, Invocation of My Demon Brother.[16][6] At the film's British premiere on 5 May at the Tower Mill Cinema in Hawick it was shown as a double-bill with Daniel Cockburn's The Argument (with annotations), another short film that ostensibly begins as a nonfiction film but reveals itself as a drama midway through, at the Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival.[17] The two films played together in the UK and Ireland.[18] In July, The Rare Event was screened following Invocation of My Demon Brother and preceding L. Cohen (2018) "a 45-minute single take of Oregon farmland capturing a solar eclipse as darkness engulfs the landscape" by James Benning, at the Queensland Film Festival.[19] In March 2019, the film was screened alongside the Danish 2018 short film, Sisters Academy - The Boarding School. at CPH:Dox.[12]

Critical response

Tara Judah called The Rare Event "a visual earworm that eats its way through its own transparency to magically reveal the promise of opacity", and "brilliantly" illustrates the "apex of communication and interruption."[5] Giovanni Marchini Camia felt the inclusion of Nancy's and Diawara's discussions was "a tad self-contradictory, as their purpose seems to be that of providing context for the film's most perplexing and fascinating conceit – to clarify its causality, in other words."[7] Nevertheless, he appreciated the film's playful digital effects:

Through their rudimentary appearance, repetitive motions and limited colours – either black-and-white or the phosphorescent green of old monochrome monitors – they are reminiscent of early screen savers. As the seminar continues, the shapes accumulate, giving the impression of containing the knowledge and ideas exchanged amongst the speakers. At one point, the studio is replaced with an entirely virtual space designed in the same fashion, where the green man wanders through a breach in the wall and into a cosmos of spinning shapes, as if accessing a purely metaphysical plane. It's a really fun diversion and one that accentuates the film's many dialectical layers: the irreverent approach to intellectual discourse, the comingling of seductive analogue and aggressive digital aesthetics, the Bens' instinctive camera motions and Burr's rule-based programming, the graphics' simultaneously futuristic and anachronistic look… Perhaps the green man dropped acid, assimilated the abstract concepts floating around him and took off on a spacey reverie about the relationship between knowledge and art, theory and experience.[7]

David Hudson, recalling the directors' earlier collaboration, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013), calls The Rare Event "a diverting exercise," by comparison, "an étude", and found the camera work more interesting than the visual effects: "Far more visually intriguing is the framing of shoulders and the backs of necks as the camera prowls behind symposium participants seated in a circle and listening to what for us are excerpts from presentations and conversations."[20]

Nomination

Notes
  1. Based on source of the film's world premiere,[2] and the order given for the producers' countries of residence; other sources are inconsistent about the priority of nationality and do not always include all three. The only known production company is Swiss, while the distributor is British.

References
  1. "The Rare Event". film.britishcouncil.org. British Council. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  2. "The Rare Event". www.berlinale.de. Berlinale. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  3. "The Rare Event Ben Rivers , Ben Russell". lux.org.uk. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  4. Boyce, Laurence. "Vila do Conde primed to kick off". Cineuropa. Retrieved 1 July 2019.
  5. Judah, Tara. "IMAGES FESTIVAL 2018: PERFECT FILM, THE RARE EVENT, 3 DREAMS OF HORSES". DesistFilm. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  6. "Images Festival — The Rare Event". Innis Town Hall. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  7. Marchini Camia, Giovanni (14 April 2018). "The Rare Event review: metaphysical gymnastics with Bens Rivers and Russell". Sight & Sound. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  8. "The Rare Event / Ben Rivers Ben Russell". www.cinemadureel.org. Cinéma du Réel. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  9. "Ben Rivers & Ben Russell: the rare event". beursschouwburg.be. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  10. Hui, Yuk; Broeckmann, Andreas, eds. (2015). 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science, and Theory (PDF). Lüneburg: Meson Press. p. 9. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  11. Hui, Yuk; Broeckmann, Andreas, eds. (2015). 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science, and Theory (PDF). Lüneburg: Meson Press. p. 24. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  12. "The Rare Event". CPX:Dox. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  13. "Jan 17, 2018: 13th Forum Expanded — The Programme Is Complete". www.berlinale.de. Berlinale. Retrieved 15 February 2019.
  14. "London productions at Berlinale 2018". Film London. 15 February 2018. Retrieved 15 February 2019.
  15. "Images Festival". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  16. "Invocation of my Demon Broher + The Rare Event". Forum des Images (in French). Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  17. "DOUBLE BILL: THE ARGUMENT (WITH ANNOTATIONS) & THE RARE EVENT". alchemyfilmfestival.org.uk. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
  18. "The Rare Event + The Argument (With Annotations) + Q&A". LondonNet. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
  19. "QFF Screening, The Rare Event". IMA. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  20. Hudson, David. "Berlinale 2018 Diary #3". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  21. "The Rare Event (2018) Awards". IMDb. Retrieved 30 June 2019.
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