Another Earth

From mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin, this is a dizzying 16mm portrait of an increasingly chaotic present, one whose political contours are affected by everything and nothing all at once. In the words of Zadie Smith: “Time is not what it is / But how it is felt”

‘Time is not what it is, but how it is felt.’ These words by Zadie Smith conclude, like a mantra, a text whose stumbling repetitions form the backbone of this short film by Ben Russell. This phenomenological statement places the film in the tradition of another: Against Time, made during the uncertain hours of the pandemic. That film had opened up a new register in Russell’s work: a regime of intimate or news-style images, driven as much by the pursuit of experiments in ways of expressing time, as by the desire to describe the feeling of the present. Another Earth revisits this theme: Russell’s daughter has grown, while every day brings fresh evidence of the ignoble fate reserved for children.

The rest of this text, read on camera by Leslie Auguste, reproduces – with a few omissions and the substitution of one word – a passage from the latest book by the American novelist Rachel Kushner, The Lake of Creation. Its protagonist, who goes by the name of Sadie Smith, is an agent specialising in entrapping left-wing activists, tasked with infiltrating a fictional equivalent of the Tarnac Nine. From Marseille, she travels north towards Guyenne to move in on Bruno Lacombe, formerly part of Guy Debord’s cohort, who has withdrawn to live in a cave, convinced that capitalism cannot be dismantled and that we should invent other ways of living. In the darkness, he discovers a singular polyphony, which makes us aware of the solitude in which we live, the trap of time as organised by a calendar, the isolation that separates us from our ancestors – but also the persistent presence of ghosts.

It had been the loss of his daughter that first drove him underground. While personal tragedy does not invalidate political ideas, it silently tests their significance. ‘What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed partisans hoarding canned foods and fearing each other.’  In the original text, however, Kushner does not speak of partisans but ‘pessimists’. In Another Earth, this subtle shift alters the question: a meditation on the lived experience of alienation, but also a reminder – perhaps a melancholic one – of the possibility of a moral life that the outside world persists in condemning to seclusion.

Antoine Thirion