The title of Ben Rivers’s film trilogy Urthworks collapses references to Urth, the Norse goddess of the past, and Earthworks, Brian Aldiss’s 1965 novel about a postapocalyptic future. This dialectic between mythical history and quirky speculative scenarios drives all three of Rivers’s films, which were produced in collaboration with the writer Mark von Schlegell. All 16-mm film transferred to digital, the films play one after the other like a carousel designed by Gramsci and Peter Pan: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, and some other crazy stuff. Clocking in at forty-five minutes, the longest of the films, Slow Action, 2010, takes a pseudodocumentary look at four fictional island communities that remain after rising sea levels have triggered global flooding. While the narrative structure of each case study pairs an encyclopedic sequence of images with an anthropological voice-over, the aesthetics differ significantly from site to site. Rivers juxtaposes deliberately grainy footage with crisp imagery in heightened color, shifting between intimate and close-cropped handheld shots and extreme long pans that survey abandoned modernist ruins, new indigenous symbolism, familiar everyday households, and masked mystical tribes. In the nineteen-minute Urth, 2016, a single woman details her increasingly dire yet revelatory (or hallucinatory) experiences in a dilapidated glass biosphere long after Earth’s atmosphere has become toxic. The images blur, increasingly out of focus as the reports waver. The twenty-two-minuteLook Then Below, 2019, offers a mesmerizing account of a long-lost civilization that existed below the surface of our planet. The visuals are stunning: alternately superimposed, enhanced, and color-coded, they describe a world as magical as it is suffocating. Together, these films capture the decline of one world and the rise of a multitude of others.
