Little, Big, and Far

Curiosity and wonder drive this docufiction about the Austrian astronomer Karl (Franz Schwartz). In search of the darkest place to observe the stars, he travels to a Greek island, while in his personal life he is increasingly adrift. He is estranged from his wife Eleanor (Leslie Thornton), a cosmologist studying dark matter.

Jem Cohen’s hybrid films, in which he follows professional and non-professional actors in the real world, question ways of being and seeing. Here, too, he films everyday phenomena: snow drifting beneath a streetlamp, rainbows, ocean fog. He interweaves these images with archival pictures of the cosmos, culminating in the enchanting images taken by the Rosetta satellite from the surface of a comet.

In their work, Karl and Eleanor seek to understand three things: the small, the vast, and the distant. These are not separate, but completely intertwined. In Cohen’s attentive film, the invisible and the visible, extinction and creation, the minuscule and the infinite go hand in hand.