Against Time is a visual journey par excellence, continuing Ben Russell’s investigations into the perception of time and how we listen to music. The film explores the possible relationships between image/music and offers a reflection on time in two movements. The image allows us to hear and the sound allows us to see. Once again, the director delivers a brilliant and rigorous demonstration of this phenomenon. Obliterating the ephemeral trajectory of a firework, Against Time first immerses our gaze in the continuity of layers of sound, through a melancholic reverse movement. From an empty concert stage, haunted by the bluish swirls of a smoke bomb, to the Prado tunnel in Marseilles, repetition becomes the annihilation of time, which emerges on this long nocturnal journey. The tunnel’s neon lights are like identical notes of an infinite score. This is how the transition from the visual collage to the second movement with a faster tempo takes place. Here, the strobe mixes places and faces, colours and black and white. It produces overlays by playing on retinal persistence and, in so doing, again brings into play what generates mobility between the images – the speed of their succession. So much so, that in addition to the effect of the superimposed images, there is also that of images penetrating one another. A pink flamingo nestling into a door frame, a plant against the light merging between a Mediterranean landscape and a pensive face, the spinning of a merry-go-round seems to make a child’s smile turn on itself. The images chase after one another, jostle, embrace and bump into one other, repel and attract each other. The music acts as the hammering rhythm of this visual sculpture. From these two perceptual movements, Ben Russell presents two conceptions of time: a space of rapid succession and a space of simultaneity. Against Time celebrates the moment as an entity in which an infinite number of realities comes together synchronistically.
