Counting

Description

Jem Cohen’s (SFIFF POV Award 2013) Counting features the filmmaker’s roving camera peering out of subway cars, airplane windows, trains and taxi cabs, contemplating modernity with an intimate yet impassive eye. In explicit homage to both Chris Marker and Chekhov, Cohen traverses a handful of world-spanning urban centers—New York City, Istanbul, Moscow, the Emirati state of Sharjah—collecting detail after detail, quotidian illuminations of contemporary life. The familiar is transformed: Airport security barriers loom in the fog like felled crucifixes; an erhu-playing busker in the New York subway does his best “Star-Spangled Banner”; feline avatars appear with sphinxlike insouciance. This accretion of mundane elements gathers symbolic force—Soviet brutalist monoliths become indistinguishable from American apartment blocks in Brooklyn; graffiti in cities half a world apart depict the same surveillance cameras, as if in warning. Tension rises with urban cacophony—a soundtrack of radio broadcasts, protesters, traffic and endless chatter—but is dispelled by transfixing images: A makeshift menorah of birthday candles is affixed to a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid; dead jellyfish and trash mingle in Istanbul’s city waters; and, in perhaps the film’s most arresting moment, an unfurled strand of VHS tape trails from a minaret, dancing in the wind to the keening muezzin’s call. These and other pleasures beckon, inviting meditation, reflection and revelation. —Paul Meyers

Trailer

Film Details