This new feature by American filmmaking legend Jem Cohen is like a strange cousin to his classic “Museum Hours,” another essay film given structure by fiction that swaps art for science and one time-honoured gallery in Vienna for a range of different institutions. Karl is an ageing Austrian astronomer and museum consultant. His wife Eleanor is a physicist based in the US, just like his young friend and colleague Sarah, a specialist in citizen science who is cautiously starting a new relationship. The three of them converse and hold forth on their respective specialities to mesmerisingly informative effect, but also keep returning to and interrogating the feelings that intertwine with their disciplines: politics and climate change, the uncertain future, solitude and intimacy – academic work as a pursuit for the melancholy.
Cohen’s camerawork shows them in frame, but also accompanies their voice-overs with his typical blissful digressions, wandering through museum corridors and exhibition spaces, fixing his gaze on heavenly bodies and scientific instruments, capturing city streets, oceans and landscapes, exploring and collecting with a curiosity equally studious and felt: tiny fragments, massive discoveries, stars at an infinite remove. Grasping the hugeness of the world might seem impossible, but it’s just about disentangling all the perspective: the big, the little and the far.