Little, Big and Far: Jem Cohen turns his thoughtful gaze to the stars

• Reviewed from the 2024 New York Film Festival 

When was the last time you looked up at the sky in search of stars? This is the question docu-fiction film Little, Big, and Far asks – not as a clichéd romantic ideal, but as an interrogative, political examination. Its protagonist, a 70-year-old Austrian astronomer named Karl, tells us: “People don’t care about the stars because they don’t see them.” Jem Cohen’s films are always concerned with ‘ways of seeing’. Museum Hours (2012), another Cohen docu-fiction hybrid, follows a museum guard as he watches other observers, exploring the role art plays in daily life, while his 16mm and 8mm travelogues linger upon moments of unguarded vulnerability in urban spaces. Here, Cohen diverges from his previous work, venturing into more unearthly territory – but he never loses sight of the interconnected nature of the ‘little’, ‘big’ and the ‘far’.

Epistolary in form, the first half of the film is structured as a series of long-distance voiceover exchanges. The film blurs the line between fiction and reality purposefully, filming in real locations while featuring non-professional actors who are mainly Cohen’s friends, including experimental filmmakers Jessica Sarah Rinland and Leslie Thornton. Karl’s conversations with his wife, a cosmologist named Eleanor (Leslie Thornton), who now lives in Texas, offer an alternative perspective to cosmology and an affectionate look at their shared vocation. And Karl’s frequent discussions with his colleague Sarah (Jessica Sarah Rinland), a museum consultant, explore their mutual struggle with the environmental changes in their fields – Karl’s study of the cosmos often faces the same existential concerns as Sarah’s work in natural conservation. The voiceover structure is striking, but leans towards a slight didacticism as the conversations descend into continual monologues which lack an exchange of perspectives.

Cohen questions the role images play in Sarah and Karl’s respective fields as records of a lost past and glimpses of a possible future. Sarah observes dioramas of wildlife by taxidermist Carl Akeley, creator of the portable Akeley Motion Picture Camera. She notes plaintively: “He knew that dioramas depicted worlds already on the edge of disappearing.” Interspersed with Karl’s voiceovers are striking images from satellite cameras: galaxies captured by the Webb telescope, the Rosetta satellite’s perspective of a comet’s surface and a billionaire’s robot map of Mars, evaluating the potential of interplanetary real estate. Images are mausoleums, time-travellers, land-grabbers – bearing witness to a rapidly deteriorating world while also reaching out to other planets – for good or bad. Images, for the filmmaker himself, are the inexorable bearer of knowledge. Cohen attempts to portray Karl’s theoretical physics with his camera – swirling snow only made visible under a streetlight, a rainbow arched on the surface of the sea. From the collision of these two worlds emerges a surprising lyricism.

Where Karl dwells on the realm of the visible, his wife sees her work conversely as the study of the “great invisibles”. In response, the film’s moments of darkness are magnificent. When capturing the moment of a total eclipse, the filmmaker chooses to direct his focus not to the sky but a wide-shot of a Texan mall’s parking lot, all set against Eleanor’s recounted conversation with a waitress at her hotel. Multiple perspectives are glimpsed at once – the workers who sneak out to watch the eclipse, the waitress, and Eleanor. Cohen is interested in bringing the cosmos to the streets. The parking lot’s view of the eclipse is not as brilliant as the sightseers who have paid to watch the phenomena from a stadium, but nonetheless, the sky does not have borders.

Later in the film, Karl ventures out to the darkest part of a Greek island to seek out the stars. Cohen’s gaze vacillates between the minute and the infinite – close-ups of a blade of grass, a rock, Karl’s face, are all set against Karl’s voiceover questioning the universe, the bleak state of politics, his own relationships, asking: “How do we lose our way to each other?” Then, a wide-shot of a darkened sky littered with stars make Karl’s silhouette appear tiny, quivering so slightly. The montage is accompanied by Cohen’s personal vulnerability – close-up frames of his son asleep – he is the whole universe for that moment, but you can’t help but feel Cohen’s encroaching anxiety about the world he will inherit. By becoming part of the film, Cohen effaces the distance of observational documentary-making, and places private struggles, politics and the mysteries of the universe on equal footing.

Cohen casts out a wide net, pulling the astronomical towards the ephemeral, draping them around each other with the implicit conviction that our lives are connected to the cosmos. It is democratic cinema, equally dedicated to physicists and street-corner astronomers. The sky still belongs to all of us, even as contemporary society has marred our ability to see its lights.