Urth, 2016
Urth takes its name from one of the Old Norse fates—meaning turned or looped, Urth personifies the past. With echoes of our own word Earth, Rivers threads together numerous discourses of environmentalism, artificial intelligence, literature and history. The film was shot on location at B2, formerly Biosphere 2, a project that between 1991‒1993 turned from an experiment in cybernetic systems into a disaster described as a cult. Without reference to this specific history, Urth reverses the fortunes of Biosphere 2. In this world the experiment has survived, while the Earth burns. A lone narrator remains the involuntary captive of the biosphere, tracing her thoughts through audio logs recorded during her final solitary months in the sealed building.
In many of his films Rivers approaches the question of the future, often drawing on literature—particularly those texts that knowingly reference their own position in history. In adapting these texts Rivers' work is always framed and rarely offers a direct telling of a story, rather his films parallel and re-enact their material. Paul Bowles' writing was the starting point for Rivers' recent project The Sky Trembles And The Earth Is Afraid And The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), while There Is A Happy Land Further Awaay (2015) features a poem by Henri Michaux. This approach leads to projects that become larger than themselves, inserting Rivers' work into an existing framework of events and cultural artefacts which allows these to be reread.
Urth opens with a prologue quoting from The Last Man by Mary Shelley, regarded as the originator of both Gothic horror and science fiction. Shelley delineates the political-familial breakdown that follows an apocalyptic plague in twenty-first century England,
Will the earth still keep her place among the planets; will she still journey with unmarked regularity round the sun; will the seasons change, the trees adorn themselves with leaves, and flowers shed their fragrance, in solitude?
Urth, though, draws less on the content of The Last Man, and more on the framing device. Shelley's introduction describes her own descent into a cave somewhere outside of Naples, where she discovers fragments of leaves covered with writings of the Cumaean Sibyl. The Sibyls were women of Ancient Greece, living alone outside the polis, prophets of Chthonic deities, but these oracles were unreliable; their mode of speaking, indirect and indistinct, could be easily misinterpreted. According to Virgil, if the leaves on which the Cumean Sibyl painted her words were scattered by the wind she would refuse to reorder them. Shelley writes that she has collected and translated these prophetic writings and published them here as The Last Man.
Jacob Charles Wils
https://jacobcharleswilson.com/but-the-game-is-up-we-must-all-die-ben-rivers-urth
