After Work (Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers, 2022) (Patreon)

TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022

In recent years, the great British avant-documentarian Ben Rivers has been making a considerable amount of collaborative work. Always intent on learning more about the scenes in front of his lens, Rivers turns to other artists to help him grapple with what he may not know. After joining forces with filmmakers such as Ben Russel and Anocha Suwichakornpong, he has now teamed up with visual artist / researcher Céline Condorelli. In her work, Condorelli explores relationships between public and private space, and the relationship between work and leisure.

For After Work, Rivers and Condorelli adopt a rather Farockian cinematic approach. The film is about the construction of a playground in South London, on an estate that has institutional connections with Condorelli's gallery. We go back and forth between the spatialized labor or installing the fencing and equipment, and the actual forging of the metal equipment in a factory. Following from Henri Lefebvre's insight that all social space is produced, After Work not only shows the adult labor behind children's play; the film also asks us to watch as the playground takes shape, it being the end result of a host of industrial decisions. As a counterpoint to this visual information, After Work features a voiceover by poet Jay Bernard, which lights upon these very questions in an allusive, open form. The result is one of Rivers' finest works, and indeed one of the best films of the year.