Counting (2015)

Counting: Directed by Jem Cohen. Fifteen distinct but interconnected chapters, shot in locations from Russia to New York City to Istanbul. Together, these build to a reckoning at the intersection of city symphony, diary, and essay film. Perhaps the most personal of Cohen’s documentary works, COUNTING measures street life, light, and time, noting not only surveillance and over-development but resistance and its phantoms as manifested in music, animals and everyday magic.

“Whilst the duration and some underlying themes of each of the 15 chapters to this film may vary, the overall feeling I got from them was not difference but their likeness. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eMany of the pieces were shot in the same locations and nearly all the film seemed to have been filmed during the colder winter months of the year, resulting in the same very drab and oppressive look to most of the chapters. That may have been the idea but this combined with the lack of variety in the content left me very uninspired. Alone the amount of in taxi/airplane footage could have been cut by about 90%.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIu0026#39;ve been to many of the places visited by the director and enjoyed the shared interests in places and details yet was constantly left left wanting better shots… more interesting attention to details and also of interesting eccentric locals (like the old lady ripping the credit advertisements off the advertising board). u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eA lot of it felt like filler and the shots of the bands and the directors friends in particular I felt added nothing. I could imagine the film being much more interesting as a travel journal short at half the length.”