The influential British avant-garde filmmaker and artist Ben Rivers (b. 1972) returns to the Harvard Film Archive with two recent works that give special resonance to ideas of non-human time and the singular qualities of inhabited places that have been explored, in many different ways, across his films to date. In Things, Rivers accepted the challenge to make a work filmed entirely within the confines of his own home, the London flat that he would soon depart. Made for a group project—Stay Where You Are, commissioned by London’s Film and Video Umbrella—Things is a quietly personal work that takes a modest and poetic inventory of objects of Rivers’ every day and touchstones of his imagination, while also chronicling the passing of the seasons, observing from his windows fleeting signs of the planet’s turning. In now, at last! Rivers offers a playful ode, or perhaps manifesto, to slow cinema, to filmmaking set to the inimitable pace of a Costa Rican tree sloth. Alternately a black-and-white observational film and an almost 3D color musical, now, at last! allows the viewer to delight in the sloth’s leisurely passage up tree trunks and limbs while contemplating the ways the camera, and 16mm film in particular, give sculpturally moving dimensions to even the slowest and, at times, stillest of creatures. – Haden Guest