On Saturday September 30th 1967, Robert Smithson boarded the number 30 Inter-City bus to Passaic, carrying with him a copy The New York Times, a spiral notebook, a paperback of Brian Aldiss’s Earthworks and his instamatic camera. This kit of the modern day explorer was most likely not so different to that used by Ben Rivers when he set out in 2010 to shoot his most recent film Slow Action. Smithson explored Passaic, New Jersey, identifying new monuments in the suburban post-industrial landscape and discovering the ruins of an alien prehistoric society. In Slow Action, Rivers created an island biogeography in four chapters. Narrated in the neutral tone and scientific language of 1950s ethnographic documentaries, the history, ecosystem, and inhabitants’ of each of the four isolated landmasses unfold from the register of the ‘great encyclopedia’—as the narrator describes the source. Two narrators negotiate the utopian potential of the four islands, channeling the perspective of an unspecified ‘curator.’ Film critic Ilona Halberstadt’s alluring, yet slightly metallic voice was intentionally chosen by Rivers for this role to reference Werner Herzog’s collaboration with film critic Lotte Eisner in his film Fata Morgana (1971). The voice-over narrative was written by Mark von Schlegell independently to …