Echoes Of The Invisible
http://www.echoesoftheinvisiblefilm.com
View it on Apple TV in North America here: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/echoes-of-the-invisible/umc.cmc.er8ixmrjycuw8v6wd724v5m7
Or Kanopy Herę: https://www.kanopy.com/product/echoes-invisible
Or Altavod here: https://www.altavod.com/content/echoesoftheinvisible
For more on THE MAKING OF THE FILM: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Making-ECHOES-OF-THE-INVISIBLE
SOME REVIEWS
"Echoes has placed me somewhere beyond words...one of the most profound things I've seen...See this film for in a time of uncertainty and fear it puts it all into perspective...One of the tip top best films of 2020."
-Steve Kopian (Unseen Films)
“Emotionally and visually stunning”
-Medium
“Could not be more timely...an unusually transfixing movie...a path forward during uncertain times..."
-Hollywood Soapbox
“This film is an emotional experience and feels like coming home…It does what words cannot do on their own…It goes through you, straight to your core. And what remains is not a narrative but a sense of possibility and wonder…an opening of one’s heart and eyes…”
-Modern Times Review
“Echoes of the Invisible is an absolutely gorgeous look at humanity, the environment, and the way they interact and weave in these stories...some of the best cinematography in a documentary in some time.”
-Clapper (UK)
“Like Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World or Meru...Echoes gives perspective to the relative smallness and insignificance of human existence in the grand scheme of time and space, while still giving depth of purpose to life... exhilarating.”
-Vague Visages
“Simply dazzling…brilliant…profound…This isn’t, 'Stop and smell the roses.' It’s more, 'The roses are here, there, and everywhere, and no matter what you believe, they’ll still be around when you’re not, so give it a whiff and expand your own horizons in the process.' Absolutely phenomenal.”
-Behind The Rabbit Productions
(WATCH): Echoes of the Invisible (SXSW 2020 Teaser)
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION:
ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE follows the daring journeys of scientists, athletes, monks, journalists and artists into some of the most extreme environments on Earth, so it may come as no surprise that making the film involved unique and profound challenges. Over the course of its eight years in production, director Steve Elkins found himself filming in sandstorms in the driest desert on Earth (which partially disabled his camera), free climbing with monks up nearly vertical cliffs to reach remote filming locations in Ethiopia, navigating cracking ice (forty kilometers from shore) on the frozen surface of the world’s deepest lake in Siberia, and filming by candlelight half a mile under the earth in an abandoned Minnesota iron mine.
In Chile and India, Elkins filmed at locations over 16,000 feet in altitude. Oxygen masks were sometimes required to breathe. Some monasteries in India could only be reached by trekking across the Himalayas on horseback or foot. To reach them, Elkins had to find locals who could to provide horses to carry his film gear across the mountains, in regions cut off from the outside world most of the year due to impassable snow and ice. Significant scenes were filmed in two of the hottest places on Earth, including the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, where daytime temperatures rose to 128 degrees Fahrenheit and at night remained over 100. Private military escorts were required to guide Elkins through the boiling oil lakes and salt mountains of this region afflicted with unpredictable outbursts of tribal warfare and kidnappings.
Many of the film’s locations had no power sources for filming equipment or batteries. Extreme environmental conditions caused electronic equipment to malfunction. Meticulous pre-production planning was paramount. Elkins spent four years petitioning for access to film in a restricted military zone on the border of Tibet (which was eventually granted after collaboration with the King of Ladakh). Another location near the border of Pakistan required traveling on roads that were undergoing shelling attacks. Production with musicians, shamans and hunters in remote villages near the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China was almost disrupted by an undercover Russian agent following Elkins and his small crew en route to Kyzyl, Tuva.
But in some ways, the most extreme location for production was CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long underground microscope beneath Switzerland and France, which when operating is the coldest known place in the universe. It generates a magnetic field 250,000 times stronger than the Earth’s, searching for extra dimensions, the "God particle," anti-matter, and forces akin to those that took place in the first trillionth of a millisecond after the Big Bang.
These extreme undertakings were necessary not only to tell the stories of the extraordinary pioneers who require these extreme environments to push the boundaries of our knowledge; but for Elkins to experience firsthand one of the film’s themes: the transformative value of slowing down and struggling in contrast to the impact of speed and convenience which increasingly alters our relationship to the world around us.
Filmmaker's Statement
The road that led to ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE began unexpectedly during production of my first feature documentary THE REACH OF RESONANCE. In that film, I had been exploring diverse ways music can allow us to experience - through our bodies - aspects of the world around us which would otherwise remain invisible or intangible: the Earth’s magnetic field, the social patterns of insects and plants, the physical and emotional forces that shape our relationships to each other. As part of this journey, I found myself in Toronto, where I was documenting John Oswald's permanent sound installation at the Royal Ontario Museum, in which thousands of events happening around the world are heard simultaneously in the main atrium at the exact moments they happen in their respective parts of the globe: drum rituals in Africa, Big Ben chiming the hour in London, the call to prayer in Mecca, whales singing as they migrate through the oceans.
This massive attempt to make a sonic map of the entire globe got me thinking about how each of us forms our inner maps of what the world is actually like. I had recently visited the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico, where technicians laid railroad tracks across 23 miles of remote desert to move massive telescopes into positions where they could look deeper into space. They reminded me of monks I had seen in India who spend years bowing across the desert to look deeper into the human mind; flattening themselves face first on the ground in between every step. The contrast of these two painstaking and slow undertakings - one track at a time, one bow at a time - struck me as a moving contrast of the extremely diverse paths we can take to connect deeply with who we are and where we come from. That we all carry within us, from the time we are children onward, untapped depths to accomplish that which seems intuitively impossible: to see the invisible.
As I set out to explore this human impulse on film, the internet and high speed “convenience” technologies were expanding their ubiquity as the primary tool we use to “see the invisible,” to make us feel more connected to the world and each other. But ironically these technologies have also revealed their capacity to disconnect us, to control our vision, and place a frame around what we believe to be possible. ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE developed into a reflection on how each of us connects the dots of the world within ourselves, and what is gained or lost in the paths between them. It is a snapshot of this moment in human history, when our relationship to technology is rapidly and radically altering the world we are handing down to the next generations.
-Steve Elkins
About The Music
ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE features a highly unique and diverse soundtrack of music from around the world, including:
-An original score by Ben Eshbach of The Sugarplastic
-New music composed for the film by Morgan Henderson of Fleet Foxes
-Jim O' Rourke of Sonic Youth and Gastr Del Sol
-Colin Stetson of Arcade Fire
-Julianna Barwick (in collaboration with Jónsi of Sigur Rós)
-Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams
-Music and technology pioneer Pauline Oliveros
-Tuvan throat singers
-Nils Frahm
-A wide range of incredible artists from Africa, India, Japan, the Middle East and even Antarctica.
A special interview series with these musicians and composers is here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Music