Timepiece - A Review of the film, "Unrest"

by Mountain Shadow Director, John Bennison

Among my personal family heirlooms is a steeple clock that sits upon the mantle above the fireplace in our living room. The pendulum is still. There is no longer any audible, monotonous tick-tock. There’s no bonging chime announcing each passing hour of the day; except, of course, in my childhood memory, watching my father insert a key into the clock’s face each morning and crank the spring to restart the endless cycle of time.

I also have my paternal grandfather’s gold pocket watch, made in Elgin, Illinois. Engraved inside the lid is his name and the year of his graduation from high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota: “Floyd William Bennison, 1908.”

Then there is the bulky 14-carat gold Patek Philippe (Swiss) wristwatch. A gift to my father from a wealthy admirer, it’s too valuable to be worn or shown in public. So, it remains locked away in a wall safe, useless. Instead, I have my father’s Girard-Perregaux wristwatch, which he brought home from his first trip to Switzerland in 1957. I wore it for many years; winding it each morning, just as I remember him doing.

I don’t regularly wear the watch anymore. Instead, of course, I have an iPhone in my pocket. Always charged, and far more accurate, it has no mechanical ‘unrest’ wheel like the clocks and watches of the past. And yet, we still endlessly strive – as did our forebears -- to give meaning to the eternal passage of time.

With a running time of 93 minutes, the filmmaker of this new-release Swiss film, “Unrueh (Unrest),” we will spend the next 1-1/2 hours of our own lives watching this one large cinematic metaphor about time. As the filmmaker shares his own personal family memories in his statement below, it is a rest-less task for which there is no timelapse. I hope you appreciate the film. jb