multiverse
2019 · 3m · Japan
Directed by Hiroshi Kondo
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Layered time-lapse footage turns Taiwan's swarming scooter commuters into a hypnotic portrait of individuality inside the crowd.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Time-lapse commuter footage should be a cliché—the easy visual metaphor for urban anonymity—but Kondo somehow strips it down to something genuinely uncanny, where the crowd stops being a crowd and becomes this pulsing, almost organism-like thing; most people would've added a voiceover or narrative crutch, but he trusts the hypnosis instead.
The formal restraint here is exquisite—layered time-lapse as both documentary tool and abstract composition, placing Kondo in conversation with the structural experimentalism of Brakhage and the observational rigor of contemporary city-symphony traditions, all resolved in three minutes with the kind of considered editing that filmmakers spend careers failing to achieve.
What makes this work is the decision to let the overlapping time-lapse layers compress without averaging them out—you see individual scooter paths held in tension rather than blurred into motion blur, and that one choice turns commuter documentation into something genuinely meditative and singular.
Reviews
At certain moments, Kondo focuses on an individual rider, which emphasizes unique journeys within the teaming repetition.