Tokyo Reverse

Recently, Ludovic Zuilli, a 28-year old photographer, spent over nine hours walking backwards through the streets of Tokyo. You get the pleasure of watching his journey in reverse. Tokyo Reverse, the product of that simple editing trick, is a dreamlike journey through a world in which everything and everyone moves backwards. In the footage, captured by friend Simon Bouisson, crowds bustle hurriedly in reverse; people arrive at the top of an escalator with their backs turned; and a selfie is saved, reviewed, captured, and posed for–in that order. These short clips come from a 9-hour production that aired on TV last month in France. It’s the latest in an emerging genre called Slow TV, in which programmers broadcast epically long videos of quotidian (or in this case, perfectly unquotidian) subjects. Last year, according to the BBC, over half of Norway’s population tuned in to check out a six-day ferry excursion through the country’s fjords. In advance of his backwards adventure, Zuilli took dance lessons in hopes of achieving more realistic movement. His swaggering gait is still a little bit unnatural, but really, who cares. The remarkable stuff is everything that’s happening around him.