1. 15 December 2007

    Documentaries

    355 days ago

    I watched two recently, both stunning and amazing and a little bit unnerving, even disturbing. Both in the same style, mostly mute but with completely stunning and sometimes frightening visuals (frighteningly beautiful as well).

    Manufactured Landscapes follows around Edward Burtynsky, photographer of massive human altered environment. From quarries to unfathomably large chinese factories to tankers washed ashore in Bangladesh being slowly disassembled by wiry barefoot peasants to large towns being wholesale destroyed because in a few months the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam will rend them 100 feet underwater, Burtynsky has photographed some cool stuff. The documentary puts things in scale a bit for someone who’s never know anything but a pleasant and warm home, wanton mobility, and abundant food.

    Food is the second one, namely Our Daily Bread. The only dialog is that of various food workers talking to each other during their lunch breaks, none in english, and none subtitled. The idea is to take a look at where our food really comes from now that multinational agricorporations have hijacked our food supply. Giant greenhouses of veggies growing on 12’ trellises, with robot pesticide dispensers riding the long rows hissing whatever substances which, deemed by whatever governing bodies as only toxic to insects and pests – somehow not to the food itself nor the humans all to ready to eat it. Chickens in barns the size of a football field, beak to beak, being sucked up by an elaborate cross between a crane and a tractor and spit out into cartons for shipping off to the factory where some poor old lady sits in a chair under a line of upside down gliding carcasses slitting the heads off those where the machine couldn’t quite manage. It’s really brutal how all this works, but some stark beauty shines through, the grime of blood running on the floor contrasted with smooth dark chrome walls and apparatus.

    These two really show that however advanced and scientific the world gets, man, is it still fucked up. You can’t have one without the other, and you have to be impressed by both.

  2. 04 December 2006

    The Time Machine

    732 days ago

    “I thought the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now come the reaction of the altered conditions.” 27

    “When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances.” 46

    He [...] thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. 76

  3. Also somewhat recently

      |