Recently shown at the Berlin International Film Festival, And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine lays out clear as day how exponentially our ability to film every aspect of our lives has grown since the invention of cameras in the 1800s. Directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck present an entertaining and well curated selection of footage shot by these fantastic machines over the past two centuries, but leave a yearning feeling of pointlessness like any good TikTok scrolling session.
Maybe that’s the point. Our desire to document our existences or watch the most viral of clips with unchecked access and reproducibility will inevitably grow like a cancerous cell. Is that bad? Probably. Sitting and watching this film, entertained as I was, I still said in my mind “no duh, yes I’m aware of the weird state of things.” To say “no duh” to something truly frightening is very frightening in itself.
The film starts out by teaching me things I don’t know though. Specifically how cameras actually work, which I’ve googled a few times but have never come close to grasping. They show people wowed by camera obscuras they’ve set up. They explain how exposure works and bitumen back in the day. I felt close to understanding. It was exciting. I was excited but also secretly grateful that we don’t learn any more about the inner workings of cameras because I probably would have gotten bored. I was grateful to be shown a series of clips.
Things shift quickly from the technological aspects of the camera to its cultural impacts. There are a lot of great historical tidbits I’d never heard of before like the title exclamation from King Edward VII. He said it after hiring a French crew in France to film a fake version of his coronation with French actors. It was then shown in cinemas all over Britain.
I have heard of Leni Riefenstahl and Triumph of the Will though and her filming of Hitler and his Nazi rallies. There used to be and still is a man in Toronto named Reg Hartt who specialises in showing prints of controversial films in his Bathurst St home. My dad took me when I was a kid, I think in an attempt to educate me about everything and the dangers of propaganda. You see, back in my day, getting dragged unwillingly by your dad to watch old black and white footage of Nazi rallies in a stranger’s house was the only form of entertainment. Kids today don’t know how good they have it with their smartphones and tablets.
This documentary shows some footage of Riefenstahl as an old woman in 1993 watching footage from Triumph of the Will. Although she has expressed disgust at how her work was used by the Nazis, the elderly Riefenstahl looks way too happy and giddy admiring her handiwork as she watches the then 60 year old Triumph of the Will clips.
The makers of the documentary we are currently watching contrast this with how filmmakers carefully filmed the horrors of the concentration camps with long unedited shots so that the German people, bombarded with propaganda for years, would be able to see the truth of what happened in the war and would not be able to say this footage had been manipulated.
The images and clips are relentless. We see the award-winning photo of a young Haitian girl who died in the 2010 earthquake. Then we see the full context: 5 or 6 other photojournalists taking the same photo of the same dead girl. We see ISIS members flubbing their lines or teaching you how to make a bomb in the style of a youTube tutorial. We see a man in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s becoming self-conscious about his hat after seeing a photo of himself for the first time.
We learn about the staggering amount of footage being created every day. We end with listening to snippets from the golden phonograph records meant to represent the diversity of humanity sent out into space on the Voyager spacecraft. But the sheer amount of video has become too much for the documentary to corral into one final message.
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