Directors: Axel Danielson, Maximilien Van Aertryck (Sweden, Denkmark). Year of Release: 2023
Fantastic Machine (let’s save space and refer to the shorter title) starts with people in a shopping centre gawping at a camera obscura. We quickly go back in time to the world’s oldest photograph, taken by Josepg Nicephore Niepce in 1827. It took 10 hours to expose this picture. In the following hour and a half, we’ll be breathlessly transported through the history of photography, film and online videos.
The film’s title comes from Edward VII, whose coronation (in 1902) was the first to be recorded on film. Except that it wasn’t. The crown authorities refused to grant access to film maker Georges Mélies, so he made his own film of what might have happened. The king remarked: “The fantastic machine even found a way to record parts of the ceremony that did not take place.” This is not the first time we hear that Bucks Fizz may have been wrong when the claimed my camera never lies.
We rush through history to a 1993 interview with Hitler’s film maker Leni Riedenstahl claiming that Triumph of the Will had “nothing to do with politics”. Of course it didn’t. It’s hard to tell whether the old Nazi director really believes herself when she says she was only interested in the equipment used to display the Swastika flags adorning the 1936 Berlin Olympics. For the moment, at least, the film makers are clearly taking a side and they’re not letting Riefenstahl off the hook.
To emphasize their point, the Riefenstahl interview is followed by one with Sidney Bernstein, who filmed concentration camps at the end of World War II. Bernstein is obsessed with authenticity. Committing these atrocities on film means that it will be impossible to deny that they happened. The recent death of David Irvine reminds us that things are not that simple, but Bernstein and people like him did a great service to the collective memory of humanity.
The problem I have with Fantastic Machine is that you can’t rally follow that. Discussion of Green Screen technology is slightly interesting, especially the footage from Eurovision showing different presenters reporting from their respective countries, except that they’re all performing against a manufactured background from inside the same room. That’s pretty funny, but compared to the discussion about the way the Holocaust is portrayed, it feels somewhat trivial.
There are some attempts to approach seriousness, but they are often undercut with levity. We watch an ISIS training video, but the star keeps fluffing his lines. The bird that is co-starring with him won’t shut up. In the end, he tells the people filming him that they’ll sort it out in the edit. What are we supposed to learn from this footage? Are the directors just playing it for laughs by showing that even ISIS can fuck up? As a joke, it’s not hilarious, is it?
After this, the footage which we see is increasingly trivial and used to prove points which are basically banal. The longer the film goes on, the more we encounter social media stars and influencers. I think we are supposed to feel a mixture of admiration and revulsion for such people, but to be honest, most of them just bored me. A gamer falls asleep in front of his camera and gets many more views than normal? Vaguely interesting, maybe, but hardly compelling viewing.
When we see someone livestreaming himself being picked up by police, I have a lot of questions of a film which has told us that authenticity is everything. The liverstreamer says that his phone is down to 3% battery power and yet continues to film for a while. The police call him to leave his car, and he exits with his phone in his hand? Afterwards he tells his followers that he is traumatised, but how much is actually true? Wouldn’t the police just have shot him?
Now, it’s possible that everything happened exactly as the guy reported on his TikTok channel. It’s possible, but I very much doubt it. And if it isn’t true, what exactly is the film trying to say? That people big themselves up on social media? That’s hardly a revelation. But to understand what exactly happened or why he behaved how he did, we’d need some background information. Instead we’re quickly off to the net bit of footage.
We swing between different aspects of social media, from the video by ISIS (them again) about how to make a bomb, to an online video telling you how to defrost your freezer. We approach rock bottom with a montage of kids reacting to the end of the Lion King (I haven’t seen it, so can’t give any accurate plot spoilers but apparently someone dies). It looks like these have been taken from social media, so I guess parents are traumatising their kids then pimping the videos to the world?
Are we being asked to judge all this? I guess we are, bur in a very passive aggressive way. The tenor of the film seems to be that social media has fundamentally changed society and that monetisation is bad. A teenage girl is interviewed about how her TikTok posts are just the tun up to the release of her hard porn video. No judgement is made. Now, I don’t think sex workers are to blame for their own exploitation, but shouldn’t we be blaming someone?
And this is my big problem with the film, which one review described as “a film that loves itself a montage” (again, what does that mean exactly?) It comes across as something that you might be shown when a kid with ADHD shows you their youtube collection. Tonnes of information, very little context, and if one section is boring, no need to worry because something quite different will come along in a minute. It’s interesting enough, but what’s the point of it all?
CinePhil 