THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE
(Check out Jonathan Marlow’s The History of Concrete movie review, it’s in theaters now. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
“The History of Concrete? That doesn’t sound very interesting,” says the teenager.
“The title isn’t intended to be interesting! That is the point,” says the father-of-the-teenager.
When is a documentary not quite a documentary? The History of Concrete has screened at some of the most prestigious showcases of nonfiction filmmaking in recent months: the Sundance Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel and elsewhere. Perhaps it is more than a documentary? What even is a documentary, exactly? It is this! It is also not this. Can it be both? It can, intermittently. Is The History of Concrete-adjacent You Can See Everything a documentary? Of a sort. Remains to be seen.
“What is your definition of a lie?”
Truth, twenty-four times per second. [Twenty-five in Europe. Or 29.97, the default in the realm of ones and zeros; theme, with variations.]
If you have any familiarity with the self-deprecating HBO series How To with John Wilson, you have some idea of what to expect: a cascade of B-roll observational filmmaking with persistent filmmaker-narration making associations between what is visible and what might be merely perceived. Add to that a handful of interviews or overviews with (usually) non-celebrity subject-experts, such as a lecturer on the repetitive story-structure of Hallmark made-for-television holiday films. Or a fellow who removes gum from sidewalks. Or, in an effort to turn …Concrete into a “rockumentary” (pun intentional) for elusive funding purposes, the singer / songwriter of the local band Nebulus: liquor rep by night / guitarist for assorted cover acts by later-the-same-night, Jack Macco incidentally becomes the emotional-center of the meandering narrative with an eleventh-hour revelation of an unanticipated paramour, bookending (and inverting) the sure-fire Hallmark plot-points from the opening moments of the film.
If you have yet to invest your viewing-hours with the multiple seasons of How To…, The History of Concrete is a reasonable “Hey, New York” place to start. Or the dry wit of his numerous short films (found on the appropriate johnsmovies.com site, including a few pre-series tutorials as well as Escape from Park City, his take on Sundance roughly a decade before …Concrete premiered there).
How does one get to become a videographic philosopher / memoirist? Fortitude. Persistence. From a for-hire / now-fired testimonial:
“The poor quality of your work, your failure to follow the very clear brief and your refusal to finish editing the project has essentially destroyed my working relationship with this client.”
Yet, David Byrne brought John Wilson along to document his concluding Temporary Color tour-dates in Toronto and Brooklyn. A plausibly Byrnesque avenue and the resulting thirteen minute short is a characteristically Wilsonian exploration, intersecting preparations for—and backstage footage from—the show with a concurrent tale of two escaped convicts.
Wilson isn’t merely a filmmaker, though! After graduating from Binghamton University, he was briefly a private investigator. Investigative journalism-adjacent. Last year, he opened the forty-two seat Low Cinema in Ridgewood, New York (with Cosmo Bjorkenheim and Davis Fowlkes). However, if this visual evidence can be trusted, he can generally be found wandering around New York with an unwieldy antiquated video camera. As he states in the narration for The Spiritual Life of Wholesale Goods, “I often feel so alienated by the work that I do for money that I end-up spending all of my free time making films with zero commercial value.”
Clearly, Magnolia, the distribution company behind …Concrete, believes differently. One could wager that they’re right. Some-number-greater-than-zero, definitely.
THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE
dir. John Wilson [100min.] Magnolia Pictures + Peanut World Pictures
– Jonathan Marlow (@aliasMarlow)
