Great. I'm going to check it out.
The film is an amazing documentary (came out in 89 but still is
fascinating). The structure that links the sections together is the
narrator (sounds traditional.....but..). He is a man or puppet connected
to wires heading off in many directions to monitors, each of which holds
and runs a specific video and audio segmente. The interview with a former
nasa head who argues that the moment a shuttle astronaut fixed something
inthe shuttle bay he was a true fusion of man and machine/cyborg as he had
two lines running essential feeds, one to him and one to the computer on
his back. He could not have completed the task without the computer and
vice versa. The narrator has his eyes closed and describes a dream, and
this narrative links to the segments. A japanese robotics
designer/engineer shows the marilyn monroe robot he has been working with
for years and it crushes him that he can't get it, yet he also says things
that indicate he has fallen in love with it!
I love Vertov's "man with a movie camera". It shows technology as both
advancing and segmenting out aesthetic experience and time, memory,
movement. The point when the film "breaks" into still photographs is
amazing as it questions the intrusion of the observer as much as an
imposed narrative on singular moments and architectures. I show it to my
students with "La Jetee", "Metropolis" and "Fast, Cheap and out of
Control".
I have long wished to teach a class somewhere that centers on Duchamp's
nude descending a staircase and the female robot in metropolis. The class
will look at the concepts of technology, form, function, beauty, movement,
feminism and the way technology references woman and form. There is a
linguistic component too (how new concepts and tools are called "sexy" for
example).
Small note - I think you'd find a reference to 'machine dreams' of
interest in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason - the line goes
something like 'it was the machine in them that did the dreaming' - in
reference to assembly line workers - Alan
recent http://www.asondheim.org/
WVU 2004 projects http://www.as.wvu.edu/clcold/sondheim/files/
recent related to WVU http://www.as.wvu.edu:8000/clc/Members/sondheim
Trace projects http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm partial
mirror at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
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