Beautiful Things, dir. Giorgio Ferrero
This wildly ambitious documentary follows four men who work in isolation at remote scientific and industrial sites around the world. Like monks, they carry out their daily tasks in silence and solitude, creating products soon to enter the capitalist cycle of production, consumption, and destruction. A ravishingly beautiful audiovisual experience, Giorgio Ferrero’s debut feature is a transfixing work about the origins of consumer society imbued with a musical sense of rhythm (Ferrero is also a composer and sound editor) and a wealth of aesthetic ideas about the way we live now.
http://www.beautifulthings.it/en/
The creators of this film present us with a few 21st century "immensities" --
the immensity of our petroleum production and consumption, the immensity of cargo shipping, the immensity of our technology to test the physical construction of goods, and the immensity of garbage produced by our excessive consumption.
This is presented in a context of worldly immensities: the vastness of Texas oil field lands, the vastness of the oceans, the loneliness of humans in some of these consumer-propelled professions.
The director, with his ear for music and cool handling of topics, allows the viewer to create their own emotional landscape(s) inside the luscious visuals. When we witness the final "music-video version of ourselves" joyfully dancing at the temple of consumerism (the shopping mall), we know that the director and all of the creators of the film are looking at us for our response. -- dp
