A Machine to Live In
— “A Machine to Live In,” directed by Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke, was shown at the 2020 True/False Film Fest and, for T/F festival films, I’m giving a general reaction to the viewing experience, followed by the film’s description as it appeared on the festival website.
I like architecture and am an Oscar Niemeyer fan, so I thought this film would be right up my alley. Not so. Brasilia’s architecture is featured as one view of utopia, but alongside other cult and mystical utopian structures and landscapes. There’s a blending of real and mythic with the film viewing Brasilia as a “generative domain for imagining alternative cosmologies” and creating individual utopia and new visions for the future. It’s all very mystical and a little hard to follow. Since it was a showing that started at 10:00 p.m. I gave up and left about an hour into it, before I was fully accepting of the possibilities.
Description from the T/F website: “In this wildly inventive hybrid documentary, the feature debut from experimental film and installation artists Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke, viewers are transported to the space-age city of Brasília. A modernist architectural marvel, the city is a sparkling wasteland of machine dreams and aging monuments to a utopian future. Highlighting the sacred geometry of triangles and symmetry of lines, this sci-fi flick interrogates the semiotic structures that undergird the Martian outpost. With striking visuals and a thumping, electronic soundtrack, ‘A Machine to Live In’ is a transcendent, transcendental voyage through Brazil’s cosmic capital.”
I like architecture and am an Oscar Niemeyer fan, so I thought this film would be right up my alley. Not so. Brasilia’s architecture is featured as one view of utopia, but alongside other cult and mystical utopian structures and landscapes. There’s a blending of real and mythic with the film viewing Brasilia as a “generative domain for imagining alternative cosmologies” and creating individual utopia and new visions for the future. It’s all very mystical and a little hard to follow. Since it was a showing that started at 10:00 p.m. I gave up and left about an hour into it, before I was fully accepting of the possibilities.
Description from the T/F website: “In this wildly inventive hybrid documentary, the feature debut from experimental film and installation artists Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke, viewers are transported to the space-age city of Brasília. A modernist architectural marvel, the city is a sparkling wasteland of machine dreams and aging monuments to a utopian future. Highlighting the sacred geometry of triangles and symmetry of lines, this sci-fi flick interrogates the semiotic structures that undergird the Martian outpost. With striking visuals and a thumping, electronic soundtrack, ‘A Machine to Live In’ is a transcendent, transcendental voyage through Brazil’s cosmic capital.”
[2020. 87 min. Directed by Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke.]
https://filmmakermagazine.com/people/meredith-zielke-yoni-goldstein/#.XmFU6ahKg2w
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