And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine

And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine

“And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine” is a meta selfie of a movie about how we see ourselves through images, specifically photo and video. It can be dizzying; it can be dazzling; sometimes it barely touches on the things it wants us to think about more deeply. The most persuasive argument, though, comes from the clip after clip format of the film itself as if writer/directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck are convinced by their research that none of us has a longer attention span than a mayfly.

But some of its most memorable moments give us space to breathe and absorb what’s happening. Leni Riefenstahl watches “Triumph of the Will,” her iconic propaganda film for Hitler, claiming it had “nothing to do with politics” and that all she did was shape material that came in so it had “a beginning, a middle, and an end,” “a thrill.” But then she looks at footage of Nazis marching to a powerful music score that everyone today finds horrifying and she smiles; her eyes glow with pride or pleasure or something like that.

Then there’s a section on people who stream their lives online, 24/7 sometimes. A gamer who live-streamed his plays fell asleep at the console, astonishingly somehow his viewers increased tenfold while he was asleep. I’m guessing not because they wanted to watch him sleep; he’s as boring and uncomfortably invaded during those few seconds as you’d expect.

They wanted to see what he would do when he woke up and found out how many people had been watching him. One of the longer segments in this part follows one live streamer getting into trouble after being threatened by someone he describes as a gangster; eventually he ends up in the back seat of a police car. Later we see him confessing to his followers that the experience was traumatic.

This, probably his most real moment on camera, speaks to one of the movie’s central ideas: that there’s a difference between the way we present ourselves, the way we hope to be seen, the way we are seen and the way we are often overlapping but never the same. This is shown early in the film, as a young woman lets herself breathe and relax her stomach muscles after taking several photos in a pose she thought made her look better.

We see representatives from different countries presenting their votes in some Eurovision contest each apparently on camera in his own country; turns out they’re all in the same studio, in front of a green screen. And then it gets really dark. We see outtakes from an ISIS propaganda video kid keeps trying to sound tough on camera and keeps forgetting his lines while their prop bird of prey keeps squawking; at one point he finally tells the off-camera people filming him they can fix it in post.

The history of film is fascinating. Just 200 years ago, people were amazed to see photographic images. The title comes from the British King Edward VII’s comment when he saw for the first time a movie of his coronation the first one ever filmed! Except it wasn’t. In 1902, an American producer commissioned Georges Méliès a brilliant filmmaker and pioneer of special effects in delightful fantasies to film the coronation, but British authorities refused him access. So he hired French actors and shot his own version of what he thought it might look like, which was released the day after the real-life coronation took place.

“The fantastical machine even managed to record parts of the ceremony that didn’t occur,” King Edward said.

Throughout “The Movies,” there are questions about what is revealed and what is real. The Riefenstahl section gives way to a brief excerpt from interviews with filmmaker Sidney Bernstein and editor Peter Tanner, who were charged with documenting the Nazi death camps so thoroughly that no one could ever say it wasn’t true.

Is that even possible? So much of what we see in this archival footage seems about questioning what we see and increasing sophistication in those monetizing our attention with whatever technical or psychological tricks they can think up. This whirlwind of clips and soundbites goes by very fast, asking questions each deserving its own full-length documentary or miniseries: It races from a how-to about defrosting your freezer to an ISIS tutorial on making a bomb; Netflix founder CEO Reed Hastings says he learned not to rely on customers’ responses about what they want: “People rate as their aspirational self.”

They say they like “Schindler’s List” but then watch Adam Sandler; interviewed about his first superstation, Ted Turner says it was intended to be “escapist We show ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ and let them forget their miserable life,” then smiles and says “I’ll do the news” when asked what he’d do if other stations copied him. (He later founded CNN, of course).

It’s fun to watch and occasionally illuminating but over-packed and barely touches on scammers, the murky world of “influencers,” copycats who engage in dangerous or harmful behavior or the infinite regression of people filming their reactions or their friends’ or children’s reactions to what they are watching. What kind of parent not only films a very young child seeing the death of Simba’s father in “The Lion King” but then posts it online for public consumption? Hmmm, hang on while I film and post myself reacting to that reaction, so someone else can film themselves reacting to my reaction and post that.

Watch And the King Said What a Fantastic Machine For Free On Gomovies.