Sundance Film Festival: London 2023 - And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine
And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, a title alluding to Edward VII’s reaction to Georges Méliès' filmed staging of his coronation, is a documentary from Swedish filmmakers Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck, analysing the human relationship to cameras in both historical and contemporary contexts. Presented as a long montage of clips from the 1870s to the 2010s, the film almost comes across as a human highlight reel of the last 150 years, told from the perspectives of what we as a species have decided to film and photograph. It is a meditation on the omnipresence of the camera, on its inherent bias and limitations, and on the incomprehensible number of images it can produce in the internet age. But the film struggles to have an opinion on all of this.
It is somewhat odd for a documentary partially about the inherently one-sided perspective of modern media to appear to take an objective standpoint. Fantastic Machine is about cameras, but the film doesn’t present many outright conclusions about its subject. Instead, much of the runtime consists of concepts and clips being presented to the audience to form their own opinions on – is this the product of an inconclusive research project, or done as an exercise in critical thinking? Either would be valid within the broad and labour-intensive nature of this film’s production, as a central theme could easily be lost in a project that covers this much ground. But remarkably, Fantastic Machine stays basically consistent in its message, and uses the topic of the camera as an avenue to explore the damning limitations of human perspective, where what may seem like an incomprehensible amount of content to us is but a pale blue dot on the black surface of the universe, photographed by Voyager 1, 3.7 billion miles away. There is an existentialism within this topic that is touched on very briefly, but would have been great to expand on, perhaps providing a hard-hitting conclusion to a purposefully messy and densely saturated film.
So why isn’t this aspect explored more? The irony of Fantastic Machine is that it appears to denounce media’s role in the degeneration of attention spans, but still partakes in it. The goal is noble – to reach school-age generations and teach them media literacy. But what is most memorable about Fantastic Machine isn’t its legitimately thought-provoking subtext, but the clip of the guy who came in for a job interview at the BBC and was mistaken for a tech expert. It’s the videos of the Russians climbing skyscrapers, or of YouTube videos from the 2000s of people falling over. The message, which is there, is almost hidden behind layers of quick, stimulating videos, where meaning has to be carefully and sometimes tenuously extracted. If appealing to short attention spans, a clear and concise message needs to be repeated constantly, not clouded with irrelevant short-form content.
Despite this, Fantastic Machine is a thoughtful, wide appeal look at media that is distinctly modern and will likely serve as an interesting time capsule of the content and attitudes of our period. Unfortunately, just as it begins to scrape the surface of its wider philosophical implications, it ends on a pig sniffing at a camera in the mud.
