Old Time Continuity: Illusion, Futility, and The Way Things Go

Old Time Continuity: Illusion, Futility, and The Way Things Go
Art & Trash, episode 30
April 5, 2024

In 1987, the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss released The Way Things Go, a thirty-minute 16mm film that portrays the continuity of a single chain reaction. Across a series of long takes, maintaining the illusion of a single take, a chain of simple, at times absurdly comic physical reactions occur in a chemical-industrial game of dominos.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer explores the idea of continuity in cinema, as it appears in Fischli and Weiss's film, but also, as it evolved from early cinema through to its refinement in the poetics of the Soviet montage theorists, and its interaction with the work of filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Breer and Michael Snow. At the same time, Broomer undertakes an exploration of another precedent for Fischli and Weiss's films, the marvellous imaginary machines of cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

CHAPTERS
00:00 - Prologue
00:57 - Rube Goldberg and the Futile Machine
02:58 - Cinema as a Continuity Machine
05:30 - Absurd Mechanization and Naturalism in Cinema
08:40 - The Way Things Go
10:14 - The Illusion of Continuity
12:00 - Spectator and Effect
16:30 - Conclusion
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[seanramsdell]

Your essays are awesome and this is one of my favorites

[vamptina]

Accidentally stumbled upon your channel when searching about Louise Bourque. such a hidden gem for cinephilles! thanks for creating this channel.