Life In The Aerie

This is National Film Board of Canada's darling Theodore Ushev's animated film short titled Drux Flux. The official synapses of which is below:

Partly figurative, partly abstract, Drux Flux is an animation film of fast-flowing images showing modern people crushed by industry. Inspired by One-Dimensional Man by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the filmmaker deconstructs industrial scenes and their terrifying geometry to show the inhumanity of progress.

The inhumanity of progress?

The stark beginning of this film with its decaying industrial environment set against the sounds of creaking metal and footsteps is effective and impactful. The quick cutting images quickly sweep us into an old factory of rusting gears and chains. In this mixed media piece, photographic images mix with animated images and starkly horizontal and vertical graphics, blending order with a chaos of human and industrial images. It takes us back in time to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution with men in tams swinging sledgehammers and the use of the worker as propaganda in a distinctly communist style.

The filmmaker is Bulgarian and this genre often shows up in art from eastern bloc countries, but why he is belaboring (an apt word) an industrial revolution that provided jobs to those immigrating away from communist exploitation to live the, in this case, Canadian dream? This is a digital artist after all who is using high tech equipment to express his dismay with all that industry. If he wishes to free the factory worker from their misery, he must consider those village girls that have migrated to the cities in China to make the chips that power his precious equipment.

Ironic?

My grandad immigrated from Scotland to work in the foundries of Detroit. My mother's family came from the Eastern Bloc and lived on a dirt poor farm where an acre of pickles netted the family of nine a hundred dollars at the pickle factory. She remembers the stained hands and the aching back of her childhood. She also remembers the pain of being sent away to Detroit to live with factory working relatives because her mother could no longer afford her care. My grandad wore his tam and sweated in a Ford Factory, where he was paid handsomely. He saved his money and used it later to spoil the grandkids.

Who was better off?

Marcuse, writing in the 60's, would argue that we are slaves to consumerism. Controlled by advertising, we work more hours than we have to in order to BUY happiness. This cycle of work/buy makes us one-dimensional and unable to think for ourselves. Give Mary an iPod that will shut her up. No, I don't think it will. Working for a living and progress allows me this box that I can write and create on, it allows freedom of expression to the world.

Yes, a lot went wrong during the industrial revolution both here and in communist states, but why bring it up now? It's as if to say look at the crumbling factories, we were right!

But progress hasn't crushed humanity. In America we have voted for a different path and said out with backward thinking. It may not be the revolution Marcuse was hoping for, but it hardly supports his theory that we are slaves without voices either. Thanks to progress and the ongoing digital revolution Ushev has his too. Everyone can listen and watch it on YouTube or not, it is your choice.