John Wilson’s Ruminative Documentary Is Blisteringly Humorous and Deeply Shifting

Again in 2000, on the introduction of the digital digital camera, French New Wave pioneer Agnès Varda made The Gleaners and I. One of the consequential documentaries of the brand new century, the movie is without delay an appraisal of Varda’s personal ageing physique, an exploration of a brand new cinematic software, and, most prominently, an investigation into meals scraps. How Varda takes a topic like discarded meals and turns it into one thing way more esoteric and profound, quotidian but complicated, is a little bit of magic.

John Wilson possesses the harmless curiosity of a kid and the calm knowledge of an historic thinker. His model of filmmaking is the logical continuation of Varda’s micro/macro, private/public fascination. The Historical past of Concrete payments itself as a sardonic tackle the machinations of Hallmark movies, however really it’s, like The Gleaners and I, an try at understanding the self and neighborhood by way of one thing innocuous and supremely ignored. On this case, the titular materials, which is second solely to water in widespread use.

The Historical past of Concrete is, unsurprisingly, for the How To With John Wilson creator, blisteringly humorous. Extra startling is that it is usually one of many finer, extra transferring documentaries of latest reminiscence. Watching The Historical past of Concrete seems like being caught within the movement of a casually transferring river, its ebbs and flows persistently novel but inevitable. It’s a wholly distinct expertise. What different filmmaker can quote Man Debord in response to a weird Hollywood occasion in honor of Kim Kardashian?

The Historical past of Concrete is a Miraculous Marvel

Wilson started the undertaking considerably accidentally. Within the midst of the WGA strikes, which had been introduced on, largely, as a repudiation of the incursion of AI, Wilson observed that his union was providing a workshop for writing a Hallmark film. On the identical time, he grew to become a landlord at a constructing with quickly deteriorating infrastructure. Within the thoughts of somebody as deliriously ingenious as John Wilson, a pure connection is made: what for those who made a documentary on concrete within the fashion of an affordable romance? Maybe that method, it might get some funding.

However that is just the start of The Historical past of Concrete, which travels to all types of wierd locales, capturing photographs alongside the way in which of on a regular basis oddities. He travels to Las Vegas for the annual concrete conference, stumbles into a wierd enterprise that preserves the lifeless tattooed pores and skin of family members, and, within the movie’s most emotionally trenchant sequence, befriends Jack Macco, a tough rock musician who moonlights as a liquor salesperson and who’s engaged to a trailblazing New York Metropolis choose. Macco’s armchair thinker ruminations on artwork are magnetic of their cogent poetry.

Alongside the way in which, Wilson wryly meditates on duty, inventive ingenuity and duty, the commerce of artwork and the irreconcilable conflict between creation and capitalism. He makes implicit arguments in opposition to the usage of AI in our on a regular basis life, merely and successfully advocates for discovered household and friendship, and questions why sure avenues of artistry are judged as commercially viable or not earlier than they’ve even been made.

The Historical past of Concrete shouldn’t be a movie about local weather change. However, amongst the myriad of matters it touches on is the deleterious impact of regularly producing new issues or in any other case desperately hearkening again to nostalgic days of yore, all of the whereas ignoring the very factor proper in entrance of us. Wilson confirmed along with his tv collection simply how life-affirming it may be to simply observe, and, along with his triumph of a function doc, he exhibits us how merely wanting round can reveal whole histories.

The Historical past of Concrete screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Pageant.