SXSW Film Review: Documentary The Arc of Oblivion explores the beautiful effort of human record-keeping.
For such an existential question as whether the human urge to make a mark against the entropy of the physical world is folly, Ian Cheney’sIn self-effacing narration and twee animation for the South By Southwest Film and Television 2023 selection, thedirector creates a musing, meandering, but sneakily organized look at the compulsion to memorialize.
Cheney grounds what could be an impossibly vast subject in his family, sharing anxieties about losing photos of his kids, plumbing his photographer father’s archives, and showing his parents’ witty reaction to the building of the ark in their backyard.
In such a wide-ranging exploration, there are some digressions that confuse, glancing on complicated scientific ideas or veering too much towards the unorganized philosophical. The narrative conceit of talking heads interacting with meta footage on an old-fashioned TV is a tad played out.
This is also a filmmaker’s film, through and through; Cheney is reflexively curious about the urge to record, exploring how the camera necessarily changes the scene it’s capturing. We get producer Werner Herzog performing a reading of"Ozymandias" by Percy Shelley as a finale. Though at times the artistic navel-gazing and endless pondering did remind me of film class in undergrad, it also made me nostalgic for it in the best way. In the end, Cheney lands on what imbues the film with such refreshing wide-eyed optimism: Yes, the urge to record is folly, but it’s beautiful.
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