AND SO SINGS OUR MECHANICAL BRIDE
Digital Video, 2005
Running Time 19:00 minutes
Producer/ Director: Sabine Gruffat
Voice: Joseph Gandurski
Selected Text: Michel Serres and Eddie Boyd
Archival footage supplied by:
Southeast Chicago Historical Society
Calumet Regional Archives, Northwest Indiana University
Prelinger Archives (at archive.org)
Combining archeological excavation and science fiction thriller, this
video resurrects the site of an abandoned US Steel mill—now an archetypal
monument of industrial history preserved in concrete—to investigate
themes concerning the unfulfilled promises of industrialization and the
destructive capabilities of evanescent ideas and imagery on fundamentally
physical beings (and objects). History and future are aestheticized evolving
into a mournful landscape where a decomposing body still continues to
breathe.
There is and has always been an integral relationship between industrialization
and early cinema. Thomas Edison’s first films were not intended
for cultural purposes, but instead served as practical aids to industrial
training, largely teaching factory workers to efficiently perform repetitive
tasks. Consequently, there are intentional conceptual and formal links
in this film: between the rhythm of the steelworker’s movements
and the flicker of archival film footage, the abrupt edits and the alienation
of the factory worker from family and community, and lastly, the relative
anonymity of archival footage and the loss of human autonomy in an industrial
era.
This is not a nostalgic film, but rather a film about the collective nostalgia
of a past relative to our future. An aesthetic shift occurs halfway through
the piece when the ruins of the mill walls are recast in a digitally rendered
future. The ending is a metaphor and question: Does the digital era signify
the death of analog physicality? What is at stake and who are the victims
of the post-industrial shift?
