Accelerando

A cinematic essay about the analytical power of utopias as depicted in early documentary films and political pamphlets, centering on excerpts of «Fabrik Poldihütte», a fragment of an early Austrian sponsored film about Karl Wittgenstein’s steel factory, originally titled «Poldihütte steel works during the Great War» (1916), the British documentary and propaganda film «The Battle of the Somme» (1916, Geoffrey Malins & John McDowell), the “reactionary modernist” Nazi propaganda film «Metall des Himmels» (1935, Walter Ruttmann), and the text «Europe’s Optical Illusion» (1909) – British pacifist Norman Angell’s pamphlet about the “Great Illusion” that war and military action can help maintain the status of countries in the “economically civilized” world. (Georg Wasner)