Films that think about what we build
A curated selection of films, documentaries and series connected to the themes of this site — technology, organisations, language, complexity.
WALL-E
The first thirty minutes of WALL-E contain almost no dialogue and constitute one of the most precise depictions of work ever put on film. A small robot wakes up, charges his solar panels, puts on his treads, and goes to…
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Roy Neary is driving a power company truck down an Indiana road when something comes over the hill and lights him up. He does not know what it is. What he knows, afterwards, is that he has received a signal, and the sign…
Paprika
The parade is the image that stays. A procession of refrigerators, Shinto gates, tin dolls, daruma figures, brass bands, and household gods marches through Tokyo with the formal logic of a religious festival, and the str…
2001: A Space Odyssey
A hominid discovers that a thigh bone can be swung, kills a rival with it, and throws it into the air in triumph. The bone tumbles against the sky, and Kubrick cuts — to an orbiting satellite, four million years later, m…
Snowpiercer
The train is a closed system, and Bong Joon-ho organises his film as a traversal of it. Curtis Everett starts in the tail section — dark, cramped, fed on gelatinous protein bars whose ingredients nobody asks about — and…
Chinatown
The mystery in Chinatown is solved completely, and the solving changes nothing. Jake Gittes identifies the crime — the diversion of public water to destroy the agricultural value of the San Fernando Valley so that land c…