Mensch Maschine Or Putting Parts Together
A real-life story becomes the starting point for a cinematic reflection that leads from the personal to the political. Rather than the synthesizer that she wants, the first-person narrator is given a food processor as a gift. Baffled, she sets off to find out the possible reasons why. After all, the confusion poses a few questions: What identities and gender constructions are inscribed into these devices? What are the relationships between people and machines, bodies and devices, the domestic and the artistic fields? What connections can be made between two such different instruments and what role does military technology play in this?
In the search for synchronicities, Camhy looks to films: she collages clippings of instructional films and documentary recordings of food processors with archive footage of early forms of modular synthesizers. In doing so, active hands shift into focus. The careful turning of buttons and sensitive exploration of sounds are opposed by the routine movements of assembly line workers and rigid rotation of the mixer. At the sound level, the sounds of the food processer blend with abstract synth signals and spherical sound clouds.
Mensch Maschine Or Putting Parts Together is a feminist essayistic film as audio-visual remix: an experimental collage of sound and image, sketch-like and associative. Rather than providing answers, Camhy lays the tracks and in doing so, gently references the films of Harun Farocki; semi cultural-studies analysis, semi subjective stream of thought. (Shilla Strelka)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt
Mensch Maschine Or Putting Parts Together
2019
Austria
8 min