2023 Directed by Axel Danielson, Maximilien Van Aertryck
A visually exuberant documentary that uses powerful collages edited out of archive footage, home videos, live-streaming material and private documentation to offer a glimpse at what (or who) is at work when an image of our reality is arranged.
Fantastic Machine, Zázračný aparát, 판타스틱 머신
USA
Sundance Film Festival
Sweden
Tempo Documentary Festival
Denmark
CPH DOX
Czechia
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
UK
Cheltenham International Film Festival
Denmark11
Czechia
Sweden11
Norway9
Czechia
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
UK
USA
A rather spellbinding look at the history of photographic imagery and pivotal images are in shaping our world view; and how essentially from the very beginning images have been manipulated in order to tell a story. It spans from the very first photographic images to the billions of instagram posts every day. At times, it can feel a bit scattered and unfocused for that reason. Even still, it’s quite a captivating watch.
2023 Ranked
Sundance 2023 Ranked
Degrees of Kevin Bacon: Unknown
I honestly kinda hated this. The first 20 minutes were incredible and had me sucked in, but then the final 60 minutes was just a B-tier YouTube compilation with 15 minutes of Ice Poseidon stream footage.
Fantastic Machine is at its best when it is telling the history behind the camera, picture, and film. The final hour focuses on a few convoluted messages the filmmakers are trying to get across that range from political slants to a warning of overconsumption and over-indulgence. The beginning definitely taught me a lot of new things, but that final hour brought nothing new to the space.
Fantastic Machine struggles to know what it is and what the goal of the documentary is here. At…
Loved. A documentary on the history of our relationship to the camera, from the invention of the camera until now using archival footage. Showing how the camera has shaped the world, how it’s changed it and us. It’s funny it’s embarrassing, it’s one of those docs that made me feel one with the world. It stayed with me.
Fantastic Machine has some interesting insight on the power of a camera here-or-there - along with an impressive collection of archival footage - but the overall structure feels very scattered, and without a strong central thesis tying it all together, it’s hard to engage.
A sprawling, unsubtle, incredibly lazy look at the last 200 years of motion pictures that struggles to make smart connections between all of its disparate ideas and images. There's a fire hydrant's worth of information here, starting with the birth of the first photographic image, to the ways dictators have exploited the image to push ideological control, to the rise of television and its consumer-baiting images, to the current moment we share with billions of hand-held cameras on the planet. Comparisons are made between Georges Méliès' camera illusions and the more sinister era of Nazi propaganda and contemporary #FakeNews. There is zig-zag juxtaposition between Lumière's train, the holocaust, ISIS, the Beverly Hillbillies, our love of cat videos, and a whole…
You can’t deny that the creation of images, thanks to everything from the TV we watch to the social media we participate in, is one of the most prevalent and important facets of our daily lives. But you don’t have to explain it like Fantastic Machine.
The documentary—with the pretentious full title of And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, after the British monarch whose coronation Georges Méliès staged and filmed—is a bad undergrad media studies paper, given shape and movement by directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck. Its shambling, self-important history of the captured image, from camera obscura devices to livestream webcams, is a condescending, eyeroll-inducing lecture for people that’ve never watched a behind-the-scenes clip, used a camera, or thought twice about what they were shoving into their eyeballs. Its intended audience of indie-documentary-watching media illiterates might exist, but I certainly don’t know who they are.
Full review @ Paste
a sort of silly but mostly scathing retrospective look at what humanity can do - both good and bad - when in the presence of a camera
Terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. A fabulously edited documentary that serves as both sociological history lesson and bone-chilling cautionary tale. Wonderful stuff.
Well done but a bit too scattered. Still works and had some good stuff but I couldn’t really follow
