This is a unique film of a long stream of cause and effect with physics, chemistry, and normal everday items---a long domino sequence which is incredible to watch, but may be boring to some. My brother, the engineer, loved it. My husband, thought it tedious and redundant. It's a movie, not necessarily to watch over and over, but to share with others who may find it fascinating.
I shall never look at an old pair of shoes the same...
The Way Things Go (1987) aka Der Lauf Der Dinge (perhaps loosely translated from German meaning The Laughing Dingo...okay, maybe not...the German I learned in high school didn't take very well) is an odd and wonderful film that I think would be well served shown in the various science and art classes one often has to take during ones stint in receiving a basic education.
In an old warehouse, artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, who must have pillaged a local junkyard, create an extensively elaborate set up involving tires, chairs, rocket tea kettles, spray bottles, sugar cubes, old shoes, wooden ramps, small carts, garbage bags, balloons, fireworks, pools of liquid (sometimes flammable), gelatinous goo, along with other common, household items, with a result that I can only describe as a wondrous adventure in `planned chaos'. I used to do a similar thing with dominoes, spend hours lining hundreds of them up, only to watch them all fall within a matter of minutes, but this is so much more. Fischli and Weiss use all forms of matter, fire, water, and gravity to effect the forward motion (illustrated by transformations, propagation, reactions, and kinetics) of contraptions and such, resulting in constantly evolving concept of one thing leading to another, or, to put it another way, an artistic representation of cause and effect. I say it would be useful to show this in school science classes, as it's an implicit demonstration and display of the laws of thermodynamics, and presents the material in such a way that one may forget they're actually learning something, being mesmerized by the events occurring on the screen. It could also me a valuable tool in an art class, as it shows the simplistic beauty that can be drawn from very commonplace objects arranged in such a way to illustrate lifecycles through normally inanimate objects.
I enjoyed this short piece a lot (it runs 30 minutes), as I found myself constantly trying to guess what was going to happen next (synapses firing...mind stimulated...brain functioning...), and often trying to figure out what just happened. Most of the time the events were relatively easy to follow, but ingenuous in their simplicity. The camera work here is strictly for utilitarian purposes, following the seemingly constant reaction (the spark of life, if you will) and there is no music, but only the occasional sound effect from the noisier reactions. I do agree with some of the other reviewers that there may have been some cheating going on here (`hands on' manipulation), as sometimes the camera moves forward when a particular reaction seems not to have produced the intended result, but often, during the more precarious events, the artists appeared to have understood the possibility of failure, and worked contingencies within the set up. Even if they did supply some assistance in the form of tricky camera work, I'm willing to cut them a great deal of slack as it's the ideas presented within that I found fascinating, the intricate, linear chain of events that must have taken a great deal of time to plan, test, and produce.
As I said, the feature piece runs 30 minutes, and there are a couple of extra features like biographies of the artists and a little text regarding the actions in the film. I would have liked to see a little more, perhaps a scientific commentary track delineating the principals involved during the sequences within the film, but maybe it's better there's not one, as it may pique someone's curiosity enough to try and learn more about it for themselves. I am interested in some of those chemical reactions, specifically the ones that created a great deal of foam, as I often find myself in need of ideas for practical jokes (leave it to me to take something beautiful and twist it for my own, devious means). The price seems a bit hefty for the DVD, but the replay value is here, so I think I'll get my moneys worth.
Cookieman108
6th grade science review
If you've read the other reviews you already know what this video is about. What I'd like to add is that I am amazed every year that my sixth graders watch this video, with no dialogue or music, and are enthralled with it for the full 30 minutes. I show it after we've done an extensive motion and energy unit and simple machines unit. Before watching it I explain 3 or 4 reactions that they may not get on their own, which piques their interest. It is the one video they remember years after leaving 6th grade!
Captivating. Astonishing. I could watch it again and again. This makes a great gift. I have already given this DVD to three people who love it every bit as much as I do. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Films of Charles & Ray Eames - Charles & Ray Eames DVD Release Date: Released the 15 August 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides is a truly beautiful, Scottish-German 2001 documentary about artist Goldsworthy, a Scotsman whose medium is nature itself and whose preferred studio is the outdoors, particularly where water forever flows, rises, and/or retreats. The soft-spoken, secluded Goldsworthy is seen hard at work making ephemeral sculptures out of bits of ice in the trees, or building tall, mysterious cones from loose rock, which stand like spiritual sentinels in forests and on shorelines, overgrown by plants or swallowed daily by high tides. Filmmaker-cinematographer Thomas Reidelsheimer goes to great and sometimes inexplicable lengths to make visual corollaries to Goldsworthy's ideas about underappreciated relationships between light, color, movement, balance, and... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Thomas Riedelsheimer DVD Release Date: Released the 28 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Explore the world of famous Eames design concepts in Blacktop and House: After Five Years of Living. Also includes Toccata for Toy Trains, Lucia Chase Vignette, Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair, The Black Ships, and Atlas. 62 minutes. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Films of Charles & Ray Eames - Charles & Ray Eames DVD Release Date: Released the 05 September 2000 THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE. If you would like to purchase this title, we recommend that you occasionally check this page to see if it has become available.
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PLEASE NOTE: Amazon is calling this Volume 6, but it's actually Volume 5. (Click on the enlarged picture and you can plainly see that it's Volume 5.)
Volume 5 contains: Tops, IBM at the Fair, A Computer Glossary, Eames Lounge Chair, The Expanding Airport, Kepler's Laws, Bread, Polyorchis Haplus and a rarely seen precursor to Tops, (also called Tops.)
Actually, I can only comment on "Tops" because I haven't seen the rest of DVD yet. But "Tops" is just a wonderful piece of filmmaking. More Info about this DVD Director(s): Charles Eames DVD Release Date: Released the 19 December 2000 Usually ships within 24 hours
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