The English narration is a little languid and monotonous but mixed up here with a lot of obvious facts about human civilization are quite a few little gems as footnotes only, like a claim Oppenheimer resisted plans to try the bomb on an uninhabited area of Japan - keen to learn of the deadly effects of the new weapon... it's a sort of thesis that frames human history as all about exploitation of nature and a 'fight' against it. There the linking of industry with war, and then back to industry again and the incentives oil gave to shaping a society to use it, etc.. Electricity it's pointed out was in bed with the US construction industry where deals were made to supply homes, kicking solar power development into the long grass.. There's stuff worth concentrating on if you can. The visuals are something of a collage of mostly incidental archive footage, but the thrust is in the sedated drone that forms the non-stop rhythm of the narration. Perhaps it's a blessing that it's measured vocally rather than erratic & polemical, but by the same token the work doesn't really assert a great deal in the end about perhaps a counter-progress. Being shown how deeply we've been invested into fossil fuels, or wars even for so long rather begs the question as to what else we could have done. Still intelligent and thought-provoking in a sophomoric sort of way.
Review of L'homme a mangé la terre
