This is based pretty closely on an earlier post
We hear the rumble of what sound like B-17s in the distance. A boy runs up to the camera craning his neck toward the sky. We look overhead and can barely make out a formation of hazy planes slowly flying into the distance. Fade to black.
In a scrubby desert, children run from a Quonset hut school house. School's over. Only one boy seems to notice the thin wisp of smoke in the distance. The boy walks toward the smoke. An old man with a metal contraption on his head watches from the distance. The boy finds a small sputnik-like satellite that has plunged into the ground.
It's night. The boy is looking at the satellite which sits on a table partially disassembled. It looks like some kind of strange receiver that picks up noisy sounds and images. He spends some time looking at a poster of an aircraft with five wings and ten engines. We look more closely at the device.
Images flash by. We see more strange aircraft. Then more schematics. Gradually, we see images of organs and other medical images that meld with technological schematics. Then we see the boy again, but now he's grown up. He looks at the poster on his wall. This time, it's a valentines-style heart mounted in a port hole on a rocket ship. The text reads, "A wary eye discloses pious travail."
Now we're in a warm romantic scene in the desert. The young man and his mother stand there with a sleek rocket in the background. They bid each other goodbye then he walks off into the distance. We now see him being prepped for his flight. His head is shaved. Hundreds of tubes are stuck in him. Tubes come out of his mouth. His eyes are covered with a strange mechanical device. Everything shakes as he blasts off into space. His lips curl into a smile.
THE END
Backstory
This really short film is about technological change. The extrapolated technologies are baroque. The financially strapped military tries to take advantage of an overage of jet engines by putting more of them on their old plane bodies. But it gets worse and soon, there isn't enough money for even that. So they start creating feints. They test fly fearsome aircraft in order to strike fear into their enemy's spies. But many of these aircraft feature hollow bombs and non-functional weapons like those fake car panels used by car companies when they road test new car models. Then their technologies became aestheticized. I think Benjamin said that in capitalism, violence becomes aestheticized whereas in Marcism, aesthetics becomes violent. In the film we're seeing the end of an era of baroque, aestheticized violent war machines. Then someone comes along with the idea of using cyborg technologies. And gradually, live humans are used to guide and regulate the functioning of space craft. The ending is supposed to evoke surgery, medical technology and one-man Japanese suicide subs. Unlike noise film, I'm not exactly sure what this one means. It's simply supposed to be a poetic meditation about how technology changes.
There are also new things to learn to shoot. A bunch of kids. An opportunity to shoot an emotional scene with two people. Maybe some hanging miniatures. A couple of small set pieces. It's do-able, but yet it can look big.
(above: WWII one-man Japanese suicide sub)
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