Accelerando

Essayist Georg Wasner used fragments from three films to breathe new life into a text from 1909. This was the year that Norman Angell published his manifesto Europe’s Optical Illusion, in which he warns of violent reactions to globalisation, which even then was in the air. Angell developed his ideas in the book The Great Illusion (1913), about the delusion that war can bolster the status of countries in an ‘economically civilised’ world. This work later formed the basis for Jean Renoir’s classic La Grande Illusion (1937). The term ‘accelerando’ is borrowed from science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The best-known footage used by Wasner is from The Battle of the Somme (Geoffrey Malins & John McDowell, 1916), released in 18 countries at the time and perhaps the most-watched of all documentaries on World War I. In addition, he uses footage from the German propaganda films Fabrik Poldihütte (1916) and Metall des Himmels (1935).

All Short films at IFFR 2017