Cablestreet
2019 · 22m · United States
Directed by Meredith Lackey
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, provocative, surreal
Two disembodied voices, one English and one Mandarin, muse on technology, war, and power while a Huawei-designed undersea data cable is laid across the ocean floor.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's essentially a talking-heads meditation on geopolitics dressed up as experimental cinema—clever enough to sidestep being boring, but too enamored with its own conceptual cleverness to actually subvert anything about the form it's supposedly challenging.
Lackey's decision to anchor an essay on power and infrastructure to the material fact of a cable being laid—letting the voices drift over that patient, almost sculptural image—recalls the essay-film tradition of Farocki and Godard, where form and argument become inseparable.
The pairing of English and Mandarin voices creates a kind of productive friction that keeps you listening for asymmetries rather than consensus; it's a single sound design choice that does the entire political work of the piece.
Reviews
Cablestreet vividly delves into the psychic underpinning of the conflict. Directed by Meredith Lackey, the documentary observes the process of laying down a seabed data cable designed by the tech giant.