Una breve historia de los rascacielos - Parte uno: Barro
2013 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Katerina Cizek
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic
The history of tall residential towers traces from the Tower of Babel to New York tenements. Narration guides a survey of mud-built origins.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Cizek treats the skyscraper like a formal genealogy when she could've blown it up—the mythic angle (Babel!) hints at something weirder she's not quite willing to pursue, which is frustrating because the premise is begging for irreverence.
A luminous essay film that traces vertical ambition through material history, anchoring metaphysical questions in the tactile specificity of mud and stone; the archival eye is unmistakably in conversation with Harun Farocki and structural documentary, executing that lineage with clear precision across three minutes.
The decision to begin with mud—to ground the tower's mythology in its literal substrate before showing a single skyline—is the entire film; that single reframing gesture transforms what could've been a textbook survey into something physically grounded and strange.