The Song of Styrene (2022)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Thanks for the memories!

Sick Product of a Sick System

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

"Le chant du Styrène" is a French documentary film from 1959, which means this one will have its 60th anniversary soon. The director is the famous Alain Resnais and the commentary was written by the not-so-famous Raymond Queneau. According to IMDb, it runs for 19 minutes, but all the versions I found only go for 13 minutes. That is actually really enough as all this film shows us are the work procedures at a large polystyrene factory. I have no idea why this was called poetic or aesthetic here on IMDb, because it is neither. I can't imagine people are really interested in this unless they work at such a factory themselves, which means this film is really only for a very small target group. In the film's favor, you have to say that color is nothing to be taken for granted for a film from the late 1950s and it definitely would have been an even more boring watch as a black-and-white film. The animation factor is negligible. As is the film as a whole, I do not recommend the watch. Thumbs down.

The narrative here, I imagine conceived as an educational short to be screened before a feature, is the backwards journey from a plastic bowl to the raw elements it originates from. It doesn't matter, the journey could be anything. What matters here is the plasticity of the image itself, how the forms can be moulded, bent, shaped into a fluid cinema. The various technological processes provide the opportunity; we swirl around machinery, track beneath structures or across platforms, follow busy assembly lines, and it's all joyful and upbeat. A celebration of French industry for who funded this, but for us and Resnais a celebration of the adventurous camera and cinematic texture.

This cinematographic project is as poetic as it is technical in its depiction of the realm of plastics from its extraction from Nature to its final product in modern Civilization. The narration, thanks to R. Queneau, reminds of a mid 50's news real, as featured prior to blockbuster films in France, depicting the glory of Babylon lending a mechanical hand to the so-called imperfect aboriginals. Although this movie is closer to a dry documentary than anything else, a philosophic mind appreciative of essences and existenz will admire the exhaustiveness of the subject matter as well as the keen eye for detail.