Hand Ges­tures

One to file next to such wispy, ambi­ent doc­u­men­taries as Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence and Gideon Koppel’s Sleep Furi­ous­ly, this fas­ci­nat­ing minia­ture by Francesco Cleri­ci chron­i­cles the cre­ation of a life-sized bronze sculp­ture of a dog in tired repose. The twist is that the men (and one woman, that we see) employed by the Milanese work­shop at which this ​“event” occurs strict­ly abide by a pro­duc­tion process orig­i­nal­ly devised dur­ing the 4^th cen­tu­ry BC.

Yes, there’s the odd air gun usage to remove loose debris, or a blow torch to attain a strong direc­tion­al flame, but every­thing else is as it was. It begins with lay­ers of red wax care­ful­ly manip­u­lat­ed by a sculp­tor into the shape of the mutt. Then an exoskele­ton of plas­tic pipes is placed over the top and whose func­tion only comes into play much lat­er in the intri­cate pro­ce­dure. A plas­ter cas­ing is then pro­duced via a series of painstak­ing stages, and then final­ly the molten bronze is slow­ly poured in from an old bucket.

There’s a mes­mer­ic qual­i­ty to watch­ing these crafts­man go about their intri­cate busi­ness, and for the first half of the film it’s entire­ly uncer­tain how this strange pink mono­lith they’ve pro­duced will fur­nish them with a met­al-based art­work. Cleri­ci con­trasts the meth­ods we’re see­ing with those con­tained with­in archive footage, some­times even film­ing his sub­jects from iden­ti­cal angles to empha­sise how lit­tle these tech­niques have altered over the ages.

And yet the film is nev­er hec­tor­ing­ly nos­tal­gic about the old ways or both­ered with how such a tra­di­tion is allowed to with­stand the wreck­ing-ball of cap­i­tal­is­tic progress. There’s no nar­ra­tion, very lit­tle talk­ing and explana­to­ry inter­ti­tles only arrive pri­or to the end cred­its, as this is a film which cel­e­brates a his­to­ry of arti­san­ship and mem­o­ry through a sin­gle scin­til­lat­ing act of creation.