Dust and Piranhas

Directed by Helen Marten

“The faster you break it the faster we make it,” says the wooden column at one point, going on to acknowledge the bounteous economic logic of this reality with the observation that “production is sealed in gold.”Early on we see the black-and-white striped house Adolf Loos designed for Josephine Baker. It’s a cardboard model, of course; the plans were never realized. The house is an idea, an image, a virtual presence, a possibility, a provocation. Later in the film it reappears, reconfigured in different materials with a different range of qualities and surface finishes. “Why do so many things look the same, and only one of them is good?” asks a female voice. This is not the column’s voice but that of someone who sounds much like Marten herself. It is, in fact, her sister, one Marten speaking another Marten’s words. After all, in order to manufacture glamour, a little plagiarism is essential. And this process—call it borrowing, copying, paying homage, whatever—is both violent and comic.