All That Is Solid

The present is characterized by the absence of shared visions of the future. While circulation of commodities and technology appear to command universal claims to meaning and dominance, fragmentation, diversity and difference occupy the foreground.

Partly funded as a Bicentennial commission through the University of Queensland Art Museum and the ABC, Hughes’ speculative, essayistic documentary is an examination of the future of Australia in light of the processes of post-industrialisation, Walter Benjamin’s ruinous “angel of history” and Marx’s quixotic vision of modernity. Mixing together documentary and fiction, interviews and sketchy Brechtian set pieces, this state-of-the-nation mosaic draws on the forms of contemporary TV as well as the profoundly “historical” work of Kluge, Godard and Straub-Huillet to provide a consciously parodic and bracingly fragmentary postmodernist vision.