The History of Concrete

  As nothing human was alien to Whitman, nothing noted by the flaneur John Wilson’s roving camera eye is irrelevant to the human condition. His History of Concrete is a metaphor for our compulsion somehow to transcend our impermanence. The film’s radical irony is that concrete is only human in the permanence to which we devote it and the fragility and decay that it shares with us.

Like humanity, concrete is everywhere, second only to water in ubiquity, necessity and ultimate transience. 

One incidental joke catches its radical humanity. In a scene about the extra fragility of white concrete the builder continually accents the first syllable of its ingredient “cement” instead of the second. The essential construction component turns into our white base (you know: semen).

Another background motif traces the disintegration of Wilson’s rooming house, with its nostalgic low rentals and crumbling materials. From the basement suite to the highways and high rises the emblem of security and aspirational firmness submit to decay. Our edifices — domestic or monstrous — share the doom our flesh is air to.

Wilson’s open process of construction moves from the sentimental bromides and blinkers of the Hallmark movie desiderata to his own fund-raising to complete the project. Building a film, you see, is as material and challenging as building one of those freeways. The final sponsor’s demand for a rock music group provides an episode that seems completely irrelevant to the thrust of the film — plot or thematic —but in fact reveals its heart.

The musician is a pudgy, unprepossessing chap whose day job is giving out booze samples at a liquor store. As an anodyne, that echoes the Hallmark launch of Wilson’s project. The guy’s band is sufficiently loud and available to dream of making it — though a couple of members disdain of rehearsal and invention. 

This seems remote from the concrete story but it replays the core metaphor: the strength of concrete comes from the diversity of its component parts — cement, sand, pebbles, water. The band’s set alternates established hits by others with their own aspirational compositions. 

Then comes the whallop. That bumbling bandleader turns out to have a girlfriend. And she dies. 

But she’s no bimbo groupie. She was the first Chinese-American woman dean at her law school and again first on the bench. Indeed she was the judge behind the earlier anecdote of a rocker jailed, released, dead. She has made her own rock lover, our apparent loser, her beneficiary and executor. 

There are two points here. One, despite the filmmaker’s best efforts his film has turned into an unbelievable Hallmark romance after all. Two, the story of concrete is the story of us. Stone or flesh, we aspire to permanence but have an ineluctable doom. Our strength lies in heterogeneity, in mixing and containing a diversity of elements. This breadth and richness enabled Wilson to expand his TV doc format snd range to a feature film. It stays with us.