Through three seasons of his HBO documentary series How To with John Wilson, filmmaker John Wilson has crafted mini-masterpieces of rambling nonfiction storytelling—wrapped up in the thin guise of a helpful guide for, say, making perfect risotto or finding a public restroom.
His first feature film The History of Concrete provides similar moments of quirky humor and poignant insight about the world around us, but the movie also reveals an underpinning of all of Wilson’s work to date: a desire to stop time.
That may seem like an odd ask for an artist working in the medium of moving images. But much like our modern predilection for filming even the tiniest details of our lives on our smartphones, Wilson looks to preserve the strange personalities and minor bits of weirdness he encounters before they are gone forever.
Wilson has a study metaphor for this practice in his film’s titular subject. A mixture of cement and minerals, concrete is supposed to stand strong forever but generally falls prey to time and the elements, cracking and crumbling to dust.
The filmmaker gets to see this in firsthand when a flaw in his home’s foundation causes the basement to flood during rainstorms. The incident sends him on a quixotic cinematic journey—captured on handheld cameras—that takes him from Italy to admire some of the world’s oldest concrete buildings, to Ohio, home of the first concrete street.
If you’ve seen any episodes of Wilson’s show, you know that he rarely follows a linear storytelling path. His visit to Ohio, for example, leads him to a company that removes tattooed skin from the recently deceased to be preserved for loved ones. Also threaded into the film are Wilson’s efforts to get the money and support to make the film. Those virtual calls and emails land him in the path of Jack, a New Jersey rocker on a Sisyphean quest for stardom. (One potential backer suggests he find a way to work a famous musician into the film.)
For the uninitiated, that all may sound scattershot and almost avant-garde, but Wilson’s brilliance lies in how deftly he ties it all together and spikes the serve with visual comedy and his charmingly reedy, halting voiceover.
What may be especially surprising to folks experiencing Wilson’s work for the first time is how relatable it all is. To be human is to chuckle at a double entendre on a street sign (he shows several; my favorite: Titman Road) or wonder about how gum gets removed from a sidewalk (in New York, at least, there’s a lone company that pressure washes it off and vacuums it up). Your eyes may glaze over at discussions of the issues concerning the future safety of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but I guarantee you’ll share Wilson’s excitement at meeting the grandson of the man who embalmed the real Chef Boyardee.
The History of Concrete opens at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st, Thurs Oct 1, 100 minutes, not rated.