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SXSW Review: 'The Arc of Oblivion' is a Thoughtful Exploration of What We Leave Behind

By Seth Freilich | Film | March 11, 2023 |

By Seth Freilich | Film | March 11, 2023 |


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On its surface, the documentary The Arc of Oblivion is just a gimmick - some guy is gonna build a small arc in the middle of Maine. And thus, filmmaker Ian Cheney starts where he must, showing the beginning of this arc-building project, which is being done on his parent’s farm and mostly by his neighbor because Cheney has no idea how to build “a storage shed shaped like a boat, like an ugly boat.” But Cheney has something more profound in mind, which explains why Werner Herzog is on board as one of the exec producers and even shows up late in the film.

And thus, the film quickly pivots to what Cheney is actually interested in exploring via this gimmick, the dual questions of what is worth saving and whether it’s folly even to try to keep anything. Cheney’s film explores several topics spinning off from these fundamental questions. This journey starts by looking at our planet itself acts as a historical archive, from limestones and clams, to tree rings and bat shit (“guano”). Other segments look at, for example, the creation of archives (digital archives*, as you might expect, along with the more unexpected ceramic tile photograph archive), the fallacy of “perfect” human memory, the fascinating 700-year old Al Ahmed Mahmoud Library in the Sahara, and how entropy and cosmology show that we don’t even have to talk about cosmological timescales to think about a universe that has completely forgotten about humanity’s existence.

*The digital archive segment, among other things, talks about how film can be stored on and recovered via DNA. And as I was literally saying out loud to myself “well this is fucking bananas,” the talking head said “ok this is pretty bananas, but this is how it works.” Science is wild, y’all. This may currently be prohibitively expensive to be practical. But still. Wild.

Cheney smartly balances these larger-focused segments with other portions of the film that are smaller in scale and, thus, more emotional. For example, a woman in the Bahamas shows the destruction to her town from a hurricane, noting that “all my baby pictures are casualties now.” And when Cheney asks her if she still takes pictures, it’s heartbreaking when she says not really, because “what’s the point.” This comes right on the heels of my favorite part of the documentary, a short segment featuring African American cemetery historians. They recognize that these cemeteries will fade into oblivion but still “deserve their time” to act as “sites of mourning and sites of warning.”

While all of this presents as [deep voice] important stuff [/deep voice], Cheney wisely keeps the mood light and the film moving. The Arc of Oblivion is not the kind of documentary that poses questions that are easy to answer, and it smartly does not even try to answer them. How can it? The best one can hope from an exploration of these topics is thoughtful exploration. This is why, on the one hand, someone tells us how “wherever there are humans, there are archivists” combined with a (too brief for my tastes) discussion about tribal collective memory. On the other hand, we hear Werzog explain how he does not keep anything from a film once he’s done because “a carpenter doesn’t sit on his shavings either” and, in fact, “I think oblivion is a blessing.”*

*That’s maybe the most Herzog thing that he’s ever said.

So should we try to document and remember things and preserve thought and history even though the second law of thermodynamics is undefeated and entropy, though conserved, will always come out on top? Clearly Cheney thinks so or else this film would not exist. And clearly I agree, or else these words would not exist. I have no out here so, as Cheney did, I’ll turn to Percy Shelley’s famous words:

The Arc of Oblivion had its World Premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival.