"Mobilisierung der Traeume" - review

"The Mobilisierung der Traeume" is an essay film whose directors (Martin Reinhart, Thomas Tode and Manu Luksh) return us back a century back in time with cadres debuting the myth that the reigning technology craze was born with the Internet. The film is a disorienting, spiraling journey into the rabbit hole from which the technology has begun, which had a breakthrough effect on our current reality. One of the benefits of the film comes from the voice of Tilda Swinton, the natural choice for accompaniment of blinking signals and lights from a mysterious (and a little threatening) past. The range of her comments extends from geography's history to the comic - by announcing footage from the earliest telephone conversations with the familiar jingling joke of ours today. Sources for the film are early industrial films by Thomas Edison, various archives (General Motors) dating back to the 1890s, as well as footage of the first cinematic wizard - Georges Melieres. Montags create the sense of magic and retrofuturism, where parts of the past look more modern and sci-fi than anything familiar today. Deprived of chronological precision that connects the involved footage, the film goes beyond the history lesson, treating discoveries as more of a pile of mechanized plastic, and showing how the ideas behind these discoveries continually affect the market at global level, world politics and peace, social contacts and so on.

"Dreams Rewired" does not call for concrete action, but instead stimulates the inner need of each one of us to be more aware of the world around him and the changes that he experiences. Sharing photos on social networks may be a relatively new phenomenon, but the impulse behind this sharing has been alive for at least a century back in time.The film does not attempt to historically reconstruct or analyze the facts but instead validates what has happened in its own way, it locks it in the mantra: "Our time is a time of absolute communication." While not surprisingly phenomenal, "Dreams Rewired" is an interesting and meaningful interpretation of the history of technology and its influence. At least, it's worth it because of Tilda Swinton's voice, both consolation and exciting, sounding the symphonic arrangement of found footage footage, turning them into something incredibly familiar and strange.

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