from Hacker News

“Logistics”, an 857-hour movie, tracks a pedometer from shop back to factory

by dzuc on 8/13/22, 1:48 PM with 272 comments

• by forgotmypw17 on 8/13/22, 4:55 PM

  The crazy part is that this journey is only the tip of the iceberg for this pedometer. It is made of many components, all of which follow similar journeys to the pedometer factory from their respective factories. And the components are made of raw materials, which are also shipped around in a similar manner after being mined. And the mining itself displaces those who live in that space.

• by caymanjim on 8/13/22, 5:30 PM

  Why did they do this backwards? It sounds like they took the trip in reverse. I thought they recorded it forward (tracking an actual object the whole time) and presented it in reverse, but it looks like they didn't actually follow a real object. They just chose a path and took the path in reverse, using the types of transportation that such an object might in theory have taken:

  > They write that, “Four years later we found ourselves on the largest container ship in the world on our way from Sweden to China.” As per the trip: “We had started the journey by truck to Middle Sweden, then by freight train to the port of Gothenburg, and after four weeks at sea, we filmed from a truck again, this time from the port of Shenzhen to a factory in Bao’an.”

  The idea of following a single, real object from point of manufacture to destination--documenting all the transfers and hiccups along the way--is interesting to me. Presenting it in reverse chronological order is an artistic decision I'm ambivalent about. But it doesn't sound like that's what they did. They didn't track a pedometer; they just took freight vehicles along a path that maybe the thing went on, without following the actual transfer of the item from box to container, from truck to ship, etc.

  I'm disappointed. I was ready to actually watch the whole thing. But it's contrived.

• by logisticsfilm on 8/13/22, 6:01 PM

  Hi there, creators of Logistics here. Super happy to see this featured on Hacker News.

  Feel free to ask us anything!

  official site is logisticsartproject.com

• by idiocrat on 8/13/22, 4:12 PM

  Here is more of container shipping pron.

  A container ship is sailing through a water highway, docks. The containers are getting unloaded/loaded.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h16zyxiwDLY

• by collegeburner on 8/13/22, 3:30 PM

  in the same vein (tho lots shorter) i reccomend giving I, Pencil a read: https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/

• by radicality on 8/13/22, 6:01 PM

  Is it available anywhere? Article says was on Vimeo but that it was taken down.

  I don’t see any info on their page either https://logisticsartproject.com/

  I wonder how large (in file size) the final cut was and what codecs were used. Such slow moving footage probably compresses well, but at 857 hours of footage it’s probably still big.

• by lifeisstillgood on 8/13/22, 3:24 PM

  I want to see (edited highlights) of the film now.

  It is extraordinary but then again it's just "the container will be here in three weeks"

• by TulliusCicero on 8/14/22, 12:50 AM

  > I Watched An 857-Hour Movie To Encounter Capitalism’s Extremes

  International trade is not the same thing as capitalism. International trade existed before capitalism, and if capitalism disappeared tomorrow, short of everyone simultaneously adopting anarcho-primitivism, we would still have trade between nations.

• by rahimnathwani on 8/13/22, 3:17 PM

  I really enjoyed Ascension https://g.co/kgs/agLbnp

• by rendall on 8/13/22, 3:43 PM

  > Going on the Logistics journey means encountering a staggering depiction of alienation, isolation and just how much capitalist social relations have distorted our ability to understand time and space.

  Bit of a stretch. Would anarchist shipping take less time or be less boring somehow?

• by mpalmer on 8/13/22, 9:37 PM

  Was the author inspired by the filmmakers not to edit this piece down to a sensible, non-redundant length?

• by drited on 8/13/22, 8:58 PM

  The author mentioned that they started out looking for the world's longest horror film but ended up finding a film which exposes capitalism's underbelly and brings home why life is turned into a blur by capitalism.

  If you ask me though, based on this paragraph they did actually find the world's longest horror film! As for the anti-capitalism hints in the article, try watching an 857 hour film without starving in a non-capitalist economy!

  "There came a point about three weeks into my viewing where the maddening, non-Euclidean shape of Logistics fully formed in my mind. I had an unnerving migraine. I could barely get myself together, let alone watch a boat not move for nine hours. I thought about quitting or taking a few days off, but then it occurred to me: the crew of the ship couldn’t quit, and the filmmakers couldn’t take a day off. I was now a part of this filmic thing, and I couldn’t stop until it was done."

• by boomboomsubban on 8/13/22, 3:43 PM

  I think I could handle watching the boat, 857 hours of silence would drive me insane. I wonder if they supplemented their own background music.

• by neilv on 8/13/22, 10:18 PM

  If this were an ambient display on a wall in a living space or work space, I wonder what effect that would have on mood and mode.

• by permo-w on 8/13/22, 5:58 PM

  the mid-section of this article is just rephrased paragraph after rephrased paragraph, each less philosophically sound than the last.

  we get it, the film is an art piece making a point about how capitalism compresses time and space into inconsequential objects. it was a big undertaking schedule-wise. you don’t have to say this backwards and forwards 5 times

  compress your article space and time-wise

• by wizardforhire on 8/13/22, 4:30 PM

  While not nearly as harrowing a journey nor the commitment as watching the film described in this article, reading this article in its entirety was surprisingly riveting and oddly fulfilling.

• by hef19898 on 8/13/22, 7:11 PM

  Not a critique if the film, but rather the article ablut it:

  >> Logistics may have been birthed into this world in 2012, but the past few years have given the film a second life, with the pandemic laying bare the fragility of just-in-time logistics.

  I so hoped we got past that already... JIT had nothing to do, as a root cause that is, with the supply issues the world is facing since the pandemic. I hate this meme so much.

  That being said, I live the film project! Even if I would never watch 35 days plus on part of my day job, the idea is great so!

• by readerbaza on 8/23/22, 10:52 AM

  So...buying items made in your country is an extreme right winger thing. And if you buy shitty stuff from communist china then it's exteme capitalism.

  Would you watch a real time "movie" of the countless man-years it took to design and develop the infrastructure that made it possible for you to "watch", write and publish about this? I thought so.

• by Aachen on 8/14/22, 12:02 AM

  I use a simple webview browser on Android because it's 10x faster than something heavy like Firefox. Every few months I come across a site, like this one, where the page flashes into the screen before being redirected to a data URI. Does anyone know what causes this? I'm inclined to think of trackers and ads, but it's a bit hard to debug without developer tools.

  This is what the submission redirects me to, a 1x1 image the browser says: data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

• by keepquestioning on 8/13/22, 10:13 PM

  Container ships seem very inefficient. Is that why shipping from taobao is horrible?

• by causality0 on 8/13/22, 8:42 PM

  just how much capitalist social relations have distorted our ability to understand time and space.

  This is meaningless bullshit. The fact you can purchase, for an hour's wage, a digital pedometer than was built on one continent from raw materials from another and then shipped to a third is a breathtaking triumph.

• by manytree on 8/13/22, 3:16 PM

  What a lovely article and piece. Tremendous. I don’t think I will make such a commitment to this film as did the author, but in a way I feel it is perhaps the only way to understand it: at the speed of undilated time.

• by tasuki on 8/13/22, 8:06 PM

  > It was on, in front of my eyes, while I worked, ate and lived.

  Either you're working or you're watching a movie. I know people who claim they do both at the same time, but I don't think they're actually doing either.

• by UIUC_06 on 8/13/22, 3:38 PM

  > However, if Logistics showed me anything, it’s that time belongs to the working people of this world, when we can find ways to take it.

  So deep. So profound.

  > Logistics is the filmic annihilation of capitalist relations to time by a force of ultra-cinematic space. Logistics isn’t a feat of temporal duration, it’s a feat of spatial presence.

  Such overwrought prose. Such "forcing everything into a Marxist framework."

  Leonard A. Read talked about the pencil and how no one person could possibly make one, in 1958: https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl.html?chapter_n... and he wasn't the first, either.

  The supply chain expands, but the principle stays the same.

• by akudha on 8/13/22, 3:11 PM

  Most people have no clue where/how everyday things are made. Reminds me of this video where a teenage girl was saying food comes from supermarkets, not farmers

• by codeflo on 8/13/22, 3:40 PM

  So the entire freighter journey is shown in real time, to show how “crushing” (a word used in the article) capitalism is? Because before capitalism, there were no freight ships, or what?

• by gurumeditations on 8/13/22, 3:32 PM

  So much fluff I couldn’t finish it.