“The History of Concrete” Humanizes the Material World

Wilson’s chain of observations and anecdotes includes plenty of material that is eccentric or funny, yet little of it is there just for humor’s sake; through association and allusion, its significance is ultimately revealed. There’s the “Gumbuster,” a New York contractor specializing in steam-blasting chewing gum off sidewalks (for the record, he also has private-label wine for his customers); a thirty-one-hundred-mile race, sponsored by followers of the spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, that’s run for fifty-two days, eighteen hours a day, around a single block in Queens; the first concrete street in the United States, in Bellefontaine, Ohio, which is also home to a funeral director with a side gig removing tattoos—i.e., tattooed skin—from the dead, and preserving it. Throughout, however, Wilson keeps one big idea going, like a pedal point, which reflects back on his effort to create the work at hand. Whether he’s showing footage from a GQ dinner at the Chateau Marmont, where Kim Kardashian is an honoree; touring a Hallmark movie studio in Canada; filming a local rock band at gigs in Queens and on Long Island; or visiting the on-location shoot of “Marty Supreme” (whose director, Josh Safdie, and co-writer, Ronald Bronstein, are among Wilson’s executive producers), Wilson emphasizes the problem of what gets funded, what gets produced, what gets shown. Concrete represents something that’s not readily visible except in its effects, not often perceived except in its absence or failure—namely, infrastructure.

For all the self-deprecating whimsy of “The History of Concrete,” Wilson is doing some serious diagnostic and analytical work, in part by tipping his hand to show which methods he’s using and why. The rock band is featured in the film, for instance, because one potential financier required him to include a prominent musician. Wilson simultaneously hints at contempt for the financier’s demand and makes the best of it, finding a local rocker’s life and work to be of interest and discovering how that musician gets his own original material into gigs in a cover band—by slipping it in between the popular songs that his audience wants to hear. The same is true of Wilson’s own self-conscious process: his idiosyncratic humor distinguishes “The History of Concrete” from a traditional issue-oriented reportorial documentary, allowing him to smuggle ideas inside entertainment and—he hopes—bring the film greater attention.

Wilson’s contemplation of concrete opens with a fact so obvious as to be startling: second only to water, concrete is the most-often-used substance on earth. Its importance lies in its ubiquity—and, thus, in the extraordinary span of the physical world that depends on it to hold up. When it cracks (as in the foundation of Wilson’s house), floods result. When its composition changes (owing to shortages in cement, or to less-than-careful production), it becomes less durable. When it isn’t maintained, catastrophe looms.

The most consequential visit that Wilson makes is to a former New York City transportation commissioner, Sam Schwartz (identified in the film not by name but by the distinction of having coined the term “gridlock”). Schwartz takes the filmmaker on a chilling tour of a major roadway, a section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that traverses Brooklyn Heights, where three levels of transit are, in Schwartz’s view—and to the eye of Wilson’s camera—supported by concrete that’s in a grievous state of deterioration. (He cites the specific danger of a chunk of concrete falling and killing a motorist—something he’s seen happen.) Similarly, Wilson visits a Bronx public swimming pool and learns, from a technician employed there, that its concrete is so profoundly damaged that it’s beyond repair. The pool can either be scantly patched or completely rebuilt, “from the structure up.”