If you’ve watched John Wilson’s HBO show How To with John Wilson, then you already have a pretty good idea of what to expect from The History of Concrete, the feature debut from the inventive, idiosyncratic documentary filmmaker. The series would take basic concepts (the series’ pilot episode: “How to Make Small Talk”), and use found footage of New York City – that is, found by Wilson and his ever present camera – to find humorous answers to philosophical questions. The series was executive produced by Nathan Fielder, a comedian who has also made comedy gold by incorporating nonfiction filmmaking into the frey. Like Fielder, Wilson finds profundity in the oft-hilarious images that he discovers, but that’s about where the similarities end. Fielder is an architect whose own neurotic curiosity is always the main character. Wilson is a perpetual voyeur, constantly present in voice-over but almost never in front of the camera. The result is about as close to real point-of-view filmmaking as you can get.
The History of Concrete began with the 2023 strike, which leads Wilson to a screenwriting course on Hallmark romance. He hears about the foundation of the popular sub-genre, a formula which includes gratuitous repetition of the same elements over and over. It’s the foundation that makes the marketability of these films so sturdy. Similarly, the foundation of our day-to-day lives lies in the concrete that surrounds us all around the world. As he does, Wilson begins to ponder how he could know so little about something that is so ever present, especially in the concrete jungle that is New York City. In his nondescript way, he begins to investigate, walking into the various people and spaces of the concrete world. He gets into the granular (sorry) details, but also takes a wider lens, and comes to realize that the history of concrete is also a history of urban spaces, and much like those spaces, concrete appears to be depreciating rapidly.
Another similarity to Fielder, the glory of a John Wilson project is in the experience. One could explain the information he finds, the people he talks to, and the images he constructs, but it wouldn’t do justice to the majesty of his process. There is no way to prepare you for the film’s final thirty minutes, which manages to take the film’s brief and extrapolate on the world that is beginning to crumble above and below us, much like the concrete that surrounds us. Perhaps human grace is our only salvation, and capturing those moments of grace has become one of Wilson’s greatest talents. I was still a New Yorker when I first became a John Wilson fan, and I often feared that I could become one of his embarrassing found images of New York eccentricity, but The History of Concrete further proves that he loves all the people he records because of that eccentricity, which is the most New York attitude that one can have.
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Directed by John Wilson