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And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine

Award-winning documentary about the history of our visual culture: from the invention of photography in the nineteenth century to Instagram today.

Programme arrow-breadcrumb And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine
Please note that this film is in Swedish, English, French, German and Arabic, with Dutch subtitles.
Time & Tickets

The camera is a fantastic machine. Filmmakers Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck turn their cameras directly on society to explore, explain and expose how our unchecked obsession with image has grown to change our human behaviour. From Camera Obscura and the Lumière brothers all the way to YouTube and the world of social media, the film chronicles how we went from capturing the image of a backyard to a multi-billion-euro content industry in just two hundred years. With archival and found footage, the film uses the very medium it examines, in a self-reflective yet hilarious montage.

Axel Danielson & Maximilien Van Aertryck, Denemark, Sweden, 2023, 88 min. Swedish, English, French, German & Arabic spoken, Dutch subtitles. With Maximilien Van Aertryck.

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