In the Course of Human Events

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From the moment we see a wrecking ball crashing through San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway, it i s clear that IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS will not comply with the progressive view of technology and history advanced by the classic city symphonies of the 1920s. By focusing on demolition precipitated by the Loma Prieta earthquake, Dominic Angerame suggests that the natural disaster simply highlights the intrinsically destructive aspects of urban development. This negative spectacle is all the more striking for taking place in San Francisco, the backdrop of innumerable Hollywood narratives and avant-garde films. Familiar landmarks like Coit Tower, the Ferry Building and the Transamerica Pyramid appear freshly strange framed by the exposed guts of buildings and the clouds of dust thrown up by the crumbling highway. It is a landscape of machines not humans . And yet Angerame's indefatigable camerawork evinces a single individual's reckoning with the city and its cinematic representation. - Max Goldberg