The Goal Is To Live

The Goal Is To Live unfolds like a hypnotic loop, drawing viewers into an ever-revolving cycle of creation and transformation. It is an extension of Dina Kelberman's fascination with the process of making, born from her accumulation and recontextualization of industrial footage from How It's Made. This seemingly mundane material, plucked from the daily lives of factory workers and repurposed into a new form, takes on a mesmerizing quality. The film begins with an innocuous clip, showcasing the humble beginnings of everyday objects: the manufacture of a stapler, perhaps, or the assembly of a bicycle. However, as The Goal Is To Live progresses, these fragments of production start to disintegrate and reassemble, morphing into a Rube-Goldberg-like narrative that spirals out of control. The once-linear process of creation gives way to a kaleidoscopic display of transformation, with materials and machines blurring the lines between cause and effect. Throughout the film, the viewer is subjected to an onslaught of images and sounds, an unending flow of factory whirs, clinks, and whizzes, accompanied by the hypnotic minimalism of Rod Hamilton's and Tiffany Seal's soundtrack. In an aural and visual equivalent of sensory deprivation, we are drawn deeper into this labyrinthine world of creation and consumption, as the boundaries between production, transformation, and waste begin to blur. At times, the film appears to be a study in contrasts – fast and slow, light and dark, precision-crafted objects and haphazard assemblages. But beneath this veneer of oppositions, The Goal Is To Live reveals a deeper symmetry, as each object's existence is predicated upon the interconnectedness of multiple processes: design, production, transportation, and obsolescence. It is the ultimate Rube-Goldberg machine, in which each event triggers the next, creating a boundless web of dependency and interconnection. The Goal Is To Live is not merely an exploration of production; it is a profound meditation on the nature of value, as assigned to both materials and the hands that shape them. We see the intricate dance between human skill and technological precision, where workers imbue each object with their sweat and labor, even as the machines that manufacture them grow increasingly autonomous and efficient. In the film's surreally looped narrative, value bleeds out of the material itself, dissolving into the abstract realm of exchange and consumption. Kelberman's recontextualization of industrial footage transforms the ordinary into the sublime, elevating everyday objects into strange and wondrous artifacts that defy easy categorization. Her use of How It's Made clips creates a sense of intimacy with these anonymous workers and machines, whose labor shapes our world. We are made to feel complicit in this web of production and consumption, implicated in the very systems of creation that The Goal Is To Live so masterfully unmasks. Through this mesmerizing assemblage, Kelberman reveals a world where production has become a form of ritual, an endless process of transformation, in which raw materials are continually reshaped and redefined. It is an art film that burrows into the heart of modernity, unmasking the unseen forces that shape our lives and transform our world into an ever-shifting landscape of objects, materials, and desires. The Goal Is To Live remains a hypnotic, ever-turning spigot, inviting us to immerse ourselves in its mesmerizing loop, a reflection of our endless quest to make meaning in a world of flux and transformation.