Director: Tom Potter
Running time: 2mins
For a film so firmly rooted in re-editing historical stock, I Am Become Death is weirdly prescient. When Tom Potter first released this film, it was early 2020. The UK, US and many other nations in the global still had not entered lockdown, and were maintaining that somehow everything would just be fine if they kept the proverbial beaches open. At the same time, Christopher Nolan was getting ready to release Tenet – and would not come aboard the project that would eventually be Oppenheimer until the Covid-19 pandemic was in full swing.
The apocalyptic feel of Nolan’s eventual biopic feels in-step with an increasingly fractured global order – in which geo-political grievances not only played a role in dominant nations refusing to co-operate over a viral contagion that left millions dead, but boiled over into a number of apparently endless hot and cold wars. In the case of Potter’s bleak and distressing experimental edit, however, it taps into a Zeitgeist that much of the world was seemingly oblivious to.
Going into the new year, many grotesque and boorish apologists for the likes of Boris Johnson had been forecasts boom times – the ushering in of a new ‘Roaring 20s’. For some people, the 20s have arguably delivered on that promise. If you are an arms dealer, a mortician, or a tech-bro, for example, the good times have indeed been rolling. But for many, many more people, there is a bitter and continued collapse in living standards – all while supposedly revolutionary technology is hailed as placing the world on the brink of a new age of luxurious discovery.
Potter’s film seems to pre-emptively reflect on so much of this spirit of the times – several years before it went mainstream. Playing over a muffled recording of Robert Oppenheimer and his famous recounting of the moment the Manhattan Project realised it had succeeded in creating atomic weaponry that would place the world on the edge of oblivion, sooner or later. As the famous quote runs its course, a pair of eyes is shown propped open with match-sticks, watching the unfolding devastation that breakthrough leads to – with the eyes being reimagined in various visual metaphors in the process.
All of the imagery is lavishly realised, with some wonderfully high-resolution film bringing out the beautiful, Lynchian viscosity of each subject the lens is drawn to. The eyes are wonderfully rendered in stark, black and white film – but the skin around them has a visible dankness that makes the image feel distinctly grimy and uncomfortable. At the same time, the metaphorical comparisons do some incredible work at showing us what the viewer is thinking about, without being too literal. The use of a cup of milky tea to represent the unfolding horror of a mushroom cloud, for example, is an incredible piece of invention.
All of this unfolds having been paired with an offputtingly warm soundtrack of Life is But a Dream by The Harptones – while a rather more optimistic narrator tries to close out proceedings by asking if the splitting of the atom need only be destructive, and whether it might open a “new progressive chapter in history”. The use of both resources takes on an unapologetically eerie note, however, when placed in this context. How many times in living memory have we been assured that a development will turn out for the best, only to deliver a further crushing blow to the lives of anyone beneath a tiny minority of the usual suspects? As we gaze at the hideous tonal dissonance of I Am Become Death’s finale, we are glimpsing our own lived reality, on repeat.
Simple yet effective, I Am Become Death repurposes footage which many of us will be well acquainted with, and manages to do something new and unnerving with it. To have produced such a bleak and distressing experimental edit to reflect these times would be worthy of praise on its own. But to have completed it on the precipice of so much grim, 21st century history, rather than after it, is downright spooky.