The Way Things Go

Peter Fischli and David Weiss's 1987 film, The Way Things Go, has become a classic art film, still shown in contemporary art museums around the world.  The Swiss artist's timeless work, which documents a thirty minute long chain reaction using commonly found objects, is still as fascinating to watch today as it was twenty years ago.

The chain reaction was set up in a large warehouse room, and includes objects like tires, planks, water, gasoline, candles, and fuses.  The clip above shows a segment of the film especially devoted to fire and pyrotechnics.  There is no mystery to the work; the artists do a fantastic job of breaking down physical phenomena into simple, mesmerizing steps.  It is an exercise in ways to transfer energy between different objects and systems.

The real genius of The Way Things Go is its timing.  The reactions are paced in a way that makes clear what is happening at each step, but also has a spellbinding rhythm in which objects speed up, slow down, and build into each other.  This fastidious pacing is what sets this piece apart from a mechanical assembly line, or many Rube Goldberg contraptions.  This use of time scale calls to mind the kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson, and perhaps Ganson was influenced by Fischli and Weiss.