The title is a pun that may be appreciated on a number of ranges. The framework for the film is Cheney’s quest to assemble an precise ark (small “ok” on the tip) like those within the Previous Testomony or the Epic of Gilgamesh on household property within the woods of Maine, so as to include all the stuff he desires preserved. The constructing of this vessel an try and superimpose kind and limits (or boundaries) on a mountain of random ephemera and information that he is gathered up in the course of the course of many a long time, in addition to a self-deprecatingly humorous lashing-out in opposition to the idea of impermanence (as if sticking all of his stuff in a ship on dry land is not truly going to protect it!). Constructing an ark can also be a considerably arbitrary and funky (verging on gimmicky — and Cheney realizes this) technique to superimpose limits on the 98-minute film you are watching. “The Arc of Oblivion” may simply as simply have been 9 or nine-hundred minutes lengthy, contemplating what it is about. And the “c” within the phrase “arc” confirms that that is all in the end pointless, despite the fact that we are able to fantasize in any other case. Or as Bruce Springsteen sang in “Atlantic Metropolis,” “All the pieces dies, child, that is a reality/However perhaps all the pieces that dies sometime comes again.”
Documentarian Kristen Johnson (“Cameraperson,” “Dick Johnson is Lifeless”), whose personal work has related fascinations, seems within the movie together with her brother Kirk Johnson, a paleontologist and fossil collector who tells the filmmaker that he desires to be buried within the Mississippi River as a result of spots like which might be the place fossils are almost definitely to be shaped, and he desires to be remembered by some means, even when it is solely by the land itself. We additionally meet potter Yasmin Glinton Poitier, who misplaced her childhood home in a hurricane, and limestone magnate and Christian David Hoch, who does a high quality test on the concrete getting used within the ark’s basis, then does a bit of presentation about limestone and its use within the so-called magic lantern, which is the place the phrase “within the limelight” comes from; and married photographers Erin and Brian Palmer, who shoot cemeteries the place the stays of Black People are interred. The rating is by the director’s brother Colin Cheney, who combined the household’s audio and video with recordings of sounds that he comprised of interacting with objects his father saved within the household’s barn.
The good German ruminator Werner Herzog did not have a lot to do with “Arc of Oblivion” past government producing it, however his spirit infuses your entire factor, together with Cheney’s narration, which has that Herzogian high quality of disappearing into its personal navel nearly instantly and being entertaining and humorous anyway as a result of it is concurrently self-mocking and honest. There’s additionally a buried (like, deep beneath the artistic soil) acknowledgment of Herzog’s personal filmography, which is full of tales about males who went on a mad quest to erect a monument to their very own existence solely to seek out out the laborious method that it is a pointless train.