Drux and Flux: The Flow of Progress into Tragic Social Decay »

This acclaimed short film provides a visual experience that's extremely relevant to today’s ever-deepening economic crisis. “Drux and Flux” won the Canadian Film Institute’s 2008 Award for Best Canadian Animation. This five-minute experimental/abstract animation presents an oppressive and miserable vision of how both the contemporary commitment to an over-arching belief in progress and to the ever-expanding industrialism in society have effected modern life.

The film's rapidly coordinated cuts elicit disturbing associations between ever-increasing industrialization, exponential technological advances and the rise of totalitarian political regimes that can be quite unsettling. Inspired in part by the late sociologist-philosopher-activist Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” (1964), the film echo's Marcuse's contentions that advertising, industrial management, politicians and the mass-media cooperate to brainwash members of the working class, eliminating their potential for effective expressions of negativity, critique and opposition.

The result, according to Marcuse, is an increasingly “one-dimensional” universe of thought and behavior, in which the very aptitude and ability for critical thinking and for developing either opposing or alternative social positions are withering away. As “Drux and Flux” travels through its series of dismal industrial scenes, one is left with a deeply sad mood about the frightening impressions of the enormous slabs of metal and rust, the smells of rotting death. By the end of this short five-minute journey, the viewer is left to wonder whether this is what things actually might be like when our industrial world finally reaches its end.

Includes a number of wonderful photographs and the award-winning experimental short animation.

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