The Magic Machines

This was only the second movie that I had produced so I was terribly flattered that it won the 1969 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. The film follows Robert Gilbert speaking about and displaying his kinetic sculptures and his thoughts about our culture. It is rare event when a serious artist creates art that is truly amusing but Robert Gilbert has done just that.Of course the most famous master of kinetic sculpture is the great Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely,whose famous moving-sculpture at the Museum of Modern art was created to destroy itself (which almost got Peter Selz, MoMA's curator who organized the Tinguely exhibition fired), but Gilbert's absolutely charming works take off in a rather different direction, that of a very gentle delightful whimsy.

Sculptor Robert Gilbert narrates his own story as he trawls the scrapyard looking for his own pieces of abandoned engineering so that he can design and build some pretty innovative contraptions. He's based in the desert, and it's astonishing not just what he and his scrap-merchant pal manage to accrue from the sands, but also of his imagination in creating a sort of Meccano's user's wet dream. Some of these constructions are actually capable of self-propulsion! The production is a little on the dry side as we don't really see very much of the man actually at work, and his narrative is overly effusive at times - about both himself and his goals (though he does acknowledge that sex is better). I also found the soundtrack a bit annoying too, but that a man can create something from nothing quite this inventively makes this well worth quarter of an hour of your time.