Machines In Flames (2022)

• 74%
• 2022
• Documentary
• Andrew Culp
• Thomas Dekeyser

Two researchers find a secret history of self-destruction by following the footsteps of a clandestine group of French computer workers from the 1980s. The workers - who operated under the elusive name 'CLODO' - bombed computer companies in Toulouse, France, but were never found. Journeying through the cybernetic nodes of military, industrial, and socialist development, the film exposes how recording devices fail to collect the ashes of history. The film combines archival traces, a viral desktop choreography, and paranoid footage of nocturnal stakeouts into a philosophical investigation of self-combustion. The film is the debut work of the Destructionist International, and the first in a series of films on the appetite for abolition in ultra-leftism. It was first distributed through a network of self-erasing USB data sticks dropped outside corporate campuses.