I’m looking for the name of what I think was a music video I saw maybe ten or fifteen years ago on the tele. At least I think it was a music video, on one of the music video shows here, probably Rage on the ABC in Australia. Either that or it was some kind of obscure short film, in which case I’m probably screwed for finding it.
Anyway, it was American in appearance, more or less spoken word with background music. It’s a sort of a calm, 50’s TV announcer voice doing the talking. There’s this guy, see, and I think he has a dream or watches a movie in which everything happens backwards. They use black and white newsreel style footage, played backwards. The voice over describes the dream/movie. It talks in part about a war setting, about the buildings reassembling themselves, the bombs leaping back up into the bombers which fly back to their bases, where the bombs are unloaded and taken back to the factories. At the factories the workers take them apart, un-manufacture them into raw materials that get un-refined back into ore and hauled back to the mines where the miners bury them back under the ground… and so forth.
Does anyone remember anything like this? I’ve been Googling keenly but to no avail thus far. It’s probably on Youtube or something but without the name, it’s all uphill.
Please help, I want to know that I didn’t imagine this stuff.
Apparently, there was a scene like this in the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, though I am ashamed to say I don’t remember that part, I am pretty sure it was not in the movie (I guess it’s time for me to read the book again).
Sounds like what you saw was likely inspired by it though. There are some related videos on youtube but they all seem to be recently made.
It’s definitely Slaughterhouse Five that inspired the video you remember. The relevant passage is reproduced in a blog entry here.
There are a couple of fan-made videos on YouTube, and somewhere there’s a video of reversed WWII footage with Vonnegut himself reading the passage quoted above- he doesn’t really have a ‘50s style announcer’ voice, it’s more of a drawl- but otherwise exactly as you described. I watched it online only a month ago but I can’t find it now.