REVIEW:
This short documentary by Jessica Edwardsis about Gomberg Seltzer Works, a seltzer bottling plant in Brooklyn. It is an interactive documentary, as it incorporates interviews with the plant owner, Kenny Gomberg. Attention is also drawn to the filmmaker’s presence, with Kenny twice interrupting the interview by asking his own questions. First, he repeats the interviewer’s question (“How do we make seltzer?”), which made me pay attention to the face that someone asked a question off-screen. Then, when he is describing the taste of seltzer, he asks, “Want some?” to the same off-screen interviewer. The documentary is mainly guided by a formal voice, as Kenny describes the process and history of bottling seltzer with authority. The audience simply follows the narrative laid out by his account.
The documentary uses a lot of static shots of machines running, along with close-ups of still tools used for the bottling process. However, when the camera does move through the factory (i.e. following the worker pushing a cart of bottles out the door or a low shot panning alongside a bottling worker), I finally got a sense of the space.
With regard to editing, a majority of the film is composed of montage of the machines bottling seltzer, or workers moving through the plant. Even when Kenny is speaking, less screen time is given to his headshot than to the shots of mechanization. A lot of the natural sounds of the plant were removed and replaced with music, which created a slightly surreal feeling, especially when matched with the more slow-moving mechanical parts. (Just as an aside, the music that bookends the documentary reminded me of a song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which is perfect for a surreal factory setting). I thought it was a good choice to begin and end the documentary with similar close-up shots of a bottle of seltzer, with the seltzer theme music playing, as it gave a nice symmetry to the film.
