In 2020, HBO began airing one of the funniest and most significant docuseries in the history of the form, How To With John Wilson, in which a man named John Wilson attempted to give advice or illuminate a certain banal ubiquity of urban life with the help of his constantly roving video camera. In one episode, he describes both the utility and the menace of scaffolding, which seems to breed like a fungus infecting New York City’s buildings and intersections. In another, he investigates the best way to make risotto (while also attempting to purchase his building from his elderly landlord).
In 2023, How To With John Wilson ended. As Wilson’s feature debut The History of Concrete begins, then, he’s struggling to locate a creative — and psychic — way forward. Coincidentally, the foundation of his home is cracking and flooding, uprooting his tenants (who are also his friends) and leading to a crushing sense of futility and powerlessness. A botched DIY repair job subsequently leads to Wilson’s fascination with concrete. Unfortunately, nobody seems to want to pay for a documentary about it despite it being a literal foundational element of almost everything around us, so a mission to find financing leads him to the set of Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie is credited as a producer here) and to Rome, where once again nobody seems to know the secrets of this perhaps miraculous material (or if they do, they don’t want to share it).
Typical for Wilson’s projects, The History of Concrete dives down multiple simultaneous rabbit holes. A trip to the Hallmark movie studios leads to a digression about urban gentrification and ultimately about the rapper DMX. Concrete seems to last forever, leading to a thread about preservation, which brings us to the proprietor of a business that preserves the tattooed flesh of deceased loved ones, which winds up with the location of Chef Boyardee’s grave.
As in the series, Wilson’s camera — which behaves as much as a tool as it does a personal companion of sorts (an emotional support camera, if you will) — trains on anything and everything, whether it’s pertinent or not (spoiler alert: somehow everything is pertinent). Camera in hand, he diagrams the pervasive presence of concrete in our lives. He points out the five-by-five sidewalk grids, he blanches at the seemingly unending splotches of dried chewing gum all over the pavement “wherever people congregate.” He documents the literally crumbling infrastructure of the New York City traffic system, complete with rebar so corroded it leaves fossil-like imprints in stone and bridges secured by industrial tape, which he contrasts with such monuments as the Roman Parthenon, which has stood pristine for something like two millennia.
And yet, The History of Concrete is about so much more than just concrete. It might even be about everything. When it becomes clear that nobody will finance the movie if it’s inexplicably not attached to a rising musical act, Wilson finds himself in the company of Jack, a liquor sales rep who also fronts the Nebulas, a struggling rock band playing bar gigs in the sticks. There’s something sad but reaffirming about Jack’s perseverance in the face of incredible, likely impossible, odds, and Wilson becomes increasingly friendly with the guy. A late element of tragedy (too unusual to spoil here) throws the entire relationship into sharp relief within the context of the film.
For Wilson, concrete is a metaphor for the ultimate binder — the glue that secretly holds everything together and the fickle hand of fate, a manifestation of entropy and impermanence. It can last for thousands of years or a mere matter of months. It’s life and death at once. When it’s fresh, people carve their names into it in some sort of challenge to immortality. When it’s dry, it seals off trees from rainwater or entombs dead family members forever. But right as this characteristically sprawling, digressive, and endlessly curious thing is finally bearing narrative and thematic fruit, intercutting monks ritually smearing a Buddhist mandala with a ceremony celebrating the passage of a NYC affordable housing program, we also get Wilson giving Eric Adams the Headcrusher move through the camera. The History of Concrete is a tremendous ode to hope and kindness in the face of inevitable collapse.
Published as part of Visions du Réel 2026.
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