John Wilson’s ‘The History of Concrete’ Is Anything But Mundane

“Do you ever think about concrete?” opens the trailer for The History of Concrete, a documentary released in select theaters in the U.S. last Friday. If your answer is no, the quirky new feature by filmmaker John Wilson may mean you can’t get it out of your head.

Wilson is known for the cult-favorite, comedic HBO docuseries How To with John Wilson, which he described as being “kind of like that show Planet Earth, except if it was only in New York and David Attenborough was forced to film everything himself.” His movie debut is primed for absurdity, delving into something that’s immanently mundane yet fundamental to the way we live.

The film captures concrete’s ubiquity in urban sidewalks, buildings, and homes, not to mention the eccentric ways it appears on the streets and in the industries that have grown up around it. To most of us, it’s a kind of infrastructural building block, but through Wilson’s lens, it’s an unlikely medium through which to understand New York and its denizens.

See more on the movie’s website.

a still from the movie 'The History of Concrete' featuring a man who runs a company called Gum Busters

a still from the movie 'The History of Concrete' featuring two men jackhammering a concrete slab

a still from the movie 'The History of Concrete' featuring a self-portrait of filmmaker John Wilson taking a selfie in a mirror

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