Sundance review: 'Fantastic Machine' examines the camera, and asks whether it's doing more to us than for us.

Nearly everyone reading this review is carrying a camera, and the makers of the documentary “Fantastic Machine” pose a timely question: What is that doing to us?

Swedish directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck start with the history, starting with Niceephore Niépce’s first captured photograph in 1827. The story quickly runs through Louis Daguerre’s first photo prints in the 1830s and Eadweard Muybridge’s first photograph studies of motion — the precursor of the first motion pictures.

In 1902, Georges Méliès, the French illusionist and filmmaker, wowed English audiences by screening a movie of the coronation of King Edward VII — a simulation, filmed in the outskirts of Paris, and released on the day of the actual coronation. Some critics decried the fakery, but one fan was King Edward himself, who called the camera “a fantastic machine.”

Thus has it been that for as long as there have been cameras, there have been criticisms about how they are used.

One montage early on raises that point rather chillingly. It’s a montage of famous world leaders using stagecraft to appear invincible. The montage runs from Hitler and Stalin to Trump and Vladmir Putin. That’s followed by images of a girl killed in an earthquake in Haiti in 2010 — and then cut to show a line of photographers all trying for the same photo of the dead girl.

The sound era of moviemaking is depicted here as encompassing everything from Al Jolson saying “you ain’t heard nothing yet” in “The Jazz Singer” to YouTube videos showing people hilariously injuring themselves in home accidents. 

The camera can show the earth rising over the horizon of the moon, or it can show insurrectionists trashing journalists’ gear on their way to storming the U.S. Capitol in Washington. And viral videos can show people a woman demonstrating how to defrost a freezer or a member of Isis showing how to make a bomb.

This is the way many people see the world, through their screens — and Danielson and Van Aertryck, through a flurry of fascinating images, make the sharp point that we need to get smarter about how we process what we see.

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‘Fantastic Machine’

★★★1/2

Playing in the World Cinema Documentary competition of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again Tuesday, Jan. 24, 6:55 p.m., Broadway Centre Cinemas, Salt Lake City; Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2:45 p.m., Egyptian Theatre, Park City; Thursday, Jan. 26, 3 p.m., Park Avenue Theatre, Park City; Friday, Jan. 27, 9:30 a.m., Redstone Cinemas, Park City. Also screening online on the Sundance Film Festival platform, starting Tuesday, Jan. 24. Not rated, but probably R for nude images, violent images and language. Running time: 88 minutes.