All the Rest: The Musical Documentary

Synopsis:

If there is one feature that links the short clips of this documentary, it is the theme of singularity – the uniqueness of the individual, the resistance of existence – a relentless contestation of sovereign violence. ‘The violent grouping together of everything from the worm to the chimpanzee, the lizard to the dog, the protozoon to the elephant, under the general singular name animal’. Inspired, thus, by Derrida’s critique of sovereignty, it mixes homegrown musical realisations with internet vestigial tape.

August Kekule

“I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth . . . but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.”
Kekule, on his dream of the benzene structure.

August Kekule (1829-1896) was one of the most prominent organic chemists and the discoverer of the structure of benzene.