★★★★
This film is called Helvetica. It gathers a bunch of people who love and dedicate their lives to typefaces to talk about Helvetica. It is literally called Helvetica; it is an 80-minute-long documentary about Helvetica.
Personally, I really liked it!!!! I think it is an interesting and sometimes silly documentary. There are some REAL NERDS!!! in it, which should be expected because it is about a font, but I love real nerds so I thought they were all very charming and funny. Big standouts for me include: the Most German Man Ever and the lady who said Helvetica was the font of the Vietnam war(!!). I really agree with the reviewer who said that the movie is a lot like Helvetica itself (pretty conventionally created, rarely draws attention to its own construction, acts as a vehicle to convey information without being itself very stylish at all), but through its dissection of and dialogues about Helvetica, it makes you think more about the “invisibility” of the techniques and products of modernity. It un-naturalizes something we now are super used to and in general reveals the unnoticed (at least to me, but probably also to most people who aren't font nerds) importance of small things in the world around you. It highlights how something as small, omnipresent, and naturalized as Helvetica font creates a narrative about globalization and temporal cycles in art and society, and discussions about topics, like: what does it mean that Helvetica is the dominant font in most European/US cities? What does the chosen font of Western countries reflect about advertising and CAPITALism (haha get it)? What do the backlashes to it say about perception of corporate culture, power, and subjectivity at a certain time period and place? I am not a font-head, so I had to watch this wondering where my favorite font was (the creepy one with all the letter dripping), but I really liked this movie.
Sent from my iPhone
Typed in Helvetica
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