Review: Crafted

The short documentary film Crafted marks a conventional shift for director Morgan Spurlock, known for his provocative, unflattering, and self-involved profiles like Supersize Me (2004)  and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011). Indeed, Spurlock does not once show himself in this short film, and the subjects he profiles are treated with soft lighting and vibrant cinematography. What results is an intimate and honest look at the practice of making across professions and across cultures.

Crafted profiles five subjects in three different cultural and geographic contexts: two bladesmiths in Georgia, two restaurant managers and chefs in San Francisco, and one potter in Japan. The documentary weaves through their individual stories, asking how they entered their craft, what successes they have reached, and what failures they have suffered. Despite their differences in craft, each profile had remarkable similarities to the other in terms of their subject’s motivations and philosophies for engaging in their particular practice of making. Each subject stressed that their making deeply contrasted with the global phenomenon of hypermodernity, with its fixation on fast, disposable consumer products. Instead, their making purposefully slows down the process, focusing on the artisanal details and repurposing old techniques or materials. The bladesmiths in Georgia, for instance, create the handles of their knives from supplies that their customers send, turning a portion of a wedding dress and a blue apron into a beautiful spotted handle, adding value to the handmade object by “linking the story of that material” to the crafted blade. The potter in Japan, meanwhile, emphasizes learning from traditional methods while creating value for those who use those objects today, as he prepares pots that can cook rice in a very specific way to preserve a certain flavor. And the chefs in San Francisco exercise a cooking approach that starts at the very beginning: the butchering of meat and the preservation of vegetables and sauces from days, months, and years past. The chefs use this approach to deliberately slow down their process and experience the full cycle that comes from making things by hand so that they understand their craft better.   

            

Even though Spurlock gives a flattering portrayal of his subjects and highlights their interwoven, creative philosophies, he makes no effort to hide the difficulties these makers face, highlighting the stories of hardship that come with making. I thought these stories of the “discouraging days” were fascinating, as the failures and disasters that befall makers are hardly mentioned within the wider discourse of the maker movement. The ability to lose one’s livelihood due to accident or natural disaster, as was almost the case for the Japanese potter when an earthquake devastated his backlog of order, is a frightening prospect for those flirting with the possibility of becoming a full-time maker. Additionally, the propensity to balance traditional techniques with modern labor concerns is another factor to consider. I found this especially relatable to the chefs in San Francisco, whose process and organization methods would be hard to replicate by a new set of staff.  Crafted doesn’t ask those questions of the staff explicitly, but the camera’s lingering gaze on labeled preservation jars from years past makes one wonder how a different chef would approach this system (how would they move those preservation jars if they needed too??). Given the restaurant’s recent closure a year after this documentary was released, these questions must be interrogated in order to foster making practices that are sustainable.

While the brevity of this film might frustrate viewers wanting a more in-depth presentation, the stories that Spurlock fleshes out captures the wonder and the risk of embracing making as a means of personal livelihood. It’s intimate portrayal of its subjects is only briefly undercut by the fact that the film was commissioned by Häagen-Dazs, with its gratuitous logo at the end showing that Spurlock hasn’t completely lost his essence. In any case, Crafted brings the practice of the making to the forefront by emphasizing the societal values of past and present that are shaping new perceptions of hands-on work.