John Wilson’s most recent film The History of Concrete (2026) is, in some ways, a continuation to How to with John Wilson (2020 to 2023), a TV series created and directed by the same author. Both the series and the film present a cinematic John Wilson, serving as narrator and character, of a series of documentaries that describe things that perhaps are overlooked in New York, or in life, in general. The genre of the series is difficult to define. The videos presented are in-between documentary films and tutorial videos. Each episode’s title echoes the title of the show. The first episode, for instance, is titled “How to Make Small Talk?” and it presents John Wilson as he reflects and presents ways to learn how to make small talk. Each episode presents, then, a collection of images that Wilson has filmed throughout the years, in some cases, or that he has captured to illustrate what his narration tells. The History of Concrete is less of a tutorial but keeps some features of the TV series. The main difference, however, between the TV series and the film is their length. Most of the episodes of the TV series are 25 minutes long, and the film is 101 minutes long. So why would Wilson take 101 minutes to say what he could have said in 25 minutes?

While the title of the film tells us that viewers witness see the history of concrete, this history but only a part of the film. The movie kickstarts with Wilson’s voice off. As he reflects on the aftermath of his success with How to With Jon Wilson. The voice tells us that he feels lost. After being nominated for awards and so on, now he feels out of place, without much purpose. And suddenly a new endeavour appears: the making of a film on concrete. “Do you ever think about concrete?” Is the question that Wilson asks to several individuals in New York, in Rome, and Las Vegas. Wilson, here, as he does with his TV series tries to underscore the importance of the things in life that make it possible but that, by the same token, we rarely think about. Just as sociability would not be possible without small talk, modern life would not the same without concrete. This documentary is, then, a film about the making of a documentary on the history of concrete. So, after attending a workshop on how to make Hallmark movies, Wilson pitches the idea of the documentary on concrete to producers. While at first the idea does not convince many, Wilson signs contracts with concrete companies and guarantees a budget for filming on the condition that the film does not depict the concrete industry in a negative way. Similarly, to guarantee more funding, Wilson introduces to the mix (qua concrete) the story of an emergent musician, since documentaries on emerging musicians are making money in the film industry.

To some extent, more than providing the history of concrete, the film is excessively meta-discursive and self-reflecting, this is a film that is overexposed to its own conditions of production, making, edition, and telling. No wonder why, then, like the TV series, the film also presents several reflections on other topics, including but not limited to housing, infrastructure, urbanism, the ecology and the climate crisis. But, more fundamentally, this film makes explicit what perhaps has been present but not emphatically said about Wilson’s take in cinema and art. The film echoes with the “basis of concrete painting,” for which among some of its foundations considers that “art is universal,” and that “the painting technique must be mechanic, i.e., exact, anti-impressionistic” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_art). Wilson’s movies precisely place everyday life experience as universal, we are all surrounded by concrete, after all, and more, his work too is fully mechanic, it has been said that he, as a film maker, is constantly filming all that he sees in New York from a concept he thinks about while he wonders around (https://www.are.na/block/35782600). From this perspective, what Wilson offers is concrete cinema, a history of its making, and a concrete example of what this cinema could be. Concrete cinema, from Wilson’s film, is about the making of art with things that are overlooked but exceed and presuppose the act of living: concrete, small talk, watching a game with friends, and so on. If a documentary, as a genre, worries on registering eventful moments of life, Wilson embraces registering those things that may seem unimportant buy are overwhelmingly essential.