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SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW

Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass): concealment through technology.

Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) · 2017

A source-led reading of Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) as cinematic narrative: technology, concealment, documented consensus, and the counterpoint that shifts the conclusion.

THE FILM EDITORIAL DESKAugust 31, 2026309 WORDS
01

THEMATIC CENTER

technology
02

NARRATIVE PRESSURE

concealment
03

FORM

cinematic narrative
04

RECORD ANCHORS

species · extinction · concepts

The record for Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) yields three coordinates specific to its premise—species, extinction, and concepts. That vocabulary places technology at the center and gives concealment its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.

Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) brings technology into contact with concealment through cinematic narrative. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A strong, singular piece of cinema driven by genuine directorial conviction.

Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) (2017) arrives with the coordinates of a cinema film situated in 2010s cinema. The record credits Elke Marhöfer with the direction and places its documented performers in the foreground. With an unusually compact form, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.

Read as cinematic narrative, the film carries the pressure of concealment. Technology works less as novelty in itself than as a revealer of human desires for control, permanence, and simplification. The most precise critical test is therefore what the secret allows people to maintain before it is revealed. A quick verdict always simplifies the object it claims to summarize. It is more useful to follow visible choices, their consequences, and the tension they create between familiarity and singularity.

The unexpected angle asks not whether the machine becomes human, but what the human is willing to make mechanical. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of technology, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The final question becomes less ‘should this be liked?’ than ‘which choice truly organizes the experience?’

THE VERDICT, REFRAMED

Our angle: a singular voice often emerges from tension between familiar elements. Here, technology changes meaning under the pressure of concealment.

THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT

The two concepts of extinction and becoming are difficult to think together, both are more than just a metaphor and none of them offers an easy way out. Tossing more species to the margins increasingly faster, extinction highlights the extraordinary level of disturbance and precarity that the bonding of science and capitalism has imposed on our and other species. Most creatures and places of the earth have been measured, consumed, exhausted, infected, eliminated, and otherwise killed. Becoming adds an affective dimension to our relation with the environment and helps to grasp the disappearance of species, not only as destructive and final, but as transitory. Becoming-with-the-dead mobilizes our imagination for a future life without reconciliation or a place to hide.

Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.
Year
2017
Runtime
23 min
Direction
Elke Marhöfer
Performers
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