December 29, 2020
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Who doesn’t know that by now? Nothing great is shown on television later in the evening, let’s see what should be offered on the Amazon Prime streaming service. Last week was another evening that came up with a surprising new discovery: the film “California Typewriter”.
What followed was a lovingly constructed documentation about the technical marvel of the typewriter. In just under one and three quarters of an hour, director Doug Nichol shows how a nostalgic, coherent work can be created with a mixture of interviews with artists, authors and collectors and a passionately told thread about the store that gives the title.
Sympathy for a technology that is dying out
“California Typewriter” is the last existing typewriter repair shop. Filmmaker Nichol manages to convey a high level of sympathy for the dying technology and the people who were or are connected to it. That moves. Especially when you find out how often bankruptcy has knocked on the door of an ancient business and yet a way has always been found to continue. The question “Who actually serves whom?” Is omnipresent. The machine for the person or the other way around? The work makes you think about our own relationship with technology … and that’s good. You want to throw the iPhone next to it on the wall again. Who needs a computer when you have a typewriter? All’s well that ends well? Unfortunately not quite …
Even a full-length documentary in which stars like Tom Hanks, John Mayer and Sam Shephard also express their love for the typewriter cannot stop an era that is dying out, as I learned from my current research: “California Typewriter”, the shop in the US -american Berkeley closed for good at the end of March 2020. You could cry. Thank goodness at least the film “California Typewriter” still exists and even if it ended up being a bit too long, it tells the young and savage how the good life of an entire generation of writers once looked.
By Andreas Huber
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