"What would probably really impress the hell out of them would be a supermarket, though."
At the end of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's film Tout va bien there is a very long take, a panning shot that sweeps back and forth across a Carrefour hypermarket from just outside the cashiers, showing you the whole breadth of departments: fresh veg, canned goods, clothes, etc. I was amazed by this – the whole hypermarket format commonplace to us today and seemingly a development of modernity, was already completely in place by late 1971 and virtually nothing has changed since (except bar-code checkout).
So, maybe development on that particular sphere of human existence stopped for a long time. We in 2017 know that we might be on the cusp of drone delivery, but if someone from that near future went back in time to the 1980s and showed it to a customer in a hypermarket, that might have blown their minds just like your 1750s guy.
In fact, already in Godard's 1972 film Tout va bien, it is said (quoted from memory): "the Press has signed its own death sentence, when it has decided to rely on ads for its survival."
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"What would probably really impress the hell out of them would be a supermarket, though."
At the end of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's film Tout va bien there is a very long take, a panning shot that sweeps back and forth across a Carrefour hypermarket from just outside the cashiers, showing you the whole breadth of departments: fresh veg, canned goods, clothes, etc. I was amazed by this – the whole hypermarket format commonplace to us today and seemingly a development of modernity, was already completely in place by late 1971 and virtually nothing has changed since (except bar-code checkout).
So, maybe development on that particular sphere of human existence stopped for a long time. We in 2017 know that we might be on the cusp of drone delivery, but if someone from that near future went back in time to the 1980s and showed it to a customer in a hypermarket, that might have blown their minds just like your 1750s guy.
In fact, already in Godard's 1972 film Tout va bien, it is said (quoted from memory): "the Press has signed its own death sentence, when it has decided to rely on ads for its survival."