Summary

Ready Mix (2021) is a forty-five-minute film shot over two years at a concrete plant in central Idaho. Ready Mix records the churning transformation of mineral aggregates and cement binders into one of the world’s most ubiquitous building materials: ready-mix concrete. The film’s extra-wide aspect ratio references the surveying origins of the anamorphic format. Developed during World War I to give military-tank operators more expansive views of the terrain, the format later became a staple of Western genre films. Ready Mix collapses this perspectival depth into visual flatness and material density. In doing so, it counters the ways in which Westerns traditionally frame the landscape to perpetuate the myth of the so-called frontier as receding, empty, and untamed.