How to Make Glass (Manually) is part of a series of educational films for television intended for young audiences. Directed by Peter and Zsóka Nestler, the series was dedicated to the history and processes behind the making of objects (paper, printing books, fabrics and so on), highlighting the differences between artisanal and industrial production and the labour and economic relations involved in each of these methods of producing things. “These films coincide with what Sergei Tretyakov postulated with regard to literature in his 1929 essay, ‘The Biography of the Object’: ‘In the biography of the object, we can view class struggle synoptically at all stages of the production process... On the object’s conveyer belt, the revolution is heard as more resolute, more convincing, and as a mass phenomenon. For the masses necessarily share in the biography of the object. Thus: not the individual person moving through a system of objects, but the object proceeding through the system of people’.” (Jörg Huber)
