CINEMA the @ brewhouse
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World Directed by Werner Herzog
Friday 9 December @ 7.30pm Running time 1 hr 38 mins Starring: Elon Musk, Lawrence Krauss, Lucianne Walkowicz
“It’s a cyber world after all”
12
Oscar-nominated Herzog Herzog leads viewers on a journey through a series of provocative conversations that reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works – from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships. Extract of Joshua Rothman’s review, originally appearing on The New Yorker Culture Desk: Werner Herzog’s films have a common theme: they’re about visionaries and dreamers. Herzog isn’t alone, of course, in valuing dreamers. Herzog’s dreamers are often businessmen. It’s from within the enabling, ennobling, and ostensibly sane frameworks of their business ventures that they find ways to pursue destructive and violent visions of godlike transcendence. In this respect, “Lo and Behold,” Herzog’s new documentary about the Internet, is a natural extension of his previous work. It presents familiar figures from the world of technology—programmers, hackers, engineers, gamers, security analysts, and so on—as Herzogian
fantasists, and in doing so puts the messianic vibe of today’s technofuturists in a menacing new light. True, the middle-aged men in polo shirts who populate the film lack the charisma of Klaus Kinski, in “Aguirre”; there’s something gently humorous about seeing them, through Herzog’s eyes, as conquistadores of the server room. Herzog’s subjects talk about that dream in familiar terms: at U.C.L.A., for example, the Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock tells Herzog about the idea of a smart room in which one might explore the Internet through gestures. We watch Kleinrock as he trails off into silence, overawed by his own thoughts. The same thing happens when Joydeep Biswas, an engineer who has built a robotic soccer team, talks about its clever teamwork; when Sebastian