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”
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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
Thrun, the autonomous-vehicle and online-learning pioneer, describes how the networked cars of the future will learn from one another’s mistakes. It’s both amusing and frightening to watch these men adopt identical faraway stares. “Lo and Behold” largely ignores the animal videos, pop-culture quizzes, and memes of the trivial, everyday Internet; it barely touches on the problem of smartphone-driven distraction. And there’s little need to go looking for darkness: the optimistic technologists Herzog interviews already thrill to the spectre of destruction. A group of professors explains to Herzog that, if something were to happen to the Internet—if it were taken out by a massive solar flare, say—civilization itself would probably collapse and Thrun, after describing the achievements of Udacity, his online-learning company, wonders if a time will come when there won’t be any point in educating people, since machines will learn so much faster—perhaps, he says to Herzog, they’ll even learn to make movies. The most intriguing person in “Lo and Behold” is Elon Musk, the billionaire associated with PayPal, Tesla Motors, Solar City, OpenAI, SpaceX, and other ventures. He appears for only a few minutes, which is a shame: if any single human being alive
deserves to have a Herzog documentary dedicated to him, it’s Musk, who plans to outdo Fitzcarrald’s steamboat stunt by lifting human civilization all the way to Mars. (Call it “Little Elon Needs to Fly.”) After volunteering to be a Martian colonist himself—“I would come along!”—Herzog asks Musk whether the Internet could be extended to Mars: one imagines the sadness of sitting in some Martian dome, hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, while thumb-swiping through Twitter. Dreamers in Herzog’s films often relish the Wagnerian layering of hope and death; they are eager to face the coming world by turning their backs on the rest of us. Herzog admires the technologists in “Lo and Behold” because they embrace the future. But he also senses in them a love of dark prophecy—an attraction to the future’s grim potential, to the amorality of futurity. Like Aguirre, they marvel at the beauty of the future they hope to create while exclaiming, “What great treachery that will be!”
Tickets: Adult £8 / Senior £7 (Over 65) / Child £6 (16 and under)
Come and join us in our main auditorium for Brew Cinema. Relax in our comfortable seating and enjoy the film with state of the art visuals and full Dolby surround sound. During performances, our fully stocked bar will be open for you, offering a wide range of reasonably priced refreshments. Don’t forget we are close to a number of car parks, have disabled access and are close to good public transport links.
COMING UP...
18 Jan The Light Between Oceans
21 Jan Frozen (sing-along)
26 Jan Life, Animated
BOOK ONLINE www.thebrewhouse.net BOX OFFICE 01823 283244 IN PERSON The Brewhouse Theatre and Arts Centre, Coal Orchard, Taunton, TA1 1JL