It is pretty universally acknowledged that Werner Herzog is
a great filmmaker. He is also remarkably prolific, having directed (and mostly
written, too) forty-eight feature films over the last fifty years. His nineteen
narrative (fiction) features include the highly regarded Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Stroszek (1977) and Fitzcarraldo
(1982); yet over the last twenty-five years, Herzog has increasingly focused
his efforts on documentaries. More than
half of his twenty-nine feature-length documentaries have been produced since
1992, including Grizzly Man (2005), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) and the
two films I’ll be discussing today: Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World and Into
the Inferno both of which came out in 2016. (And both are now available
on Netflix).
Herzog’s interests are wide and his intellect is probing. It
seems he’s particularly drawn to exploring the ideas, lifestyles and
aspirations that distinguish us as individuals and societies, while
paradoxically highlighting our human commonality. This, of course, makes him an
ideal documentarian. His two 2016 documentaries provide a nice example of this.
Into the Inferno is an exploration of the awesome power and
fascination of volcanoes around the world and how their threat and mystique has
affected the worldview of those who live in their shadow. The movie features
jaw-dropping, stunningly gorgeous photography - often peering directly into the
craters of “living” volcanoes at the brilliant, mesmerizing inferno of lava and
magma at their core – a churning, orange-red sea, exploding like the surface of
the sun, roaring with the force of an angry, terrible god. Herzog accompanies
these images with grand religious music – Verdi’s Jesu Pie, Vivaldi’s Magnificat,
Rachmaninoff’s Glory to God on High
and the like, all of which feels completely appropriate. Indeed, as the film opened with several
minutes of this fabulous stuff, I was thrilled enough to grab my journal and write
“Turn up the sound to your system’s (and your ears’) capacity; turn down the
lights; watch on the biggest screen available!”.
In retrospect, this is still good advice. Eventually, of
course, Herzog turns his interest to human beings (and one may need to drop the
volume a bit). Along with his collaborator, the engaging British volcanologist
Clive Oppenheimer, he takes us from the tiny South Pacific archipelago nation
of Vanuato to Antarctica, then to Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iceland and even to
North Korea – not just to gaze at and into their volcanoes, but to try and understand
the powerful effect volcanoes have had on human history and the human psyche.
For example, in the Afar region of Ethiopia, there’s the
Danekil Depression, part of the Great Rift Valley, lying more than three
hundred feet below sea level, and the hottest place on earth. Not far away is
the great Erte Ale volcano, one of only three in the world where magma is
directly expelled. Erte Ale is also notable because, over hundreds of thousands
of years, it extruded vast quantities of obsidian – volcanic glass – one of the
hardest substances on earth, yet so brittle and sharp that it is ideal for
making primitive tools. So, this is also a place that attracted the earliest
humans; and we go with Herzog and Oppenheimer to a paleontological dig, seeking
fossil evidence of our earliest ancestors. Tim D White, the UC Berkeley
professor in charge of the dig, is so enthusiastic that this digression becomes
every bit as interesting as the “main” topic.
More important to Herzog than volcanoes themselves is the spiritual
and mythic hold these terrifying, yet fascinating natural forces have had on
the generations of people who living on their slopes. So, in Indonesia where
Java’s Merapi volcano has erupted regularly over the years, most recently in
2010, we not only learn about the eruptions, and how the recently installed
monitoring-early warning system has saved lives, but we also witness the
religious rites that have grown up in the community at the base of the
mountain. Incorporating ancient animism with the official muslim faith, the townspeople
annually hold an elaborate, sexually tinged ceremony seeking to reconcile the
goddess of the ocean with the demon of the nearby volcano, sort of an unholy
marriage, which aims to placate both parties.
In Herzog’s hands, all of this – the volcanology, the
paleontology, the cultural anthropology, a venture into the core of North
Korea’s state controlled group-think - is fascinating and stimulating stuff.
The core inquiry of our second movie, Lo and Behold,
Reveries of the Connected World, is similar to that of Into
the Inferno - namely, who are we and what are the forces that have
shaped our understanding of the world, but Lo and Behold takes us in a
completely different direction. It is an exploration of the revolution in human
affairs – some would say in human development – known as the internet. If this
is less viscerally thrilling than the scary-beautiful images of roiling lava
cauldrons, it is more immediately relevant to our current existence and,
prospectively, to the lives of our children and our children’s children.
Herzog is no expert on the cyber world; but he’s a
well-known and respected explorer of ideas and thus able to pull in those with
the expertise, perspective and, in some cases, celebrity of their own to
discuss where we are and muse upon where we may be going, for better or worse.
Although he finds much wonder and promise in some aspects of our brave new digital
world, one suspects he is not altogether a fan.
Lo And Behold is structured by breaking down the many concepts
and concerns associated with the broad topic of the Internet into ten sections,
each dealing with a different aspect of the subject. Perhaps the easiest way to
talk about this movie it Is to use the same format. So, the movie starts at the
beginning, with a chapter entitled The
Early Days – a very brief introduction to the history of the Internet going
back to the late 1960s and the 1970s, featuring some of the pioneers who were
there at the inception, such as Leonard Kleinrock and Robert Kahn –developers
of packet technology, the TCP/IP protocol and ARPANET (forerunner to the
internet). It’s hard to remember now, but in those days the idea of computers working with one another over long
distances was revolutionary. Kleinrock tells the story of the first ARPANET
transmission, from a computer at UCLA to another one in Northern California at
Stanford University. The transmission was to commence with the command ”login”.
But the Stanford computer crashed after
only two letters were received – so, prophetically, the very first message
transmitted on the new network was “Lo”. It’s hard to imagine a more auspicious
beginning!
Chapter 2, The Glory
of the Net, looks at some of the amazing things humans are doing with the
help of and because of the Internet, such as advanced robotics and, in one of the more interesting stories: engaging online gamers to help solve seemingly intractable problems of molecular modeling to cure various kinds of cancer. Taking a more pessimistic view, Chapter 3,The
Dark Side, looks at internet bullying, stalking and harassment.
In a bit of a sidestep, Chapter 4, Life Without the Net, introduces us to one of the few places in the
world that is virtually free of the electromagnetic radiation emitted from
cellphones, Wi-Fi networks, power lines and the like: Green Bank, West Virginia
– a 13,000 square mile “Radio Quiet Zone”. Dozens of people who suffer from
what they call electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) have flocked there to
escape the headaches, nausea and other ailments they believe to be caused by
the modern world’s dramatic turn to electronic communications.
The next chapter examines what could happen to our
internet-dependent world if a disruptive cataclysm shuts it all down. Maybe we
should say when that event occurs. In
1859, the earth experienced the effects of a massive solar flare, a
“geomagnetic storm” on the surface of the sun known as the Carrington Event. Auroras
typically only experienced in arctic regions (e.g. the Northern Lights) were
seen as far south as the Caribbean and central Mexico; In New England, it was
bright enough to read a newspaper in the dead of night. And around the world, most
telegraph systems were blown out, and many telegraph operators received
electroshocks. Astronomer Lucianne Walkowitz suggests that such events may
recur every 200 to 300 years or so. Thus, Chapter 5 of Lo and Behold is
ominously titled The End of the Net. Continuing
in this gloomy vein, the 6th chapter, Earthly Invaders, considers the dangers to military defense,
governmental and other Internet – dependent systems from hacking, malware,
military grade viruses, and the like.
Turning to what we might call speculative futurism, in Chapter
7, The Internet on Mars, Herzog turns
to Elon Musk and his vision of establishing colonies there. The question isn’t
just “Is this feasible?” but, just as importantly, “Is this desirable?” Would a
Martian society of humans be any better environmentally, politically, etc. than
their Earthly predecessors? Chapter 8
looks at and is entitled Artificial
Intelligence. Can we have truly intelligent robots or cyborgs? Could the
internet develop some sort of consciousness? Might it have a sense of itself?
What would this mean for us?
Some visionaries (or are they fools?) are imagining what
they (and Chapter 9) call The Internet of
Me. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where everything is fully (and invisibly) wired, so the network is always
aware of you, attuned to your needs – knows what temperature you like, your
schedule, where you left your keys, stuff like that – and always at your
service via voice command? Well wouldn’t it? Can we even imagine what a
generation raised in such a world might be like? Maybe we should go back and
watch chapters 5 and 6 again.
Lo and Behold concludes with a short chapter called simply The Future. But let’s face it: nobody
knows. Look how poorly past futurists (and most sci-fi writers) missed the boat
on smart phones, the world wide web, social media, and all the other futuristic
stuff that’s a part of our everyday world.
Into the Inferno runs 1
hour 44 minutes.
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World runs 1 hour 38 minutes.
Both films are
available streaming and on disc from Netflix.
Lo and Behold is also
available streaming on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and other streaming
services.
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