[D66] Lo and Behold!

[J.N.]

Werner Herzog werpt een licht op het communicatief kapitalisme.


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cosmology-returns-connected-age-werner-herzogs-lo-behold/#!

WERNER HERZOG is the filmmaker of the unfilmable, not because he
attempts to film what is technically unfilmable, but because his
documentaries acknowledge what must remain undocumented. He has been
known to suppress audio-visual phenomena from his viewers — most
famously in Grizzly Man (2005), where the director’s own reaction to
footage of a grizzly attack is substituted for the footage itself.
Behind this suppression looms an ethical imperative that creates a kind
of cinematographic ecology, regulating the circulation of images. Within
this optical ecosystem Herzog has developed a special care for those
images, spectacles, and phenomena that must be kept clean from cinematic
vision so that they may remain visible off screen, in their own habitat.
Essentially, his is a concern not for particular phenomena, but for
unguarded seeing itself.

This media ecological aspect is crucial for understanding the
exceptional condition of Herzog’s latest work, Lo and Behold: Reveries
of the Connected World, because for the first time, Herzog deals not
with human responses to natural phenomena, but with human responses to
technical phenomena. It has seemed arbitrary that Herzog’s humanistic
concern for image circulation should emanate from film technology, but
Lo and Behold finally makes the relation necessary. Immersing himself in
the connected world of information technology, Herzog has made a film
that shows why an ecology of vision, and hence filmmaking itself, only
makes sense if you know what is human about the world.

Herzog has always drawn clear, perceptible lines between the filmable
and the unfilmable, but this form of distinction is called into question
in Lo and Behold. In 10 chapters, the film traces the origins,
consequences, and potentials of worldwide IT communication in our
contemporary global societies, beginning from the early days of the
internet and ending in predictions of its magic future.

...

Whatever the future might end up feeling like, Lo and Behold
demonstrates that humans will not come up with such new “alternative”
worldviews themselves. Against the hopes of New Age followers and gadget
entrepreneurs — even against those of Cyberpunks and hacker manifestos —
Herzog’s ethnography shows that in the long run, the Connected Age will
affect our forms of life with physical and psychological constraints,
but not with new methods of imagining the world. To live under
connective divinity feels nothing like a united utopia, but like being
in a mess of nomadic tribes. Perhaps, though, intentional resistance
against seeing will again become a reliable practice in this setting.
What did not work for the Paduan astronomer Cremonini in 1610, who had
to accept the heliocentric universe despite refusing to look through
Galileo’s telescope, might become a human skill, now that our cosmology
is no longer based on empirical discoveries.

In the film’s final two chapters we find that there may, in fact, be
something unfilmable about the Connected Age. Nobody in the interviews
can truly answer Herzog’s question, “Can the internet dream of itself?”
This unfilmable forges a new common scene of disconnected communication
that can be found everywhere, namely to look up and daydream — the true
cosmological sense of the imperative “Lo and Behold!”