Cosmology Returns in the Connected Age

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Portraying the Connected Age is effectively a search for a new form of documentary film, which consequentially can only happen in slow pace, scene by scene, constantly marking itself as work in progress.”

“This open approach, which is very unusual for Herzog, is crafted like a meditation about the nature of the image in today’s societies. It reminds us that trusting our sense of sight has become almost impossible in a culture that consists largely of screens and of people dependent on them.”

“There is no emotive iconography of the Connected Age — a vacancy as far reaching and twisted as our use of emoticons to camouflage it. It is obvious how this fact goes straight to the heart of Herzog’s filmmaking, because a scarcity of the filmable leaves us with complete contingency of the optical.”

“Manifest throughout the chapters of Lo and Behold is that no one can leave the digitally connected world — there is no “off screen” — and so Herzog’s usual observer position is unattainable.”

“Leaving behind any reality check, Herzog feverishly seeks out humankind under connectivity’s spell.”

“The human passion demonstrated in these conversations refuses the filtered egotistical worldview, but rather is a full affirmation of multi-perspectivity, which brings out the placelessness of the connected world.”

“No differences exist between dwelling grounds, whether we deem the world hyperlinked like the roboticist entrepreneur or disconnected like the radiosensitive refugee. Metaphysically, there is no off the grid.”

“One is reminded of Herzog’s Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia (1993), which portrays various cases of intact witchcraft traditions, self-declared faith healers, and rituals informed by legends in post-Soviet Russia. No hard evidence for any of this spirituality is presented, but just as in Lo and Behold, people feel deeply connected to a planetary network of invisible lines and grids.”

“Forced transcendence is what the superstitious life seemingly has in common with the connected everyday. In both films, Herzog’s protagonists have been selected because their mere living presence showcases a special adaptation to their cosmic connectivity, resulting in a manner of speaking and thinking that no scripture can explain.”

“But still, Lo and Behold’s characters differ from practitioners of folk mysticism, as they are exemplars of a radically new spirituality. The internet victims, hackers, programmers, visionaries, and junkies that Herzog picks are not necessarily more connectivity-affected than anyone reading this article, but have rather intensified their relation to the connected world so much that their bodies and minds have had to come up with transcendent responses.”

“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.”