With films like Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams Werner Herzog has repeatedly proven the poetic capabilities of nonfiction filmmaking. A Herzog documentary often raises as many questions as it answers. It not only presents information on such themes as man’s relationship to nature or humankind’s collective artistic consciousness, it probes at the vaster meanings and implications of the subjects it explores. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected Age is no different. By turns ponderous and hopeful, deeply serious and frightening at one moment, funny and optimistic the next, Herzog’s film takes on no less hefty a subject than the internet, and yet it never fails to stay in touch with the hearts of the humans whose lives are so profoundly effected by the dominant technology of our modern age.
The title refers to the first message ever sent over the ARPANET, which was the precursor to the internet as we know it. UCLA student Charley Kline was attempting to send the message “login” to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, when the computer crashed after just the first two letters and thus the first message transmitted via the internet was “LO,” as in ‘Lo and behold.’ Fittingly so, perhaps, for that message signified the dawn of a new age, a paradigm shift that would transform the world in inestimable ways.
From gaming addicts in rehabilitation clinics, to entrepreneurial pioneers, hackers, to Buddhist monks with cellphones, and many more, Herzog’s film attempts to trace some of the innumerable pathways that the internet has carved out in the world. Divided into ten chapters that are representative of both positive and negative aspects of the internet, Lo and Behold is surprisingly intimate. Through dozens of interviews, Herzog focuses primarily on the human individuals more than the hardware, though a respect for the wonders of the technology, the awful beauty of its power, is prevalent. Tied together by Herzog’s hypnotic voice, the director’s severe ambivalence is apparent. In his awareness and delivery, it would seem that for every boon granted to the world by the internet, there has been a danger to society or a warping of the soul. Masterfully shot (some of the interviews look like moving portraits), and edited, Lo and Behold is filmmaking of the highest level. The great achievement of his film is that Herzog begins to articulate a question we must all ask ourselves: amidst all the technological abstractions, what does it mean to be human?
Lo andBehold: Reveries of the Connected Age screens at Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of BAM Cinema Fest which runs through June 26.
