Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow is our world of today. Humanity has a remarkable knack for destruction, why imagine our clones would be any different? This is where the Western World is leading us, an immersion into a technological realm over which we imagine, naively, we harbour control. World of Tomorrow is Hertzfeldt's imagination, or at least some marvellous, minuscule fragment of it - just glance at this great filmmaker's other output and you'll find this film not to be the grand unleashing of an artist's invention, rather the intricately-formed details therein. A great filmmaker, since he is so generous: World of Tomorrow is hilarious, terrifying, intellectually challenging, heartbreaking, baffling, all in turn and together, like a miniature symphony of emotion filtered through the absurd and the unfamiliar. We're presented with a world in which we are the playthings, where technological advancements have overtaken our pitiful capacities as intelligent entities - it is the reverse of what we think we know, and the absence of clarity and security is unnerving, not least in that it so succinctly highlights the value of such qualities. In our opposite, we observe that which we are not, and thus that which we are; opposite sides on a coin, but it's still the same coin. Tomorrow is not today, but it's still the same dimension, shuttled back and forth in an unreliable time machine from World of Tomorrow to the world of today. From your digital screen to your actual life. Prescient and profound, and appropriately unforgettable.
No comments:
Post a Comment