One quick plug before we get to the meat of this week’s column: if you’re interested in seeing Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky’s new documentary Watermark, I’ll be conducting a Q&A with the filmmakers after the 7:25 pm screening tonight (Friday, September 27) at the Varsity Cinemas. They’re interesting people, they’ve made a good movie and this will be a good way to see it. Do come down!
Now, on to the other thing. The new season of the Doc Soup documentary showcase kicks off Wednesday (October 2) at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, but this month’s featured title ain’t that promising.
Google And The World Brain, which screens twice on Wednesday and once more on Thursday, is a slick, hand-wringing look at the California megacorp’s ongoing project to digitize as much of the world’s printed matter as possible. It’s called Google Book Search, and filmmaker Ben Lewis does not trust it at all.
In fact, Lewis is so certain that Google’s project is the first step in creating a commercialized dystopia in which all information is steered through a single checkpoint on the web – or possibly create Skynet, I couldn’t quite tell – that he’s constructed an entire movie out of worst-case scenarios and vaguely unsettling hypotheticals, cutting between doomsaying quotes from authors like H.G. Wells (who first put forth the notion of the all-knowing “world brain”) and William Gibson with sinister high-contrast tracking shots of server towers. It’s all very creepy, but it’s also total conjecture, based on the idea that whatever Google is doing with these books, it has to be something bad.
When Fisher finally gets around to the notion of copyright infringement, he seems like he’s about to explain what that bad thing is – but then he launches into another tangent about the value of a physical text and loses the thread.
It’s like listening to a particularly energetic dinner guest juggle conspiracy theories for an hour and a half. You might catch a glimpse of an intriguing idea here and there, but a coherent argument just isn’t going to happen.
