Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

Could you love a robot? Should you love a robot? Or, rather, a geminoid, as its creator, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, calls it. That’s one of the questions posed in Phie Ambo’s Mechanical Love.

Ishiguro built his geminoid in his own image. Make of that what you will.

In fact, he coined the word “geminoid” from the Latin geminus, meaning “twin” or “double” and oid, which indicates “similarity”. And the damned thing does really look like him. If he were a robot, that is.

Apparently, he got the idea for this because he is so busy. He can’t be in two places at once, after all. So he built this copy of himself–sculpted from casts of his body–so that it could, say, sit in a meeting at the office while he was working elsewhere, and it would stand in for him as he spoke through it and manipulated it via remote control. ‘If I could have one at the university, and one at ATR, I would just do all my work from a hot-springs resort.’ Well, okay… it makes sense when he puts it that way. But he also wonders if people could come to have feelings for these things.

His thought was that something that looked like him and spoke in his voice could carry sonzai-kan, or “presence” in a way that his mere voice over a conference call couldn’t.

But I dunno… this thing made my skin crawl. I wouldn’t want it anywhere near me. When he introduces his young daughter to it for the first time–after having told the documentary film crew that he is certain that she will be able to accept it easier than an adult would–she shies away from it and doesn’t even want to look at it. She refuses to touch it and can’t wait to get the hell outta the room.

I can’t blame her. I mean, I don’t wanna pick it apart–it’s a remarkable piece of engineering–but the face simply does not work. And it looks like the “skin” is rubbery in a naaasty way. While we do see Ishiguro complain about an earlier version’s inability to form its lips to match the words he is speaking through them, the finished version looks no better. I can understand what he’s trying to achieve, but I don’t think he’s there yet. And, frankly, I don’t see how having this thing sitting in a room while he is manipulating it by remote control from elsewhere is somehow better than just being there via videoconferencing. Surely the image of the real person has more sonzai-kan than this bucket of bolts does. Or mebbe that’s just a film-lover’s opinion.

Anyway, this doppleganger is not the only robot in the film. There is also Paro.

Paro is what’s called a “mental committment robot”:

Unlike industrial robots, “Mental Commitment Robots” are developed to interact with human beings and to make them feel emotional attachment to the robots. Rather than using objective measures, these robots trigger more subjective evaluations, evoking psychological impressions such as “cuteness” and comfort. Mental Commitment Robots are designed to provide 3 types of effects: psychological, such as relaxation and motivation, physiological, such as improvement in vital signs, and social effects such as instigating communication among inpatients and caregivers.

Why a baby seal, you ask? Well, they tried it first as a cat. But the designers found that people are so familiar with cats that all they could see was how fake the kitty-Paro was. So they figured that fewer people were familar with baby harp seals… and they were right. People no longer focussed on what was “wrong” with it and focussed, instead, on how “cute” it was.

We see Paro introduced to nursing home resident Mrs. Körner who, while she knows it is not a real animal, nevertheless forms what appears to be a genuine emotional bond with it. To be honest, these sequences were really upsetting to me… The repulsion I felt towards Professor Ishiguro’s geminoid was nothing next to the horror of the thought of being so alone in this world that I have to resort to artificial companionship. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach as I watched this genuinely sweet lady cuddle this mewling thing, cooing to it and stroking its (fake) fur. It makes me cry, even now, just to think back on those sequences… It’s not that I think the good feelings it engendered in Mrs. Körner were a bad thing. Quite the contrary! But the thought that this is what we’ve come to makes me feel very sad for all of us.

I think Ambo’s film is quite wonderful in that it could provoke such a strong emotional reaction from me. It is a fascinating subject told well–with humour and with empathy–and easily one of my favourites of Hot Docs ‘08. See it if you get a chance.

Starting with Sundance, back in ‘06, I have made a habit of trying to sit on the aisle, in a row near the back of the theatre, whenever I go to film festivals. Sometimes you need to get out quickly to get to another screening and other times you discover that you’ve chosen unwisely and just wanna slink out without causing other audience members to be taken out of the film by your rustling and excuse-mes as you squeeze past them out the row.

Well, wouldn’t you just know it, but the only time I ended up having to sit down at the front of the theatre at this year’s Hot Docs was for the one film I absolutely hated and wanted to get the hell outta before it was finished. There was nothing I could do but just gut it out.

The write-up on this thing described it as being about Carlos Castaneda’s five “wives”, who mysteriously disappeared right after his death—never to be seen again. Sounds like it might be interesting, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But when the director introduced her film by saying that she doesn’t normally make her films for an audience—she makes them for herself—and then added, ‘I hope that if you don’t find what you are looking for in this film, you find something else’, well… As it turns out, I didn’t find what I was looking for and all I found in its absence was frustration and boredom.

Minou Norouzi’s Anatomy of Failure reminds me of something that was made by a self-absorbed teenager who doesn’t know 1. how to construct a story, 3. how to capture something interesting within the frame, 3. how to draw a comprehensible story from the people she sets before her lens, or 4. how to focus her fucking camera!

I sat and seethed through this self-indulgent thing. What on earth the programmers saw in this, I dunno. I saw some blurry navel-gazing shit on a beach and then a bunch of interviews with flaky nouveau-hippies.

At least the opening film was interesting. It was called The Apology Line and was a rather poetic little film about an anonymous phone line in Britain that you call when you need to apologize for something and you don’t feel you can make your apology to the person who deserves it. Some of the apologies are funny while others are wrenching. Directed by James Lees, it won the Best Short Documentary award at the festival.

Minou, the number is 0800 970 93 94.

I was looking forward to the group-directed Jesus Loves You–a film about a bunch of fundamentalist Christian missionaries from around the world who converged on Germany to minister to the millions who were there to attend the 2006 World Cup–but it left me with little taste in my mouth, good or bad.

It was shot by four crews–meaning four directors: Lilian Franck, Matthias Luthard, Michaela Kirst, and Robert Cibis–so that each could focus on one particular missionary… Tillman is a charismatic German who started a group called Youth With A Mission. Scott is a young pastor who preaches at the 411 Church in NYC in a bad hairdo. Gershom is a friendly, outgoing Zambian who, despite his young age, is a veteran missionary. Cody, in contrast, is a complete noob at this–freshly baptised in Scott’s church and decidedly awkward when it comes to approaching the strangers to whom he is meant to appeal.

There is a lot of buildup to the missionaries’ arrival in Germany but once they are there, it seems like there is little interaction shown between them and the soccer fans, and the film seems to lose its direction and peter out. The few soccer fans we meet don’t seem to know quite what to make of these earnest folks appealing to them to accept Christ as their saviour. The ending felt abrupt, without resolution. Not sure what the point of it all was, y’know?

The English Surgeon (dir. Geoffrey Smith, U.K.) has won the Best International Feature award at this year’s festival. While I would’ve cast my vote in the direction of Man On Wire instead (because it is interesting not only in content but in form–whereas The English Surgeon’s content is compelling but it is not doing anything interesting formally), I must say that I really enjoyed it.

It tells the story of British brain surgeon Henry Marsh, who has been helping out an impoverished Ukrainian clinic for the past 15 years, and his colleague in Kiev, Dr. Igor Kurilets, who admits he looks up to Marsh as an older brother. The film focuses on one operation that Marsh is to perform on a poor Ukranian farmer, Marian, who suffers from a brain tumour. What might be a simple operation in London is complicated by an ill-equipped clinic and inexperienced staff. We see Marsh and Kurilets shopping for a cordless drill at a hardware store in the local market. You can imagine what a brain surgeon might need a drill for. Just not the kind a handyman might buy. The operation, itself, is featured in the film and it’s definitely not for the squeamish. I had to avert my eyes a couple times and the guy beside me sat there with his hands over his ears when the drilling started.

Marsh is a droll delight, and this serves to leaven what could’ve been shameles melodrama. Yet we see how a failed attempt to help a child in his past has left a permanent mark on his soul and how it informs all his doctor-patient relations.

While it might not have gotten my vote for the award, I still feel that it is a beautiful, facinating film about a lovely man.

…That is how an early L.A. screening of Erik Nelson’s Dreams With Sharp Teeth was billed, and it is as good a description of what this film is as anything. There are few moments in this film when Ellison isn’t unruly. Hell, there are probably few moments in his life when he isn’t unruly.

Co-presented by Toronto After Dark, this film was at the top of my list of my what-to-see list when I was planning my schedule for Hot Docs this year.

I was introduced to Ellison’s work by Stephen King, in his non-fiction look at genre fiction in literature and film, Danse Macabre (1981)… pronounced “McBare” by those who’ve read it and if you are a fan of horror fiction and haven’t read it, WTF is going through that noggin of yours?! Here. That very book has played a major role in my life for reasons like the one I just cited–see pp. 242-247. In the early- to mid-80s I went through a major speculative fiction phase and Ellison’s work was a major part of it.

So I knew what to expect when I sat down last night to watch this portrait of the artist as an angry man. I knew to expect to be thrilled by this man’s mastery of the language (peppered with expletives more foul and frequent than even my own), both tickled and spurred by his rage against the various kinds of stupidity accepted by our society, and delighted by his confrontational fearlessness. I adore the mouthy little bastard!

That goiter was fucking nasty, though. If’n I’d been eating popcorn, it’d've put me off it. Pah!

Described by some critics as more hagiography than biography, Nelson’s portrait of Ellison is presented through the subject’s own words (not just conversations but also readings from his work) as well as those of friends, colleagues, and critics (see the list of thank-yous at the end of the review I linked to at the beginning of this post–that article is very good!). We see him at home–in the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars (curiously but accurately named) in the Santa Monica hills–and on the road for speaking engagements, yelling at drivers as he’s walking across the street, yelling at pedestrians as he’s driving down the street, at Pink’s, and always he is on on on and I am laughing laughing laughing–‘If you had to live with me 24/7, you’d put a gun in your mouth… or my mouth,’ he says.

And if it is too affectionate a portrayal of the subject, then so be it. I don’t blame Nelson. I mean, I wouldn’t wanna risk getting thrown down an elevator shaft, either.

Wednesday was full enough that I didn’t get a chance to do any writing between screenings. I had brunch at Future Bakery with an old friend and then we went to a screening of Second Skin. After that, we parted and I went on to The English Surgeon, The Black List, and then finished the night with Stranded, I’ve come from a plane that crashed in the mountains. Then, on Thursday, it was lunch with another friend–this time at St. Lawrence Market–then he went back to work and I went on to see Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?, Mechanical Love, and one of the films to which I have most been looking forward: Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

But it is late and I wanna go to bed, so just a little right now…

Second Skin, directed by Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza, is a look at a handful of M(assively)M(ultiplayer)O(online)R(role)P(playing)G(amers) and the role the games, themselves, play in their lives. The games featured are World of Warcraft and Everquest and, yes, I’ve heard of them but this is the first time I’ve ever clapped eyes on them. My experience in this realm began and ended with Pong.

It was a very familiar sensation that settled over me as the subjects began to explain how they felt about gaming and we saw the players sinking into their virtual world. It came as no surprise, then, when, later in the film, we were introduced to Liz Woolley–the founder of Online Gamers Anonymous–who was trying to help self-admitted game-addicted Dan, who has lost his job, his health, his home, and his friends. Liz blames her own son’s suicide on his gaming addiction and has set out to help others. Now, bear in mind that I have all kindsa trouble not with what she is trying to do but how she is trying to do it. So I wasn’t surprised to see her fail.

We are introduced to lots of couples who met via the community of online gamers. Folks who met virtually–as the characters they play in the games–before they met in the real world as their real selves. The relationships that are the focus of the film, however, don’t seem all that stable or strong to me because the individuals seem so emotionally immature. The cutting between the real people and their avatars is almost cruel in that you go from a handsome, swashbuckling hero in the game to a bespectacled nerd with a bad haircut, crooked teeth, and a cheesy goatee at the computer. I mean, we’re talkin’ living clichés, here!

Of course, what exactly constitutes their “real” selves is in question. Some of the gamers do believe that they are more their “real” selves online. To an outsider like me, that is extremely sad. But I realize that their perspective is very different from my own so what do I know? I mean, there seemed to be a lot of gamers in the audience and they reacted very positively to the film. I get the feeling we’re only getting part of the picture, though. I’m pretty sure there must be gamers who aren’t as loserish as these folks seemed to me to be–people who are able to function as responsible adults in the real world and still find time to devote to this hobby.