01/03/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: In Slovak documentarian Viera Čákanyová’s lucid essay film, there are two options: ascend to the virtual realm, or just log off

Viera Čákanyová’s Notes from Eremocene [+see also:
trailer
interview: Viera Čákanyová
film profile] offers a persuasive, speculative scenario: what if the sole traces of the natural world and our past experiences could be summoned, with the assistance of a search engine, only through a vast online archive of images and brief video files? As betrayed by an early, self-captured and masked-up shot of Čákanyová near the film’s start, this constituted many of our experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown: screen natives to the nth degree, we were reliant on our devices to remind us of the world beyond our immediate environs. To explain the title’s reference, this is the first dawn of the “Eremocene”, a successor to our current Anthropocene epoch, with atomisation and interpersonal loneliness our shared destiny.

The film is a Berlinale Forum selection from this year’s edition, in keeping with the strand’s adventurous curation and links to the city’s art scene, and Čákanyová – completing a trilogy on shared subject matter that began with FREM [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Viera Čakányová
film profile] and White on White [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] – has devised a work of great beauty, hinting at how online life could look if it were that bit more aesthetically pleasing, and not reliant on clicking and dragging various blandly coloured geometric shapes, bathed in artificial brightness. In other words, and in the bitterest irony, if it resembled the real world that it aims to supplant.

Čákanyová’s narration and structure are reliant on tech jargon she’s redeployed for her speculative aims: troublingly hinting at the pan-global “new world order” beloved by conspiracy theorists, the parameters of life are now controlled by the G-DAO [Global Decentralised Autonomous Organization], an AI government, with human subjects existing solely within a “new vector” where their consciousness has been uploaded. The non-conformists are the “botomori”, who have decided to follow their mortal fate, and die out as the natural world recedes and biodiversity depletes.

A computerised, English-speaking rendering of the director’s voice engages in dialogue with an aural chatbot, as an assortment of ambiguous but sometimes witty 16mm and 8mm celluloid-shot images cycle by; Dante, joined by his poetic muse Virgil as he surveys the Inferno, springs to mind as a comparison. But the lucidity and compositional allure of Čákanyová’s work peters away as we start scrutinising more of what we see; the long quotations from cryptocurrency pioneers Ralph Merkle and Satoshi Nakamoto appropriately reference how their invention will drag us into a decentralised and potentially more equitable economic future, but she struggles to place this subject matter into the film’s dystopian thrust. Satirically intended archival clips of drone pilots, military patrols and the neo-hippie Burning Man festival also ripple by, only intermittently expanding upon the film’s thesis.

Yet, as said, the experimental, hypothetical nature of this project allows Čákanyová to dream, doodle and denounce our coming technological captors, illustrating with surety and visual wonder the strange frontier humanity is about to cross: a doorway with enticing rewards on the other side, but where our potential could be caught in its hinges.

Notes from Eremocene is a production by Slovakia and the Czech Republic, staged by guča films, Marina Films, and Rozhlas a televízia Slovenska - Radio and Television Slovakia. Its world sales are also handled by Marina Films.