Last night I watched the film, “Even Dwarfs Started Small.” This was the first Werner Herzog film, other than “Grizzly Man,” that I have yet to see. It was his second feature film, a “Lord of the Flies” allegory of society starring an all-midget cast. The fact that allthe actors in the film are midgets made one IMDB reviewer with an admitted “fear of small shapes” call the film ” very scary,” and the fact that someone else was scared of the film made me in turn fearful of watching it alone, so I invited my friend Alexa over and she watched it with me.
“Even Dwarfs Started Small” made me question the role of serendipity in Herzog’s filmmaking. Was he setting up these shots based on strict storyboards crafted months in advance, or had he given himself the freedom to film what “felt right,” following outlines from his script. Based on the beauty and oddity of some situations, like a driver-less van careening in circles, I am guessing the latter. If thats true then my current goal of watching all of Herzog’s films should be very good for my own art. The spontaneous and unplanned is a crucial component of the art I value, and I can only benefit from studying a master.
Today, after a nights sleep featuring dreams about old friends when they were young and with their families, (thats what you get for posting pictures of yourself as a kid on the facebook,) I did my daily duty of serendipitously trawling the internet. Hombre, a central character in “Even Dwarfs” was a theme. In the film, Hombre is peer-pressured into a room with a woman, but he cannot get onto the bed to copulate with her. Its a touching, funny scene, watching Hombre try and fail. He can’t “get up.” That kind of shit is why I love Herzog!
Eventually I stumbled upon a Digg-linked page detailing how Milky Way fluctuations can effect life on Earth, for example how every sixty four million years our solar system’s celestial movement brings us outside the galactic plane, exposing our planet to much higher levels of cosmic rays. From there I read about how machine has conquered man in every game we’ve ever created, save the oldest game, “Go.” From the excellent film “Game Over: Gary Kasparov and the Machine,” and talks with my sister on artificial intelligence advancements and possibilities, I knew that the machine mind was dominant over our own in terms of computational power.
This article, however, demonstrates that computers have a ways to go before they are our intellectual equals… Perhaps when the time for intuitive computing comes about, the film “Even Dwarfs Started Small” will apply as much to them, as to us. In that case, were I the future-director of a remake, perhaps I’d cast Wall-E as Hombre?
“Go has become a cryptic symbol of unlocking the secret of artificial intelligence. If a machine can figure out how to dominate at Go, it is believed that mankind would be very close to replicating human thought. However in spite of over a million dollars in prize money up for grabs, programmers have not yet been successful.
It has been calculated that there are more distinct games of Go than atoms in the known universe. A move early in the game can affect the passage of play hundreds of moves later. The vastness of the possibilities offers a wide range for individuality, and an intuitive awareness of the other players feelings and thoughts.”
