Sci-Fi London: "8th Wonderland" and other wonders
So today I was out to the Sci-Fi London festival, which I was stupid enough not to attend last year and will regret it ever after, to watch Love Story 2050, a 3 hour long Bollywood sci-fi extravaganza. I did not get to see it in the end, but some other things happened instead.
The screening had to be cancelled, because a projecter managed to drop the film down on the floor, causing festival organizers to run around crazy looking for a DVD copy and finally to reach the conclusion that it's not gonna work and look for alternative solutions. First they let us inside the hall and explained the situation. Meanwhile, Starcraft game maneuvers with v-o commentary were being projected on screen, somewhat bizarre, yet amusing to watch when you're not a gamer yourself. At that time, they were still hoping to find a DVD copy of the Indian movie, so we agreed to watch a short in the meantime. The film, Copelia, started off without sound. People started murmuring and shouting for the sound to be turned on, then someone remarked that, hey, it may be a silent movie! Of course, everyone took it as a joke, but then, explanatory intertitles started appearing on screen, forming a stark contrast with the eerily beautiful colours of the images. The audience got somewhat quieter, and I thought, heck, this might actually be a silent film... It was not. The sound was turned on later. But those first couple of minutes were a good contrast between audience expectations and what filmmakers could have actually done with the material they had. The film itself is SUPERB. Many, many layers to it, and stylistically, it is a perfect blend of god knows how many visual SF tropes we have seen from Metropolis to Matrix. An absolute must for those looking for a spectacular SF short.
Well, once Copelia was over, we were told that Love 2050 wasn't going to be screened because of the said disaster. The audience was understanding and enjoyed the Indian snacks we were offered. Now in the place of the Indian film, we were shown another work from the festival's menu: 8th Wonderland. It's not one of those films you "either love or hate." You will probably find amazing things as well as deeply disturbing stuff, depending on your own worldview, of course. But nonetheless, it's very much worth watching, because it gets your brains moving like crazy. I'm going to write down some of my own thoughts below, but please bear in mind that it will probably contain spoilers so it's best to come back and read it once you've watched it.
So, first of all, it's amazingly rich as a text. The way it is presented reflects its topic - the virtual. The story moves forward in youtube-clip-length-like steps, and one zips through the media channels of the whole world not just episodically, as in so many movies, where Hollywood attempts to show that "the asteroid crisis is global, and not solely American (but we're gonna solve it)", but giving central attention to the multilingual and multicultural environment of the internet. Interestingly, though, all of this environment merges in the virtual country of 8th Wonderland, where the language of communication is - no surprise here - English. Language is one of the central players in this game, as especially obvious from the episode where an 8th Wonderland citizen disrupts nuclear plant negotiations between Russia and Iraq by providing a deliberate mistranslation of the negotiators' words. She does not only misinterpret the language, but uses the common cultural stereotypes to disrupt the carefully balanced diplomatic negotiation space: she tells the Russian president that the Iraqi president has just called the Russian first lady "fat" (which, according to the stereotype, is a sign of a wealthy family in Islamic countries), and then mistranslates the Russian president's response as an insolent remark upon the Iraqi first wife's niqab, supposedly mistaking it for a carnival outfit. Postulating that the Russian and the Iraq presidents have no other way of reaching out to each other but through an interpreter, who can then manipulate the negotiations the way she wants, and, by extension, by eliminating the possibility that the two leaders actually have a language in common (from later episodes we know that at least the Russian president speaks English, and there is no reason to believe that the Iraq president does not), the film text thus also seems to suggest that people like the young 8th Wonderland interpreter are the most important mediators in contemporary world and thus should not be ignored.
The film tends to lean a bit to one side in its message, but overall, it attempts to present a balanced picture, and 8th Wonderland itself is presented as neither a completely positive, nor a completely negative entity. Sceptic as I am both about anti-corporative world-saving impulses from various activist organizations, and about fears that the Internet and popular culture are destroying the world for good, I appreciate it that the film shows both sides of the coin. It shows that the virtual world which we see developing under our own eyes can be a very powerful tool, but it is also very easy to misuse. How is balance to be found? I don't think the film gives a satisfactory answer, but it does point to the problem. Lastly, one last thing that is extremely important but would take a longer analysis to unravel is that 8th Wonderland is imagined as a democratic country, with voting procedures and concepts of equality stemming from the Western liberal democracy model. So if you are looking for a power narrative in this film, here you go.
The screening had to be cancelled, because a projecter managed to drop the film down on the floor, causing festival organizers to run around crazy looking for a DVD copy and finally to reach the conclusion that it's not gonna work and look for alternative solutions. First they let us inside the hall and explained the situation. Meanwhile, Starcraft game maneuvers with v-o commentary were being projected on screen, somewhat bizarre, yet amusing to watch when you're not a gamer yourself. At that time, they were still hoping to find a DVD copy of the Indian movie, so we agreed to watch a short in the meantime. The film, Copelia, started off without sound. People started murmuring and shouting for the sound to be turned on, then someone remarked that, hey, it may be a silent movie! Of course, everyone took it as a joke, but then, explanatory intertitles started appearing on screen, forming a stark contrast with the eerily beautiful colours of the images. The audience got somewhat quieter, and I thought, heck, this might actually be a silent film... It was not. The sound was turned on later. But those first couple of minutes were a good contrast between audience expectations and what filmmakers could have actually done with the material they had. The film itself is SUPERB. Many, many layers to it, and stylistically, it is a perfect blend of god knows how many visual SF tropes we have seen from Metropolis to Matrix. An absolute must for those looking for a spectacular SF short.
Well, once Copelia was over, we were told that Love 2050 wasn't going to be screened because of the said disaster. The audience was understanding and enjoyed the Indian snacks we were offered. Now in the place of the Indian film, we were shown another work from the festival's menu: 8th Wonderland. It's not one of those films you "either love or hate." You will probably find amazing things as well as deeply disturbing stuff, depending on your own worldview, of course. But nonetheless, it's very much worth watching, because it gets your brains moving like crazy. I'm going to write down some of my own thoughts below, but please bear in mind that it will probably contain spoilers so it's best to come back and read it once you've watched it.
So, first of all, it's amazingly rich as a text. The way it is presented reflects its topic - the virtual. The story moves forward in youtube-clip-length-like steps, and one zips through the media channels of the whole world not just episodically, as in so many movies, where Hollywood attempts to show that "the asteroid crisis is global, and not solely American (but we're gonna solve it)", but giving central attention to the multilingual and multicultural environment of the internet. Interestingly, though, all of this environment merges in the virtual country of 8th Wonderland, where the language of communication is - no surprise here - English. Language is one of the central players in this game, as especially obvious from the episode where an 8th Wonderland citizen disrupts nuclear plant negotiations between Russia and Iraq by providing a deliberate mistranslation of the negotiators' words. She does not only misinterpret the language, but uses the common cultural stereotypes to disrupt the carefully balanced diplomatic negotiation space: she tells the Russian president that the Iraqi president has just called the Russian first lady "fat" (which, according to the stereotype, is a sign of a wealthy family in Islamic countries), and then mistranslates the Russian president's response as an insolent remark upon the Iraqi first wife's niqab, supposedly mistaking it for a carnival outfit. Postulating that the Russian and the Iraq presidents have no other way of reaching out to each other but through an interpreter, who can then manipulate the negotiations the way she wants, and, by extension, by eliminating the possibility that the two leaders actually have a language in common (from later episodes we know that at least the Russian president speaks English, and there is no reason to believe that the Iraq president does not), the film text thus also seems to suggest that people like the young 8th Wonderland interpreter are the most important mediators in contemporary world and thus should not be ignored.
The film tends to lean a bit to one side in its message, but overall, it attempts to present a balanced picture, and 8th Wonderland itself is presented as neither a completely positive, nor a completely negative entity. Sceptic as I am both about anti-corporative world-saving impulses from various activist organizations, and about fears that the Internet and popular culture are destroying the world for good, I appreciate it that the film shows both sides of the coin. It shows that the virtual world which we see developing under our own eyes can be a very powerful tool, but it is also very easy to misuse. How is balance to be found? I don't think the film gives a satisfactory answer, but it does point to the problem. Lastly, one last thing that is extremely important but would take a longer analysis to unravel is that 8th Wonderland is imagined as a democratic country, with voting procedures and concepts of equality stemming from the Western liberal democracy model. So if you are looking for a power narrative in this film, here you go.