Lo And Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

Werner Herzog’s documentary explores the technological phenomenon of the internet. Characteristically of the Bavarian-born filmmaker we move from the profound, to the prophetic, to sheer absurdity, all in the space of ninety minutes; it’s good, but it’s not enough. Each of the chapters into which Herzog splits his film barely seems to scratch the surface.

Having spent the larger part of his career as a director of feature films, narrative and character have forced their way into his later documentaries. Herzog’s filmography has always been scattered with the occasional doc, but recently his non-fiction focus has widened, from My Best Fiend – about his off-screen relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski, to Grizzly Man – about the death of a bear activist, to the transcendental Encounters at the End of the World in which a penguin walks off into the Antarctic wasteland, never to return.

Lo and Behold is similarly bizarre. It begins at the beginning, in Stanford Research Institute, with a guided tour of the first computer to connect with another. Intending to transmit the word ‘LOG’ to log in, the scientists managed only the first two letters: LO, hence the title. We then move on to the global spread of the internet, how initially there was a phonebook-sized physical list of everyone on the internet (if one were to be published now it would be 72 miles thick). He covers its dangers – internet trolling and addiction (though briefly), and considers the future, with football-playing AIs, self-driving cars and an interview with Elon Musk about his planned Martian expedition. Always the tone is one of bemusement; Herzog, we get the feeling, doesn’t know very much about the subject himself, and the questions he asks (‘does the internet dream?’) betray his abstract thinking. This naivety is what makes the doc so entertaining, as is the case with many of his films: everything is fascinating to him, everything is weird.

A new Herzog film is an event for cinephiles. His style of questioning, the way he stages and frames interviews and finds philosophy in practically anything, is endearing and hilarious. Perhaps if Lo and Behold had been longer, if it had not just dipped its toes in and maybe gone deeper, it would have properly reflected the scale of the internet. Entertaining, but slightly more superficial than Herzog’s best.