When
is a room not a room? When it is a
Chinese translation machine, of course.
However, it has no conscious awareness of what it is translating,
because it is just a room. Let the
epistemological-ontological-linguistic games begin in Daniel Cockburn’s
unabashedly cerebral genre-straddling narrative You Are Here (trailer
here), which
opens today at the ReRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn.
A
New Agey Lecturer immediately puts us on notice not to passively accept the
images put before us. Then Cockburn
introduces us to Alan. More than a man
of the masses, Alan is the masses. More accurately,
his is the collective conscience of a crowd.
Some of Alan’s members are tracking operatives, who guide field agents
around the city for no apparent purpose.
Their paths will cross the Archivist, a woman compelled to collect and
catalog mysterious documents, VHS cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes that seem
to seek her out. She will be our
protagonist. This might not be
immediately evident, but the press notes assure us it is so.
But
wait, there’s more, including the Experimenter, who creates a prototype of John
Searle’s “Chinese room,” a hypothetical construct purporting to illustrate the
limits of artificial intelligence.
Putting himself into the “machine,” the inventor responds to passages of
Chinese (which he does not understand) by utilizing step-by-step reference
books, replicating the computer’s translation process in the physical space of
the cell, without any understanding on his part. Eventually though, this system break down. However, the Inventor perfectly realizes his
scheme, forever altering mankind’s perspective on the world with prosthetic
eyes.
You Are Here really is a
narrative feature, but you would be hard-pressed to prove it to some
viewers. Episodic by nature, Cockburn’s
film is fragmentary, hop-scotching all over the place. Indeed, Cockburn’s background in experimental-installation
and short filmmaking is readily apparently in his narrative approach. However, there is a there there in You Are Here. Unlike say James Franco’s Francophrenia, Cockburn respects his
audience, presuming a high level of sophistication that will appreciate his
philosophical gamesmanship.
Stylistically
and intellectually, YAH’s most
successful arcs follow the Experimenter and the Inventor. In fact, their modular feature sections could
easily be lifted out of the film and presented as rewarding self-contained
shorts in their own right. While the
other braided strands are less focused, Tracy Wright dramatically humanizes the
film as the Archivist. In one of her
final screen roles before tragically succumbing to cancer, she resolutely eschews
quirk, conveying the profound frustration of one seeking meaning in a
randomized universe.
YAH bills itself as
a meta-detective story, but that rather overstates the mystery elements. If Alain Robbe-Grillet rewrote The Matrix, jettisoning the kung fu and
narrative cohesion, it might look something like this. Though not every arc fully plays out, its
ambition and inventiveness are impressive.
Recommended for those well versed in analytic philosophy and
post-structuralism or simply inclined towards cinematic puzzles, You Are Here opens today (5/11) at the
ReRun Gastropub in Brooklyn. Graciously
recognizing the film requires a bit of unpacking, ReRun will not charge for
repeat screenings.
