NYFF 63: Currents Program #4 - Model Behaviors

by Nick Taylor

FICTION CONTRACT, Carolyn Lazard

As always, the names for these NYFF shorts programs are creatively apt. Here, Model Behaviors encompasses practical applications of technology across very different fields. How do these machines recognize human beings, and how do they in turn shape us? Broad perceptions of reality, filtered through a digital intermediate, are taken to specific extremes as these filmmakers explore the unique applications of technology happening across fields of labor and care…

ACETONE REALITY, Sara Bagenheimer & Michael Bell-Smith

We start with the short I’m least enthused about. Whether this speaks more to Acetone Reality’s ambitions as experimental cinema, or to my interest in the labor it’s centered on, is still up in the air. The visual patterns and styles keep changing, going from cascading black-and-white pixels (which may be close-ups of Bagenheimer and Bell-Smith in conversation) to colorful geometrics that only change place between cuts. Nature footage from different anime is used as interstitials. The only real through-line is the voices of our unseen directors discussing an audio recording through physical, chemical, and philosophical lenses. We, the audience, only hear it in the last five minutes, and Acetone Reality gives it a visual schema of its own, with live-action footage of apartment complexes and industrial labor.

Bell-Smith describes the goal of their interpretations as “finding meaning in the nonsensical”, and it’s a daunting task. Is there an internal logic to the seemingly random combinations of words and sentences, or is it really as incoherent as it sounds? All of their analysis of the audio recording comes before we ever hear it, affecting our intellectual engagement differently than if Acetone Reality had opened with it. But is it better to hear their critique and prime ourselves for the recording, or to experience it and then try to make up our minds while they talk it out? What’s the best way to interpret and experience art, even if the right choice may be less penetrable or intuitive? Sure, the imagery gave me a bit of a headache, but it’s been interesting to ponder its provocations.

THEIR EYES, Nicolas Gouralt 

Less formally out-there than Acetone Reality, though almost anything would be. Their Eyes also features unseen speakers discussing the particularities of their jobs, though here the imagery relates directly to their work. We watch a computer mouse click click click its way through photographs of busy intersections, metropolitan thoroughfares, outdoor kiosks, and empty streets. The mouse outlines different subjects before giving them the appropriate color-coded label - “segmentation” being the official term for all these clicks. Human. Tree. Building. Road. Vehicle. As the speakers describe, their job is to annotate everything in hundreds, thousands of training images before they’re fed to an AI learning processor for self-driving cars.

It’s amazing how much humanity Their Eyes evinces for these unseen digital laborers, all of whom clearly know a lot about their work and the wider implications of AI. You marvel at their technical thoroughness but also the ways they try to bring any kind of creativity to a deadeningly dull job. Everyone’s got their own playlist. Some folks think of segmentation as a kind of painting. Candid testimonies reveal their responsibilities as well as the hardships and exploitations they’re suffering. Because this unnamed facility is located in the Global South, employees are paid exponentially less than European or American contractors. There’s a story about VPN usage to try and work around this that’s perhaps the crown jewel of a film built on great dialogues to humanize nameless, exploited laborers. Is there any level of this AI shit that isn’t built on exploitation?

P.S.: You should absolutely get a VPN if you don’t already.

AND IF THE BODY, Toby Lee

And in the Body begins in the world of a 3-D video game, one of those generically immersive worlds of floating islands and rope bridges. A lo-fi human traverses the landscape, looking around as if to marvel at their body and the space it’s inhabiting. She walks across a frighteningly long bridge, surrounded by clouds with the texture of a fluffy bush. Do we project anxiety into this figure? Is she wobbling from nervousness, or is it simply built into the simulation? The camera cuts to an overhead shot high above her, and we cut to black before the title.

It turns out this digital world is inside a full-bodied virtual reality device, as part of an experimental treatment designed to stimulate the nerve endings of individuals who have suffered significant neuromuscular disorders. The goal is to help people recover some mobility to body parts the brain was previously unable to send signals to. It’s an astonishing development, and Lee has made the integration of this tech into ongoing treatment plans into a proper film. Maybe the best feat of And if the Body is how it never frames the proceedings as a saccharine advertisement. The humanity of doctor and patient alike is rendered in clean strokes through the camera’s formal but never distant directness. Personalizing details are rightly affecting without being sappy. Any work to regain mobility is painstakingly hard. The VR developments are exciting, and give the film some truly wondrous imagery, but it’s properly contextualized as the most recent development in a long line of complex neuromuscular advances. The most honest thing Lee does is depict that work and the people doing it with zero frills.

FICTION CONTRACT, Carolyn Lazard

Perhaps my favorite of this program. The warm humanism of the premise is a great hook for me, though Lazard’s keenly observational style realizes this as ideally as one could hope for. Set in Chicago’s Elmhurst Hospital, the film follows a simulated birth exercise being practiced on a life-sized dummy named Jada. She’s being attended to by an all-Black obstetrician team, with another OBGYN viewing their progress through a one-way mirror and ventriloquizing Jada’s needs through a wireless headset synced to a voice box. The birth is not without complications, and requires a lot of spontaneity from the OBGYNs. This practice is as much about their ability to comfort and reassure Jada as it is their medical know-how.

You can guess I would not have said this was my favorite if the exercise had gone poorly. The patina of care and professionalism these women exude, not just in how they care for Jada but in their trust and respect for each other, is palpable through every step of the exercise. Lazard has a great feel for how to block and edit the swelling momentum of the birth as new obstacles are introduced. The way she depicts the interplay between every body involved in the simulation - to include Jada, her baby, and the overseer - flows so naturally, even as roughly half a dozen doctors, nurses, and midwives assume their proper role in making sure everything goes smoothly. It’s such a moving, well-crafted portrait of collective medical competency, and at a time when all forms of pregnancy care across the United States are being demonized and defunded.

The Currents program remains one of the most exciting sections at the New York Film Festival, now in its 63^rd edition.