Pfister: Transcendence (2014)

At first glance, Wally Pfister’s first film as a director after working as a cinematographer on Christopher Nolan’s films is driven by a classic Nolan high concept: an eminent computer scientist, played by Johnny Depp, is uploaded to a network after being assassinated by a group of anti-technological activists, where he proceeds to wrap infrastructure and data around himself, with the help of his wife (or widow), played by Rebecca Hall. In some ways, though, it is too conceptual for one of Nolan’s films, which tend to wrap their quandaries in earnest, compelling character studies. As a cinematographer turned director, Pfister doesn’t quite have that gift for extracting character from his actors, but, given the nature of the film, that tends to work to his advantage. Most immediately, it allows him to capture the way identity disperses and disaggregates when it is networked – and Depp is very much a networked presence in the film, appearing for the most part as a multiplicity of images and voices, much like glimpsing all of Scarlett Johannson’s presences in Her. Strangely, that doesn’t feel so strange, since Depp has felt synthetic for years – somewhere around his fourth or fifth Burton film he became a  free-floating, charismatic elasticity more than a corporeal actor, and Pfister is perhaps the first director to really take advantage of that. More than any of his recent films, Depp feels like a process, which means that the network also feels like a process, albeit the process by which it continually transcends its own material parameters. And that means that Pfister’s experience as an analog cinematographer works as well as his inexperience as a director (and it is striking that this allegory of becoming-digital is shot in analog) – he’s used to forcing the material basis of the film to transcend itself, used to coaxing his audience into thinking they’re glimpsing something more like a mere collision of light and celluloid. Watching it, then, is a bit like experiencing the moment at which a network’s brain turns into its mind, transcends any one hub or node (and the film is fascinated with network junk, with most key scenes playing out against banks of servers or corridors of hard drives). That tends to bypass human characters – people tend to be subhuman network nodes or portals for post-human network perception – but that’s what makes the film so memorable; it is cinematographic and post-cinematic without ever quite being cinematic.