About a Hero is a better opening film than regular film selection. In the press notes, director Piotr Winiewicz calls it “an essay film … aimed to trigger a discussion” – and it probably will. By elevating this AI-based film to the festival’s opening salvo, IDFA has taken a subject usually relegated to their new media showcase DocLab and put it centre stage.
Given the current political climate, this may seem like IDFA playing it safe. But make no mistake: Generative AI is already present in every facet of our societies, including warfare. Just consider the deepfakes made of Ukrainian president Zelensky and of former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir’s voice, designed to confuse and demoralise, or the unprecedented scale of AI-driven targeting by the Israeli army in Gaza.
In this fast-changing environment, the international documentary community has a special responsibility to safeguard the reliability of the documentary image – with all the caveats that concept entails. To this end, the Archival Producers Alliance recently published a proposal for guidelines, designed to protect the heart of documentary practice from the tsunami of AI-generated images flooding the internet – which has also led to actual photographic images now being suspected of being GenAI.
Back to About a Hero. For this experiment, the filmmakers asked German maestro Werner Herzog for permission to train an AI language model on his speech and writings. Herzog – who famously said no AI would make a film as good as his in “4500 years” – agreed, but without believing at all in the feasibility of the project.
So the very convincing voice of Werner Herzog which we hear in About a Hero – and which provides much of the fun – is AI-generated. Except, one assumes, for the recording of his voice at the beginning, where he agrees to the project. But why, then, is that recording played back on an old-fashioned answering machine of the kind nobody uses anymore?
And why does Piotr Winiewicz in the film, or the Piotr Winiewicz character in the largely fictional narrative, react hesitantly when his lawyer asks him if he has full permission to use Herzog’s material? And why do the press notes mention that all of Herzog’s voice (except, one assumes again, the one giving permission) has been AI-generated “in exception of very particular moments in the film”? Not knowing which these moments are clouds the question of whether a Herzog-like film can be created using GenAI.
Also, there is a character in the film who impersonates Herzog, mostly seen from behind, but who does not look much like him at all, apart from also being old, bald and wearing a suit. And when we finally see him head-on, Herzog’s deepfake is unconvincing.
A much larger part of the film’s experiment, however, concerns the script. An AI was trained on Herzog’s films – as far as I can tell, only his scripts, not the imagery, soundtracks or cinematic style – to create the script for the central part of About a Hero. This AI was called Kaspar*, after Kasper Hauser, the nineteenth-century boy who suddenly emerged from solitary confinement and had to learn language and social norms almost from scratch – about whom Herzog made his wonderful fiction feature The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, 1974).
Herzog, of course, made both fiction and documentary films. It isn’t clear to me whether his fiction work was also used to train Kaspar*. Without it, the corpus becomes much smaller, and training the AI presumably more difficult. On the other hand, the fictional story in About a Hero, about the murder of one Dorem Clery in the fictional German town of Getunkirchenburg, uses the documentary format, with the most recognisable Herzogian aspect being the voice of the Bavarian inquisitor coming from behind the camera.
Then again, most of the talking heads in the film do not sound very documentary. They sound scripted – casting a famous actor such as Vicky Krieps underlines this fictionality; but why do that, if the aim of the project is to challenge notions of reality and authenticity? Similarly, the spelling of ‘Police’ as ‘Plice’, and the fact that the inhabitants of this German town speak English to each other seem intended to reduce the sense of being in a documentary – but again, why?
(As a side note, the strange name of ‘Dorem Clery’ sounds like an anagram to me. In English – the main language of the film – one can rearrange the letters to read ‘cry modeler’, ‘cold eery mr’ or, my favourite, ‘merely cord’. Make of that what you will.)
Herzog’s voice, with its, let’s say, ‘alternative intelligence’, its unexpected questions, its non sequiturs, seems eminently suitable for being AI’d. Indeed, this is not the first time Herzog’s voice has been used in relation to AI-generated texts. See, for example, The Infinite Conservation (2022).
But the script of About a Hero is much less convincing. There is very little – if anything – Herzogian about the way the documentary-style murder mystery unfolds. Stylistically, there is nothing I would recognise as coming from Herzog. In the press notes, the filmmakers point to German photographer Thomas Demand’s empty paper models as an “uncanny” inspiration for the sets – which is fine, but not Herzogian.
Worse, I don’t feel there is much Herzog to be found in the storytelling. When they first prompted Kaspar*, its first line was “This is a movie about a hero dreaming up surprisingly ordinary dreams” – hence the title of the film. Dreaming is of course a central theme for Herzog, and one that lends itself well to an AI reinterpretation – after all, alternate realities such as dreaming can, according to Herzog, contain real ‘ecstatic’ truths, so why not digital ones? But dreaming (or equivalent Herzogian concepts like flying and chickens) plays a negligible role in the rest of the narrative.
At the same time, the most remarkable scene, in which a woman makes love to a toaster, is about as far removed from Werner Herzog as one can possibly get. The only visible sex in the whole of his oeuvre is a scene of two piglets fucking in Cobra Verde (1987). That’s it. Never would Herzog have anyone say “I want to feel you deep inside me,” as the woman here does to the toaster.
So I don’t know precisely how the AI has been trained, but I suspect other material was added or a more general AI was used as a base (a single body of work, even one as vast as Herzog’s, may not be enough to train an AI model on). Or it wasn’t AI at all, but one of the other two screenwriters, Anna Juul and Winiewicz himself, by whom the material was ‘edited and adapted to the screen,’ as per the press notes. There, the filmmakers are quite honest about the unsuitability of the script created by Kaspar*: “At first I thought that we were making a kind of cinematic Turing test, and that we would be able to fool the audience to believe it was a real Werner Herzog film. But I soon realised that the AI was in no way reliable as a singular filmmaker,” explains producer and ‘creative technologist’ Mads Damsbo. However, neither the film nor the press notes reveal which parts are Kaspar*’s and which are the results of human creativity.
Do not expect, therefore, an AI script which eerily veers in and out of Herzogian territories, challenging our ideas of authenticity and authorship. In fact, the most Herzogian parts of About a Hero are the actual, documentary interviews with real people about AI – a diverse group of experts and thinkers, including Deborah Bennett, Charles Mudede and Stephen Fry, who give stimulating and though-provoking insights sure to keep the discussion going after IDFA’s opening night screening.
One only wishes Herzog would have been there to ask them about their dreams.
Denmark/Germany/United States, 2024, 84 minutes
Director Piotr Winiewicz
Production Tambo Film, Pressman Film
Producers Rikke Tambo Andersen, Mads Damsbo, Sam Pressman
International sales Film Constellation
Script Kaspar*, Anna Juul, Piotr Winiewicz
Creative technologist Mads Damsbo
Cinematography Emil Aagaard
Editing Michael Aaglund, Julius Krebs Damsbo
Production design Emilia Bongilaj
Sound design Peter Storm Wich
Music Lasse Aagaard
With Vicky Krieps, Bianca Rusu, Bernd Tauber
