When you zoom in or out far enough, everything you look at turns abstract. Only for a brief period, you can recognise what it is you’re seeing. This is what happens when watching Users, a mesmerizing visual essay on the impact of technology. It doesn’t judge but observes and poses questions, which don’t necessarily need answering.
Technology, is it good or bad? And how does it affect our world, our children, nature and our relationships? Filmmaker Talma Amadia captures the world of technology and she captures the world through technology – for instance using high-end drones to create stunning birds-eye views of breaking waves, symmetrical patterns in roads and cultivated lands, roaring bush fires and a freight train running through the night, which is reminiscent of the never stopping train in Boon Jo Ho’s post-apocalyptic tale Snow Piercer.
We are all on that ceaselessly travelling train, going nowhere, but trying to live our best life while doing that (like the swimmer, moving endlessly against an artificial current while staying in one place). The impressive images taken from afar are juxtaposed with intimate shots of vulnerable life: a baby being rocked to sleep in a robotic cradling bed – a scene that lasts for over a hypnotising minute. She also catches her child’s face watching a screen: the innocent young eyes eagerly trying to soak up what they’re seeing.
Meditative music gives the images an even greater sense of contemplation, although sometimes it enhances the feeling of anxiety or alienation. When the camera runs alongside the speeding train, the rhythm of the vehicle morphs gradually into electronic beats, stimulating the feeling of being in a rat race, maybe the proverbial race to the bottom which the world now seems to be in.
Amadia also offers some interesting facts – given in a synthetic voice-over we later learn is her own voice, but abstracted. We follow deep-sea divers installing a pipeline containing glass fibre cables on the bottom of the ocean as her robotic self tells us the earth contains enough of these cables crisscrossing the oceans to wrap the earth almost thirty times.
She also focuses on older technology, like the photo genetic pumpjacks in a desolate landscape in the United States. Technology which will become extinct, like the old guy – the only one who is being interviewed – who has come to terms with his destination. He doesn’t need much except his dog, aptly named Little Bit. As his image is replaced by that of a pumpjack against a beautiful sunset, you hear sober music resembling the screeching recorder at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West. It is a brief and subtle moment of comic relief, which we find more of in the film.
The sequences might sometimes feel slightly random if you’re trying to find a connection between everything you see and hear. But maybe you don’t have to understand everything, or does it make sense only when you zoom out, just enough to see the bigger picture?
Users offers you moments of contemplation in a fast world, without forcing an opinion. It is something to watch, marvel at or wonder about, and the film provides you ample time to do just that. The camera zooms in and out on objects, processers, users of technology and the consequences of it – such as the continuous stream of obsolete motherboards in a recycling plant. It also gives you moments of sheer beauty, with satisfying pictures of perfect synchronicity and balance.
Users also evokes feelings of anxiety and awe, looking at our own mortality and fragility compared to the capabilities and longevity of technology and nature. It is a humbling experience but at the same time makes you feel proud to be human: for only we can appreciate the beauty of it all, and of this documentary.
USA/Mexico, 2020, 81’
Director Natalia Almada
Cinematography Bennett Cerf
Editor Natalia Almada
Music Dave Cerf Kronos Quartet
Production An Altumara Films, Department of Motion Picture production
World Sales Film Constellation London
Producers Josh Penn, Elizabeth Lodge Stepp, Natalia Almada
Co-producers Daniela Alatorre Elivia Shaw
Executive Producers Sean O’Grady, Bill Stertz, Charlotte Cook, Tony Hsieh, Roberto Grande, Mimi Pham, Kathryn Everett, Bryn Mooser, Noah Kadner, Rune Hansen, Mónica Reina.
