Possessed (2018)

Directed by: Metahaven, Rob Schröder | 67 minutes | documentary | Starring: Olivia Lonsdale, Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek

It is hard to imagine for generations, but there was a time before the smartphone, the worldwide web and the digital revolution. A time when people were not connected to each other 24/7, but ‘just’ picked up the phone – first with a dial and later on push buttons – if they wanted to know how a family member or friend was doing or wanted to book a table in a restaurant. Payments were not made with ‘Tikkies’ but with transfer cards and when information had to be found, maps, telephone directories, Yellow Pages and encyclopedias were used. ‘Selfies’ didn’t exist; a picture of yourself could only be taken by someone else. Times change. Since the internet and the smartphone entered the lives of (western) people, life has become easier and faster on the one hand. On the other hand, we are now much more egocentric in life and are more concerned with the outside than with the inside: constantly taking pictures of ourselves is just one example. We worry too much about how we come across to our digital ‘friends’ and let our self-image depend on it. The Dutch-made visual essay ‘Possessed’ (2018) denounces the smartphone as the source of all evil. With a stream of penetrating associative, poetic images and confrontational ‘found footage’, the effects of the smartphone on our society and on ourselves are depicted. And that’s not an image that makes you happy.

The focus is on a young woman (the talented Dutch-British actress Olivia Lonsdale, who we know from the 2015 Golden Calf award-winning TV film ‘No kings in our blood’), who intended us to be provocative through a voice-over. asks questions. We also see her, lying in a grubby bedroom, with deep bags under her eyes and staring blankly ahead; her cell phone is the only item with her. But we also see fragments of recordings made with those mobile phones. Countless selfies, in the most idiotic and life-threatening places. Four young people in a car films how they crash. Vanity of young women and men, who try to brush away their insecurity with smoothing filters. Tourists who can no longer see the splendor of their surroundings because they are only busy taking the perfect photo, to show the home front (and all those followers on social media!) how wonderful their lives are. Most shocking is the image of tourists who, to loud cheers, film precious ice caps plunging into the ocean. So far ‘Possessed’ has been effective in exciting its audience; the stream of images that is fired makes you think about your own ‘digital behaviour’.

But filmmakers Metahaven (a design and media collective consisting of Vinca Kruk and Daniël van der Velden) and Rob Schröder (the documentary maker who made the award-winning film ‘Ouwehoeren’ (2011) among other things) want to impose even more confrontational images on us. They move Lonsdale to a ruined nameless town in the former Yugoslavia, where she plunges into a pile of old socialist books and finds herself in the legacy of communism: a desolate airbase, bombed-out buildings and more sadness. The refugee crisis is also touched upon in the maze of images that are fired at the viewer. Meanwhile, political scientists Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek try to explain the consequences of years of neoliberal policies and advocate their philosophy of accelerationism: Man is destroying not only the earth but also themselves and the values ​​that have been fought for for years; let things escalate and then we’ll see what the world will look like afterwards (just put it bluntly). Lonsdale, too, in her clash with history, is forced to think about the future. But how do you avoid becoming a zombie or a shadow of yourself in today’s technological climate? And how do you keep contact with others realistic and real?

‘Possessed’ takes a lot of work and comes across as pretentious due to its excessive stylization. The issues raised are very interesting in themselves, but the way in which Metahaven and Schröder design their visual essay creates an unbridgeable distance between the film and the audience. For the general public ‘Possessed’ is too heavy, too cold and too artistic. Provocative questions are being asked – can we still pull ourselves out of the rubble caused by the digitization of our lives or is it already too late for that? – but the answers are unfortunately far from satisfactory.