Netzwelt Archiv: Themen	04.08.98

 
FILM

A Search for Ourselves and the Future

by David Hudson
reprinted by permission.

Anticipation mounted as an audience selected from those who have contributed to the short history of what was once called "cyberculture" strolled into the modest cinema tucked away in the back of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Icons in a world small enough to grant them cyberlebrity, ranging from such first generation digerati as Howard Rheingold to well-established second generation upstarts like Carl Steadman, chatted quietly with curious newcomers and lesser knowns. Eventually, as the seven o'clock show time came and went without the show, the crowd grew rowdier and more amicable.

San Francisco Examiner columnist Rebecca Eisenberg leapt rows of seats to greet and gab with any and everybody while Wired News columnist Steve Silberman quietly allowed a small entourage to gather around him. Gradually, as the cinema filled up, it became clear that just about everyone present was also to be featured, even if just for a few moments, in the film to be shown that June evening: Home Page.

Documentary filmmaker Doug Block discovered the Web early in 1996, and while he was immediately put off by the shovelware from the established media, he was fascinated by the online diaries and personal sites flourishing, multiplying and linking to each other. Block set off with a bit of start up money from the US cable company Cinemax to document the source of his fascination, and later, his production partner Jane Weiner also won the support of ZDF and Arte. Not only will the film tour the film festival circuit over the next several months, but eventually, European audiences will be able to catch it on television as well.

As they should. In its present state, the film runs almost two hours, but it's one of those that just doesn't feel like it. A mere twenty minutes or so into it, anyone who has any sort of inexplicably irresistible relationship to the Web is going to realize that Home Page is THE film they've got to show to all their friends and loved ones who just don't "get it" -- yet.

In a voice-over that begins the film, Block himself wonders what it is about the Web that attracts him so powerfully that he feels moved to capture his experience with it via another medium, film. He checks in with a few of his friends and family who have also caught the bug and quickly learns that all links eventually lead to Justin Hall. Block sets out to meet this prolific wonder who has pounded out close to two thousand pages at his site. "I sensed almost the minute I saw him (and saw that hair!) that I had found a 'star' to hang the story on," Block tells Jon Lebkowsky of the Austin Chronicle.

As a "star," Hall works not only because he's left his digital fingerprints all over the Web or because his career traces many of the highlights of the medium's development (from HotWired to Electric Minds to ZDTV) but also because he's so damn watchable.

Block documents Hall's turn as an evangelist for the Web as he travels across the US teaching the basics of HTML to non-profit organizations or whoever happens to be gathered in whichever cafe he stumbles across. Hall lands a teaching job at a university, and before Block thinks twice, he's fallen under Hall's spell and has his own site up.

But it isn't just his outrageous get up and hairdo ("God is my hairdresser," Hall once wrote at his site, explaining why he went for nearly two years without cutting or even combing the tangled mess piled high on his head) nor his mile-a-minute way with words that makes Hall the ideal protagonist for Block's film. As Home Page unreels, it becomes clear that Block is searching for a way out of the professional shell he's built up around himself, a way back to his family and to himself.

Many feel that the true star of the film is the woman who appears for a total of perhaps three minutes -- Block's wife, Marjorie. The one rule for Hall and his online cohorts is complete and explicit honesty in what they write for all the world to see. At one point, Hall realizes that he's just published the very last secret he'd held from his readers, and at Block's request, he reveals it again on film. Seems that when he was fourteen, Hall discovered that he could hook his legs up behind his head and fellate himself.

In another scene, one in the long line of Hall's girlfriends checks his site to check up on the state of their relationship. For some, such as Hall's college roommates, such honesty can be brutal. But for Block, it turns out to be therapeutic, and wiping away a calm tear toward the end of the film, Marjorie looks straight into Block's camera and says, "I feel like you've come home."

Home Page will no doubt come across as a distinctly American film to European audiences. Besides Hall's Kerouac-like road trip in a series of Greyhound buses, all this "coming to terms with one's own feelings" may make some European viewers queasy at best. Yet the culture that sprouted up around the Web, particularly during 1996, when most of the footage was shot, was itself distinctly American, and intensely so.

Block follows Hall into the offices of Wired, for example, where co-founder and then Editor-in-Chief and Wired Ventures CEO Louis Rossetto waves him off as a nut. But the offices themselves are bustling with digital revolutionaries. In the corner of the HotWired loft, Carl Steadman has set up bunk beds next to the equipment he's bought. "It cuts down commute time considerably," Steadman states flatly. "I was warned that the Suckster was some kind of snide, sarcastic, snarly beast," Block says. "In fact, I found him surprisingly warm, even vulnerable. As well as snide, sarcastic, and snarly."

Steadman's segment in the film is surprisingly moving, as it turns out. Block asks him why he's put up on his site the horrifying images of the wreckage a huge truck has made out of Steadman's girlfriend and the car she'd been driving before the accident that killed her, and Steadman calmly explains that he had no other way of sorting through the documentation. Steadman's stare into the camera is unrelenting, yet his piercing blues eyes are also misty.

And surely few European businesses have ever launched with the send off employees at Electric Minds gave their online community site. Minutes before the site was to go online, Minds honcho Howard Rheingold picked up an empty can and started drumming and chanting. Others joined him immediately: "Change the World!" "Make money!"

The chanters then gathered in a circle, held hands, and sent an squeeze from hand to hand through each employee to the last finger that hit the key and opened the site's virtual doors at 11:11 on November 11, 1996. A roar of jubilation rose and Justin Hall and Rheingold rush into each others arms. Freeze frame. The titles read: "Seven months later, Electric Minds went out of business."

The scene must have been tough for Rheingold to watch. He plays such a prominent role in the film because Block sees him as something of a father figure for Justin Hall whose real father killed himself when Hall was just eight years old.

But after the credits rolled and the ovation waned, the lights came up on a crowd that had gone through an emotional roller coaster many had experienced personally the first time around. They had lived their lives, written about them, published their triumphs and agonies, and then talked to Doug Block's camera about the meta-experience. That evening, they lived through that intense year all over again, and many reacted the way Rheingold did when confronted and asked for their verdict on the film. Rheingold paused, the crowd hushed, and finally: "I think it's a work of art."

The audience cheered and Doug Block beamed from ear to ear. "I came across a quote recently from a book called Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors by a guy named Stefik," says Block. "'Our search for understanding of the information highway is, ultimately, a search for ourselves and the future we choose to inhabit.' That kind of sums it all up in a nutshell."

SPIEGEL ONLINE 32/1998

Copyright © 1996-1999 D.B. Block. All Rights Reserved