WE LIVE IN PUBLIC Review - Written by Mathius Mack Gertz

Title: We Live in Public
Year/Country: USA, 2008, color
Director: Ondi Timoner
Producers: Ondi Timoner, Keirda Bahruth
Editors: Josh Altman, Ondi Timoner
Running Time: 90 minutes
Website: www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com


Documentaries have always been associated in the publics mind with reality, actuality and objectivity. In the beginning there was Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895). In 1922 Robert Flaherty took a romantic approach to documentary with Nanook of the North while the Soviets like Dziga Vertov took a propagandist approach to cinema. In the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s documentary in the hands of filmmakers like John Grierson and Leni Riefenstahl became more of an auteur’s medium. Taking a direct cinema approach, actualities became a re-presentation of reality that separated the realist filmmaker from the artist. Then starting in the 1960”s till the end of the century, filmmakers like DA Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back) in music and Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies) in institutions brought a cinema verite style to documentary. At the turn of the century Michael Moore took a page out of reality television and turned objective investigative documentary filmmaking into subjective and narcissistic spectacle. Enter Ondi Timoner.

With a filmmaking style that harkens back to many earlier pioneers and to Frederick Wiseman in particular, Ondi has already amassed an enviable body of work. Her latest, We Live in Public, is no less an offering. She takes us on a journey into the internet that covers more than a twenty year period starting in 1984. With Josh Harris, one of the internets pioneers and detritus, as its main unsympathetic character, Ondi culled through thousands of hours of Harris’s own footage as well as her own thousands of hours of footage (taken of Harris over a decade) to force us to take stock of our relationship to the internet, and to assess it and our future together. Will mankind become a virtual collective with many superficial relationships or will we rebel against the machine and rediscover our human connections in real time and space? Ondi cannot give us many answers, only history and questions to ponder.

We Live In Public won the 2009 Sundance Grand Jury prize and rightfully so. Most likely it will be nominated for an Oscar as well. What it needs is you, an audience. In limited theatrical run in major cities around the country, We Live In Public is well worth the price of admission. Predictive as Network (1976) and The Truman Show (1998 ), it is informative, entertaining, thought provoking and a potentially chilling vision. See it…before it sees you.