DVD review: We Live in Public by Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner Ondi Timoner
Josh Harris in public
A cautionary tale of the effect of the technological age on the human mind, this documentary by Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner Ondi Timoner portrays the ‘public life’ of a man named Josh Harris.
Josh is a man whose work demonstrates that existing in the modern world means existing ‘in public’, and whose vision has been proven both piercingly accurate and compromisingly ahead of its time.
In the late 80s and early 90s, Josh, who began as a market researcher in New York in 1984, became a multi-millionaire by correctly predicting and buying into the ‘online’ market at a time when the internet was unfashionable and for “nerds”.
Josh set up Pseudo.com, a television network housed solely online, which led to him being dubbed “The Warhol of Web TV” by Times Magazine, and threw lavish parties to recruit the freshest young talent of the time. He believed that people the world over would eventually use the internet to put every aspect of their lives into the public domain.
He went on to set up “Quiet”, a purpose-built underground bunker where people volunteered to live, eat, sleep, film and be filmed in an ‘anything goes’ environment for 30 days over the turn of the millennium.
The only stipulations were that they remained under 24-hour surveillance, and that the footage was owned by Josh Harris and his internet company.
Although at times a brutal environment for its inhabitants, (one subject cheerfully dubbed the project “Orwellian”), it’s revealing how we learn from the footage selected for this film that many of the ‘citizens of Quiet’ willingly submitted to harsh interrogation and being stripped of their privacy and dignity in front of cameras.
When Josh and his then-girlfriend Tanya (a former presenter from the Psuedo.com network) became the subjects of the experiment, turning their apartment into a ‘Big Brother house’ and using the chat function on their website to connect with their viewers in real time, it was clear that the negative aspects of living in the public eye took their toll.
The relationship suffered as the couple became more interested in what people were saying about them than in the lives they were actually living.
It has to be said though that it is only through the interviews with his family and friends interspersed with the documentary footage that we find out enough about Josh to have any interest in his life.
Having described how he was brought up watching television as a substitute for real relationships, they discuss his detachment from the real world, his eccentricity, his persona as part genius, and part victim of his own culture and design.
It all suggests that the film is less about the environment in which we live and are heading to, than about the psychological effects of a media age.
The documentary reveals that media, in the interests of providing more and more information and choice allows us less and less humanity and privacy.
DVD extras include: Behind the Scenes at the Sundance Film Festival 2009, a ‘Making of’ with Ondi Timoner, Commentary by Josh Harris, and ‘Inside the Bunker’ - a closer look at ‘Quiet’.
It is a weirdly fascinating to watch a film like this; in ten short years, the scenarios predicted and practiced by Josh Harris have become commonplace - people star in their own internet films on Youtube, halt their daily lives to update their Twitter feed or Facebook status, vote on dozens of different reality TV shows…
But these are not members of the public claiming their ‘15 minutes’ of fame. This is everyone, all of the time.
Director and narrator Ondi Timoner
We Live In Public is available from Dogwoof
To submit a review of a book, course, film, magazine or website, please email judy@EssentialWriters.com
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