Movie Review
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DREAMS REWIRED
Directed by Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart, and Thomas Tode. Written by Luksch, Reinhart, Tode, and Mukul Patel. Narrated by Tilda Swinton. At the Brattle. 88 minutes. Unrated (as G: Old images, new ideas).
‘Every once in a while, a revolutionary technology comes along that promises to change everything.’’
In the past two decades, those words have most frequently been applied to the Internet. In “Dreams Rewired,’’ a provocative little tone-poem of a documentary opening today at the Brattle, it’s applied to the railway, the telephone, the movies, and television. And the takeaway is that our hopes — and mostly our fears — haven’t changed in over a century of technological innovation.
The heady brainchild of a German consortium of artist-filmmakers headed by Manu Luksch and her writing partner Mukul Patel (Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode are co-director/writers), “Dreams Rewired’’ summons archival footage from the 1880s through the 1930s to examine how each new breakthrough collapsed time and/or place and drew humans together in a growing social-neural network while at the same time creating new dilemmas to confront. The railway redrew the psychic space of America so that the frontier was mere days away. The telegraph collapsed it further. The recorded voice gave bosses more control over their secretaries but secretaries more control over their time.
And so on: The arrival of the movies forged new relationships of voyeurism and imitation while offending guardians of morality; it also shrunk the world and introduced us to global cultures while indicating new ways to exploit them. Radio, when it first came on the scene, held the potential of each citizen with his or her own broadcast device — we see footage of a chic Jazz Age woman with a transmitter in her garter — and early television held out the promise of eyes looking everywhere and seeing everything.
But who wants everything about their lives to be seen? What’s subversive and fun about “Dreams Rewired’’ is the ways it draws connections to conversations we’re having right now about social media and our growing digital hive mind without ever mentioning such developments by name. It’s all there in the old black-and-white footage: Fears of a surveillance state (film cameras on rooftops letting police invisibly patrol gangs), the perils of star worship (a silent-era fan going gaga over an onscreen idol), the dangers of corporate and governmental control (citizens being deprived of the radio airwaves until only the short-wave frequencies are available for their use).
At one point, the filmmakers toss up the mind-boggling image of a woman in the 1920s toting a boxy portable phone — she grounds it to a fire hydrant and uses her umbrella as an antenna — that functions as a prehistoric iPhone. Says the narrator of early television, “We broadcast ourselves across the sky: a book of faces.’’
That narrator is Tilda Swinton — of course it’s Tilda Swinton — and she hovers over “Dreams Rewired’’ like the robot from “Metropolis’’ giving a TED talk. Every so often, the script forces the actress to get overly cute, as when an image of a woman “broadcasting’’ phonograph music over a telephone prompts Swinton to burble, “Check out the remix, yo.’’ Luksch makes the point that many of these early technologies were embraced as tools of liberation and communication by women and utopian political groups, but sections on filmmaking pioneer Alice Guy Blache — who directed arguably the first narrative film in 1896 — and the early Russian directors deserve more than the drive-bys they receive here.
But “Dreams Rewired’’ is scattered by necessity and intent, and it throws off enough sparks to set your brain reeling. As the film ends and you check your text messages, keep in mind Swinton’s cool, laconic voice intoning “Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one truly is’’ — and remember that she’s talking about the 1920s.
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DREAMS REWIRED
Directed by Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart, and Thomas Tode. Written by Luksch, Reinhart, Tode, and Mukul Patel. Narrated by Tilda Swinton. At the Brattle. 88 minutes. Unrated (as G: Old images, new ideas).
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.
