Michael Palm
Austria | 2011 | 95 min
Languages : English, German
Subtitle : English
Welcome to the big brother era! By editing “low-grade” CCT video surveillance images, accompanied by explanatory voice-off dialogue between “experts” (neurologists, theologians, sociologists…), Michael Palm provides an analysis of the alarming ability of “developed” societies to impose the mechanization of perception in the public space and in medicine.
“It’s just a load of slogans. When they broadcast information, they don’t expect you to believe it but to behave as if you did. In other words, information is precisely the control system”, wrote Gilles Deleuze… not imagining that this “information” would be conveyed by technologies used without any real restrictions by States and their security forces to predict what they cannot prevent. Each individual is now the object of permanent surveillance, which looks for and finds potential criminals everywhere in the name of “preventive security”. Orwell could not have foreseen that we would all become “Little Brothers” engaged in a virtual war all against all, or zealous servants, new Leviathans. Michael Palm has perused and edited hundreds of low-quality images taken by security cameras to create Low Definition Control – Malfunctions #0, an analytical film accompanied by voice-off dialogue involving neurologists, theologians, sociologists, etc., questioning our frightening capacity to accept the mechanization of perception in the public space and in medicine.
Emmanuel Chicon
Translation BMP Translations