Werner Herzog has for decades been our seeker of anguishing extremes, from the snail-drawn atmospheres of Fitzcarraldo (1982) to the extravagant—and fatal—hubris of an obsessive intent on living among grizzly bears in Grizzly Man (2005). His studies of the Antarctic wasteland in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and of Paleolithic cave art in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) bring stillness and focus to maximal saturation, holding on evocative images until they yield a new feeling of time. Staring at a bison shape on a rock wall, or the diffusion of light in the waters under an ice cap, we feel we might be hallucinating.



“Pay attention” could be said to be Herzog’s cinematic mantra, his mission being to cleanse the windows of perception and recover, if only for a moment, some imperiled sense of gravity and importance. In From One Second to the Next (2013), a 35-minute documentary commissioned by AT&T on the dangers of texting and driving, he keeps the camera fixed not on technology, but on the people who lost loved ones when a driver’s attention strayed. Herzog is well aware of the nature of our distracted present, and deeply fearful of its outcome.

Which brings us, hopping and skipping over the many triumphs of a long and engaged career, to Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, Herzog’s new full-length documentary about our digital age. The very idea of such a switch-up boggles—that the brooding and patient explorer of the world’s legible surfaces should now take on the inchoate sublime itself: the invisible and all-pervasive internet.

Lo and Behold wants to be everything—survey, interrogation, bedazzled act of witness. Herzog presents ten titled sections that each bear storyboard headings, from “The Glory of the Net,” a nod to the possibilities of collective collaboration, to “Earthly Invaders,” a look at the ease and danger of hacking. The segments are, by turns, informational and exploratory. We see talking heads—gurus like Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, and Leonard Kleinrock, who created the mathematical theory that underpins the internet’s network—alongside an impressive array of neuroscientists, robotics experts, and astronomers. But this parade of experts only serves to highlight the core question: How does one address what is arguably the most important single development of our time, without simply mirroring its totalized diffuseness? Can Herzog bring his trademark attentiveness to bear on what is, in so many ways, a force that is shattering our attention?

The dilemma is vexing. I have come at it myself over the years from one direction and another, essaying, arguing, trying to isolate just where the transformations impinge on what we still regard as the familiar human verities. But to plant the lever you need a fixed place to stand, and increasingly it feels like everything is in motion, fluid. We must address not just the manifold technologies that are intermingling—the “what” of it all—but the matter of their effects on every aspect of private and public life. Herzog’s strategy is to move in stages—from a panoramic, if glancing, overview to a summoning of implications and portents.