THEATER OF THOUGHT (Werner Herzog 2022)

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WERNER HERZOG: THEATER OF THOUGHT (2022)

Herzog asks: is it all in our brain? in another of his quick tours of a deep subject

Werner Herzog is renowned and even loved for his documentaries. He has made films about, among other things: mountaineering, Antarctica, the Soviet Union, the internet, texting while driving, meteors, the Chauvet cave, and - by far my favorite, the doomed bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, known as "Grizzly Man." His German accent and his distinctive, hushed, slightly choked-sounding almost groan of a voice seem to have become essential trademarks. But aren't they also distractions? That they may call too much attention to him and overwhelm his subjects is indicated by how often he's been imitated and satirized. But here he is again, approaching another big subject, this time, functions of the human brain. Sheri Linden, reviewing this film for Hollywood Reporter, calls it "one of his most piercing inquiries yet." Guess that depends what you mean by "piercing" and "inquiries." But the human brain certainly is one of our great unsolved mysteries.

Actually, the brain is so difficult a subject most researchers focus only on either a tiny portion of it, or on much-smaller-than-human brains, like that of the earthworm, or a tiny, delicate creature called the hydra, a small freshwater polyp whose virtue is that its nerve net is transparent and visible. It can also reconstitute itself from a mush of pulp, and turn summersaults with only one leg.

We don't learn much about the worm research because the researcher is interviewed in ,a a park sitting next to her unforthcoming, but somehow highly distracting, Nobel Prize-winning husband, and because Herzog interjects with a distracting question about whether parrots can talk. Another scientist Herzog asks about his background in rodeo, and sings a song he's composed. So what? Well, this is what our filmmaker likes to do to keep it interesting. But shouldn't science be interesting enough in itself? Not for Herzog. This is the way his quirky mind works, by digressions, and the odd personal detail.,

Thus he takes us suddenly to the Catskills, where he films and talks to his old friend Philippe Petit, the famous French highwire artist who broke the rules and made headlines by, among other things, illegally stringing a line between the Twin Towers and walking back and forth between them on one memorable morning in August of 1974. This was the subject of James Marsh's priewinning and superb 2008 film Man on Wire. That was a long time ago, but Petit still practices on the same wire he used then, every day. Starting point: to walk a tightrope, your brain has to be very calm.

From Philippe Petit Herzog moves to one of the most remarkable topics, optogenetics, the science of controlling the brains or neuro functions of animals using light. He talks to Karl Deisseroth in the Bioengineering Department at Stanford about this, and Deisseroth describes some of the moments of breakthrough when animals' behavior has been altered by adjusting their brains externally, using light. Here Herzog jumps in with a seemingly irrelevant but fascinating question: do we live in a world of our own fantasy? Deisseroth is unfazed, keeps his slight smile, and comments that the novelist Miguel de Unamuno thought so. The film shows animated films as Herzog reports that children prefer to watch drawn, artificial fish and children to real ones. This leads him to the increase in addictions to video games among the young.

A scientist in Israel has mapped two different responses to a J.D. Salinger story ("Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," if you're asking), in an experiment that has determined that now by scanning the brain of future listeners one can guess their interpretation of it. Herzog again pops an oddball question: can you guess what my films are about before I make them? No, but this leads him to the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, which has premiered many of his films, where he talks to UC Berkeley neuroscience professor Jack Gallant, an expert on mapping the thoughts of the brain, locating multiple places there where images, numbers, names and concepts are.

Gallant's talk is energetic, sharp and pertinent - so much so that he makes it seem a lot of the earlier interviews maybe didn't really click so well. Relatively, many hardly spoke, or were only a little communicative, or got edited down to a soundbite. But soon Herzog moves on from brain mapping and the Roxie and talks to someone else (in Silicon Valley, perhaps?), Tom Gruber, a pioneer of AI whom Herzog calls "the creator of 'Siri." One of the three," Gruber corrects, holding up three bunched fingers. He doesn't even do that sort of thing any more, he says, but to answer the qeestion, "How stupid is Sifi?" he checks on his phone to show that indeed, Siri can't currently distinguish between "night" (as in day and) and "knight" (as in medieval). Soon Herzog is distracted by the pretty fish images on a screen behind Gruber to speculating: "Do fish think? Are they all thinking the same thing, when they swim in a school of fish?"

Somehow this question about collective thinking leads Herzog to famous San Francisco brain surgeon Edward Chang "who has become known for decoding mental language and transforming it into synthesized speech." Chang and his whole crew at USCF consented to being filmed during brain surgery, and there's a kind of awesome feeling about watching this. (It's being done to relieve a patient of excruciating pain.) Chang's research is in how we turn thoughts into speech: he explains that the process has been found to be, a very precise one. This takes us to Ken Shepherd of Columbia, an electrical and neuroscience engineer who started at IBM making microprocessors and who now makes chips, some infinitesimal, to insert in the brain or body that can restore, say, the function of the eyesight. These extraordinary "cures" of the seriously disabled surely would warrant a whole film to themselves.

The thought of all the ways that the brain can be "manipulated' (and manipulate) through man-made neurological devices leads Herzog toward the end of his film, where he deals briefly with medical ethics. If there's a new gadget that lets us write or surf the internet with our brain, what's to prevent something (or someone) entering out brain externally and implanting commands, or making us buy products, and what's the ethics of that? Herzog asks Sara Goering, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington, about this. He also consults with Joe Fins, a doctor and expert on medical ethics at New York's Weill Cornell Medicine. We need first of all to guarantee rights to people who are afflicted to get neurological help, Fins says, but we certainly need also to be protected from the misuse of the vast progress in neutechnology by governments, and this is a burgeoining subject.

Over the ninety minutes of this film Herzog has taken us not only back and forth from coast to coast but on a remarkable meandering virtual trip through the world of neuroscience, neurotechnology, and medicine. It's been quirky at times. It's had abrupt starts and stops. Some of the speakers have barely done more than appear, while others have actually spoken engagingly and informatively. As has sometimes been the case wtih a Herzog film before, progress seems random at times. But for the Herzogian, this may be okay. The material is compelling and the authorities consulted are leading in their field. But the subjects are only dipped into. More for a fan of Herzog and his unusual turn of mind than for those deeply curious about thought and the brain.

Theater of Thought, 107 mins., debuted in 2022. It will be shown Fri., Jan. 17, 2025 at Roxie Theater (San Francisco Theatrical Premiere). Metacritic rating: 63%.