The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams, 2023) (Patreon)

It's patently obvious that Eduardo Williams' The Human Surge 3 is unlike pretty much any film that's ever been made. That's because Williams is employing new technologies that were made for 3D virtual reality, but adapting them for 2D feature cinema. Using cameras that I presume look a great deal like the multi-lensed spheres atop Google Earth vehicles, Williams is capable of disrupting the linear perspective that photography inherited from Renaissance painting, and this alone is worth the price of admission. Modern art historians, from Erwin Panofsky  and Ernst Gombrich to Norman Bryson and Svetlana Alpers, have all agreed that the geometrical perspective formulated by Alberti distorts human vision, which actually follows the convex shape of the eye and communicates it to the brain. What traditional perspective loses in fidelity to our bodily experience, however, it gains in systematicity.

So it's true that The Human Surge 3 reintroduces the natural "distortions" of vision that the cinema has ironed out for 128 years. Indeed, the movement of figures through Williams' cinematic space often resembles our multidimensional clicking through Google Earth, moving across distinct planes that are connected by rounded hinges, creating a kind of Mercator projection of circumscribed areas like city streets, hilltops, and expanses of ocean. The only film I've seen that even vaguely resembles The Human Surge 3 is by another Williams. Blake's Coorow-Latham Road (2011), a work that actually used Google Earth as a compositional tool. While that film took us down one long single road, The Human Surge 3 moves his small coterie of personalities (they are not really performances, exactly) across national and continental boundaries. After all, since the film's radical re-envisioning of human space entails overlapping edits, tabs, and joints between adjacent planes, why should Williams hold back? It's all creative geography, and always has been.

Williams' last feature, The Human Surge, moves across territories and populations in a very straightforward manner. It was a triptych, and although the various spaces are linked through Internet relationships, digital communication, and of course global capital, each of the three diegetic arenas maintains its individual integrity. Many critics described Human Surge (1) as "hyperlink cinema," a film that traversed many disparate trains of thought like so many browser windows or Wikipedia deep-dive excursions. However Human Surge 3 -- a film so aggressively forward thinking that it leapfrogs over the concept of a second installment -- features characters who enter stations in Peru and exit in Taiwan or Sri Lanka. In addition to creating a world of travel that moves at the speed of thought, an almost physical remapping of the planet, The Human Surge 3 dispenses with ordinary zones of dramaturgy, instead staging lengthy sequences in the middle of the water or on an arduous hill. As Williams melds different space-times into single scenes, even the basic rules of gravity are up for debate. Like living clip-art, people occupy the same location, but cannot possibly share a contiguous environment.

So yes, The Human Surge 3 is a major work of art, and if we give it proper attention, it could change the terms for cinema -- the clash between photographic inscription and embodied, phenomenological space -- as dramatically as Apichatpong Weerasethakul did twenty years ago. Nevertheless, I am still deeply ambivalent about the things Williams chooses to communicate with these exciting new tools. In a sense, The Human Surge 3 is a hanging-around film, or better yet, a fucking-around film. Its globe-hopping collection of friends are young, queer, seemingly working class, and given to repetitive dialogue. Now it should be noted that Williams' use of key phrases and fractured conversations never tries to reflect ordinary speech. The language of The Human Surge 3 is more like poetry, its meaning more sidelong and implied than narratively articulated. 

But in much the same way I was left rather cold by the first Human Surge, Williams' new film displays a sensibility that is simultaneously freewheeling and insubstantial. I don't think this is a case of a director being so fixated on formal matters that thematic issues fall by the wayside. Rather, Williams seems to think that the use of moving-image technology to reorganize cinematic as well as national space ought to simultaneously reconfigure our notions of identity and subjectivity. This certainly makes sense. If we become unmoored from our lived environment and link ourselves digitally to a new world order -- not exactly virtual, but not held down by the ballast of the organized spaces of capitalism -- our notion of the self would evolve in the bargain.

Does The Human Surge 3 accomplish this? I think that Williams is depicting his own demimonde, the beautiful friends who he loves and desires. This is moving, up to a point, but it's also insular. These people are not ciphers, but they do not emerge as distinct individuals either. Perhaps Williams is too close to this universe to be able to subject it to a more abstract organization. It's a film that exemplifies an ethos but cannot fully open it to the spectator.

Then again, maybe I am just too goddamned old.