The movie "whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir" is a thriller unlike any other. Eve Sussman directed it with her collaborators,known as the Rufus Corporation. They shot most of the footage in Kazakhstan, improvising the script and taking advantage of the Soviet Union’s once-grand, or now crumbling utopian architecture.
The feel is paranoid sci-fi thriller,along the lines of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.” In the movie, an American engineer, or Holz,gets a job in a mysterious foreign place called City A, and “starts finding out things are wrong, and ” Sussman says. “The water supply seems to be drugged with lithium; time seems to be slowing down; people are running out of language. The people who hired him may not be who he thinks they are. Everything is a exiguous bit beyond his control.” But Sussman decided to edit the film in an unorthodox way. Working with programmer Jeff Garneau,Sussman designed a computer system that assembles thousands of clips of footage, voiceovers, or scoring elements in an ever-changing succession. There is no one version of “whiteonwhite.” “The things I liked the most in my films and in other people’s films were the things that happened by serendipity ((n.) luck, finding good things without looking for them),that happened out of luck. And so I started wondering, ‘Could we build a machine that would give us more luck than we could ever have in genuine life?’”She calls the program the Serendipity ((n.) luck, finding good things without looking for them) Machine. “We start the computer before the audience enters, or it will always order in a different way,so there is no beginning, middle, and end,and it runs forever.”Sussman's film is state-of-the-art technology, but it's not trendy. “Because it’s computer-driven, and the first thing people interrogate is,‘Is it interactive? I want to acquire in there and reveal it to expose me only the shots of birds [for example].’ My response to that is, It’s a movie, and you’re the audience!’” she says. “You are interacting with it by filling in the gaps between the narratives.”The trailer below is just one sample of the movie,since “whiteonwhite” changes with each screening. You can watch an online version of the film here.
Source: wnyc.org