Review: We Live In Public (2009)

[Tristán White]

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC
Directed by: Ondi Timoner
Review by:  Tristán Harvey E. White
Rating: (0 to *****):    ***** (five stars)


I was privileged to attend last week a special screening in London of
this incredible documentary, followed by a thorough Q&A session with
the "star" of the film, Josh Harris, "the greatest Internet pioneer
you've never heard of".
WE LIVE IN PUBLIC won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this
year, (its director Ondi Timoner is the first person in the history of
Sundance to win this prize twice, the first time being with DiG!, her
documentary about the Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre).
It is a truly fabulous piece of work, although clearly not all of the
filming has been carried out by her but has been compiled from other
sources, such as the webcams within Harris's house. But that should
not be seen as a criticism of Ondi's work: this took ten years to make
and, according to the movie's official press release, was culled from
5,000 hours of footage. No mean feat!

So, who is Josh Harris? He was one of the innovators of the Internet,
but his ideas were way more advanced than with what the technology
then could cope. His live audio and video webcasting websites,
particularly Pseudo.com (founded 1993), were far too advanced a
concept considering the limits of pre-broadband connections (online TV
on 300 baud modems? No thank you!) - he always seemed ahead of the
game. However, as the technology - as he knew it would - caught up, he
eventually made a fortune, but then subsequently lost it when the
dotcom bubble burst. In that way, there are some similarities with a
similar documentary, STARTUP.COM, which followed the rise and fall of
Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman's govWorks.com website, a
documentary which I liked just as much as WE LIVE IN PUBLIC.

Josh also foretold the Big Brother TV concept of everyone wanting to
be 24/7 on camera and feeling like a celebrity all of the time (rather
than the 15 minutes that his hero Andy Warhol referred to), by
creating a world called Quiet, underneath the streets of New York,
where 100 or so people lived side by side, able to watch one another
interact, have sex or occasionally fight on live TV. Following the
closure of Quiet by the New York police, he decided to live with his
new girlfriend Tanya in his house, followed 24/7 by webcams.
Eventually, his ended up having something akin to a mental breakdown,
no money in the bank, no assets apart from his apple farm, and
eventually moved as far away from technology as possible: teaching
basketball to children in Ethiopia, a country where, as Josh revealed
in his Q&A after the film, he had lived as a child.

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC is a fascinating documentary because Josh Harris is
a fascinating individual and, oddly, extremely likeable in spite of us
seeing some no-holds-barred footage of Josh at his worse - whether as
his clown alter ego (Luvvy), whether it's his cold video message
saying goodbye to his dying mother; treating his former protégés from
Quiet with contempt; or refusing to acknowledge that Tanya was ever
his girlfriend but rather that he had auditioned her for the role -
something that Tanya and Josh's own family vehemently deny.
Incidentally, regarding the latter, the viewer is likely to believe
Tanya's side of the story (although how much of that is thanks to
Ondi's clever editing remains to be seen; in the Q&A following the
film, Josh stressed again that Tanya was always a pseudo girlfriend).

I believe that the fact that we can get to like this occasionally
obnoxious character so much is testament to Ondi's skill at making a
great (and indeed, very amusing) documentary. In the end, you really
really feel sorry for this great entrepreneur.

Josh Harris was clearly an innovator, before his time. Not that we
should get too carried away with such epithets. Jennifer Ringley
started documenting her life on JenniCam in 1996 (and charging for it
in 1998) long before both Quiet and Josh's own home-based webcam
experience started. The original Dutch version of Big Brother was a
contemporary of Quiet's although no one (except perhaps Josh) would
have envisaged that Endemol's concept would have gone global and be
sold around the world., so clearly Josh did grasp the zeitgeist here
(in fact, the Dutch Big Brother ended on 30 December 1999, two days
before Quiet was busted by the police). But even this isn't entirely
original: Dutch TV show NUMMER 28 put strangers together in a house
and monitored them in 1991. But what Quiet reminded me most of was
Jean-Michel Barjol's avant-garde happening from 1972, WHAT A FLASH!,
in which about 100 strangers were kept locked in a warehouse and told
they could improvise as though they were on a spaceship and have just
a few days left to live (look out for a pre-LAST TANGO appearance of
Maria Schnieider). The resulting orgies and fights were very
reminiscent of the stuff we see in WE LIVE IN PUBLIC, but more to the
point it shows that even a great innovator such as Josh Harris is not
completely original. Where he was ahead of the game was in his vision
of how the Internet would soon be playing catch-up with his ideas.

Following the screening, in the Q&A, someone asked him about what is
going be the next big thing. Josh told us that he is now back in the
US, in Los Angeles to be exact, creating an Internet TV network called
"The Wired City" which will define Web 4.0, in which thousands of
people will basically be turning their own homes into TV studios,
making their intimate lives public directly from their TV. Following
that, Josh succeeded in losing me, and probably losing many of the
audience members, as he spoke enthusiastically about what will happen
after Web 4.0 and "borg interfaces". I wish him luck. And I don't
doubt him for a moment.

One must wonder whether we have seen an early contender for "Best
documentary" at the Oscars on 7 March 2010. I dearly hope so, having
been overlooked by the Academy for DiG!, but I am doubtful. This is a
very strong category this year, with powerfully mediatic contenders
such as ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL; CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY, not to
mention THE BEACHES OF AGNES, BURMA VJ and my top tip, Kirby Dick's
OUTRAGE, all vying for one of those five nominated places. Whether
Ondi Timoner's delightful documentary manages the make it there
remains to be seen.



Reviewer:  Tristán White
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90 minutes.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/
WE LIVE IN PUBLIC went on general release in the UK on 13 November
2009 and will be shown at 14 screens throughout the UK from 17
November 2009, including four in London. The movie has already had a
limited release in Los Angeles and New York, and is coming to
Minneapolis, Cleveland, Washington DC and Portland within the next few
weeks.