Filmage the invisible? Nothing excites Jean-Stéphane Bron more. The Swiss director already has several documentaries to his credit that confront objects that are a priori impossible to show in the cinema. In 2003, he looked into the question of genetic engineering, taking an interest in the parliamentary debates which then surrounded a bill from the Swiss Parliament (But im Bundeshuus: The Swiss Genius, 2003). After a foray into the field of high finance (Traders2009), politics (The Blocher Experience2013), then culture (The Opera2017), here he is again arriving in the laboratories with his cameras to bring, this time, to the screen the advances in science concerning the functioning of the brain.
Divided into five chapters, his latest feature film* takes the form of a journey across the world in the footsteps of the greatest researchers in the field of neuroscience. “I don’t know how many kilometers I did for this film, but it probably represents several tours of the globe,” jokes the 52-year-old filmmaker. The journey begins in the suburbs of Geneva, where Alexandre Pouget is developing a new generation of artificial intelligence capable of integrating a draft of digital consciousness. Faced with his son Hadrian, a young researcher at Oxford, who fears the consequences of such a project, he justifies it in a terrifying way. “For him, the human species is doomed to disappear. His speech is radical. It calls for a response commensurate with this challenge”, summarizes Jean-Stéphane Bron, who refrains, as in his previous films, from judging his subjects here, leaving this task to his spectators.
The director then takes us to Seattle. There, Christof Koch tries to map the electromagnetic activity of the brain in the hope of locating, precisely, the zone where empathy and love are born. Jean-Stéphane Bron will then take us on a journey to Venice, in the footsteps of Niels Birbaumer, who aims to establish contact with patients suffering from the syndrome of confinement, this total paralysis which immures beings in their bodies without them being able to communicate with the outside. Thanks to a helmet with electrodes playing the brain-machine interfaces, he will manage to offer some of these patients the possibility of exchanging with their loved ones. Especially in a moving scene where a father offers his three-year-old son to watch a cartoon.READ ALSOWhen the Covid shrinks the brain!
The material of this documentary may be arid, but Jean-Stéphane Bron’s great talent is to make it moving by opening, in each chapter, a door on the intimacy of the researchers testifying in front of his camera. The intimate flaws of each appear as so many engines. Are Christof Koch’s efforts at the Allen Institute to understand what causes affects the result of the fact that his dog is on the verge of death and that the scientist is struggling to overcome the grief caused in him by this disappearance ?When neuroscience collides with psychology
If David Rudrauf, a young researcher, plans to endow his robots with a form of sensitive intelligence into which the memories of humans could one day be downloaded…, is it not to try to overcome this frontier of death that he sees in a different light since he knows he’s going to become a father? And if the roboticist Aude Billard tries to replicate the intelligence of the gesture, is it only to allow an automated arm to assemble, instead of a human hand, the delicate clockwork mechanisms that make the reputation of companies bordering Lake Geneva? Doesn’t it form, somewhere in it, the crazy dream of an augmented humanity?
The strength of this film is to approach, without heaviness, the moral dilemmas and the metaphysical abysses which hide behind each of the promises sketched out by the advances of science. “An American company has developed a brain-controlled artificial arm that allows amputees to regain the use of their limb. Even if it awakens in us the fantasy of cyborgs, the man-machines of science fiction, we could say that it’s great. But what if the company that makes these arms goes bankrupt and no longer has the parts to repair the living? These people will find themselves doubly handicapped, in their flesh and in their prosthesis”, emits the director.
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Other questions emerge here, left in suspense in Jean-Stéphane Bron’s previous documentaries and which revolve around power and democracy, and, more generally, what makes up society today. The new world created by the thought-reading technologies evoked in the documentary by Niels Birbaumer opens, in fact, worrying perspectives. “What will happen when the big Californian companies that already use big data are able to understand how we react to marketing campaigns? What future do we reserve for politics if one day we manage to manipulate our ways of thinking? These questions, which were once part of fantastic literature, are posed to us today with acuity”, confides the filmmaker.For thought
Interviewing the philosopher Serge Tisseron, who has thought a lot about the subject, Jean-Stéphane Bron thus puts into images the scenarios of the future that we are preparing for ourselves. “These questions are curiously little discussed by our elected officials. Maybe because they scare us a little. But we must look them in the face and think about ways to preserve the possibility of having a dissonant voice on these subjects, ”continues the director who also evokes the replacement of human labor by robots that can be worked at will. A revolution likely to radically upset social relations by impoverishing low-skilled employees, but also allowing the rest of humanity to spare more free time and thus make more room for culture and leisure.
Borrowing from thrillers, anticipation cinema and road movies, Jean-Stéphane Bron’s documentary is full of references to the worlds of Cronenberg, Kubrick, Spielberg, Asimov and Philip K. Dick. And the magic of the seventh art operates. As in this incredible scene where Alexandre Pouget and his son Hadrien evoke the future of human-machine relations, while a storm streaks the sky behind them. “When you know that they live very close to the place where Mary Shelley wrote her novel in 1816 Frankenstein, we say to ourselves that there are disturbing coincidences”, notes the filmmaker. Before asking a final question: “Don’t you find that father and son look like Jeremy Irons and Robert Pattison? in a great burst of laughter.*Five stories from the brain, documentary film by Jean-Stéphane Bron, production: Lionel Baier, Philippe Matin and Marie-Lou Pahud, distribution: Ad Vitam, 105 min. Indoors.