In \u201cThe Last Known Good State,\u201d engineers mingle with a female robot; they blow up stars; they fall in love.<\/p>\n
The film, the brainchild of writer and director Alexander Berman \u201910, is now in post-production, being edited in Berman\u2019s scattered, near-apocalyptic basement office where working all night seems ordinary, an affect of the setting. Berman prefers it this way. He\u2019ll edit \u2014 \u201cbinge\u201d \u2014 until sunrise, before \u201cpurging for days.\u201d Metaphors are, after all, the lifeblood of a filmmaker.<\/p>\n
The film is Berman\u2019s thesis for the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies<\/a> (VES). It is not his first film, but is the final one he\u2019ll create at Harvard. And he wants to go out with a bang.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to do something you\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d he said, \u201cand something that I may never get a chance to do again when I graduate.\u201d In one of the film\u2019s sequences, his star-struck engineer caresses his lovely blonde mate of artificial intelligence. She\u2019s more Brigitte Bardot than R2-D2, and wearing pasties.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s sci-fi, so scantily clad is normal,\u201d said Berman.<\/p>\n Shooting over 10 days in the Carpenter Center<\/a>, Berman secured two grants from VES and the Harvard College Research Program<\/a> that afforded him a budget for an elaborate production. Though only 15-20 minutes long, the film is enriched by a litany of special effects and a set that could modestly be described as mind-blowing.<\/p>\n For instance, imagine tents \u2014 used as futuristic office cubicles \u2014 that are projected with astral visualizations to create a sensory 3D experience.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a 20-minute film, if you want people to experience something intellectually and emotionally,\u201d he said, \u201cyou have to strike them with an image, because otherwise it feels like minimalism.\u201d<\/p>\n For Berman\u2019s involved and visually arresting projections, he contacted the Alliances Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago, which maps 3-D images of supernovae. He solicited the help of production designer Amy Davis, A.L.B. \u201910, and Tomasz Mloduchowski, a special effects engineer, from Blattaria Design and Effects Ltd., whom Berman put in charge of special effects. Berman\u2019s brother, Benjamin \u201912, an animator also in VES, and director of photography Andrew Wesman \u201910 are lending their skills to add more layers of artistry to this uniquely cool senior film.<\/p>\n Berman, who has long been interested in technology, said, \u201cThe idea for this film went through a lot of iterations.\u201d But he dubbed it, above all else, a love story. \u201cLooking at all these boy-meets-girl, twenty-something films, the farthest thing from those is a sci-fi.\u201d<\/p>\n But doing the farthest thing is what Berman does best. He intended to go to law school but during his first semester at Harvard knew he wanted to pursue film. \u201cI\u2019m interested in politics and social issues but wanted to explore those issues instead through art.\u201d<\/p>\n After his change of heart, Berman embarked to, of all places, Siberia. His parents are Russian, and although Berman was born in the United States he knew he wanted to make a documentary there. The film was supposed to be about Siberian ecology and volcanoes. As Berman traveled from Alaska to Siberia, he found himself ironically \u201chopping on a plane chartered by Wall Street execs going trout fishing there.\u201d<\/p>\n When Berman finally arrived, the Russians he met wanted bribes for information, and Berman quickly realized he would go broke trying to make the movie he\u2019d set out to film. So he chartered a cab to a remote part of Siberia, accompanied by his crew of brother and mother, who served as his translator. \u201cI knew one name in this ethnic group of reindeer herders,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThe guy\u2019s name was Nikolai.\u201d<\/p>\n Against the odds, they found him. \u201cHe showed me around this village of aboriginal Siberians, closely related to Canadian Inuits,\u201d Berman said. \u201cAfter the collapse of the Soviet Union, these people went through a gut-wrenching time. Cultural subsidies created everything for them, and when that went away there was no economy.\u201d<\/p>\n Berman wanted a hopeful note, though, and centered his new film on the village\u2019s makeshift shipping industry. \u201cThey take decommissioned Soviet tanks, all-terrain tanks, and run them up and down the Kamchatka peninsula to feed the villages that are most remote.\u201d<\/p>\n The result was \u201cSongs from the Tundra,\u201d which Berman screened internationally and which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Provincetown International Film Festival.<\/p>\n He hopes to show \u201cThe Last Known Good State\u201d in similar fashion, starting with the VES\u2019s annual screening each April. But now, while he edits, he\u2019s planning for his departure from Harvard and \u201ctrying to get some money together to go back to Siberia. I have a really great story to tell there, and that\u2019s my most developed project.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s also writing a feature-length script based on \u201cThe Last Known Good State,\u201d a project special to Berman for another reason. At the end of the film, artificial intelligence takes the engineer back to his college dormitory to before, Berman said, \u201che got on this very corporate career path.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a script that became personal because I\u2019m leaving Harvard and people from Harvard go on to do very high-profile, very well-paid, very successful jobs. But it\u2019s so hard to live up to the variety and the intensity that you have here, and I wanted the character to experience that as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Berman is entertaining thoughts of where he might go next. He could stay in Boston, or possibly head for Los Angeles, even New York. Anywhere, just as long as he has film.<\/p>\n \u201cAll my films are about frontiers,\u201d he said. \u201cIn \u2018The Last Known Good State,\u2019 it\u2019s a romantic frontier \u2014 how does one love a machine? \u2014 and a scientific frontier, which is blowing up these stars. Film\u2019s ability to interrogate that frontier and bring that to people, I think it\u2019s the most exciting thing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In \u201cThe Last Known Good State,\u201d engineers mingle with a female robot; they blow up stars; they fall in love. The film, the brainchild of writer and director Alexander Berman \u201910, is now in post-production, being edited in Berman\u2019s scattered, near-apocalyptic basement office where working all night seems ordinary, an affect of the setting. Berman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}