The title is borrowed from artist Ken Jacobs, and it’s one of the central themes running through the retrospective of Jacobs’ work currently at Broadway Windows. It could also serve as the caption for all the photographs I took when I went to see the exhibition last Friday. Here are a half dozen of them.
Werner Herzog’s new documentary-style PSA against texting while driving, From One Second to the Next, is beautifully shot and edited. Its four stories, which revisit tragic accidents and ruined lives, are presented simply and compassionately, with an eye and an ear for telling little human details.
Still, I have to wonder how this film — which Herzog’s sponsor, AT&T, will distribute to “more than 40,000 high schools, as well as hundreds of safety organizations and government agencies” — will play with teen drivers. From One Second does not wag admonitory fingers and avoids the good-cop scare tactics of old California Highway Patrol road-safety movies like Red Asphalt or Wheels of Tragedy, but its emotional range is limited enough that after watching 3 of the 4 stories Herzog presents here I felt I had had enough of the same tones and colors.
More importantly, the film’s pacing and duration (it’s 35 minutes long) are not exactly suited to a generation that thinks even texts can be tl;dr. I have trouble imagining an auditorium or classroom full of sixteen year olds getting through it without — well, texting or tweeting or checking social media.
So it remains to be seen whether this beautiful and sometimes very moving document can also create an effective intervention. Herzog himself senses the difficulty, but he talks about the problem as a distant observer: “There’s a completely new culture out there,” he told the Associated Press. “I’m not a participant of texting and driving — or texting at all — but I see there’s something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.”
I can’t help but be reminded here of the refain from “Ballad of a Thin Man,” written when Herzog was just 23 years old: “Something is happening here / and you don’t know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?” But this isn’t just one generation griping about another, and Herzog is right to suggest that there’s much more at stake in all this than the hazards of texting while driving. It’s about the “new culture out there”, which is taking its toll on human life — a deadly and threatening “something” that’s “going on in civilization.” It’s coming at us, with great vehemence, bearing down on us.
Where it’s coming from and what it is Herzog doesn’t say, or at least the Associated Press does not report; but it’s precisely that “something” that From One Moment misses, and never asks us to confront or better understand. I am not so sure AT&T would have sponsored a film that did.
lvgaldieri 