Anticipation.
Marc Isaacs is a British filmmaker who is ploughing his own, unique furrow of cinematic inquiry.
Enjoyment.
A hearty stew of ideas and suppositions, but very little structure or progression.
In Retrospect.
Made for an absolute pittance, who knows what Isaacs could achieve with some serious cash behind him?
In Marc Isaacs’ new hybrid docu-fiction, he strikes a deal with an apocryphal university’s AI lab, trading his archive of film to teach algorithms human authenticity.
In recent years, the British documentary filmmaker Marc Isaacs has fostered an interest in the porous barrier that separates fiction from non-fiction, with titles such as The Filmmaker’s House and This Blessed Plot blurring the line between the real and the artificial. His new work, Synthetic Sincerity, weaves in further complications to these current preoccupations by examining the potential of AI to recreate the same messy, illogical, charismatic humanity that Isaacs captured so well in so much of his early, more conventional reportage documentary work.
Isaacs plays a gawky version of himself as he takes part in a programme at the apocryphal University of Southern England, where, in exchange for training an AI model on his collected documentary holdings, he’s allowed to film the process and interview the key players. All the while, an AI played by Romanian actor Ilinca Manolache offers him dubious advice on the value of his endeavours. It’s a bit of an overcomplicated conceit, a contrived context for a work that digs into trenchant questions of representation and exploitation, utopias and dystopias. Isaacs’ wry scepticism covers for any accusations of tech fanboyism, and during its fairly curt runtime, he throws a variety of disparate ingredients into the pot and manages to make his key points stick despite the fact there’s no obvious dramatic through-line to the material.
