You Were Here

 

THE ARC OF OBLIVION (A-minus) - Writer-director Ian Cheney has a lot on his mind, and he unloads his thoughts in scattered fashion into this engaging documentary ostensibly about how we preserve human history. His heavily curated film is also one big McGuffin: He commissions the building of an ark on his parents' property, intending to fill it with objects, documents, ephemera -- anything that he thinks might mark our time here on Earth and which might be useful to future nerds.

That shtick -- the creation of a noble wooden vessel -- can wear thin at times, and Cheney inserts himself way too often in the proceedings. But those questionable choices are more than compensated for by his inclusion of a parade of talking heads, all of whom provide fascinating insights on a wide variety of topics. 

 

We meet filmmaker Kristen Johnson ("Cameraperson") and, even better, her brother, a paleontologist who waxes poetic about how fossils are formed and discovered. There is an expert on limestone, David Hoch, who taught me during the movie how the method of heating limestone creates a glow that accommodates wall-shadow projections (it's where we get the phrase "in the limelight"). We meet cave specialist Bogdan Onac, who lectures extensively about bat guano. There is also an artist whose house was destroyed in a hurricane; a couple who photograph old cemeteries from the Jim Crow era; and the sawyer lovingly plying his craft as the ark slowly takes shape. Even documentary legend Werner Herzog (an executive producer) stops by to put an exclamation point on a film that clearly was inspired by his lifelong pursuit of truth and quirk. ("Fitzcarraldo" is a natural point of comparison.)

The surface topic involves the preservation of our digital world, but as Cheney meanders off the beaten path, he excavates ideas about humans and nature and how lives and concepts are preserved over centuries and even millennia. This might be a pop-philosophical exercise that could tick off some intellectual aficionados who could dismiss this as undisciplined surface-scratching noodling. 

But don't overthink it. Cheney certainly doesn't. His technique is not so much HD as it is ADHD. He's all over the map, literally and figuratively, as he follows his nose to whatever places interest him. He then dumps it all into this 105-minute hodgepodge. This is a random movie by a filmmaker who tossed together a chopped salad of brain droppings and visual whims. Not everything has to be neatly packaged.