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How to Build a Truth Engine (2024)

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How to Build a Truth Engine is a documentary about disinformation and how we can try to combat it. Bookended by footage of the terrorist insurrection on January 6th, 2021, the film features journalists, software engineers, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and other talking heads as they tackle the topic of information warfare. The bitter irony, as one of those interviewed says, is that we live in an era in which people have access to more information than ever before, but that same mechanism which has enabled that access has also provided such a fertile breeding ground for misinformation that people have been algorithmically partitioned off into different realities. As we move from expert to expert, an idea of consciousness is constructed for the uninitiated: that among the strengths of the human mind are its abilities to recognize patterns and then complete those patterns. They don’t get into the nitty gritty about it overmuch, but if you’ve ever taken an anthropological literature course, it’s familiar, and it isn’t overcomplicated to the point where the viewer is going to have a syllabus’s worth of Michelle Sugiyama articles to read or need to learn the word “pareidolia.” 

The film rests on several pillars that all of us living in reality understand to be fundamentally true. Neurologically speaking, humans find patterns in everything, even when there isn’t one (in the same way that we see a cloud and superimpose “bunny” or “whale”), and it’s become clear that information warfare is the new frontier of mankind’s conflicts. Journalism is a dying industry despite the fact that we need the fifth estate now more than ever, and the root cause of this has been the dissolution of legacy and local newspapers as advertising revenue dried up (the connection between this and capitalism, however, is not made by this film). There was a time when there was a (mostly) functional journalistic body wherein the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world were capable of bringing down men who abused their power – sometimes, anyway. Now that most people get their news from social media, there is no longer any official entity or body that can be held legally liable for spreading and disseminating information that is not only not fact-checked, but which is often patently false upon its face. People’s algorithmically driven social media feeds exist solely to drive engagement on the platform, not deliver factual or truthful content, and we are all living in a bit of a hellscape because of it. 

The people to whom we are introduced as experts in their field have very impressive credentials. There’s Susan Benesch, the current faculty associate of Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. She’s also the founder of the Dangerous Speech Project, an initiative that attempts to balance concerns about inflammatory, inciting rhetoric and the necessity of protecting free speech through the tactic of “counterspeech,” a form of providing alternative narratives in an empathetic way as a means to counter hate speech and misinformation. Zahra M. Aghajan, a clinical neuroscience researcher, is interviewed several times. There’s also Vwani Roychowdhury, a professor who has been with UCLA’s electrical engineering department since 1996, and who is also Director of The Roychowdhury Group in Computational Science, which specializes in machine learning and application; along for the ride is Behnam Shahbazi, a student for whom Roychowdhury was the advisor for Shahbazi’s paper a”StoryMiner: An Automated and Scalable Framework for Story Analysis and Detection from Social Media.” There’s also Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon and Professor In Residence and Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program at UCLA Health, who has been recognized several times for his advancement of the science. 

Rounding things out are a host of New York Times employees, some of whom operate across multiple departments but all of whom are involved with the “Visual Investigations” team, which they themselves describe as “combin[ing] traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and the forensic analysis of visual evidence to find truth, hold the powerful to account and deconstruct important news events.” There’s Malachy Browne, who’s the “enterprise director” of this team, who has won the Pulitzer twice, first in 2020 for exposing Russian culpability in Syrian hospital bombings, and again in 2023 for the team’s involvement in exposing which Russian unit was responsible for the murder of over two dozen civilians in Bucha, and the name of the commander of the unit. We’re walked through a lot of the reconstruction of this particular investigation, which establishes the credibility of the team, which also includes Haley Willis, who mostly covers human rights topics with the V.I., and Muyi Xiao, whose beat includes covering the news out of China. Her credentials are established through her coverage of COVID-19 as early as mid-January 2020, initially through reconstructing forensic digital data of communication between medical professionals but which was quickly silenced by the Chinese government. 

Several years back, I made a new friend who told me that he never watched documentaries, citing that he had taken a specific rhetoric of film class that made him too savvy to all of the ways that documentaries are manipulative, so he simply couldn’t trust any of them any more. I thought about him a lot while watching this doc, one that I was genuinely excited to see. As someone who has lost family members down the rabbit hole of bizarre, impossible conspiracy theories in the past ten years as they have approached mainstream metastasis, I was hoping for something new, something fresh, perhaps some new idea about how to break through to the brainwashed masses. And I was still mostly appreciative of the film, even as it repeated tired old canards that all of us who have watched as logic and reason were beaten back into the darkness in the past decade already know. I was a little surprised by the sloppiness of the proofreading for the subtitles (my screening featured them for the entire run time, not simply when translation was needed). I raised an eyebrow at the idea that A.I. (in the form of StoryMiner, a potential contender for the “truth engine” of the title) could somehow be harnessed for good to help seek and map out online conspiracy theories so that counterspeech could be developed to fight back against misinformation (it’s telling that I saw this just two days after another SXSW event featuring a sizzle reel of A.I. salespitching was booed). And, in the wake of the way that the Overton Window on trans liberation has been moved further and further into right-wing conservatism because the NYT is a chickenshit rag that has started acting as a mouthpiece for the exact kind of vile rhetoric that this documentary is (correctly) identifying as evil, I was skeptical of how much this documentary was dick-riding the erstwhile newspaper of record. 

All these things, in combination with very style-over-substance editing (the visuals in this documentary are, at my estimation, 85% semi-related drone footage with voice over), were matters of concern. I was still willing to go along with the presentation, all while wondering if there would be a mention of Palestine’s apartheid and the way that even people who consider themselves “liberal” have been silent about the issue for years and have revealed themselves as genocide apologists in the past six months; as the film went on, I thought “well, perhaps that’s a topic that’s outside of the scope of this particular documentary.” After all, it was difficult to tell when this was produced, or when the footage was shot. Muyi Xiao appears in some footage with braces, and some without (and, simply to clarify and not to belittle, when I saw “without” I mean “before”). When she is walking around Times Square, advertising can be seen for the final season of Insecure—which aired its finale the day after Christmas in 2021—but then again, I’m 98% percent positive that some of the drone footage included an advertisement of the 2011 film Real Steel (it could be an advertisement for something else entirely that simply has the same name and a similar typeface, but I couldn’t find evidence of anything like that while researching in prep for this review). And then. And then. 

As I mentioned before, this film milks the NYT Visual Investigations team’s coverage of the Bucha massacre for all the credibility that they can, and there’s no argument that they did damn fine journalism there. Their coverage of a Syrian bombing is likewise impressive, including their demonstration of how satellite imagery is combined with cell phone footage to triangulate where the videos are taken and establish their veracity. Before we get to see a recap of the Bucha investigation, we hear a phone call, translated from Russian to English via on-screen subtitles, in which a soldier (presumably one of the paratroopers from 234th Air Assault Regiment) calls his mother. He asks her what the news at home is saying, what she is hearing from people around her, tells her that they keep being told of victory after victory, but that he and his companions have no idea how much of what they are told is true, if anything. Although we then go on to learn just how depraved the activities that this caller et al went on to perform in Bucha were, I can’t help but interpret that there’s an attempt at an invocation of empathy for him; you don’t play the audio of a confused, possibly scared soldier calling his mommy without an agenda. An hour or so later, after dozens of interviews and countless minutes of footage of jungles, oceans, and city skylines, another voicemail is played, one which is identified as being a call from a “Hamas terrorist” in October of 2023, and which is translated on-screen with a speech I won’t transcribe, but one which aligns with the narrative that Israel has attempted to put forth to justify their ongoing genocide of the people of Palestine. It’s horrific to hear, so brief that you wouldn’t even have to take a bathroom break to miss it, just have a thirty second coughing fit. It’s so out of place that it feels like it was inserted at the last minute, a quick little virtue signal to the bloodthirsty neoliberals who think (or pretend to think) that it’s antisemitic to criticize starving millions to death in their homes or cutting them to pieces with death from the sky. 

I was shocked at this. I kept expecting that the film would loop back around on it, bring it up, maybe even use this as a demonstration piece to say, “Look how easy it is to use media to persuade; we told you that this audio recording was from Hamas and provided a translation that makes the blood boil, when in fact this is a recipe from a podcast.” In fact, it is one of the never-verified messages provided to the West by the Israeli military, and is treated not as a potential piece of propaganda to be analyzed, dissected, and verified. At best, in a text that is taking a moral stance on the literally society-sustaining importance of journalistic rigor, it feels like a half-baked and careless attempt at relevance that compromises the film’s integrity. A less charitable reading would be to say that this segment shatters any pretense that Engine could otherwise make that it maintains a clear set of ethics, and is therefore useless as a document of fact. The latter is my personal reading, and it renders what is otherwise a strong (if atypically slick) “documentary” which makes strong points about disinformation … as disinformation itself. I’m not going to pile on the contributors to the documentary for this; from what I can tell from additional research, Haley Willis spoke out against the firing of Emily Wilder from the Associated Press in 2021 when conservatives fought for her to be ousted because of her collegiate involvement with a pro-Palestinian justice organization. Further, although I was initially annoyed that there appears to be zero commentary about queer rights from Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Project (despite the overt hate speech that the community, especially trans people, have been subject to in recent years), they did issue a statement that they concurred with the ICJ’s denunciation of Israel’s genocidal rhetoric. As for searching for the names of the other participants in conjunction with this topic, most of the results keep leading back to the same Variety article, in which Siddhant Adlakha comes to the same conclusion that I do. 

As I sat in the auditorium before my screening, I overheard an older group of people behind me talking about another documentary that they had seen during SXSW, which I assume was The Truth vs. Alex Jones. They were discussing how they hoped that the film would open some people’s eyes about the man, and about how broken the system is when the justice system can find a man guilty of defamation on a scale that boggles the mind and that same person can get right back to grinding, telling more lies and spreading more misinformation and warping more minds, with no real consequences. They hoped that they could get others to watch it and that it would open some minds about just how much damage Jones has done to democracy. I couldn’t help but think about that Vonnegut quote about how artistic resistance to governmental malfeasance and war is as effectual as a custard pie, and I never really lost the feeling that reminder brought on throughout the rest of Engine, even when I was attuned to it. The ability that this documentary had to change hearts and minds was infinitesimal to begin with, and its lack of conviction in its ethics eradicates that potential.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Last Things (2024)

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When I first read a blurb in the paper advertising a screening of Deborah Stratman’s Last Things, the description called to mind Enys Men: a “documentary exploring the geo-biosphere throughout evolution and extinction” featuring “stunning visuals ranging from the microscopic to unending landscapes” that “defies the boundaries of what a documentary can be.” There was the promise that the film blended science fiction with science fact but which continued to express itself as truth. In the end, it wasn’t like Enys Men at all. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what a good point of comparison would be, other than to say, with an awe and respect that this description wouldn’t normally imply, that it’s one of the most student film-y pictures I’ve ever seen. I loved it. 

Insofar as Last Things has a narrative at all, it tells the story of the geology of our planet as an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life. Through the anthropomorphization of molecules and minerals, an origin myth emerges – one that’s not untrue in the way that a lot of origin myths are not untrue. For instance, did you ever consider that rocks could go extinct? I certainly hadn’t, but as it turns out, there was a time when iron floated freely in the planet’s oceans, suspended in it much like salt is at present. With the emergence of the first organisms that performed photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), oxygen became a component of the atmosphere for the first time, causing the iron in the ocean to oxidize and fall to the ocean floor, where they formed into banded rock of magnetite, silica, and other minerals. Formations like this one are extinct rocks, in the sense that they can never form again (at least not on this planet). 

It’s fascinating stuff, but it’s also not for the easily bored. At only fifty minutes, it falls shy of the length we would normally classify as a feature film, but there will be moments when you wonder how that amount of time has not already elapsed. It’s comprised almost entirely of open-source footage: NASA’s conceptual animation lab footage of the planetary nebula cloud, electron microscope imagery of chloroplasts, images of ice forming in water blown up to the highest magnification. Whether its ambition exceeds its grasp is in the eye of the beholder, but I thoroughly enjoyed the way that a story emerges from the cutting and pasting of bits of philosophy, poetry, vintage science fiction, and more against the visuals of rocks, minerals, and protozoa. As we are told by a scientist talking about chondrites—meteors that fall to earth without interacting with another body outside of the asteroid belt, meaning that they have been unchanged since the moment the furnace of the sun spat them out, before our planet was formed—“All matter does have a history, but it doesn’t remember it.” 

On the more fantastical end of the spectrum that Last Things slides up and down, our own bodies are stated to have a “genetic memory” connected to the rock, as the emergence of eukaryotic cells (and therefore life as we know it) required that the prokaryotic cells which banded together to symbiotically evolve into eukaryotic life required that taking in of minerals in order to form mitochondria. The film does this, ping-ponging back and forth between scientific fact and what we might call speculative geology, and it does it all with pulsing, hypnotic electronic music. It called to mind a movie that I saw at the New Orleans IMAX on a fifth grade field trip entitled The Hidden Dimension, which included a lot of microphotography, but to a much more psychedelic effect. 

There came a moment in Last Things in which the camera lingers for a long time on a rock formation in a park. It made me think of the Kuleshov effect, the theory and effect that Lev Kuleshov was able to demonstrate through the editing together of disparate images intercut with the face of Russian silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine. Although the image of Mosjoukine was unchanging, the audience interpreted different meanings from his (identical) facial expressions based upon what footage appeared in between. Between the music and the fantasy, it does almost start to feel as if the rock is experiencing something, even thought that clearly can’t be the case. Can it? 

What’s the relationship between eukaryotic life, Petra, and glistening space concrete? Is there one? Director Stratman has stated that the film was born out of her existential panic about living through the planet’s sixth mass extinction event, and although I can’t speak for her, it seems to partially be about finding peace with the finity of human existence by viewing our transience, brevity, and diminutiveness by holding us up against mineral formations that meaningfully predate our solar system. If our concept of prehistory does not extend beyond the formation of the earth, it’s barely scratching the surface. And hey, the life that became us changed the planet; our ancestors caused rocks to go extinct, and those rocks became part of us, and although there’s no meaning in that, there is beauty, and we should appreciate it. 

I’d recommend reading this interview with Stratman; it’s insightful, and it says more about Last Things than I can. And if you get the chance to see this one, don’t miss it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Le Choc du Futur (2020)

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The French historical drama Le Choc du Futur (The Shock of the Future) is a shameless nostalgia piece. Almost 100% an exercise in aesthetic posturing, its entire thesis is that late-70s synth music sounds cool as fuck and women didn’t get enough credit for pioneering that sound. It’s not wrong; early analog synths and the women behind them are incredibly cool and, apparently, endlessly watchable. The film’s late-70s Parisian setting indulges in the same fashionable, intoxicating cool as last year’s phenomenal porn-industry slasher Knife+Heart, except without all the pesky murders getting in the way of the fun. Even with all that shameless nostalgia driving its every decision, the film somehow comes across as effortlessly charming and, more surprisingly, very much of the moment.

Alma Jodorowsky stars as a fictional synthpop composer in late-70s Paris, an amalgamated character designed to pay tribute to the real-life women who weren’t properly credited for developing the analog-synth sound. At only 80 minutes, the movie is a short & sweet day-in-the-life portrait of this made-up pioneer synth composer. We watch her perform her morning exercises (cigarette in mouth, of course), switch on her wall of heavy-duty synth equipment (with an accompanying, satisfying buzz as the machines fire up), and go about her day creating songs while attempting to pay her bills. Our Moog-wielding heroine occasionally clashes against music industry sexists who devalue her work, but this is mostly a film about process. We’re treated to a crash-course demonstration of what individual pieces of her mysterious equipment do in creating a full synthpop sound, how an individual synthpop song is built from scratch, and what bands were important in inspiring these early analog synth experiments: DEVO, Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, Tangerine Dream, Suicide, etc. It’s all very laidback, unrushed, and effortlessly cool (especially if you watch the film with a nice pair of headphones).

Le Choc du Futur stumbles into its of-the-moment relevancy in a very roundabout way. Synthpop (and most subsequent electronic music) is a very private, insular artform – especially in the composition stage. It’s the quintessential bedroom music, a craft that’s usually honed while artists are left alone in their workspaces tinkering with their toys. I’m not sure if you’re aware that the world is ending outside right now, but a lot of us have been holed up inside our homes busying ourselves with similar self-satisfying art projects in an effort to stay sane. The only reason I was able to watch this movie in the first place is because the SXSW film festival was cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns and temporarily moved to Amazon Prime as a public service. In that specific, ongoing cultural context, there is something incredibly relatable & satisfying about watching a character work tirelessly alone in their apartment on niche art & go-nowhere projects no one else in the world seems to care about.

It absolutely sucks that women musicians were not properly credited for their contributions to early synth compositions in the 1970s, and Le Choc du Futur is a lovely tribute to the work they created. The film is also just an aesthetically pleasing primer for new-to-the-table fans of the artists & songs that defined that era. More practically, though, this movie is a very comfortable, relatable watch for the current moment we’re struggling through – a snapshot of a D.I.Y. artist creating music for her own satisfaction, despite the crushing odds of the commercial music & marketing industries that do not value her work. Businessmen frequently enter her apartment to disrupt her creative art-for-its-own-sake workflow with concerns & disagreements about her music’s commercial viability, but she mostly blocks out their interference just like how her cheap, tattered curtains block out the sun. We hardly ever see her leave the apartment (except for a couple brief, round-the-block walks), but she uses her confounding wall of heavy-machinery music equipment to go on adventures of her own design, as if she were standing behind the control panel of a spaceship. Le Choc du Futur is the perfect 2020 quarantine movie in that way, even if it was intended to evoke an entirely different era.

-Brandon Ledet