The Congress (11/5/24)
Tuesday November 5, 2024 | 5:30-8:00 PM | Capen Hall 310
The Congress is a 2013 live-action/animated science-fiction drama film written and directed by Ari Folman, based on Stanisław Lem's 1971 Polish science-fiction novel The Futurological Congress. It stars Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself who agrees to have a film studio use a digital clone of her in any film they want.
The Congress then flashes forward twenty years later to her travels in the studio's animated utopia world, where anyone can become an avatar of themselves using hallucinogenic drugs to enter a mutable illusory state. The Congress premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival on 15 May 2013.
The Congress is perhaps more relevant and timely today than it was just a few years ago. Despite its rather messy narrative structure, The Congress is the perfect film to understand the Post-Truth era we seem to find ourselves in. Our societies have become deeply fragmented and divided into squabbling sub-realms of hard-right, hard-left, and inept centrists, whilst the most important thing now is the promotion of the individual and what the individual desires, society be damned. The Congress seemed to know where we were heading and where we still might be heading. And it’s a dark place.
In the film, Wright attends an event called the Futurological Congress, a conference organized by Miramount in Abrahama City, a vast place where the surroundings and citizenry are completely animated in a kind of surreal cartoon hellscape that Wright herself describes as “Cinderella on heroin.” When it becomes clear that the massive conglomerate Miramount plans a massive program to allow every person across the globe access into these digitally animated worlds, Wright uses the opportunity to denounce the proposal, imploring the audience to “Wake up people wake up” from the nightmare and instead to direct the vast resources to means other than entertainment and distraction.
About the speaker
Mark Bartholomew writes and teaches in the areas of intellectual property and law and technology, with an emphasis on copyright, trademarks, advertising regulation, and online privacy. His articles on these subjects have been published in the Minnesota La Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, the William & Mary Law Review, the Connecticut Law Review, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal among others. His book Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing was published by Stanford University Press in 2017.
