An in-depth review and analysis of “Die Gstettensaga” by Bonni Rambatan was published on the Telekommunisten page.
If the film is the defining medium of the 20th century, the social media
is what defines the 21st century. That much is clear to anyone who pays
attention to the way media constructs the lives and desires of
contemporary society. If the film, as Slavoj Zizek remarks, teaches us
how to desire, the social media, as it were, sets those ways of desiring
into stone by determining how we like, how we share, to whom, to which
things we are exposed, and so on. All is codified within the realm of
technology, that—at least to non-hackers—remain opaque, even invisible.
And all, of course, are presented as comfort—a perfect illustration to
the Foucauldian “society of control”.
This is where the contemporary romaticism of nerds as agents of change
often falls short—and precisely the target of Johannes Grenzfurthner’s
latest film, Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl.[…]
The film doesn’t beat around the bush and pretend to give us a solution
to this conondrum, but nor does it have to. What it does is that it
forces us to think deeper about this conondrum, and the fact that much
of today’s romanticized revolutions often go eerily hand in hand with
the development of digital capitalism. Few films today, if any, manage
to do such a feat.