[13:26 Tue,18.February 2025 by Thomas Richter] |
While elsewhere the debate rages on about the permissible use of AI in filmmaking (www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/20/the-brutalist-and-emilia-perezs-voice-cloning-controversies-make-ai-the-new-awards-season-battleground), the Berlinale is setting an example by presenting "What&s next?", a 72-minute animated film by the young Chinese filmmaker Yiwen Cao, the first AI-generated feature film at one of the major international film festivals – (still) not in the official competition, but in the always experimental Forum section.
;) Yiwen Cao produced "What&s next?" entirely on her own in just 7 days with the help of AI, and makes no effort to hide its machine origin, but rather reinforces its alienating effect: to a spherical soundtrack, the typical 3-4 second snippets for video AIs are wildly strung together and tell the story of the world before and after the arrival of "Evil". She jumps from one typical AI look to the next, ranging from brightly colored to darkly black and white – always including old video AI image errors such as morphed limbs and objects. The quality of the images does not correspond to the – already outdated – state of AI video technology at the time of its creation about three-quarters of a year ago, but is even worse. And "What&s next?" is only an animated film in the sense that the AI-generated images were also brought to life by AI – it resembles an animated slideshow more than a film. The sound: soothing. Visually, What&s next? begins with paradisiacal states. Gentle images full of sweetness. Figures revel in kitschy landscapes with psychedelically dancing vegetables – until the AI-generated images begin to show their teeth. They slide into dark dystopias, fill with male demons. In a montage of clichés, director Cao Yiwen critically heats up the addressed conditions – whether gender, environment or capitalism. The film throws back at its viewers the views that have solidified into visual statistics and shows their consequences. Abysmal gaps appear not only in the representation errors of the AI images. The faces of evil hallucinated by machines and the apparent realism of human suffering make visible the limitations of the imagination of the ever-faster-spinning human-machine loop. An opulent ride to hell, a farewell from the world in which we live together, to images that we make as an aesthetic sum of it. It is unmistakably clear how necessary it is to escape this current in order to approach the question posed by the title: What&s next? Yiwen Cao is not unknown internationally; she has been featured twice on the cover of the French magazine "Filmmaker Life", where she was praised as "a groundbreaking filmmaker who is redefining cinema". She debuted as an actress, but has since directed several live-action and AI short films. Her short film "Release Nuclear Contaminated Water" (2024) was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Animation Award there, and "Invisible War" (2024) was featured at the Venice Film Festival Animation Day. The gradually starting AI film revolution is somewhat reminiscent of the digital revolution in film technology: just as the affordable DV camera and editing possibilities on one&s own PC "democratized" filmmaking back then, it is now becoming even easier thanks to AI: everyone can now produce films in a very short time using only a PC and prompts. This raises many new questions: Are AI films "normal" films? From what level of creativity does a collection of snippets become a real "work"? What does it do to a film if all its images look "spectacular" in the traditional sense? And who should watch the soon-to-come flood of AI films?  more infos at bei www.berlinale.dedeutsche Version dieser Seite: "What´s next?" - erster KI-generierter Langfilm auf der Berlinale |
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