Bryan Appleyard

Hud is a film that has haunted me for decades. I was never sure why. It seemed to be something about the bleakness of the setting and the story but also the extravagance of the hero and his car. I recently watched it as research for a book, and then, immediately, I watched it again. It is that good. There are two stars of Martin Ritt’s movie: Paul Newman and a 1958 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible. Out there in the ranchlands of the Texas Panhandle Newman looks just fine — big hat, jeans, cowboy shirt and boots — but the car looks all wrong. It is long, low and wide with an absurd pair of tailfins. Moreover it is pink. Though the film is in black and white, the Caddy’s pinkness is mentioned twice in the dialogue.

For the hundredth, possibly the thousandth, time, Lucy van Pelt offers to hold the football for Charlie Brown so he can kick it. She cajoles him with the innocence of her eyes. He falls for it; he falls for it every time. Lucy, as she always does, whips the ball away. Charlie loops into the air and crashes to the ground. ‘What you have learned here today, Charlie Brown,’ she explains, ‘will be of immeasurable value to you for many years to come.’ Lucy is a cynic, a sadist, a huckster, a realist. Nevertheless, she would be right but for the fact that nothing is ever of ‘immeasurable value’ to Charlie Brown. He is too battered by life to be an idealist but he clings to hope, to the possibility that there is justice somewhere in the cosmos.

‘Radical’ is like ‘creative’, a word that has been enfeebled to the point of meaninglessness. Everybody seems to want to be both, but nobody has any clear idea of what might be involved. In the case of this exhibition, radical could refer either to aesthetic or political themes; neither seems quite right. Never mind, ’modernist’ has, with the passage of time, become more firmly anchored. We now know it was a movement in the arts that began in about the 1880s and ended in, very roughly, the 1950s or ’60s. It was a period in which art became preoccupied with form as a determinant — rather than the servant — of content.

Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying jobs and, ultimately, rendering our species redundant as more intelligent and effective beings take over. Lacking, as we now do, an agreed metaphysical justification for human specialness — for example, the soul — it must only be a matter of time before we submit to the machine ascendancy. So far, it has been a subtle, incremental process that conceals any wider significance. Take satellite navigation. This was first introduced in the 1980s and is now more or less universal. Maps have become quaint. As a result, we walk or drive without a visual model of where we are. This may be a small loss of human agency but it’s a loss nonetheless.

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog is a master of tone. His widely parodied voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous — are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he conducts are seldom less than strange, often shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his films are subtly modulated. Never more so than here. Lo and Behold is divided into chapters. The first is a fairly conventional documentary about the beginnings of the internet. Herzog talks to the people in California who made the first computer-to-computer connection in 1969, asking them reasonable questions and generally making them seem like comfortable, all-round good guys. This is then subverted by the appearance of Ted Nelson, a cyber-pioneer who believes it has all gone horribly wrong.