Tiffany Shlain finished the final cut of her dizzying new documentary, “Connected,” two years ago. But something about it didn’t sit right with her.
The film, which purports to show how interconnected humanity has become since the advent of the Internet, was missing a sense of the personal. So she went back at it.
The Jewish filmmaker broke out big in 2006 with “The Tribe,” which explored Jewish identity through the plasticized lens of the Barbie doll. Now she was tackling a much bigger subject, but she realized she had focused too much on technology.
Because she was going through the sad rite of passage of losing a parent, Shlain knew she had to make the film more intimate, and more Jewish. She had to make herself the star of her own documentary.
“Here I was dealing with all these profound feelings of my father dying, about to lose an incredible connection, and I wasn’t dealing with the emotional connection,” Shlain remembers, referring to her dad, the late neurosurgeon and author Leonard Shlain. “I was all in the head, not in the heart.”
Shlain reinvented her film, weaving in that deep connection with her father and the impact his dying had on her understanding of human interdependence.
Now, Shlain has a final final cut. “Connected” opens Friday, Sept. 16. It premiered this summer at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Telling two distinct yet related stories, “Connected” charts history’s linear progress toward global interconnection, as well as the history of Shlain’s close relationship with her father and his ideas.
Leonard Shlain theorized that humankind has begun moving away from the competitive, male-dominated mode characterized by centuries of war and conquest. In its place is a tech-heavy, emotion-driven interdependency linking humanity in a kind of “one world one people” destiny.
It’s all to serve Tiffany Shlain’s thesis that human history is not unlike a flow chart gone mad: overpopulation links to health care links to the Web links to corporations.
Despite the human propensity for war, neglect and environmental ruin, she still sees global interdependency as a net positive.
“It was so essential to connect to the bigger ideas,” Shlain says. “My goal was to trigger a global conversation about what it means to be connected in the 21st century, personally and globally, and how we can harness all this connectedness to take us to a new place.”
Like her previous films, “Connected” employs fast-paced editing, inventive animation and stock footage, everything from silent film stars hamming it up to corny clips from 1950s-era industrial education films.
It makes the film laugh-out-loud funny, but the humor never distracts from her larger, more serious observations about human needs.
“We want to connect,” she says. “We want a hug. We’re curious. We need new information. Our minds are voracious. Yes, we’re tribal, but we’re evolving, I hope, to a place where we understand our interdependence more.”
Shlain appears on camera frequently, including intimate scenes with her family, and she co-narrates the film (with fellow Mill Valley resident and actor Peter Coyote).
Sometimes, she has found, to truly connect one must first disconnect.
“Being connected has a lot of wonderful aspects,” Shlain notes, “but there are a lot of things to be mindful of: not to let technology make us so distracted with the people we love.”
That’s why every Friday night, Shlain and her family mark what she calls a tech Shabbat, during which the computer, Facebook, BlackBerry and anything with a screen gets switched off for 24 hours.
“The Shabbats have made my life more balanced,” she says. “My girls and I make challah Friday morning, then we light candles and turn off the technology. I’m excited to turn off on Friday night.”
Family is important to Shlain, and not just the one she started with husband Ken Goldberg, a professor of robotics at U.C. Berkeley. In addition to the bond she had with her father, she grew up close to her siblings and her mother, psychologist Carol Jaffe (her parents divorced when Shlain was young).
Shlain was an early booster of the Internet, back when dial-up was considered high-tech. She founded the Webby Awards and used the Web as a key marketing tool for her films.
“The Tribe” was an exploration of Jewish identity in the new century. Over the years, her films have been shown at more than 100 festivals.
Shlain sees herself as a “conversation starter” and expects her newest work will provide a springboard for discussion. The film’s upbeat, almost utopian take on the future reflects the views of its director.
“We’re going to see in our lifetime a time when everyone’s connected online,” Shlain says. “This access to information is very exciting. Technology is an extension of us. We’re incredibly curious and we want to connect, and that ultimately gives me hope.”
“Connected” opens Friday, Sept. 16 at the Landmark Embarcadero in San Francisco, the Shattuck 10 in Berkeley and the Sequoia Theatre in Mill Valley. It opens Sept. 23 at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz. www.connectedthefilm.com.