Martin Hans Schmitt is a movie director. He produces non-verbal documentary films and 3D-videos.

Force Fields vs. the Ruling Classes – a Plea for the Non-Verbal Documentary Film ROBOT WORLD

Non-verbal documentary films affect audiences from an emotional and an intellectual point of view. Their aesthetic side offers no apparent action; in other words, there is no story with actors, plots and so on. In these films the scenery of images themselves becomes the subject and the interaction of image, music and viewers is what is wanted. The viewers must make an effort to derive any personal meaning from the film. And this is where these films – including ROBOT WORLD, of course – differ from "normal" documentary films. In particular, the development of television documentaries over the last ten years has constricted the documentary into to a kind of radio play in which the lines of the protagonists and the action as shown on film are repeated by a commentary until at the end, even the most inattentive viewer (who might be ironing his or her underwear while watching the film) has understood it all. The documentary thus deteriorates into a primary school lesson and loses its aesthetic and dramatic potential. It seems that, the more channels are created for pure childrens' television, the more childish the adult channels are that have been liberated from childrens' programmes.

By including ROBOT WORLD in your programme schedule you will create the opportunity to counteract this time-wasting tendency for documentaries over the longer term. And incidentally, ROBOT WORLD also continues the historical development of documentaries. They began in Germany in 1927 with Walter Ruttmann's "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City"; at European level they were continued in France with the production "Dogora" in 2005. The best-known is the Qatsi trilogy by the US director Godfrey Reggio (1983 - 2002). All these films are non-verbal documentaries that do not preach to the viewers. ROBOT WORLD is about depicting conditions, not about analysing them. Against the background of a conservative education, it might at first seem like a provocation as ROBOT WORLD does not bear the mark of a ruling class which wishes to place its stamp of approval on national education. The force fields of music underpin the effect of the images which have been liberated from human language at an emotional and a psychological level but without letting them in descend to the proximity of the triviality of a pure illustration. Together with the image sequences, they capture the essence of things. In non-verbal documentary films in particular, the musical image sequences give rise to a true dialogue between the viewers and the non-verbal film in the viewers' minds. So the social relevance of ROBOT WORLD is not only based on demonstrating the new key technology of the 21st century, combining robotics and artificial intelligence, it is also based on the option of no longer of reducing the viewers into – per se – lazy-minded primary school pupils.

Please help make the "brainwork" of the documentary film possible in the future as well. Or, as ROBOT WORLD might put it, "Don't let your audience deteriorate into human machines controlled purely by television programmes".

Yours Sincerely

Martin Hans Schmitt, director