Directing
Short film by George Haggerty.
The stylish eighties brought Haggerty a mixed bag of Los Angeles blessings. His friends were outsiders, people like Charles Bukowski, Victor Mature and Sirius Trixon. He worked as personal chef to movie mogul Jack Warner - he claims he helped poison him. It was Mall Time that launched this project and it still amazes viewers with its sheer cheek in not recognising boundaries of taste and presentation.
Robotopia uses the same blend of magic realism and poetic journalism to unpick contemporary Japanese culture. Post-war Japan is viewed as a vortex that sucks in imagery, ideas and applications from all over the world and somehow translates them into diverting artefacts. For a country that never had an industrial revolution, Japan has a unique relationship to robots. Haggerty's investigation of the how and why of this phenomenon bravely slides us up and down the interface between humans behaving like robots and machine robots behaving like humans.