Sam Klemke's Time Machine

One can expect the unusual from Australian documentary filmmaker Matthew Bate, whose Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (VL-3/12) was a decidedly oddball chronicle of sparring roommates who were captured on audio. Bate takes a similarly indirect approach to telling another unsettling yet often funny story about how destiny for some people seems to end in a cul-de-sac. This is a record of the life of one Sam Klemke, a Colorado native who faithfully shot video of himself every year from 1977 until the present. Intended as a personal journal detailing his ups and downs (many more of the latter), and peppered with general reflections about age, success and failure, the fleetingness of love, and the way a body changes over time, Klemke's video diary often reflects life itself: miraculous but seemingly random. We meet Klemke as a rail-thin 19-year-old with too much hair and a face too narrow for his big teeth. Over time, entering his 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond, Klemke gains a lot of weight (some of his homemade footage has fun with his pattern of overeating junk food), moves in and out of his parents' home, changes girlfriends a lot, and seems to have his greatest financial success as a caricature artist at malls and festivals. Fascinating, but what does it all mean? Bate provides perspective through a poetic contrast born of coincidence: the first day that Klemke began filming himself in '77 also happened to be the day the Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched to explore the solar system. Aboard Voyager, rather famously, is the Golden Record, a metal disc with diverse evidence of humanity's existence on Earth, including diagrams and music. Here, Bate intersperses footage and dialogue from the Golden Record broadcast during the last four decades of Voyager's mission, which is to tell anyone out there that we exist. His point is that as a representation of human life, the Golden Record presents a sanitized image, whereas Klemke's goofy but honest visual autobiography comes much closer to the truth. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)