Conceiving Ada

Highly conceptual, intricately cerebral and ever-so-slightly pretentious, Conceiving Ada is a semi-science fiction semi-biography of Ada Byron King, the daughter of poet Lord Byron and the great-grandmother of the digital age (she invented the first computer language in Victorian England). The film taps into her genius as well as her frustration with Victorian convention through a modern protagonist, a passionate computer prodigy who creates a digital wormhole that reaches back through history within her computer to interface with Ada's memory--and by extension Ada herself--in a world that is half Victorian reality and half cyberspace. An abstract, almost elegant rumination on feminism, technology, genetics and the mechanics of memory, Ada is often pure intellectualism, given passion and consciousness by these two women who collaborate and commiserate through the virtual umbilical cord that ties them together. Recommended. (R. Blackwelder)[DVD Review—Sept. 28, 2010—Microcinema, 85 min., not rated, DVD: $19.99—Making its second appearance on DVD, 1997's Conceiving Ada sports a mediocre transfer. Extras include a Q&A with director Lynn Hershman Leeson and star Tilda Swinton (35 min.), a “making-of” featurette (4 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a so-so DVD reissue of a thought-provoking film.]