The Bit Player

Mark Levinson / United States / 2019 / Central European Premiere / 90 min.

synopsis

A mixture of documentary and live action film, The Bit Player is a multilayered portrait of Claude Shannon, the man who invented the word “bit” to describe a unit of information and whose scientific work laid the foundations for IT and artificial intelligence. Through interviews with members of the scientific community, archival footage, and reenactments, the film presents the life and professional story of this forgotten genius who, in addition to his groundbreaking discoveries, also produced numerous strange and useless inventions and enjoyed juggling and cheating at games of chance. The film shows Shannon’s theories and technical ideas using animations easily understood by everyone.

"Claude Shannon should be a model for everyone in any creative field. He never lost his child-like curiosity. Sometimes it revolutionized the world; sometimes it made a flaming trumpet." M. Levinson

biography

American director and producer Mark Levinson hold a Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of California in Berkeley. He is an expert in the post-production dubbing technique known as ADR (automated dialog replacement), which led him to work with such filmmakers as with Miloš Forman, David Fincher, and Francis Ford Coppola. His earlier films include a documentary about Soviet dissidents, Prisoner of Time (1993) and about the discovery of the Higgs boson Particle Fever (2013).

more about film

director:	Mark Levinson
cast:	Judith Ivey, John Hutton, Kaliswa Brewster
producer:	Mark Levinson
script:	Mark Levinson
photography:	Claudia Raschke
editing:	Tim Sternberg
music:	Robert Miller
art director:	Jeremy Woodward, Yuko Sobrin