On DVD: "Erasing David"

The eye-catching, thought-provoking documentary Erasing David plays like a Morgan Spurlock project in thriller rather than comic mode. Piqued by a letter he received from the Government, informing him that some agency or another had mislaid his family's bank details, the documentarist David Bond wondered how much more of his essential information could be vanished into the ether. His plan was to go on the run across Europe for thirty days with a team of private investigators on his tail, obliged to go through his bins, access his Facebook page, etc. to see just what they could ferret out about his whereabouts. At the centre of this stunt is the recent growth in databases, an official form of the covert info-gathering once practised by certain oppressive historical regimes.

It is, undeniably, a somewhat self-serving exercise, allowing a previously unknown director the chance to play at being Jason Bourne; the title, not to mention the giant photo of Bond's face tacked to the wall of the PIs' office, serves notice of the filmmaker's desire to put into play not just his own life, but the lives of those around him, principally his seven months pregnant wife Katherine. Yet in doing so, Bond more successfully exploits the layer of personal tension mined by Spurlock in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?; his inquiry is exactly that of someone concerned with what kind of world his children are going to grow up in, now we have biometric fingerprinting technology in our classrooms.

Some staginess and construction is evident: the paranoia Bond spirals into while off the map, dismantling his kit like Harry Caul in The Conversation and flailing in Blair Witch night vision when he finally retreats to the woods, is all too clearly (and, over the long run, monotonously) a performance. The film's strongest material is unfaked, and taps into the high anxiety of the age: while ducking his pursuers, Bond discovers the extent to which his favoured online retailers and service providers have documented his every move, not to mention several case studies of individual lives ruined by heinous data mismanagement. Aggressive lobbying by the private security sector, coupled with our administrators' nannying influences, have, we learn, combined to leave the UK the third biggest surveillance state behind China and Russia (who have form in this field) - and that's before we factor in ID cards.

Erasing David is avilable on DVD from today.