Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

[projekktor id=’20478′]

Alex Gibney, the director of this year’s revealing documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, returns with a look at one of the technology world’s most interesting figures in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. It premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival earlier this year.

Perhaps the most publicly revered corporate figure of the technology age, Jobs’ untimely death at the age of 56 in 2011 set off a worldwide outpouring of grief from consumers who worshipped his signature products such as the iPhone and the iMac. As the co-founder and CEO of Apple, his name and image had become synonymous with the sleek, high-tech personal devices that came to define and transform the first two decades of the 21st century. Even after his death, the highly secretive creation and careful launching of each new Apple product continues to be the focus of mass media interest and a rush by consumers to be the first to own it. As a result, Jobs was able to transform Apple from a small start-up working out of a garage into the world’s most valuable corporation in history, a global economic engine. Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine is no corporate sanctioned hagiography and was made without Apple’s cooperation or that of Jobs’ immediate family.

“I originally envisioned the film as a kind of ‘Citizen Jobs,'” explains Gibney, “borrowing the meandering structure of Orson Welles’ masterpiece, in which an inquiring reporter moves from witness to witness, trying to piece together the meaning of Kane’s ‘Rosebud.’ The resulting film is a journey of visits to people – some central, some tangential – to help the audience better understand him and his legacy.”