Breaking the Maya Code

What elevates Breaking the Maya Code to the zenith of the documentary format? Maybe it's the subject: deciphering a lost written language involves both adventure and rigor. It's like Indiana Jones taking on a heroic quest without ever having to punch a bad guy.

Or maybe it's the technical elements, which are handled with care and clarity. The production team blends narration, interviews, old photographs, and animation to paint exquisite portraits of time and place. It's an expertly-crafted documentary, but that's not what makes it special.

It's the story, the details, and the characters. We meet such a variety of people with a fascinating mix of skills. And their contributions combine to piece the larger puzzle together. And the way that puzzle comes together is beautiful.

I was never good at language classes in school, but Breaking the Maya Code had me dreaming of glyphs, syllables, and the magic hidden within them.

If you study cinema, you need to understand visual languages. You will end up here, with a society not hampered by the need for commercial counting systems. That is what drove the written language of the "west."

You will end up here for another reason. The great migration out of Africa of humans was preceded by at least a million years of language without speech. Here and Australia are where the image/gesture essentials of that language are best preserved. You'll need that if you you communicate in image.

You'll end up here because this documentary is the definitive introductory film, much better than the book on which it is based because it features interviews with real experts, key players in the process. It shows the artifacts. It includes archival footage. But most of all, it shows the glyphs themselves with animated explanation. No printed description could possibly have captured that. The image language needs an image language to describe it.

If you do some simple mapping from culturally situated Mayan metaphors to today's metaphors and analogies, it still lives. If you are in DC, I suggest you visit Dunbarton Oaks, mentioned here.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.