Bodysong

As I started to watch this extraordinary film, I found the 30 or 40 graphic birth sequences, a few cut with MTV precision, to be somewhat repetitive, even though the cumulative effect is one of wonder and the "That's-how-we-ALL-started" realization. As the film wandered on, photographically documenting our communal journey through life, the immense variation of sequence (locale, year, style, situation, etc.) gave it rhythm and pace.

The first climax of the film is arresting, as are the rest.

An interesting, if sometimes obvious, musical score of various genres, projects warmly in 5.1.

The snaps of real sex are sandwiched by snips of painful and joyous reality and while the film has a humanist political bent, it is a truly amazing work of art with remarkable archival footage edited like movements of a sonata.

The premise of this film is certainly worthy. It's a collage of film archive documentary footage which depicts the complete range of humanity and human experience, starting with birth and going on through various themes (love, war and the like), set to an interesting soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood (the music is in fact by far the best bit).

I expect some people thought this film was wonderful, and I came to it well-disposed myself, but ended up thinking otherwise. Sorry to sound cynical, but given a half-decent film archive, a pair of scissors, a roll of sticky tape and a few days, I could have done quite a bit better myself.

It became apparent after a while that almost all of the footage dated from the 70s or earlier, and it certainly showed. Crackly, poor colour, etc. And it was pretty second-rate footage too.

Lots of shots not particularly well filmed, ranging from the uninteresting to the mildly interesting. The themes were worthy (that word again) enough - people being happy, people being sad, people being shot at, etc. But with a handful of exceptions, you just wouldn't have chosen this particular footage to illustrate the themes. Rather than being inspired by the images, I ended up feeling that I was supposed to be inspired by them, but they just weren't very good.

I couldn't help wondering: given the vast scope of this film - potentially depicting all and any aspect of humanity and human endeavour - was this the best that could be found? Given the billions of hours of film that have ever been shot, was this really the top 83 minutes of all?

I'm afraid not. No moon landings, Beatles, Hiroshimas or other spectacular or memorable imagery here. Working down from the top of the pile of all footage ever taken, you'd find this stuff somewhere in the bottom half - not quite cutting-room floor or home video stuff, but not choice material either. Kind of old, mediocre stuff.

I assume the constraint here was budget. Presumably what happened is that the film-makers paid to use whatever they could find in a cheap archive of old footage. You get what you pay for.

And what you got was basically a load of crackly second-rate old footage on worthy themes cobbled together. Sorry to sound cynical, but that's all this film was.

Incidentally the opening few minutes, which includes (literally) about 30 different slow-motion graphic sequences of childbirth (all also apparently dating from the 1970s), are fairly gross and I'm surprised no-one in the cinema passed out or at least walked out during this.

However, as time wore on various people did get up and leave, and in the end I joined them.

I saw this film at the world premiere in Rotterdam, 3 weeks ago. I didn't know what I was going to see. The only thing I knew was the music was composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. According to the title I thought the film was going to be like an ode to the human body, or something...

It was far from that; a better discription for this film would be: an experimental summary of all the bright and dark sides of life that every human being will encounter during his or her existence... Beautiful and moving it is. This film feels as a strong, videoclip-like story, not as an documentary. Though, the whole film consists completely of archive footage. Every piece of footage of every highlight in the history was used to accomplish a stunning effect. (The director of this film told us, before the film was started, every shot has a story and every story can be found on their interactive website.)This was all superbly guided by a score that, in my opion, sounded very fresh and modern and it harmonized wholly with the visuals as its counterpart.

With all due respect to the person who wrote the first review saying the footage was 'second rate', I think he misses the point. The reason why a lot of the clips aren't well shot or famous is because they are shot by amateurs about amateurs - this is a film about real life, and about a common humanity. Incidentally, there are shots of astronauts and atom bombs, and also some very famous clips, such as the clip from the old film 'the kiss' and the infamous shooting of a Vietnamese man.

The giving birth part of the film was for me rather painful to watch, which surprised me because, having seen Irreversible the week before, I didn't think anything could shock me. Many of the clips were funny, and others moving, but the film was flawed for a number of reasons. Primarily, I was confused by the order in which he tackled the various themes, which instead of going chronologically from birth to death exploring themes in-between, went from birth to death to rebirth, religion, marriage etc.. Also, having spent about 20mins on childhood and the teenage years, he spent no time on the elderly, unless you count the 'death' part.

I also felt that the plinky-plonky music didn't really help much, particularly during the 'sex' sequence. Why is there freaky jazz music going on over the sex part? Why is sex portrayed as some strange, subversive, aggressive part of life? I'll never understand why in 'serious' films hardcore sex attracts aggressive jazz music, when if you watch a hardcore porn movie it always has soft jazz music.

Although there were many parts of the film I enjoyed, it didn't have the coherence or forward thinking approach of similar films such as Koyaanisqatsi.

P.S I don't know why people would walk out of a film like this - it was marked '18' in the UK, so some of the scenes were expected, and all the reviews I read for it clearly stated that it was a series of clips put to music. Besides, it's not that long.

The documentary genre is renowned for its creative filmic style and original brilliance the creators of said films bring to the screen. In the case of BODYSONG writer/director Simon Pummell in his debut feature is left to delve deep into the realms of his mind where anything and everything is possible. Pummell brings his ferociously honest film to life via the avenue of Jonny Greenwood, from the band 'Radiohead', with his immense musical genius creating a score worthy of the greatest motion picture.

The addresses the common truths throughout all society and more importantly the human race as the name suggests BODY being the overriding theme of the feature. All aspects of life are addressed and recorded vividly with no image censored leaving the spectator with a true sense of wonder and horror about the characteristics of the species depicted on screen. The shear volume of information and constant moving images of 'us' becomes a wanted tedium. Repetition seems to have no grounds when up against some of the most beautiful events that can ever occur for example the explicitly shown growing and birth of a human child and the resultant joy of the given parents. Only the most hardened soul could create disgust when viewing such magnificent beauty. One is truly in love with the idea of the human race and thus finds oneself deeply devoted to such a picture. Common curiosity is above all the true reason for placing yourself into the realms of Pummells' mind. This curiosity is convulsed with images that at the same time will deeply sicken most but also when realised as an entirety or as a 'human' they become less horrifying and more of a pragmatically true representation of the human species as we knew and know it. With all metaphorically decorative elements removed this film is showing you nothing more than human life, love, sex, death but in a way which truly mesmerises the soul. Whilst showing the spectator the standard characteristics of the human species Pummell chooses to show feats of human brilliance from the ignition of paper with pure mental strength to the hilariously exquisite contorting gymnastics of a man and his dog. Everything amazes solely because of the blatant and uncensored truth that is filmed. One cannot find in him a reason to criticise this feature due to its pure brilliance from the filmic techniques to the excellent score but more criticisms of the human race. You may find yourself in total emotional disarray that one human can do such things to another, but the film is 'us' and if we are like this then we must not blame the film for its grotesque frankness. More importantly blame us for giving Pummell the resources and the imagery to work with when creating the picture. The character in this film is humans not one but all and the people playing the species do it with realism and fortitude. Actors unconsciously playing a role that are generic to them, i.e. humans doing what they do best, being human. All the characters in the film have a story they are real people and what makes BODYSONG so unique is that an Internet database was created alongside the film with the background of all the people shown in the feature. One is left with only a few words to persuade others to watch BODYSONG them being, IF YOU ARE HUMAN WATCH THIS FILM.