Bodysong

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.

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.

BODYSONG is a must-see emotional roller-coaster build up out of

clips of found footage from all periods of film-making from all over

the world. A cinematic experience in the true sense of the word, using

images and music (a fantastic diverse film score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood) to speak to the audience on a gut

and heart level. In a time where the individual is paramount this

intelligent film dares to push you to think about what it means to be

human.

At first the film follows the cycle of life, starting with conception, a

cascade of births, growing up, mating rituals and sex, followed by

violence, destruction, old age, illness and death. Because there is

no voice-over used, the images are incredibly strong. There is no

way to escape the visual, you cannot box it with knowledge and

therefore the less pleasant sides of humanity are straight in your

face. We are all animals driven by procreation and lust for power,

moving in herds and I watching this, am one of them. I think I am

special, but I am not.

Fortunately director Simon Pummell then shows us the redemptive side of humanity: the search for meaning. Through religion and ritual, art, dreams, beliefs and solidarity.

Particularly interesting is the introduction of speech very late in the

film, adding cinematic ally as a positive, the discerning factors

between animal and human: voice and reason.

The film ends upbeat, pulling out into space, leaving the human

species on their planet, with all their smallness and bigness

ticking over, generation after generation.

The Bodysong website delivers finally something very few film

websites do: a meaningful experience in itself and not just a

promotional tool. The website has all the clips used in the film and

it is on the website you can find out what, when and by whom. The

choice for mostly amateur non-fiction footage makes absolute

sense to me as this film speaks about real people. That the

choice is also highly personal (and anyone else making this film

would choose different clips) echo's and underlines the theme of

the film: we are all the same, but different.

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.

Opening with footage of sperm fertilising an egg, this film begins a montage of archive footage from different places and times that encompasses the act of birth, growing up, teenage experience, sex, violence, war, spirituality, creativity and death. Having said that it is probably unfair of me to note that it is not wholly successful because when your aim is to sum up the human condition in less than 90 minutes then even attempting it is worthy of credit.

Pummell is credited as writer and director but a massive chunk of credit belongs to those who pulled together this mass of archive footage from all over the world and all over the last century. Pummell groups it together well to establish themes that generally do flow well together to create a general impression of what it is to be alive in overall terms of experience (ie not specific of individuals as such). In doing this the film slightly falters when some clips are dull and others are fascinating but this comes with the territory and the overriding impression is one of being carried along. It is an experimental sort of film and as such will not easily win a mass audience but it does deserve to be seen by many more people than its 150 odd votes on this site suggests have seen it.

Pummell benefits from the skill of those that provide him with his images and although he is "director" it is fair to say that this role is not as it would normally be considered as all of the material has been directed and filmed by others. These others are uncredited as far as I can see but they have captured a great range of footage, some good, others stunning. El-P has called it when he said that this is basically what you need to sit ET down in front of to give him an idea of what being human is. The soundtrack is haunting and well put together to mostly compliment the footage; my favourite being the jazz building to (literally) a climax during the section that depicts the passion and joy of sex.

Overall then a fascinating film that aims for an impossible goal but does a very good job of getting surprisingly close to achieving it. The footage is good and is well used by Pummell to develop themes and threads that combine to sum up the human experience. It is hard to put into words but it is not at all as patronising or arty as that sounds because it is surprisingly accessible and impacting (although you should be prepared for images of graphic sex, violence and births).