Bodysong

'Bodysong' is a most unusual film, a collection of moving images of the human body set to music. The film demonstrates all stages of life, and includes some very explicit sexual content. In a loose way, it reminded me of Richard Linklater's film 'Slacker', in that one image follows another with some linkage, but no overall narrative in the classical sense. It's very artfully done, and almost every fragment is visually striking; but for those of us who think in words, it's just a set of pictures, distinctive but slightly lacking in purpose beyond a series of things to look at. In its own way, it's very good; but not quite my thing.

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.

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.

I had been really psyched in expectation of seeing this film, but the end experience has left me rather flat. The two major issues of contention I have concern the structure and the much-hyped soundtrack. Although billed as a journey from birth to death the film actually continues past death into a bizarre and ultimately pointless montage of random and arbitrarily selected human activities. Ending the film at death would have been appropriate both in terms of content and time.

My other concern is the soundtrack, which is used to make judgements on what we see, in an otherwise silent film. However this is done inappropriately so that 'womb-time' is depicted in an anti-abortionist almost sacred manner and sex as both crazed and frenzied, whilst death camps are merely romanticised by elevator music! The net result is to depict sex as more unsavoury than the Holocaust! Either let us make up our own minds or treat all human activity with the same contempt.

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).