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.

'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 intention was to outline the human beings and there life on earth in no more then 90 minutes using tons of documentation footage from all over the world and all over the last century. It starts with a library of video recordings of sperm that has been magnified. The film starts on a collection of old recording from all over the globe and period that takes you on a journey of all of mankind's life, having a baby, learning, getting a job, sex, fighting, conflict, religion, imagination and demise.

Some of the clips are dull and others are mesmerizing, the prime impression is one of being carried along. The film somes up the word sublime for me. It The film is put together well to create the themes to create a universal feeling of what it is to be alive. It does not specific of individuals as such like my final film might. The shows me the idea of what being human is, This has really helped me as I want to show what it is like to live in the town of Eastleigh for my own film. The film is really interesting as all the material has been directed and filmed by others.

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.

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.