Bodysong (2003)

Pretty Good

Please don't spend money on this.

Overrated

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

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.

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.

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.