Bodysong (2003)

Well Deserved Praise

Load of rubbish!!

How sad is this?

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

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.

BODYSONG is a must-see emotional roller-coaster build up out ofclips of found footage from all periods of film-making from all overthe world. A cinematic experience in the true sense of the word, usingimages and music (a fantastic diverse film score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood) to speak to the audience on a gutand heart level. In a time where the individual is paramount thisintelligent film dares to push you to think about what it means to behuman.At first the film follows the cycle of life, starting with conception, acascade of births, growing up, mating rituals and sex, followed byviolence, destruction, old age, illness and death. Because there isno voice-over used, the images are incredibly strong. There is noway to escape the visual, you cannot box it with knowledge andtherefore the less pleasant sides of humanity are straight in yourface. 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 amspecial, 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 thefilm, adding cinematic ally as a positive, the discerning factorsbetween animal and human: voice and reason.The film ends upbeat, pulling out into space, leaving the humanspecies on their planet, with all their smallness and bignessticking over, generation after generation.The Bodysong website delivers finally something very few filmwebsites do: a meaningful experience in itself and not just apromotional tool. The website has all the clips used in the film andit is on the website you can find out what, when and by whom. Thechoice for mostly amateur non-fiction footage makes absolutesense to me as this film speaks about real people. That thechoice is also highly personal (and anyone else making this filmwould choose different clips) echo's and underlines the theme ofthe film: we are all the same, but different.

...shame about the film.Most of the material in "Bodysong" has been used before, elsewhere, and to better effect. Although it begins promisingly enough, with some brilliant footage of the development of unborn children, the film soon degenerates into cheap stock footage which appears to have been rather lazily arranged. By far the most disappointing part is that dealing with love, which the filmmakers "illustrate" through the use of gross-out porn. The subsequent treatment of religion is pretty weak, and the war section, which comes even later, uses footage of atrocities so clumsily that you'll feel as if you're watching a snuff movie.I'll confess I was misled about the nature of the film. I was made to expect a poetic rendering of the human story told through our successive stages of development. If this film were that, I might've enjoyed it. But it isn't, and I didn't. It's really less a "song" than a twisted scream; I can't imagine anyone sane who'd want to see this shoddily-constructed mishmash of Holocaust victims, hardcore sex and exploding amniotic sacs. Given that it's one of the few films that has ever left me angry about the time and money I wasted on it, I just wish the IMDB system allowed the giving of zero stars.

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.