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August 03, 2005

I finally got around to watching Simon Pummell's film/multimedia hybrid Bodysong, which I initially wrote about with great excitement here. In retrospect, it represents not the epitome of multimedia's potential but the epitome of the possibilities of that potential.

The first twenty minutes of the film are entrancing and extraordinary. They follow the course of human life, across time and culture, from conception through development in utero to birth to early childhood. Despite the occasionally Phillip Glass-ian score by Jonny Greenwood, Pummell sets his film apart from its most immediate and obvious comparison, Godrey Reggio's famous experimental trilogy on the various stages of life, by not using any digital or chemical manipulation (aside from slow motion). Nor, in the lengthy sequence on birth, does he echo too directly Brakhage's Window Water Moving Baby; the sequencing of Bodysong is straightforward, and its power comes from the sheer quantity of images juxtaposed together. The sense of progression, and the images themselves, are stunning, beautiful, and so fluid that the evolution from one stage of life to another is barely noticeable.

What I loved most about all of this was the intimacy of the footage; the close-ups, the lingering shots of faces. This is something that continues through the adolescent period, and then stops, surprisingly and disappointingly, as the film delves into sexuality (with some hardcore footage that, admirably and appropriately, is not biased towards any one sexual orientation). The footage is as copious as everything that's come before it, but there's less immediacy to much of it, less a sense of experience. And then the film takes a turn towards war and violence, and there hundreds of people depicted dead or dying and flames and riots; the footage is harrowing, but it is not involving in the same way that the early sequences were. The film has ceased to be about humans, collectively, and is now about the human collective.

Bodysong's logline is Birth / Growth / Sex / Violence / Death / Dreams. The film adheres quite strictly to that outline, which is an admirable achievement but also key to what I found disappointing about it. Although these stages of life cyclically become more inclusive (and then, towards the end, less so), I believe Pummell could have maintained the focus on the individual experience without deviating from his sequential plan. Both Death and Dreams mark a return to more intimate footage, but by then the early momentum of the film has been lost, and individual images stand out (such as the one I've posted here, of a woman weeping in an overgrown graveyard, or an exhilarating excerpt from a spacewalk), rather than form a cohesive whole.

Still, the movie is very much worth watching - especially because, afterwards, the online half of the film still awaits. The website, included on the DVD and best left for exploration after viewing the film, is a three dimensional space, through which every single shot from the film floats in a continual stream of imagery. One can navigate through this stream and click on each frame to bring up that image's background story (for example, it is revealed that a clip of a certain vintage stag film features the first onscreen appeareance of Joan Crawford). It's a veritable enyclopedia of human experience, and could be considered an even more impressive achievement than the film - if both it and the film were not two parts of the same achievement.

There are technological limitations the prevent the film and the website from truly becoming one multimedia entity, but consider the possibilities this DVD represents; imagine a film where one could, while watching it, immediately click on a shot and discover some facet of information about it, and then jump to a visual database to cross reference it with some other shot, all without ever actually leaving the film itself. In a sense, there have been steps taken towards this already with the branching feature available on DVDs; now imagine a more fluid, immersive amalgamation of that sort of interactivity and the sort featured in Bodysong. It's hard to imagine a film, as we know it, working this way - but what happens when filmmakers start making their films with this sort of interface in mind?This is the sort of thing Nick has been talking about over at Digital Poetics for quite some time; it's also something I'm hoping to explore to a certain extent with my short film The Outlaw Son.

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You'll note, though, that I say to an extent. Here I have a confession to make; as much as this implementation of interactive technology in the developing form of cinema greatly excites me, it also leaves me somewhat cold. To wit: if given a choice, I'd rather watch Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 in its original form than in the viewer-defined order featured on the DVD of The Order (thanks to Matt for pointing out the relevance of that particular feature, though). Or, to return to a comparison from a few paragraphs ago, I actually prefer Window Water Moving Baby to the early sequences of Bodysong. As exciting and fascinating as the absence of subjugation can be, I ultimately find myself returning to more traditional forms of narrative (keep in mind that my idea of traditional is still pretty experimental). This is not resistance, mind you; it is merely preference.

After watching Bodysong and thinking back on Pummell's comment (quoted in my earlier post) about the truth and emotion in a close-up of a human face, I realized I already had a perfect and, to me, preferable example of that phenomenon. I put in the Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds DVD and watched the video to the song Into My Arms again. The clip, directed by Jonathan Glazer (predicating his pivotal, masterful three minute shot of Nicole Kidman in Birth), is made up almost entirely of stark black and white close ups of men, women, childen, of different ages and cultures, all weeping. I don't know the backstory of how the video was made, and perhaps these people are all acting; but their tears are real, and they are drawing on something real to bring them to the surface. To have the chance to look into their eyes and wonder what it is that moves them so is one of the things I love most about film. In my own work, I want to be able to give other people that same chance.

Posted by David Lowery at August 3, 2005 02:21 AM

Comments

Posted by: Nick at August 3, 2005 05:01 PM