Written and directed by Simon Pummell
Bodysong is not a film to be passively watched, but is instead a piece of art that tries to actively engage. The director wants the audience to be mindful of the images on screen in the hopes that each viewer will create an individual and unique experience as he reflects on the film. Bodysong tells the story of a human being’s life by breaking it down into six basic elements: birth, growth, sex, violence, death, and dreams. These key points show the universality of life regardless of nationality, ethnicity or creed.
The film is a celluloid collage of edited archival films that have been recorded from all over the world since the medium was first invented. The picture quality of the images isn’t always great, which is understandable considering the age of some of the footage. Most of the subjects are anonymous participants, but the film also uses iconic images. We see Josephine Baker dance, Jackson Pollack paint and Helen Keller speak. There’s famous news footage, such as the Vietcong officer who was shot in the head by General Loan in the middle of a Saigon street during the Vietnam War and the Chinese man holding the white flag in Tiananmen Square, attempting to block a tank. The stories about every shot can be learned through the website that was created in conjunction with the film.
Bodysong starts at the cellular level. We see the building blocks of life as they work their way from egg to child. Women from different cultures give birth in different settings, such as hospitals, homes and even pools of water. This segment goes on way too long as the events and visuals are repeated over and over. The ideas are conveyed rather quickly, so the repetition becomes relentless and I found myself losing interest.
Children grow into young adults. They get involved in courtships that are consummated. This segment included pornographic images of intercourse and oral sex. I was startled, yet not offended. At first, I found them gratuitous. They seem to call attention to themselves and I was taken out of the moment. Thinking about the film days later, I realized that it was not the presentation of the images, but my reaction to them, that caused my disconnection. Images of sexual acts certainly belong in a segment about sex. They are presented very matter-of-factly and not in a salaciousness manner. No more time is given to the sexual scenes than to any other events that comprise a person’s life, so any issues I had were my own.
Article comments
1 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
great stuff, El Bicho. goodness, following this an Chris Beaumont's recent review, i'm gonna have to get the DVD out the cupboard again, it looks like. I ain't watched it in a year or more, and i find myself intrigued by the whole thing anew. Great stuff!
2 - El Bicho
Much appreciated, Duke.
What is good about rewatching it is that you should have a different experience. I'd be curious if your reaction to the film is different upon a repeat viewing.
3 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
aha! i knew i had wittered some thoughts about this back in the day. excuse the length of this comment, but El Bicho, i thought if you were interested in what i made of it second time around, you might be interested in the first viewing. apparently this was written in feb. 2004, and i ain't gonna tell you where i found it, on account of it's shockingly awful and badly written and bland;
"On Bodysong
So The Duke put his feet up on this fine Thursday in the month of February and let Simon Pummell’s Bodysong float around his person for 83 minutes of hypnotic bliss. We here at Mondo Towers have been itching to see this work since it was released late last year. Yet, no cinema anywhere in our general vicinity felt it worthwhile to screen the piece, what with Shanghai Medallions 3 or whatever packing them in like herring in a matchbox from here to Scarborough.
The film came out on DVD on Monday, and was dutifully plucked from the shelves by The Duke, eager to experience this unique homage to humanity.
The touchstone is obviously Koyanniquatsi, and anyone who saw that or its two sequels will know what to expect. Beautiful, surreal imagery, played out (although in this case footage is slowed to a crawl rather than speeded up) to a highly distinctive soundtrack, with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood here getting all Phillip Glass, with his screeching guitar and virtual-orchestral carry-ons. Indeed, Greenwood’s score is as worthy of praise as Pummell’s gargantuan trawl through the annals of cinematic history.
Purporting to tell the tale of human experience utilising archive footage by turns astounding, disturbing, pornographic and bizarre, Bodysong would still be a magnificent achievement even if it wasn’t particularly good. Which, luckily enough, it is. Very good indeed.
Where do you start to pick 83 minutes worth of footage from over 100 years of cinema? Surely there must exist countless shots of children playing, grown men fighting, dancers dancing, all filed away as stock footage or lovingly labelled home videos. To this end, Pummell grabs frames from sources as disparate as Dziga Vertov’s seminal Man With A Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) and 1970s porn loops, bombarding the viewer with image upon image that both validate the ambition of this undertaking, and compliment it. There are shots here which are startling, and others which make one flinch, turn away, repelled by the nature of the material and yet drawn towards the constant feed of image and sound. Viewers of a nervous disposition would be best to approach with caution, especially those with an aversion to graphic representations of childbirth, considering there are nigh on ten minutes of such at the films opening.
While the aforementioned Kowanniquatsi was unforgettably beautiful, and shares many traits with Pummell’s film, Bodysong is to some extent its polar opposite. While the former seemed to mourn human involvement in the world, the latter celebrates it, even finding beauty in the most regrettable foibles of the species.
The work was pitched as a website as well as a film, and so the Bodysong Site offers the stories behind every shot used in the feature, a mammoth task in itself, given the obscure nature of some of the findings. Ultimately, the film is a hymn to human experience, and while the ambition of the concept may at times overshadow the product itself, it remains something to be experienced, to be relished, and a testament to the power of the moving image."
god, "testament to the power of the moving image." what a knob i was. and am, but at least i swear more now.
4 - Tan The Man
"the experience of life itself doesn’t seem to be any different other than our own awareness of it."
Nicely put...