Perhaps I'm a bit of a philistine, but I would have preferred more context for this unique collection of F. Percy Smith's observational science films. Assembled by Stuart Staples and accompanied by a fine Tindersticks score, Minute Bodies will evoke a sense of wonder in viewers - but will frustrate some of us who would like to know what precisely it is we're watching. Some things are obvious, such as a plant taking root and growing or a bee gathering pollen, but much of what we see isn't as easily identifiable. I imagine Staples thought sub-titles would detract from the film's visual impact, but I was left a little disappointed by its obtuseness.
2 Reviews
Silent Films as Music Videos
Cineanalyst1 September 2021
I have mixed feelings about this one, "Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith." On the one hand, if this collage brings more attention to an obscure early popular-science filmmaker (Smith), then who am I to knock it. It's not like in the old days when films were cannibalized straight from the negative, permanently damaging them, for reuse in other films, and most of us may never see some of this footage, locked away in archives, otherwise.
Nevertheless, it largely feels as though I watched a 50-plus-minutes music video exploiting fascination with old nitrate to promote an alternative rock band. I prefer scoring silent films that works the other way around, where the scores are made to accompany the films. My gripe here springs from this compilation of Smith films being passed off as directed by Stuart A. Staples, who's Tindersticks band also provides the score. I could open editing software to assemble a bunch of silent films together, set it to some jazzy waiting-room music, remove the titles and put my name on it, too. Besides my respect for the visual part of filmmaking that I believe I could do myself being very low, I'd be lying if I made something such as this and didn't wonder whether I took away more from the original films than what I added to them.
A couple title cards acknowledge Smith's original making of the films assembled here, but the context of what we're looking at is largely removed. It's probably also a partial indictment of my, in this respect, poor education, but at times I had little notion of what I was looking at. Granted, the time-lapse plant photography--which has sometimes been misattributed, as with "The Birth of a Flower" (1910), as the first instance of such, which it wasn't--and the footage of bees pollinating is self-explanatory, but some of the seemingly microscopic or underwater images become nothing but hypnotic abstractions. That's the point, I suppose, as it was evidently also part of Smith's plan, but just part of it.
Nevertheless, it largely feels as though I watched a 50-plus-minutes music video exploiting fascination with old nitrate to promote an alternative rock band. I prefer scoring silent films that works the other way around, where the scores are made to accompany the films. My gripe here springs from this compilation of Smith films being passed off as directed by Stuart A. Staples, who's Tindersticks band also provides the score. I could open editing software to assemble a bunch of silent films together, set it to some jazzy waiting-room music, remove the titles and put my name on it, too. Besides my respect for the visual part of filmmaking that I believe I could do myself being very low, I'd be lying if I made something such as this and didn't wonder whether I took away more from the original films than what I added to them.
A couple title cards acknowledge Smith's original making of the films assembled here, but the context of what we're looking at is largely removed. It's probably also a partial indictment of my, in this respect, poor education, but at times I had little notion of what I was looking at. Granted, the time-lapse plant photography--which has sometimes been misattributed, as with "The Birth of a Flower" (1910), as the first instance of such, which it wasn't--and the footage of bees pollinating is self-explanatory, but some of the seemingly microscopic or underwater images become nothing but hypnotic abstractions. That's the point, I suppose, as it was evidently also part of Smith's plan, but just part of it.
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