FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.


Up close and personal
Microcosmos refreshingly awestruck and silent
by Robert Tarry

Microcosmos
directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou
Uptown Screen, Jan 17 - 30

The relentless pursuit of knowledge is just fine with me. Thanks to the Discovery Channel I now know, say, how to build a mini-gazebo for my dog, what "p.o.s.h." stands for and why my car's front windshield frosts up more than the sides. Knowledge is power, right?

But it's nice to take a break from the information age once in awhile. The almost-totally-wordless Microcosmos, an unlikely candidate for art film favorite starring insects filmed at the microscopic level, proves you don't need a pith-helmeted host or even an announcer to make nature fascinating - it does fine all by itself. (And besides, do you really care what the Latin name for dung beetle is?)

It also proves that if you spend 15 years planning and three years shooting anything - say, paint drying - just by the sheer breadth and scope of paint-drying footage accumulated, you can't lose. The crew of Microcosmos spent years shooting insects up close, editing the mountains of film down to 75 minutes of technically-dazzling, sometimes even emotionally-stirring footage. That's right. Emotionally-stirring bugs. Add some master foley work and a great score (and even the occasional faked in-the-studio set-up resembling early Star Trek sets or grandpa's electric train ) and you've got one of the most unique films in years.

Can't stand bugs? Don't worry, even my mom can handle ladybugs and a few ants (cover your eyes during the requisite spider web sequence) and oddly enough, after a while, even the rhinoceros beetles start looking cute.

It's a little tough to describe. Picture The Bear with feelers, but instead of a single cute, fuzzy bear cub doing bear things, there are hundreds of cute (occasionally fuzzy) bugs doing bug things. They eat, they mate, they fight, they walk, they fly, they eat, they mate, they fight, they walk, they fly.... One spider even builds an underwater diving bell filled with air. All with no voice-over, all with no fictionalized storyline.

Boring? Not at all. Educational? No, not really (too cute for that). It's not even really all that exciting. So what is it? The word for it, I think, is "hypnotic."

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