There is a difference between imagining yourself as the kind of person who walks down to the local second-run/art-house cinema to watch films often and actually doing this thing. For the last ten years I have been doing much more of the former than the latter. But perhaps this is changing? Being fairly certain that we are having no more children and having Deetman growing out of toddlerhood and Rara racing steadily toward greater and greater independence means that our lifestyle is undergoing a major change. Friends for dinner and going to the movies are two of the early symptoms of this change. The key now is to NOT GET PREGNANT. Hee.
I had a minor freakout when I saw the trailer for this way back in the winter or the spring or something. I think it was when we went to see How to Train your Dragon in 3D at the megaplex. What genius, I thought at the time. A movie of babies! Of course! Why has no one done this yet? My ovaries were pulsing. "I am going to BUY this movie", I whispered to Tobias. This would bring the total number of DVDs in our DVD collection to 2. The other one Rara got as a Christmas present from grandparents.
Then I read Ayun Halliday's article about it in the East Village Inky, issue #44 (buy it here when the author gets back from her hols in a couple weeks). She did a round-up of several very negative reviews of the film and talked about why she liked it. Having not yet seen the film, my reaction to the article was ambivalent. It was an interesting read, but I didn't yet know whether I agreed with Halliday, or whether the negative reviewers had their points. It definitely did seem that the reviews were overly caustic though.
Then I saw it. And it is so good. So pure. Pure documentary. So moving. So perfect. It asks so many questions and presents no answers. I just loved it. And then I re-read the article in the East Village Inky and was totally enraged by the quotes from the negative reviews. I had that experience of wondering whether the reviewers and I had even seen the same movie.
See it! If you see it with a four-year-old, may I suggest the privacy of your home? Deetman was quite disturbed by certain scenes of the movie and more disturbed by the audience reactions to them. For example, a two-year-old boys slaps his infant brother repeatedly in the face with a dish towel. The adults in the audience, while recognising the cruelty of the act, also, for the most part, consider the slapping to be harmless, provided it doesn't go on too long, and therefore, they laugh. The four-year-old in the audience parses the scene as one of bullying bordering on torture and is disgusted and disturbed and frightened by the laughter. The mother of the four-year-old must be sure not to laugh and reassure the four-year-old that no, it's not funny, you're right. Complex! Still, he liked the film overall and I would totally show this movie to kids, just maybe rent it instead of going to the theatre.
This review cracks me up, and I can't say it's inaccurate, but I really felt, after watching the film, that babies are the essence of humanity, and the movie was about humanity, or at least the human as animal.
There were a lot of pregnant women in the audience, and halfway through the movie, I really felt for them. Babies was quite stressful at times, and if I were pregnant, I would not have been calmed by the movie, though it would have given me a lot of food for thought about the kind of parent I wanted to be. Being unpregnant, the movie didn't make me want to have another any more than watching Blue Planet made me want to adopt a baby shark.
Another review said the film lacks insight and depth. My immediate response was "WRONG". But then, after consideration, I think that it's a film where the viewer adds the insight and depth themselves. Because it's so raw, I feel like I got to explore the topic on my own terms, come to my own conclusions, develop my own hypotheses. And I loved that. It reminded me of something I experienced in an Edward Tufte class I took in June. Mr. Tufte objects to traditional Powerpoint presentations because he says that they're like information dictatorship (I'm paraphrasing).
(I bought this poster. Reactions to my suggestion that I put it up in the boardroom at the office have been lukewarm. Our CEO, bless his heart, feeds heavily at the PowerPoint teat.)
In other words, the presenter strongly controls the information that she gives her audience, in an effort to strongly control the conclusions her audience reaches. But Mr. Tufte advocates for a way of presenting information that allows audiences to use their cognitive powers to draw their own conclusions from data. He suggests that presenters assume their audience is smarter than them, rather than the opposite.
Since attending his class, I have found it very difficult to stomach the Powerpoint presentations that I am subjected to in my professional life and have been talking to people who make presentations about how advantageous it is to loosen their grip a bit on their information and respect their audiences' powers of reasoning enough to simply give them the information (all at once! In its entirety! yes!) and let them figure things out themselves. I think this is what Babies does. It doesn't, for want of a better word, spoonfeed the info. It just lays it on you and you figure shit (ha!) out for yourself. Babies is to the supergraphic as Roger & Me is to the Powerpoint presentation.
On the other hand, I also have to consider this: I used to make movies for a living and the best part of that job (there were hardly any bad parts) was watching raw footage for the first time and having the movie be born inside your head. And I think I did this when I was watching Babies. I made a different movie from the video clips on the screen -- one that was much more prescriptive and preachy and made a lot of strong, salient points about How Things Should Be -- and watched that. Sort of Make Your Own Movie movie-watching experience that maybe not everyone likes to have. But then, that's kind of the point of art, no?
What do people's gender have to do with their opinion of this movie, I wonder? Are women more prone to like it? The answer seems too obvious to really warrant any discussion. I'll admit that I hope my spouse doesn't see it, because if he hates it like the male reviewers quoted in the East Village Inky, I will be very unhappy.
Whoa. Guess I just wrote a major diatribe about Babies instead of a Summie Movie Roundup. So this will be part one.
