Assorted ecologists, armchair philosophers and meddlers have been wringing their hands in recent years over the nature of nature documentaries. Are the lives of various species disturbed by the filmmaking process? Do camera and microphone falsify? Does Homo sapiens have any business peering into the lion's den or the spider's web?
For the next 300 words or so, let's ignore these questions. During the three years they spent shooting their fascinating insect movie Microcosmos, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, a pair of French biologists who double as filmmakers, gently moved a Sacred scarab beetle here and there in the name of art, and they admittedly coaxed performances from a couple of reluctant seven-spotted ladybirds. As far as we know, however, no cast member has grieved to the actors' union. And none has been accused of evil. In 1971's The Hellstrom Chronicle, by contrast, man was warned to gear up for total war with insects.
The world magnificently revealed here is, no less than ours, a teeming melodrama of birth, courtship and work, lunch, war and death. Apprehended through micro-photography, it can be unexpectedly comic, as when a circle of red ants ring the old watering hole to wet their whistles, or cruel, as when an argiope spider deftly spins a hapless katydid into a coffin of glistening silver filament. A slow, furry freight train of processionary caterpillars plods, head to tail, toward an uncertain destination. A terrifying, wild-faced pheasant, huge as Godzilla now in the camera's eye, pecks and scratches the life from a colony of scurrying ants.
Here is the Sacred beetle again, laboriously pushing its huge pill of dung up the side of a seeming mountain, only to fail and fall back. The bug pushes again and the pill rolls back. The bug pushes. The pill impales itself on tiny spikes of grass. Oh, man! Sisyphus himself was not condemned to such frustration.
Elsewhere in a world we usually ignore, bees buzz, bugs suck and flies hum, their unknown voices magically amplified to monstrosity--or at least recognizable life. And while a romantic aria rises on the soundtrack, a pair of pink-white Burgundy snails, their pale shells wobbling on the forest floor, join together in a gleamy liquid embrace. A gusting wind and an afternoon shower, as terrible as flood or earthquake or meteor shower, devastates a miniature city in the ground. The tiny citizens--thousands of them--dutifully dig out and begin repairs; clearly, they've done this before.
Want to behold a sleek polist wasp the size of an F-16 up there on the big screen? This is the film for you and yours. Care to watch the eucera bee, fat and yellow as a car, fall in love with the graceful Ophrys orchid? These are your 77 minutes of bliss. In a movie theater, plunged into darkness, in the absence of distracting narration, what Nuridsany and Perennou give us is nature gorgeous and fierce, barely disturbed at all. Ironically, they also give rebuke to the miniaturizing effects of television: Those nature docs on public TV haven't this power or scope.
Look. In the swallowtail butterfly, slowly spreading house-sized wings, a pastel glory of spring. In the spindly water spider and the notonect, once again, the evidence of Design.
--Gallo
Microcosmos. Documentary directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou.
