Name: Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2019-04-12
Duration: 55 min
Rating: 7.7
Cast: F. Percy Smith

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.

The documentary is a form of non-fiction storytelling that aims to present factual information, insights, and perspectives on real-world subjects, events, issues, or people. Documentaries can cover a wide range of topics, including history, science, culture, social issues, nature, biographies, and more.

Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith

The latest 'film and music' project of Tindersticks is a collage of the science films made in early 1900s by F. Percy Smith-naturalist, inventor and documentarist.

F. Percy Smith in Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith (2016)

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Μικροσκοπικά σώματα: Ο ενδόμυχος κόσμος του Φ. Πέρσι Σμιθ

Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith

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