All human life is here

There is a new kind of filmmaker in town. Simon Pummell's elaborate and eye-popping documentary employs the same dumpster-rummaging process as Bill Morrison's recent Decasia; both films are constructed entirely from "found" footage, re-edited, re-processed and welded together to create something more than a documentary, something less than archive restoration.

Certainly, Pummell could not be accused of lacking ambition: Bodysong (as its title suggests) takes as its subject matter human life, from conception to death, stopping at all stations in between.

This sounds indigestible, but the result is an agreeably palatable film experience, beginning with sperm wriggling towards an egg like a salmon swimming upstream.

It continues through a miscellany of birth scenes and further on to the ultimate departure, before shifting into a higher gear to embrace themes on the society we have created: religious practices, man's inhumanity to man and our creativity. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood provides the bonus of his evocative soundtrack.

Constructed with sensitivity and intelligence from more than 100 years of footage, including some wonderfully amusing (and erotic) segments of early pornography, distressing images of Nazi children and the usual grim war newsreels, plus obscure material that illuminates the human condition in surprising ways, this is a wonderful, unique movie that must be seen.

Bodysong
Cert: cert18