This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2017) |
The Body | |
---|---|
Directed by | Roy Battersby |
Based on | book by Anthony Smith |
Produced by | Tony Garnett |
Narrated by | Frank Finlay Vanessa Redgrave |
Cinematography | Tony Imi |
Edited by | Alan Cumner-Price |
Music by | Ron Geesin Roger Waters |
Production company | Kestrel Films |
Distributed by | Anglo-EMI (UK) MGM (US) |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 93 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Budget | £108,000 [1] |
The Body is a 1970 British scientific documentary film directed and produced by Roy Battersby. [2] In the film, external and internal cameras are used to showcase the human body.
The film's narrators, Frank Finlay and Vanessa Redgrave, provide commentary that combines the knowledge of human biologists and anatomical experts. The film's soundtrack, Music from the Body , was composed by Ron Geesin and Roger Waters, and includes songs that were made using the human body as a medium. Waters is also the narrator of one scene.
The film was "suggested by" a science book by Anthony Smith. [3] The cost of optioning film rights and developing the project to take to market cost £11,000 which came from the National Film Finance Corporation. After a year, by December 1969 Battersby had a script. He showed this to the NFFC which resulted in another draft of the script. The NFFC agreed to provide half of the finance. In March 1969 Battersby met with Nat Cohen at Anglo-Amalgamated who agreed to provide the other half of finance on that day. [4] [1] Battersby shot about 300,000 feet of film of which 11,000 were used. "There was a lot of blood and film on the cutting room floor," said Garnett. [3]
Tony Garnett asked John Peel recommendations for who might do the soundtrack. Peel suggested Ron Geesin. [5] Geesin later said:
It was an attempt... to put a deeply socio-human documentary about the human body into cinemas, using some then-pioneering micro-camera work: coursing along the various tubes and all that. The soundtrack did what all film soundtracks are supposed to do: duet with the visual content, for, against, unison, comment. The subsequent album for EMI consisted of most of that soundtrack, in its many parts: mine as originally recorded, Roger’s re-recorded, supplemented by two original tracks, little to do with the film and all to do with Roger and me having fun, "Our Song" and "Body Transport". [6]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Despite the makers' earnest intentions, there is a general impression of aimlessness. The theme was suggested by Anthony Smith's book, which was if anything too crowded with information; the film, on the contrary, is looking for a wider audience than it would get from an educational approach, and though it claims to 'turn hard facts into exciting visual experiences' the facts are nowhere near hard enough, and nothing is ever really followed through. The splitting of the fertilised egg into cells is followed by the bare statement that the cell is the basic unit of life, which leads into a banal song as the camera slowly and pointlessly moves from a baby along a line of naked people representing the stages of growth and ageing. Similarly the internal photography, though technically superb when it shows, for instance, urine passing into the bladder in geyser-like gusts, amounts to little more than a flow of colourful images, with not much more significance than the arty shots of a grotesquely magnified toe-nail being cut. In fact, the film is most successul when it is most straightforwardly informative, as in the final sequence of the birth of a baby, or the tour round a warehouse containing the thirty tons of food which the average Western man eats in fifty years, though the attempt to contrast this with the average Asian's diet is ruined by the coy whimsicality of the commentary. The gap between intention ('I want my films to assist people to get an insight into their lives and to understand the society they live in, so they are better able to change it') and achievement is most obvious in those sequences in which Roy Battersby cuts together unrelated shots in an attempt to give them a single meaning ... this procedure simply creates a montage of unrelated or arbitrarily related images. " [7]
In August 1971 Nat Cohen, whose company distributed the film, said it had recouped its negative cost in the Far East alone. [8]
The film was released on DVD on 7 October 2013.
Percy is a 1971 British comedy film directed by Ralph Thomas starring Hywel Bennett, Denholm Elliott, Elke Sommer and Britt Ekland.
Atom Heart Mother is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd. It was released by Harvest on 2 October 1970 in the United Kingdom, and on 10 October 1970 in the United States. It was recorded at EMI Studios in London, and was the band's first album to reach number 1 in the UK, while it reached number 55 in the US, eventually going gold there.
Ronald Frederick Geesin is a Scottish musician, composer and writer known for his unusual creations and novel applications of sound, as well as for his collaborations with Pink Floyd and Roger Waters.
Music from The Body is the soundtrack album to Roy Battersby's 1970 documentary film The Body, about human biology, narrated by Vanessa Redgrave and Frank Finlay.
"Atom Heart Mother" is a six-part suite by the progressive rock band Pink Floyd, composed by all members of the band and Ron Geesin. It appeared on the Atom Heart Mother album in 1970, taking up the first side of the original vinyl record. At 23:38, it is Pink Floyd's longest uncut studio piece. Pink Floyd performed it live between 1970 and 1972, occasionally with a brass section and choir in 1970–71.
They're a Weird Mob is a 1966 Australian comedy film based on the 1957 novel of the same name by John O'Grady under the pen name "Nino Culotta", the name of the main character of the book. It was the penultimate collaboration of the British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Canal+ Image International was a British-French film, television, animation studio and distributor. A former subsidiary of the EMI conglomerate, the corporate name was not used throughout the entire period of EMI's involvement in the film industry, from 1969 to 1986, but the company's brief connection with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Anglo-EMI, the division under Nat Cohen, and the later company as part of the Thorn EMI conglomerate are outlined here.
The Transparent Anatomical Manikin (TAM) is a three-dimensional, transparent anatomical model of a human being, created for medical instructional purposes. TAM was created by designer – Richard Rush, in 1968. It consisted of a see-through reproduction of a female human body, with various organs being wired so specific body systems would light up on command on cue, with a pre-recorded educational presentation.
Third Ear Band were a British musical group formed in London during the mid-1960s. Their line-up initially consisted of violin, cello, oboe and percussion. Most of their performances were instrumental and partly improvised. Their records for the Harvest label, Alchemy and Third Ear Band, achieved some popularity, after which they found some success creating soundtrack music for films.
And Soon the Darkness is a 1970 British thriller film directed by Robert Fuest and starring Pamela Franklin, Michele Dotrice and Sandor Elès. The plot follows two British nurses on a cycling holiday in rural France; during their trip, one of them vanishes, and the other struggles to search for her in a rural community.
Nat Cohen was a British film producer and executive. For over four decades he was one of the most significant figures in the British film industry, particularly in his capacity as head of Anglo-Amalgamated and EMI Films; he helped finance the first Carry On movies and early work of filmmakers such as Ken Loach, John Schlesinger, Alan Parker and David Puttnam. In the early 1970s while head of EMI Films he was called the most powerful man in the British film industry. He's been called "an unsung giant of British film who never got his due from the establishment in part because of anti-Semitism... the ability to be a successful studio head is very rare and most only last a few years. Cohen did it successfully at various companies for over two decades."
Murder on the Orient Express is a 1974 British mystery film directed by Sidney Lumet, produced by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, and based on the 1934 novel of the same name by Agatha Christie.
The Go-Between is a 1971 British historical drama film directed by Joseph Losey. Its screenplay by Harold Pinter is an adaptation of the 1953 novel The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. The film stars Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Michael Redgrave and Dominic Guard. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
Africa Addio is a 1966 Italian mondo documentary film co-directed, co-edited and co-written by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E. Prosperi with music by Riz Ortolani. Jacopetti and Prosperi had gained fame as the directors of Mondo Cane in 1962.
The Sandwich Man is a 1966 British comedy film directed by Robert Hartford-Davis starring Michael Bentine, with support from a cast of British character actors including Dora Bryan, Harry H. Corbett, Bernard Cribbins, Diana Dors, Norman Wisdom, Terry-Thomas and Ian Hendry. It was written by Hartford-Davis and Bentine.
Biomusic is a form of experimental music which deals with sounds created or performed by non-humans. The definition is also sometimes extended to include sounds made by humans in a directly biological way. For instance, music that is created by the brain waves of the composer can also be called biomusic as can music created by the human body without the use of tools or instruments that are not part of the body.
Up Pompeii is a 1971 British sex comedy film directed by Bob Kellett and starring Frankie Howerd and Michael Hordern. It was written by Sid Colin based on an idea by Talbot Rothwell.
Green Grow the Rushes is a 1951 British comedy film directed by Derek N. Twist and starring Roger Livesey, Richard Burton and Honor Blackman. It was the first film to be released by ACT Films, an entity formed by a trade union for filmmakers. The film was produced by John Gossage and funded by the National Film Finance Corporation and the Co-Operative Wholesale Society Bank. It is an adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same title by Howard Clewes.
Family Life is a 1971 British drama film directed by Ken Loach from a screenplay by David Mercer. It is a remake of In Two Minds, an episode of the BBC's Wednesday Play series first transmitted by the BBC in March 1967, which was also written by Mercer and directed by Loach.
A Raise of Eyebrows is the debut album by Scottish composer Ron Geesin, released in June 1967 by Transatlantic Records. Recorded in his home studio in Notting Hill, Geesin aimed to make a humorous album of social commentary that reflected his musical abilities. Considered a work of electronic and experimental music, the album exemplifies Geesin's tape manipulation of sounds and his skills on numerous instruments, including guitar, piano, banjo and devices atypical to music, and explores music, poetry, spoken word, satire, noise, and sound collages.