Wonders of the living world

Filmed in 1973, this 13-part BBC production made great waves when it was broadcast in America. It was one of the first hits on public television, and made PBS cool. Written by the mathematician Jacob Bronowski, it's billed as a personal history of humanity. Filmed on location around the world, the series is a rousing, philosophical celebration of science, invention and art. I thought that it might not have the same gravitas it had 40 years ago, but the newly restored DVD version keeps its power. Bronowski is deeply optimistic, surprisingly contemporary, and very sympathetic to the current ideas of emergence and self-organized systems. His account could have been written yesterday. The thing that struck me most about his ode to humanity was Bronowski's precise, pithy, almost poetic style. He's a fabulous presenter, a remarkable person, and while watching him you think, yes, if he is an example of what humans are, then they have indeed ascended. I learned a whole lot from this poem, and recommend it as one of the best short histories of humans written so far.

-- KK

The Ascent of Man
Jacob Bronowski, Mick Jackson and Adrian Malone
1972, 676 min
$135, DVD (5-disc set)

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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Book also on Amazon

This is a reality TV program about meerkats. It is totally engrossing. There is more melodrama packed into one day of this large family of mongoose relatives living in the Kalahari Desert than you'll find on most human shows in a month. Every 24 hours some disaster befalls this clan, and 24-hour cameras record everything. A brave son suffers a lethal snake bite, then stupid teenage baby-sitters go off to play and forget the baby who dies in the heat, a psycho uncle puts the colony in danger, a sad betrayal by a brother-in-law, a rebellious daughter gets pregnant via a male from the enemy clan, a powerful mother plans infanticide, and nasty one-eyed leader from a rival tribe tries to take over -- all that is just the first week!

This long running series has become a huge international hit. There are tons of online forums, discussion boards and YouTube clips interpreting the complicated relationships of these cuddly mammals. The small size of the meerkats speeds up the cycle of their lives, and their open desert home makes filming easy. Plus they stand on two feet -- instant film stars! In addition meerkats are weirdly social animals (the dominant female prevents other females from having families) which makes the saga of their intertwining lives endlessly fascinating.

With 52 episodes now filmed, the series is quite addictive. Unscripted, the shows are constantly surprising. You can never guess what will happen next on this super-charged reality show. Will the wayward daughter live or die? Will her mom kill her children in anger? Will the hated brother break up the clan? Meerkat Manor provides the same gossip-fodder as a human soap opera, except it's far more extreme in its plot turns. It's a soap opera on steroids.

Best of all Meerkat Manor is a supreme piece of natural history -- the cameras and longitudinal study is based the Oxford-sponsored Kalahari Meerkat Project's 10-year observation of these colonies. This series is an intense short course in mammal behavior. Hard not to get hooked.

-- KK

Meerkat Manor: Season 1
Oxford Scientific Films
2006, 280 min.
DVD (3 discs), $16

Official website from the UK makers

Website of the US presenters, including discussion boards

Friends of Kalahari Meerkat Project

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

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Anyone approaching birth should watch this film about modern midwifery. There was a lot of talk about natural birthing and midwifery 30 years ago, but the buzz about those traditional "alternatives" vanished, while the medicalization of birth has accelerated to extreme heights. Some areas of the country have 45% Ceaserean rates. This film does a great job illuminating how early choices (like inducement) rapidly funnel one's later options into surgery. The complicated figures, jargon, and options are explored by following the film maker as she makes some very hard choices in her own pregnancy. You get to see several natural births play out in cinematic detail; they are stunning. Not what you expect. This documentary is a potential mind-changer.

-- KK

The Business of Being Born
Abby Epstein
2007, 84 min.
DVD, $25

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This series should be required viewing by all inhabitants of Earth. Nearly every shot in this extravaganza 11-part BBC documentary is new, dazzling, and jaw-dropping wonderful. "Is that really on this planet?" you ask yourself. "How come we've lived here so long and no one ever showed us that before?" Because they didn't have 4 years and 25 million dollars. This fortune was well spent on ingenious high tech cameras (slow motion, night seeing, telescopic, high definition) placed in the hands of photographers of infinite patience who provide a view of this earth that will both warm you up and wise you up. As a celebration of where we live, this true film won't be outdone soon, if ever. And it is not just me who's gaga for it. This is the first item I've encountered on Amazon that had an almost unanimous 5-star rating for 280 reviews.

You have a choice of formats for the DVD. You can get it in regular display mode, or in true high definition TV mode. (If you've been waiting for something to warrant purchasing a hi-def TV, here it is.) You can also get it with American narration (Sigourney Weaver), or in the classic David Attenborough British version. I recommend the Attenborough narration for his discernible passion. The Amazon and Netflix links below take you to the Attenborough narration on ordinary DVDs.

-- KK

Planet Earth
David Attenborough
2007, 550 min.
5-Disc set, DVD
$54

Rentable from Netflix

Available from Amazon Amazon

Website

Amazing! Astounding! Utterly cool. Hi-tech photography makes this the best David Attenborough nature series ever. The subject is earth's invertebrates, or in other words, the creepy crawly things that fill the woods, bushes and undergrowth. Insects, spiders and their kin. The diversity of these beings is vast, and their bizarre stories untold. Attenborough and the BBC spend a lot of money and time traipsing around the world using really cool infrared cameras to see at night, or pinhole cameras to see up close, or ultra-fast cameras to catch wings flapping. The view they capture of these unnoticed critters is absolutely stunning. They invert the usual view of bugs by filming them from their level or below. It turns out that when you can place your camera so that you literally look up to an ant while seeing it in its environment, then you look up to it with new respect. The bugs seem more like the animals they really are. When all their hairs, scales, and whiskers are visible, their true animal nature can be seen. As usual Attenborough's very biological organization of what you see and his crisp insights make this journey unforgettable and an instant classic. I've seen it twice already.

-- KK

Life in the Undergrowth
By David Attenborough
2005, 250 min.
$26, DVD, 2-disc set

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A maverick sculptor imprints baby goslings to follow his homemade ultra-light airplane as if it were their mother, and in so doing he gets the flock of geese to fly alongside him, where he can film them. Hollywood turned this true story into the family movie Fly Away, and the great documentary Winged Migration borrowed the same technique for other wild birds. But this is the original low-rent documentary made by the Canadian artist himself, wherein he films his journey of invention, with its many dead-ends, failures and ingenious solutions. You get the raw energy and details of an artist at work. It's an engaging tale, a brilliant achievement, and a marvelous act of imagination.

-- KK

C'mon Geese
Directed by Bill Lishman
1989, 28 min.
$15, VHS

Available from Operation Migration, a non-profit organization co-founded by Bill Lishman

Distributed by and also available from Bullfrog Films

Who knew that James Cameron, the director of the Alien films and Titanic, was a hopeless science nerd and submarine groupie? Cameron uses his extensive resources to hire four cute mini-submersibles, staffs them with good looking astronauts and exobiologists, and then sets off to explore the bottom of the ocean as if it were another planet. And it is! There is a weird world down there, entirely separate from the solar powered ecosystems on the rest of the planet. In the oceanic deep, this alien world is chemically- and heat-powered, which makes for very bizarre creatures, seen up close and personal. Cameron makes the controversial case that archaic life may have begun in this non-solar environment first and then later migrated to the lighted world. The drama of surviving bone-crushing deep dives is just a rehearsal for future expeditions to the other moons in our solar system that may have water and underwater alien life. The science is well done, very engaging, and very imaginative. It's done with such impeccable Hollywood filmwork that it feels like a science fiction film. Be sure to watch the extended, and not the short IMAX, version.

-- KK

Aliens of the Deep
Directed by James Cameron
2005, 47 min.
$30, DVD

Available from Amazon

Rentable from Netflix

An articulate and overeducated man, but a drifter and nearly homeless, finally finds his calling in life: to feed and befriend a flock of escaped parrots on a high-priced hill in San Francisco. Like Francis of Asisi, he gently delves so deeply into the lives of these exotic birds that he can identify them individually, and over time follows their saga through generations as they multiply and take over the neighborhood. Through him you get to watch a parrot soap opera -- who died, who's with whom, she said, he said. It's a wonderful natural history mystery, and as therapy, the parrots seem to liberate our saint from his stagnation. Enlivened by this wild bunch, he steps out and becomes an expert -- on parrots. In short, a man is tamed by wild parrots; and the parrots become as interesting as people.

-- KK

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Directed by Judy Irving
2005, 83 min.
$18, DVD

Available from Amazon

Rentable from Netflix

It must be the two feet. Plenty of other creatures in the animal kingdom endure mind-bogging hardships, as do the stars of this movie, the empeoror penguin in the Antartica. But none look like little people as they do it. Waddling like overweight suburbanites in line for a concert, they trudge across 70 miles of frozen ice to search out their devoted mates, who, if all went well, have spent the last 3 months standing in 80 below blizzards holding an egg on the top of their feet without eating. These little being's lives are totally focused on that one egg, and they move heaven and earth to keep it alive. (Yeah for good parenting!) I've found that women in particular find this movie romantic, perhaps because once the egg is laid, the responsiblity for its survival through the harsh dark winter is passed 100% onto the fathers. There's plenty of other aspects about the penguin's life cycle which make it easy to project our humanity onto them. Whether you find these penguins sweet or pitifully trapped in a horrendous cycle of striving just to stay alive, this is remarkable film. It is expertly crafted to inform you and to touch your heart.

-- KK

March of the Penguins
Directed by Luc Jacquet
2005, 80 min.
$17, DVD

Available from Amazon

Rentable from Netflix

A quasi-documentary about a family of camel shepherds in Mongolia. The family almost loses a rare white camel colt because its mother rejects it and won't nurse the calf. Mom and child are re-united by means of a special ritual conducted by a local violin player who serenades the mother camel. Music cures what ails her. Mother camel weeps on film as she finally suckles her newborn colt. Yeah, it's odd and unusually haunting. The story is held together by the family's youngest boy. This unique film is as minimal as the desert, as melancholy as the sweetest nomad ballad, and as authentically detailed as hand-woven carpet. It is a really fine carpet.

-- KK

The story of the Weeping Camel
2004, 87 min.
Directed by Luigi Falorni and�Byambasuren Davaa
$21
Available from Amazon
Rent from Netflix

A wonderful series of cinematic speculations on what animals could evolve into in the next, oh, 500 million years. The same skill and techniques that resurrected dinosaurs of old and made them seem real and natural (see Walking with Dinosaurs) are applied here to possible animals millions of years into the future. It's a fabulous job of scientific imagination and a great lesson in following the logic of evolution.

-- KK

The Future is Wild
2003, 3-Disc Series, 328 min.
$27
Available from Amazon
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It begins as a small nod to the insects in your backyard, but soon becomes a wide-opened window into a previously unknown microcosm of insect-dom. How is it possible we've never seen this world before with this clarity? With scarce narration this better-than-usual nature film is more poem than documentary. Works for kids. Filmed by the same Frenchman who later did Winged Migrations.

-- KK

Microcosmos
Directed by Claude Nuridsany, Marie Perennou
1996, 80 min.
$18, DVD

Available from Amazon

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An offbeat, kinky, tongue-in-cheek celebration of the monstrous cane toad invasion of Australia and of the people who love the poisonous creatures and those who hate them. A nature film with attitude.

-- KK

Cane Toads: An Unnatural History
Directed by Mark Lewis
1987
$22

Amazon

Netflix

Of all of David Attenborough's famous and fabulous surveys of life, this one on the life of birds is his best -- perhaps because Attenborough loved birds the most. His look at winged creatures is quirky, intelligent, deep, and memorable. It nicely serves as a brilliant short course in ornithology, or as a mesmerizing way to keep restless young tamed for hours because he reveals one amazing thing after another. You can find nature films round the clock on cable; this series is simply in a class by itself, worth re-watching many times. Extreme Birds is how I think of it.

-- KK

The Life of Birds
1998, 540 min. (3 disc series)
Presented by: David Attenborough
$52

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You want life weird and strange? It's in the deep a mile down. You don't know life at all until you've met these spectacularly different creatures. I mean way different. Totally bizarre, totally awesome. Guaranteed to alter your consciousness. The filmmaking is superb and jaw-dropping. The disk you want is Part 2 of the acclaimed BBC Blue Planet series. The rest of the series is okay, but not extraordinary; the other episode on Part 2, "Open Ocean," is one of the better of the series; so you can order just this one disc (or tape).

-- KK

The Blue Planet
Part 2: Open Ocean/ The Deep
Narrated by David Attenborough
2001, 100min.
$13, DVD

Available from Amazon

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This 8-part (4 DVD set) series is a National Science Foundation/PBS production that is the most taxonomic of any presentation I've seen. The Shape of Life addresses the 8 major categories of animal life -- phylum by phylum. Starts with sponges, heads toward round worms, and so on. You get the full diverse view of life -- all intelligently organized around a taxonomic framework (without the vocabulary), and expertly illustrated with great (mostly undersea) BBC-type footage. Despite the wonderful nature photography, the creators work really hard to convey the innovations offered by each phylum, and it works. This series cured me of a rather vague notion of animal diversity, despite my work at All Species. I'd love to ingest the same mind-opening treatment for the plant world, as well as the other 3 kingdoms.

The Shape of Life
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Four discs, $80
From PBS

An offbeat look at chickens and the people who love chickens way too much.

-- KK

The Natural History of the Chicken
2000, 60 min
By Mark Lewis
$23

Netflix
Amazon

Nature photography doesn't come much purer. Filmed over several years from and in a church tower in Norway, this unadorned film of hawk life, from birth to death, is seen from the birds� eye view, with no human narration. Extreme filmmaking, extreme birdness.

The Kestrel�s Eye (Falkens oga)
1999, 89 min
By Mikael Kristersson
$30 VHS

Netflix
Amazon