The prospect of wading through all of that footage received depicting a day in the life of a human-being must have been one of the most daunting things any editor has ever faced in the history of cinema. In the long run, the narrowing down of the material into what we get might very well be the sole glory of Life in a Day, a piece featuring a collection of amateur snapshots of what somebody might do on a typical day in July of 2010 recorded via cell phone and digital camera. It is a project synonymous with where we stand today in moving image production: everyone's a film-maker, very few are any good at it but all of it is accessible 24/7 anyway – why not embrace the idea of such a thing and boil it down into a 90 minute film? In spite of the skills shown in dealing with not only the quantity of material, but also the gulf in how different it all is to the next project creators Kevin MacDonald and Ridley Scott received, there remains an unaddressed sensibility about the whole thing which is unshakable and, frankly, quite annoying.
Let's not look past the fact that Life in a Day was an experiment, but how successful is an experiment when several minutes are dedicated to people doing their toiletries; most of the content isn't anything you weren't already aware of, culturally nor socially, and when the best chunks of it depict "real life" people of whom I've already seen depicted in "fictional" neo-realist films more interestingly? I am, of course, referring to the likes of the goat farmers based on what look like the Uzbek steppes. Them there is wife-less Japanese hoarder living with his infant daughter in an apartment as well as the sequences that come with a young English lad whose back in his home town just after graduating from university to see his father again. Veterans of mostly any film by the Iranian Makhmalbaf film-making dynasty will have had their fill of steppe sheppards doing what they do and saying what they say in better films which, oddly, felt more real. Likewise, anybody who has seen anything by Ozu or, much more recently, 2008 Japanese film Tokyo Sonata, will slip into enjoying watching the grace and subtlety of the Japanese family – the two in question of which get up, greet one another and then light some incense for what appears to be their deceased wife/mother.
The film begins at 3am on the day in question, July the 24th 2010, and we're everywhere from Virginia to Pakistan. People comb their hair, arrive at work and breastfeed – admittedly, there is an eerie beauty to proceedings so simple and so mundane. The morning arrives with market places bustling and the like; this all gives way to a number of universal depictions of people in random places from the afternoon to the evening and then late at night again. There are attempts at parallels between people. The coverage of the aforementioned Japanese family with their lost feminine participant depicts a youngster quiet, unassuming and acceptant of their mother's death. They are measured and calm, in spite of the fact they live quite roughly. Cut to America, and a spoilt kid throwing a tantrum over something-or-another while in occupancy of his lavish family abode greets us. He has a mother and she appears to be as close to death as the Japanese already was; there seems to be some sort of distinction being made as to how different children in different cultures, or nations, behave. Later on, the piece will change its tract when it depicts an American woman's tearful goodbyes to her lover over a webcam as he serves in The Middle East – this is directly after depicting what an Afghan woman's day might consist of during as she too lives within the confines of said conflict.
Regardless, one cannot look past the paradox at the heart of Life in a Day which the production team cannot trump and that is, if the film is meant as a unique snapshot of what people got up to on that chosen day, how much of it is activity genuinely suited to what someone might have done that day and how much of it merely fell into the trap of being the very thing that inspired it? That is to say, goofy clowning around in the vain attempt at fame all captured via the digital eye and placed where everyone can see it. But there are truths, cold truths which you wish the producers had found more of during their unenviable task: the cutting from interior footage of an abattoir to two people enjoying a burger at a roadside van and not really thinking any more of it is a cold instance of life's inherent ways.
The film is at its best during these contemplative sequences and at its worst when it essentially becomes the very thing it should have evolved out of: that is to say, extended segments on what's in a person's pocket or what people eat or how they get around – content which is good only for the doldrums of Youtube's infinite online data banks of moving image. On balance, points can only be awarded for the idea behind the film. In spite of coming at you with this mantra of diversity and peace-hoping, universal love, the film's consensus is that of a bleak one. Mankind is ultimately depicted as a savage; aggressive, sometimes confused and often quite weak species – a species who appears to know what the issue is but has absolutely no clue as to how to attain the solution.
Let's not look past the fact that Life in a Day was an experiment, but how successful is an experiment when several minutes are dedicated to people doing their toiletries; most of the content isn't anything you weren't already aware of, culturally nor socially, and when the best chunks of it depict "real life" people of whom I've already seen depicted in "fictional" neo-realist films more interestingly? I am, of course, referring to the likes of the goat farmers based on what look like the Uzbek steppes. Them there is wife-less Japanese hoarder living with his infant daughter in an apartment as well as the sequences that come with a young English lad whose back in his home town just after graduating from university to see his father again. Veterans of mostly any film by the Iranian Makhmalbaf film-making dynasty will have had their fill of steppe sheppards doing what they do and saying what they say in better films which, oddly, felt more real. Likewise, anybody who has seen anything by Ozu or, much more recently, 2008 Japanese film Tokyo Sonata, will slip into enjoying watching the grace and subtlety of the Japanese family – the two in question of which get up, greet one another and then light some incense for what appears to be their deceased wife/mother.
The film begins at 3am on the day in question, July the 24th 2010, and we're everywhere from Virginia to Pakistan. People comb their hair, arrive at work and breastfeed – admittedly, there is an eerie beauty to proceedings so simple and so mundane. The morning arrives with market places bustling and the like; this all gives way to a number of universal depictions of people in random places from the afternoon to the evening and then late at night again. There are attempts at parallels between people. The coverage of the aforementioned Japanese family with their lost feminine participant depicts a youngster quiet, unassuming and acceptant of their mother's death. They are measured and calm, in spite of the fact they live quite roughly. Cut to America, and a spoilt kid throwing a tantrum over something-or-another while in occupancy of his lavish family abode greets us. He has a mother and she appears to be as close to death as the Japanese already was; there seems to be some sort of distinction being made as to how different children in different cultures, or nations, behave. Later on, the piece will change its tract when it depicts an American woman's tearful goodbyes to her lover over a webcam as he serves in The Middle East – this is directly after depicting what an Afghan woman's day might consist of during as she too lives within the confines of said conflict.
Regardless, one cannot look past the paradox at the heart of Life in a Day which the production team cannot trump and that is, if the film is meant as a unique snapshot of what people got up to on that chosen day, how much of it is activity genuinely suited to what someone might have done that day and how much of it merely fell into the trap of being the very thing that inspired it? That is to say, goofy clowning around in the vain attempt at fame all captured via the digital eye and placed where everyone can see it. But there are truths, cold truths which you wish the producers had found more of during their unenviable task: the cutting from interior footage of an abattoir to two people enjoying a burger at a roadside van and not really thinking any more of it is a cold instance of life's inherent ways.
The film is at its best during these contemplative sequences and at its worst when it essentially becomes the very thing it should have evolved out of: that is to say, extended segments on what's in a person's pocket or what people eat or how they get around – content which is good only for the doldrums of Youtube's infinite online data banks of moving image. On balance, points can only be awarded for the idea behind the film. In spite of coming at you with this mantra of diversity and peace-hoping, universal love, the film's consensus is that of a bleak one. Mankind is ultimately depicted as a savage; aggressive, sometimes confused and often quite weak species – a species who appears to know what the issue is but has absolutely no clue as to how to attain the solution.