This was always one of my very favourites of the older National Geographic documentaries, as a kid I was completely mesmerised by it every time it happened to be shown. There really is so very much going on in this world all the time that escapes our knowledge, every single moment things are taking place that the human eye cannot process because they are either too small, too large, too fast, too slow or just plain beyond the visible spectrums of light and sound. "The Invisible World" picks up where our eyes leave off, exploring numerous details and phenomena that are often overlooked because they're too minute or intangible for us to grasp. The filmmakers employ an extraordinary array of photography techniques, cameras and imaging devices to take the viewer into the multitude of hidden ecosystems and life forms that exist all around and inside us, and much of it focuses on the microscopic events that, when magnified thousands of times, eerily replicate occurrences in our world of the macroscopic. Dust mites lumber through dry terrain like alien dinosaurs, and creatures cling to a single strand of hair like toadstools on a tree trunk. It also portrays some of the more intangible events like heat signatures and the mysterious energy auras that surround people and objects and that really do react, flaring and dimming according to our moods. Very intriguing and cool, and I do kinda believe in some of that, I think human beings can effect one another with their emotions in subtle but stronger than we think ways that I don't believe we'll ever fully understand or comprehend. I find the scenes with the X-rays that show the complete skeleton of a cat as it saunters about and a person as they move their arm and crane their neck, and eat and you can see the food shoot down the spooky skeleton man's 'throat' just incredible! I've never seen that kind of work done anywhere else. And the time-lapse and slow-motion work was downright spellbinding, with blurs of motion hanging in the air as a man juggles, and a bullet(everyone always remembers that bullet!) tears through a playing card and explodes out the other side of an apple, and a match resembles a nuclear explosion in miniature as it's lit! Average things all, but they appear so fantastic when you see them happen in such a way. My favourite out of all that stuff is the milk droplets which look like a crown as they splash! There's also a simple but highly poignant and memorable scene that shows the progress from a child to a man in time-lapse photography over a period of years, it's a very humbling and sombre moment. The programme also does a great job of creeping you out and getting under your skin with icky footage of how much plankton exists in a single drop of water, a dead mouse disintegrating into bones as it's devoured, and oh yes, several microbes and parasites that live on the human body... You will not be able to sit through the whole show without feeling the strong urge to wash your face at least once! But I personally don't mind the thought of countless microorganisms living inside me, that's just nature, everything living off something else. There's such extraordinary patterns to things - our planet lives because of the warmth of the sun, we live off the planet, to all of those microbes we are their world and whole universe, and do they also have things that live inside them? It reminded me a little of that movie Men in Black, the way it emphasises again and again the message that size is an illusion and does not matter, and in its own way everything is significant. Unseen worlds within and without and that life in all its forms is both beautiful and scary was to me the main themes of this, which despite its age is still a pretty damn mind-blowing documentary in my book. It still has such a powerful sense of wonder and awe to it. The narrator's reading of the script is perfect and captivating, and I dearly love the delicate musical score that's so achingly nostalgic it makes me wanna cry! It's funny how that which is most essential to a joyful life and spiritual health and peace, like love and trust, closeness and kindness is also invisible to the eye... This is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen, and for an hour-long it tackles a mountain of material that'll make you alter your understanding and perceptions of the concept of life and the world as you know it, and if there's one thing you'll gleam from watching, it's that seeing is most definitely not always just seeing! Farewell!
3 Reviews
Noticeably dated, but still an interesting hour
rgcustomer14 March 2011
You can quickly tell that this is a show from the 70s, in everything from the speaking style to the synthy soundtrack to the aspect ratio.
Yet, it's still an hour that goes by quickly, with lots of interesting and beautiful images from the world we don't see, including
Yet, it's still an hour that goes by quickly, with lots of interesting and beautiful images from the world we don't see, including
- flowers in ultraviolet
- heat flows in infrared
- slow motion in high-speed film
- snapshots of motion with strobes
- growth and decay in time-lapse
- skeletons in X-ray
- soft tissues in ultrasound
- ice crystals in polarized light
- galaxies through telescopes
- plankton through microscopes
- individual uranium atoms through electron microscope
- "auras" in Kirlian photography
- Earth viewed from space
- Fermilab particle collision images of subatomic particle tracks
- direct stimulation of visual cortex
Gulliver, Alice, and Dorothy HAVE NEVER SEEN A THING !
elshikh426 May 2012
Warning: Spoilers
While watching it, I felt Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels, Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, with details that maybe wouldn't cross the minds of these stories' writers ever!
In this documentary, we went from earth to space to human body for seeing the unseen worlds we're living. There is more than what we know. And this movie just went to show some surprises here and there, with a lot of appreciation and delectation.
Through the ultimate abilities of 1979 cameras, the unimaginable is shot. There are some creepy moments like the creatures that live in one drop of water, the worm which takes from our eyelashes a home, and - oh yes - the house's moth; how many of them are having a party on you right now, god only knows!
The aesthetical spirit dazzles in some places. Seeing the crystallization of one drop of water between 2 pieces of glass under a microscope, especially with the selected music, came off as a symphony of endless rising rainbows; what a cinematic tableau this documentary made there.
Some rare moments made me eagerly ask; how they did capture them? To instance: when ants eat a cockroach you have to ask how many tapes were used to film that? And while seeing a face of a man from childhood to manhood; you have to ask; how many years were spent to pull off that experiment?! Well, I need a "making of" then!
Still the most interesting part for me is capturing "auras" by the Kirlian photography. As if they found the way to measure the soul's moods!
Palpably there was heavy effort to collect, picture and edit this material. I loved the music; it respected the meditative dimension creatively. And the narration included deep truths: "We're never alone", "We walk while having on our bodies creatures that equal the population of the globe". So, it's not some flashy images only, it gets itself a fine wisdom via these images too.
Speaking about the intellectual side; focusing on moments like eating a dead mouse, or growth and decay of fruits in time-lapse; as if was producing a running theme, to inform about the shortness of being. However, with other moments you feel that life is beautiful and colorful. And then with others, that we're so small and still ignorant. As a whole, it pushes you to say Glory to God, while understanding how pathetic the human is. But, indubitably, with documentaries like this, human is less pathetic and more diligent.
This is an insightful show, presented as a lovely astounding journey, which doesn't forget being a thought-provoking. Or in other words, this is a travel to a real wonderland, made by some science and film wizards, where you discover that Gulliver, Alice, and Dorothy have never seen a thing.
Finally, we need part 2, because after 30 years sure we have more technological progress in the field of cinematography, and plenty of new discoveries to be shown. I guess 2012 cameras can capture not that moth's image, but what it thinks about as well!
In this documentary, we went from earth to space to human body for seeing the unseen worlds we're living. There is more than what we know. And this movie just went to show some surprises here and there, with a lot of appreciation and delectation.
Through the ultimate abilities of 1979 cameras, the unimaginable is shot. There are some creepy moments like the creatures that live in one drop of water, the worm which takes from our eyelashes a home, and - oh yes - the house's moth; how many of them are having a party on you right now, god only knows!
The aesthetical spirit dazzles in some places. Seeing the crystallization of one drop of water between 2 pieces of glass under a microscope, especially with the selected music, came off as a symphony of endless rising rainbows; what a cinematic tableau this documentary made there.
Some rare moments made me eagerly ask; how they did capture them? To instance: when ants eat a cockroach you have to ask how many tapes were used to film that? And while seeing a face of a man from childhood to manhood; you have to ask; how many years were spent to pull off that experiment?! Well, I need a "making of" then!
Still the most interesting part for me is capturing "auras" by the Kirlian photography. As if they found the way to measure the soul's moods!
Palpably there was heavy effort to collect, picture and edit this material. I loved the music; it respected the meditative dimension creatively. And the narration included deep truths: "We're never alone", "We walk while having on our bodies creatures that equal the population of the globe". So, it's not some flashy images only, it gets itself a fine wisdom via these images too.
Speaking about the intellectual side; focusing on moments like eating a dead mouse, or growth and decay of fruits in time-lapse; as if was producing a running theme, to inform about the shortness of being. However, with other moments you feel that life is beautiful and colorful. And then with others, that we're so small and still ignorant. As a whole, it pushes you to say Glory to God, while understanding how pathetic the human is. But, indubitably, with documentaries like this, human is less pathetic and more diligent.
This is an insightful show, presented as a lovely astounding journey, which doesn't forget being a thought-provoking. Or in other words, this is a travel to a real wonderland, made by some science and film wizards, where you discover that Gulliver, Alice, and Dorothy have never seen a thing.
Finally, we need part 2, because after 30 years sure we have more technological progress in the field of cinematography, and plenty of new discoveries to be shown. I guess 2012 cameras can capture not that moth's image, but what it thinks about as well!
See also
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