Movies - Life on Earth

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	Movies - Life on Earth

:This article is about the television documentary series Life on Earth. For the article on Earth's Life see Life.

Life on Earth: A Natural History by David Attenborough (1979) is a groundbreaking television natural history series made by the BBC in association with Warner Bros. and Reiner Moritz Productions. There was an accompanying book, and the series is available on DVD, both separately and as part of The Life Collection
box set.

During the course of the series Attenborough, following the format established by Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, travels the globe in order to trace the story of the evolution of life on the planet. Like the earlier series, it was divided into 13 episodes so that it would exactly fill a programme scheduler's quarter-year.

Highly acclaimed, it is the first in Attenborough's 'Life' series of programmes and was followed by The Living Planet
(1984).

Filming techniques

In order to obtain footage of rare and elusive animals, special filming techniques had to be devised. One cameraman spent hundreds of hours waiting for the fleeting moment when a rare frog, which incubates its young in its mouth, finally spat them out. Another built a replica of a mole rat burrow in a horizontally-mounted wheel, so that as the mole rat ran along the tunnel, the wheel could be spun to keep the animal adjacent to the camera. To illustrate the motion of bats' wings in flight, they were filmed in slow motion in a wind tunnel. The series was also the first to include footage of a live (although dying) coelacanth.

The cameramen took advantage of improved film stock to produce some of the sharpest and most colourful wildlife footage that had been seen to date.

The programmes also pioneered a style of presentation whereby David Attenborough would begin describing a certain species' behaviour in one location, before cutting to another to complete his illustration. Continuity was maintained, despite such sequences being filmed several months and thousands of miles apart.

Gorilla encounter

The most famous sequence occurs in the twelfth episode, when Attenborough encounters a group of mountain gorillas in Dian Fossey's sanctuary in Rwanda. The primates had become used to humans through years of being studied by researchers. Attenborough originally intended merely to get close enough to narrate a piece about the apes' use of the opposable thumb, but as he advanced on all fours toward the area where they were feeding, he suddenly found himself face to face with an adult female. Discarding his scripted speech, he turned to camera and delivered a whispered ad lib:

:"There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know. Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell are so similar to ours that they see the world in much the same way as we do. We live in the same sort of social groups with largely permanent family relationships. They walk around on the ground as we do, though they are immensely more powerful than we are. So if there were ever a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature's world, it must be with the gorilla. The male is an enormously powerful creature but he only uses his strength when he is protecting his family and it is very rare that there is violence within the group. So it seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise everything that is aggressive and violent, when that is the one thing that the gorilla is not — and that we are."

When Attenborough returned to the site the next day, the female and two young gorillas began to groom and play with him. In his memoirs, Attenborough describes this as "one of the most exciting encounters of my life". He subsequently discovered, to his chagrin, that only a few seconds had been recorded: the cameraman was running low on film and wanted to save it for the planned description of the opposable thumb.

In 1999, viewers of Channel 4, voting for the top 100 TV moments of all time, placed the gorilla sequence at number 12 — ranking it ahead of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and the wedding of Charles and Diana.

Critical and commercial reception

The series, which premiered in the UK on 16 January, 1979, was a major international success. The accompanying book was also a worldwide bestseller, its cover image of a Panamanian red-eyed tree frog becoming an instantly recognisable emblem of the series.

In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, Life on Earth was placed 32nd.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Life on Earth ]

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