Since the conception of MTV’s The Real World, reality television has captured the interest of the public like no other television fad in history has. In 1996, four years after The Real World debuted, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou released a film called Microcosmos that many reality entertainment fans probably missed. Microcosmos gives the audience a real world experience as well, but the film presents reality in a way that no human has seen it before.
Reality in Microcosmos is measured in terms of centimeters for most of the characters, even millimeters for some. The participants don’t squabble over infidelity or the last can of beer. Battles more often stem from territory crossing or attempted baby snatching. Rather than fists or nails, competitors rely on spiky horns or poisonous pincers.
Microcosmos provides an intimate look at the world of insects, where a raindrop can mean death, but a puddle is a cherished landscape teeming with life.
Watching Microcosmos, I was reminded of Disney’s A Bug’s Life and Pixar’s Antz. Of course, the characters in Microcosmos do not speak, and there is no real plot line per se. However, in experiencing the life of an insect so intimately, one cannot help but anthropomorphize and sympathize with their “emotions.” Two especially dramatic cinema moments are when a dung beetle struggles to transport an Indiana Jones-esque boulder and when two snails come together in a rapturous, slimy sex-scene. The incredible opportunity to look into the faces of the living creatures show that they are as animated as any Pixar creation conceivable as they build, battle, copulate, and bear offspring from one season into the next.
The photographers captured the imagery with a camera mounted on a miniature robot. Computerized control of the robot preserved fluidity of the extremely tight shots.
The camera technology allowed the production team to transcend the naked eye and accomplish documentation far beyond anything produced by National Geographic to date. Microcosmos expands the human perception of the world, conveying the fact that the dirt at our feet is not simply a boundary of the human world but is a habitat in a world unto itself. The technology used in Microcosmos is a gift to science and nature photographers. Filmmakers such as Nuridsany and Pérennou can now provide humans with the visual capability to explore the frontiers of our world, in which resides a reality full of drama and entertainment all its own.
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