Microcosmos and Other Anthropomorphic Levels

Microcosmos moves beyond primitive anthropomorphism by including scenarios that draw on folk-psychology levels of anthropomorphism. Like humans, these insects must contend with a variety of external conflicts, for example, showing they have desires and strategically determine how best to fulfill them. In one scene, a beetle rolls a huge mound of dirt (a boulder from a human perspective), pushing it up a hill seemingly in time with the instrumental march in the background. In close up, the beetle looks like a soldier wearing protective armor. When this “boulder” gets stuck on a twig, the music heightens, building tension, but the perseverant beetle strategically frees the boulder from the obstacle and rolls on. When the camera zooms out, it shows the beetle on a gravel road, emphasizing the difficult obstacle it has overcome and its relation with humanity’s approach to challenging situations.

Other scenes combine primitive psychology and emotional anthropomorphism. In one scene, for example, a quail pecks up ants, killing and eating them one by one, the stamp of its beak louder than the woodwinds accompanying it, and the crack of ant exoskeleton turns this documentary into a moment of horror. The quail is meeting its basic needs, but the ants flee in what looks like fear, a fear heightened by the music and horrific cracks in the soundtrack. The horror continues in a pond scene where water bugs catch and sting flies, and amphibians feed on water bugs. Here again, the predators feed their hunger, and their victims attempt to flee in fear. 

The mood is lightened with images of water bugs seemingly dancing with their reflections in the water and spiders laying eggs in underwater nests filled with their own air bubbles, providing an emotional uplift to viewers, if not to the insects in each scene. When two snails are shown copulating, “engaging in a long and very loving wet kiss,” according to Ebert (1997), however, emotional levels of anthropomorphism are at the fore.

Folk-psychology levels of anthropomorphism are almost as prevalent as primitive psychology levels in the film, however. When insects battle the elements, for example, they are shown strategizing ways to avert rushing waters caused by a rainfall. For them, a steady rain erupts quickly into a flood. Water droplets larger than the insects they hit turn a summer storm into an eco-disaster. Orchestral strings reach a crescendo as water pounds both earth and insects.  To highlight their vulnerability, the film contrasts a sturdy single tree with a grasshopper that nearly loses its grip on a wavering grass shoot. 

After the storm, a snail drinks from a water hole left by the rain. Ants drink and find safety on grass leaves. Other insects feed, as well, but one is marooned on a rock in the middle of flooding waters. The music grows louder and more ominous as a flying insect cleans itself and a worm emerges from a hole, its skin transparent. Although the scene recalls a similar storm in Disney’s Bambi (James Algar and Samuel Armstrong, 1942), the clash of cymbals turns the scene to a damaged anthill where worker ants rebuild the structure, demonstrating in multiple ways the connections between human and insect approaches to difficulties.

microcosmos and primitive anthropomorphism

Directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, Microcosmos (1996) asserts its positions regarding insects’ relationship to humans through visual representations and a multi-modal vocal and instrumental soundtrack rather than voiceover narration. Yet, as Janet Maslin of The New York Times declares, “Not content merely to let the spiders spin and the bees buzz, they also play with anthropomorphism wherever it can be found” (1996). Despite the fact that the film includes only two voiceover sequences to begin and end the film that nearly mirror one another, “heightened sound effects and nimble editing help shape the film into something other than a passive view” (Maslin, 2006). In fact, the film suggests that our macro-world is mirrored in the “unseen” world the filmmakers have constructed for us beneath tall grasses and trees in their creation of this categorical documentary. In Microcosmos, insects are anthropomorphized on multiple levels, but in Microcosmos the emphasis is on an authentic visual representation that builds sympathy for this micro-world, perhaps encouraging a more biotic perspective on the natural world that sees human and nonhuman nature as part of an interconnected web.

Microcosmos most blatantly connects humans with insects in relation to a primitive psychology level of anthropomorphism that highlights parallels between how they meet their basic needs. For example, the opening tranquil female voiceover establishes a peaceful tone for the morning scenes of insects’ very human-like ablutions. As the camera pans down from hills to long grasses a boys’ choir heightens its rhythm. On the surface below, however, the music ends, and only background noises and bird whistles accompany the variety of insects that seem to be preparing for a new day. The voiceover heightens the comparison of these insects to awakening humanity: “Imagine a morning somewhere on Earth … [where] even the smallest pond becomes an ocean. Time passes differently here. A passing season is a lifetime. Listen to its murmur.”

It is the creation of this miniature insect world, however, that most effectively connects insects with humanity, illuminating how their everyday rituals align with ours. As Roger Ebert explains, “The makers of this film took three years to design their close-up cameras and magnifying lenses, and to photograph insects in such brilliant detail that if they were cars, we could read their city stickers” (1997). In close-up, a spider web shimmers with morning dew as various insects prepare for the day. A wasp polishes its face. An ant drinks water from a drop on a leaf, its reflection disappearing as the water evaporates. The tiny world is both contrasted and compared with the larger world above when the camera pans up to trees and then back down to the ground, where a praying mantis washes its leg and a bee wipes its stinger and wings.

           

After their morning baths, these insects eat breakfast, just like other animals, including humans. A bee searches for nectar in a poppy field. A ladybug climbs up a thorny twig and eats grubs. Ants feed their infants on the same twig after chasing off the ladybug. A caterpillar emerges from its cocoon and eats its own shell as its first nourishment. When a grasshopper jumps into a spider web, a single drum erupts, and when other percussion instruments join the rhythm, the spider wraps it in webbing. Another grasshopper feeds, as well. At a water hole, ants feed water to their young. Others pull seedpods and carry flower stems to their anthill. The mound of food grows tall. In a wasp hive, adult wasps feed larvae, who, when they emerge from their pods, clean themselves, dry their wings and begin feeding other wasps. Their basic needs are met just as ours are, and the camera amplifies the primitive rituals on display.

Ballad of Cable Hogue Conclusion

The view of water rights in The Ballad of Cable Hogue becomes possible because Cable staggers into a mud hole, one that reveals a magical, Moses-like expanse of concentrated water. Cable has found water—and it doesn’t take long for him to realize he is sitting on an endless source of money, all resting on the federal law called the Desert Land Act. The wagon tracks he sees nearby are not only a sign of civilization but of progress.  It’s Cable’s water, and people in wagons, stagecoaches, and buckboards are going to need it.

The film’s explanation for the Desert Land Act is based in fact. On March 3, 1877 the Forty Fourth Congress enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States passed Chapter 107, “An act to provide for the sale of desert lands in certain States and Territories.” Inspired by the hard work of California representative John K. Luttrell of the state’s northeastern district, the Act asserts,

That it shall be lawful for any citizen of the United States, or any person of requisite age “who may be entitled to become a citizen, and who has filed his declaration to become such” and upon payment of twenty five cents per acre—to file a declaration under oath with the register and the receiver of the lead district in which any desert land is situated, that he intends to reclaim a tract of desert land, not exceeding one section, by conducting water upon the same, within the period of three years thereafter.

Although the message of The Ballad of Cable Hogue differs from that of earlier films focused on water rights, it is still immersed in historical memory, in references to environmental history that attempted to both settle the West and turn its desert lands into a garden. These attempts to transform a desert into a garden seem to fail in the film because water serves only as a resource for financial gain. Instead, Cable Hogue demonstrates the negative effects that even a populist version of progress can have on individuals and their environment. Both populist and progressive visions of progress are represented by the changing road that passes by what was Cable’s stagecoach stop. Cable both literally and figuratively “stands still” as stagecoaches and wagons turn into motorcars.

While Cable Hogue seems to valorize claims that economic growth facilitates environmental action, it merely shows how a lone miner is able to exploit water resources for profit. No fecund valley emerges from Cable’s discovery. His water hole does not promote a garden in the desert. Cable uses water only for profit, not for community growth. Most telling, however, in Cable Hogue is the use of technology as a signifier of progress. In The Ballad of Cable Hogue, progress literally runs over Cable, suggesting that unchecked progress may result in death not only for nature but also for ourselves. 

The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Continued

The majority of Westerns take place in an arid landscape of the West where irrigation and water rights provide life to cattle, farmer’s crops, and to settlers, and where “whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting.” The Ballad of Cable is Hogue (1970) is no exception as it blatantly illustrates the impact land and water rights issues had on the environment of the American West. It also showcases well the effects land acquisition acts had on development and, ultimately, environmental damage that came from them.

By taking a populist approach to progress, The Ballad of Cable Hogue shows what happens in a desert when there’s “water enough for two, not three.” Instead of arguing for communal use of free water, the film sympathizes with its lone hero Cable Hogue played by Jason Robards, fresh from his appearance in Sergio Leone’s epic Once Upon a Time in the West. He profits off a water hole found on land he was prepared to die for, land he now claims for his own. Cable may have been searching for gold in the desert, but he makes his profit from water. Water will work just as well, perhaps even better, since the waterhole he finds is the only one as far as the eye can see.

In a film immersed in the environmental history of the old West, Cable battles a different corporation, a stagecoach company, as well as his treacherous gold mining partners, and wins. But that victory comes at a cost. Cable is the “little guy,” the hard and bitter survivor. He also illustrates populist views of progress as a working-class miner who uses water rights policies to build himself a small empire.

The film promotes a broadened view of access to property and encourages “wise use” of water. But because its consumption is limited by the price Cable charges, Cable’s property is built on exploitation of resources and signifies movement into a modern world where, in the end, technology usurps Cable’s place. In fact, modern technology literally destroys Cable and appropriates his space in the Western landscape.