NAKED BEAUTY OUT LOUD
When something is too small to notice in real time, its naked beauty must be captured a special way in order for us to appreciate it. Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg has been documenting the naked beauty of pollen and pollinators, filming them for 20 minutes a day for the past 35+ years, using time-lapse photography.
His first short film about bees and their blossoms, “Naked Beauty: A Love Story That Feeds the Earth,” magnifies a tiny world and slows it down enough so we can understand its power and its glory. The film, released earlier in France under the title “Pollen,” is a beautifully choreographed dance between macro and wide aerial perspectives. It stuns us, not only in its own inherent cinematographic beauty, but also in its message:
Bees are disappearing at alarming rates around the world. Over 75% of the world’s food supply if this trend continues. We need to take action to stop and repair the damage before it’s too late.
PREVIEW: Naked Beauty from BLACKLIGHT FILMS
“Beauty and seduction are nature’s tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with.” – Louie Schwartzberg
Schwartzberg believes filmmaker can serve a vital role in protecting the environment. He seeks to build an emotional connection with earth and nature. He wants to shift our consciousness. He wants to leverage the technology we already have as a start in stopping the madness. His passion is to create films that can have a positive effect on the future of the planet.
DisneyNature: Wings of Life - Bats from BLACKLIGHT FILMS
“Wings of Life” (2013) is Schwartzberg’s award-winning follow-up, a feature-length documentary for Disneynature, narrated by Meryl Streep. Combining time-lapse, high-speed and macro cinematography, the film plunges us into the intricate flowery worlds of bees, butterflies, birds, and bats. Here’s a preview. It’s now available on BluRay/DVD and on-demand.
Videos of two of Schwartzberg’s most recent TED talks (Beauty of Pollination, Gratitude) have received an astounding 30 million collective views.
Photo: Courtesy of Elemental. Rajendra Singh at the Ganges River.
“Elemental,” a new documentary by directors Gayatri Roshan and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, tells the stories of three passionate environmental activists and their individual quests to restore and protect naked beauty.
Rajendra Singh is a water conservationist from India known as “The Water Gandhi” for reviving seven rivers in Rajasthan and rescuing hundreds of rural villages from drought. Now, Singh is focusing specifically on India’s once pristine, now polluted and dying Ganges river. The Indian people consider the river to be sacred, their “Mother Ganga,” but they need to be rallied and riled up enough to add their voices to his protests, while Singh works tirelessly to shut down factory polluters and dams.
Eriel Deranger is an indigenous native Canadian, from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in northern Alberta, Canada. She is fighting to stop the world’s largest industrial development, which happens to be in her own backyard. Tar Sands, an oil deposit larger than the state of Florida, and the proposed 2000 mile Keystone XL Pipeline, are threatening to destroy not only nearby indigenous communities but the entire region.
Jay Harman is an eco-entrepreneur and inventor who is developing solutions based on biomimicry, using nature’s own designs to help solve our world’s ecological problems. He has created a revolutionary device aimed at slowing down global warming. The film follows his journey as he develops his products and tries to bring them to market.
“Elemental” does the job to get us all thinking about elemental beauty.... beauty in its purest and most powerful form. Watch The Trailer
Check out the rest of our posts on Naked Beauty this week in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Mind/Body, Place/Time, Nature/Science, and Soul Impact. And enter our new photo competition. The theme: Naked Beauty (Deadline, July 28th, 2013).
