We all live in our bodies. They are the vessel through which we experience the world around us and the people we interact with everyday. But for all that we experience, it feels like we know so little about our bodies, and most people don’t seem to have much of a deep connection with their own body.
Inspired by a science book by Anthony Smith, producer and director Roy Battersby’s 1970 documentary The Body (not to be confused with the 2001 Antonio Banderas film of the same title), narrated by Vanessa Redgrave & Frank Finlay and scored by Ron Geesin & Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, seeks to better our understanding of the human form and deepen our connection with it in an unflinching and somewhat psychedelic manner.
The documentary is primarily driven by images of the body from all ages and from many different angles, including extreme closeups (one notable shot is of a nipple looking like a mountain in a barren, alien landscape) and repeated use of internal cameras showing what goes on under our skin. Despite watching a VHS rip, it was quite beautiful. There’s an opening shot where the camera moves along a long lineup of people from young to old, starting with a small baby and ending zoomed out to show a studio full of people in varying states of undress. These people are the documentary’s primary models: we see them interacting throughout the documentary, talking about their experiences, singing, tickling, massaging one another, exploring each other’s bodies.



Seeing these ordinary people demonstrate their abilities and telling stories about injuries sustained from work or speaking frankly about their sex lives were my favorite parts. Structurally, the documentary begins at conception, when a sperm cell makes contact with an egg, discussing the process of fetal development from the cellular level up through birth. Copulation is tastefully shown and spoken about, physical and mental development, aging, and death are also covered.
It can also be quite graphic at times, featuring unedited footage of a woman giving birth and shots from within an intestinal tract. It can get a little gross if you’re unprepared, but it’s never violent, just a frank look at various bodily functions that usually aren’t shown or discussed so openly. This is an educational film that sets out to cover every topic one could think of (from an admittedly heteronormative perspective) about the human body, after all, addressing the beautiful and wonderful things right alongside the more gross parts we tend to avoid talking about.
All of this is backed by a remarkable soundtrack composed by Ron Geesin and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. The score is beautiful and folksy at times, with lyrics and vocals by Waters very much in line with the decade, and other times it can be strange and repellant, much like the visuals themselves. They included sounds that our own bodies make, with Geesin stating that the film was “an attempt...to put a deeply socio-human documentary about the human body into cinemas, using some then-pioneering micro-camera work: coursing along the various tubes and all that.” Redgrave and Finlay’s narration, which includes quoting William Blake and Adrian Mitchell, adds another layer to it all.
Altogether, it’s a little disjointed, but still quite fascinating and beautiful. I keep thinking about that shot of a nipple resembling a landscape, the unusual footage showing heat waves rolling off of the body, and the ways the soundtrack would unexpectedly change. It kept reminding me of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as if Battersby were attempting to do for the human body what that film did for outer space. It can be outdated at times, but that’s to be expected.
Officially, The Body was released on DVD back in 2013 by Network on Air, and judging from the trailer they posted on Youtube, it looks to be in better quality than what I watched, but their own website is down and the DVD only seems to be available second hand on Amazon, eBay, and some other places. Being a UK distributor, it could also very well be that the DVD is region locked, so should you decide to seek it out, do so with caution! 🪐