Hacker Cinema
Babies
Bébés
2010 · Film · documentary · 79 min
Directed by Thomas Balmès
A non-narrated documentary following the lovesome lives of four infants from birth to their first birthday. The babies featured are two from rural areas: Ponijao from Opuwo, Namibia, and Bayar from Bayanchandmani, Mongolia, as well as two from urban areas: Mari from Tokyo, Japan, and Hattie from San Francisco, USA.
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6 comments on Hacker News
Baraka movie is a colorful vivid beautiful impactful movie without any narrative.
Babies movie (1 hour documentary) is about 4 newborns in different locations of the world, again colored, beautiful shots and without any narrative.
The first episode of the Netflix show Babies covers almost exactly this material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOv5jDFtvsI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babies_(film)
Shows a toddler in Mongolia--probably younger than two--tethered to a bed in a tent all day while her parents work in the field. She gets checked up on at lunch time when her parents come back (and probably other times).
Such actions are routine in other cultures.
>I doubt very much there was ever a point in history where 2-year olds were left with zero supervision.
Your comment seems culturally biased. See the movie Babies? The Mongolian baby Bayar was often left alone for hours.
The basic question, as Prof. Diamond puts it is: "How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?" One can extend this: How do you know the Industrial Revolution made people lives better (read Dickens to see the inhuman conditions), or the nuclear revolution (Chernobyl, Japan), or the Internet revolution (the ADD generation texting, sexting, etc). Prof. Diamond thesis seems to be that we made a huge mistake by moving from hunter gatherer to agricultural society, which, inevitably, brought about most of the evils we are fighting with now. Proof? Just look at the idyllic life of current hunter gatherers.
To back his claim, he puts forth arguments ranging from absurd
"As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."
to anecdotal, i.e. no proof at all
"Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip ..."
And the final stroke, the masterful FUD-laden last paragraph:
"As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us? "
Setting aside that there is no global shortage of food (does not mean that nobody's is hungry, but the reasons are complex and food shortage is not one of them), most of this is, at best speculative.
If you liked his point of view, than you may also like Prof. Eric Pianka's thesis that there are too many people on earth and if an airborne Ebola virus kills 90% it would be a good thing (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html).
The problem with these views is that they resonate with a certain mindset, people who think we have too much science and technology in our lives and it would have been better to live like the "so-called" primitive people. One recent example that comes to mind is the movie Babies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/). Here, the life of the two babies living in primitive (not so-called, really primitive) conditions in Africa and Kazakhstan is discreetly shown to be better and more free than their counterparts in the US and Japan.
I watched the movie "Babies" recently. It follows a kid from birth to about 18 months in each of SF, Tokyo, Mongolia, and Namibia.
The biggest surprise me was how self-sufficient the Mongolian and Namibian kids were. They'd play with other kids or just do their own thing.
By contrast, the SF and Tokoy kids were always with a parent. One scene in particular struck me - the SF kid was peeling a banana. Instead of tossing it, she held the peel like a piece of refuse until her mom dutifully took it. Perhaps the kid was a neat freak, but compared to the Mongolian and Namibian kids, it seemed like her parent put her at the center of her world and catered to her every whim. When you've got a caretaker entertaining you, taking you places, cleaning you, feeding you, and changing their lives significantly to suit you, how do you not become entitled?