Death by Design
((FRENCH-GERMAN-U.S. -- DOCU -- COLOR/B&W))
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Imaginative, accessible and consistently entertaining, "Death by Design" juxtaposes striking micro-cinematography of cell communities in action with cleverly chosen excerpts from Hollywood-style films, as it investigates the phenomenon of "programmed cell death," whereby cells commit suicide on cue. Elegant, humor-laced docu is a must for fest and tube programmers, with theatrical runs possible in the right situations. Every school with a science or art department should own a copy, and docu's science-meets-cinema sensibility would also make a dynamite basis for a CD-ROM.
American filmmaker Peter Friedman, who edited together the remarkable footage that became "Silverlake Life: The View From Here," teamed with French researcher Jean-Francois Brunet to examine the ways in which the frisky building blocks of life behave, including a predilection for committing hara-kiri on short notice. Filmmakers' greatest accomplishment is to make the field of cellular biology seem -- well, cool -- a ticket to a parallel universe that looks like a lot of fun.
Interviews with articulate biologists speaking English, French, German and Italian are a springboard for splendid segues from magnified time-lapse footage to traffic patterns on city streets or Busby Berkeley dance routines. Cells carrying on under the microscope like skittish blobs of mercury seamlessly dissolve into a vintage overhead shot of businessmen on the stock exchange floor. A scientist declares that every hour, in every living human, billions of cells snuff themselves; cut to Harold Lloyd unsuccessfully trying to do himself in.
As illustrated with childish glee in a specially commissioned segment by animator Emily Hubley, a healthy individual cell can receive the suicide order from its colleagues at any moment, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Why go to all the trouble of manufacturing billions of cells that will never serve any useful purpose? Friedman provides a beautiful analogy by showing himself at work at the editing table, consigning excess footage to the cutting room floor -- it's nature's way of overproducing to whittle down to the essential.
Engaging docu builds to a touching and inspiring interview with Rita Levi-Montalcini, a programmed-cell-death pioneer and 1986 Nobel Prize winner in medicine who, banned from Italian universities as a Jew, spent 1942-44 in her bedroom in Turin studying the behavior of cells in chicken embryos.
Use of sound, from bird calls to sitar music and from Bartok to Bernard Herrmann, is aces.
Never even remotely dreary in tone or execution, deft and delightful docu belongs to that category of pics that can alter the way viewers look at the world around them.
With: Klaus-Michael Debatin, Pierre Goldstein, Robert Horvitz, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Polly Matzinger, Martin Raff "and a cast of billions."
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