Babies

I am not a documentary person. My mother studied communications in college, plus the library let you check documentaries out for a week (movies with a plot you could only check out for two days), so I saw my fair share when I was growing up. The only moment of a documentary that I liked was when all of the Eskimos got out of a kayak--a whole big family of them were hidden in a little boat.



This baby documentary is a different story. I could watch babies for hours and hours. This film juxtaposed the first year of life of four babies--one each from Namibia, Tokyo, Mongolia and San Francisco. There's no narrative, just a little bit of baby talk from time to time. The filming is quite good; some of the settings (especially the one in Mongolia) are gorgeous. The differences in child-rearing are shocking--the couple from San Francisco take their child to baby yoga and sing songs to the Earth, the father of all things (in a shocking reversal, it is the sun who is the mother of all things). The mother in Namibia, on the other hand, wiped her baby's butt on her knee and then cleaned her knee off with an old corn cob; she also used a knife to shave her baby's head! The baby from Mongolia gets amazingly close, unprotected, to an unbelievable number of wild animals. I mean, the main point I took away from this documentary is that you can't really break a baby.



The film did an excellent job of emphasizing both the sameness and difference among babies of the world. We see different ways of cleaning babies that vary from a mother squirting water at the baby out of her mouth, to a mother cleaning a baby's face by squirting it with her breast milk, to the crunchy San Francisco parents bathing with the baby in the bathtub, or holding her in the shower. We see different babies interacting with cats and dogs (and then there's the goats, rooster, cows, etc. that the baby from Mongolia is surrounded with). The Namibian mother paints herself with orange paste before she gives birth; the mother from Mongolia does a sort of dance while in the hospital. All of the babies struggle to crawl and eventually, to stand--so tenuously at first that even the wind can blow them over.

Cultural differences shown from the vantage point of babies is a wonderful idea--the Tokyo and San Francisco babies get pushed through busy stores and shuttled off to various baby classes. The baby in Namibia teethes on a bone she picks up out of the dirt while crawling over the stony ground. The Mongolian baby gets tightly wrapped up just a few days after the birth to join his mother, father, and brother on a motorcycle ride home from the hospital.


(picture, picture, picture)