Babies

 

Babies is a 2010 documentary by Focus Features Films that follows the lives of four infants in different locations around the world over the course of one year – from first breaths to first steps. There is no narration in the film; instead, the stories speak for themselves. You can get a good taste of the film by watching the trailer:

 

Although the movie's reception and interpretation was somewhat mixed, as is any ethnographic piece, there is a general consensus that it is a cute, lighthearted film, one that will make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. This is easily attributable to the fact that the whole 79 minutes you're watching babies go about their lives, and humans have tender tendencies to their young. However, there is more going on than just the inherent cuteness factor of babies. Raymond William's "structure of feeling" is definitely present in the way people react to this film.

"Babies" makes us feel interconnected as world citizens because everyone can relate to a baby. It's human at its purest form, before developing into the social constructs we have set in motion. We've all been babies at some point. The funny thing is, though, we don't remember being babies. We all seem to identify with the babies in the film, but can we truly identify with them? Probably not. This is the child-over-adult and innocence-over-experience aspect of the Romantic being put into play: by watching "Babies" and seeing the interactions of infants with their surroundings up close, so that we can nearly see the bare bones of what these babies are thinking, we feel as if we ARE babies. We find their innocent behaviors endearing and perhaps even desirable.

Another thing that struck me about this film is how the babies in rural areas, Mongolia and Namibia, seemed so much more interesting to me than those in major cities, San Francisco and Tokyo. Their stories have more depth and we can see more of their personality, not to mention the great view of the natural landscape and ethnic traditions which feel so exotic. To an urban American or "Western" viewer, this would again be a case of the Romantic. We seem to tend to prefer the notion of rural life rather than urban; we are more geared to react impressed and awed when we see the natural or different world rather than the one with which we are familiar and perhaps even bored.

"Babies" strikes a certain chord in its American viewers which make them feel a certain way no matter who they are. The film is so beautiful to us because it makes us go "awww." The ways in which it does that are through the Romantic.