(image via AceShowbiz.com)
Remember when the internet asked people to turn on their video cameras and record the events of a single day of their lives?
Well, 80,000 people really did that last summer. And they shipped 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries off to director Kevin MacDonald and editor Joe Walker. Over the last year, they and their team figured out a way to extract from that footage a documentary called Life in a Day.
It is one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of filmmaking based on sheer volume alone. One can barely imagine the thoughtfulness and discipline required to design and execute a post-production process of that scale. McDonald, Walker and their team may one day explain it all–if they haven’t already–and when they do they’ll offer a master class in crowdsourcing for any business that is still not sure how to turn users into co-creators.
The film is simple. It follows an obvious chronology from dark to dawn to dusk to dark again. Day parts become characters and the people who made the final cut of the film are used like dialogue. In one scene, one person utters a sentence that encapsulates the greatest value of the film: “I’m afraid of people who are different than me.”
That is actually a paraphrase, but the idea expressed is accurate. The scene passes by quickly and would be easy to miss. Perhaps the filmmakers intended it to be part of their thesis. Perhaps not. As the film introduces more and more people from more and more corners of the planet, that line becomes difficult to ignore.
(image via SFGate.com)
In montage after montage of ordinary people doing ordinary things in the course of an unremarkable Saturday in July, the homogeneity of the human experience comes into focus. None of us like to be awoken by an alarm clock. All of us enjoy cooked food. And each of us is subject to experiencing the exact same range of emotions. Customs and cultures may separate us nominally, but the human race is a singular one.
The finite wisdom of the film shows us our commonalities very plainly. It really marks the first legitimate post-racial moment in Western culture. That the film exists does not mean racism is over. But it does eliminate one crucial justification for racism.
The woman who uttered that sentence about fearing people different than her could claim, at that time, to be unaware of how similar she is to her fellow man, woman and child. Back when time and space separated the earth into what seemed like self-contained planets, reasonable people could fear the inhabitants from the faraway places who did not look like them or speak their language or worship their deity. It is a matter of opinion how long ago that separation began to dissipate. Following the release of A Day in the Life, the separation is completely gone.
Maybe everyone on earth hasn’t seen the film yet. Maybe the entire global population never will. In any case, it is no longer acceptable to say that you have no empathy for the Other. Because you could. If you wanted to.
