A quick look at my recent YouTube plays reveals that I’ve used the site to watch interviews, look for the solution to a particularly tricky videogame puzzle, research material for a seminar on Ezra Pound, and re-watch a favourite sitcom pratfall. The site has become such a catch-all that it serves, for many people, as a kind of search engine in and of itself. Want to know how to play the Lopez – Marshall attack in chess? You could look for a specialist chess site; you could head to Wikipedia; or you could find a tutorial video on YouTube. Broadband penetration, alongside the increasing ubiquity of devices capable of recording decent quality footage, has brought about a massive explosion in video as a medium of communication – it’s very nearly as easy to record a message and upload it as it is to compose and send an email.

And yet YouTube’s staple – the content with which it is associated in the first instance – is short clips of human mishaps and animal antics: a ceaseless torrent of cats running up unending slides.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that – it’s content which has its place – but Google are obviously keen to promote the use of the service for slightly less frivolous purposes. The streaming of US Presidential debates in 2008 seemed like a push forward, and there have been various other initiatives over the last few years to harness YouTube’s substantial presence at the centre of the web. The most interesting, to my mind, was the 2010 project Life in a Day, wherein users all around the world were asked to film some part of their day on 24 August, and upload the results to YouTube. From the 80,000 submissions and 4,500 hours of footage a 95 minute movie was put together to act as a snapshot of life on Earth on 24 August 2010.

I’d been waiting for some time to see the results. A very limited cinema run came and went in the blink of an eye, followed by a period in which it seemed impossible to find a legitimate way to see the film. Then, this week, it was screened on the BBC and made freely available in its entirety on YouTube – where else?

–

Life in a Day is a unique and powerful film. Its power, and its charm, come from the sheer variety it contains, and from the plain and unvarnished manner in which it presents it all. There is a very cinematic sweep to the wide range of footage, but each piece feels intimate and personal. It’s the same balance accomplished regularly by the best articles in National Geographic – tellingly listed here as the film’s distributor. Watching the film is to be immersed in dozens of little micro-stories, with the dawning realisation that they are all part of one macro-story. That is the project’s power: we see the man with the orange Lamborghini, and the single parent raising 13 children in a tin shack; the worn wooden shoe-shine box and the colourful plastic garden sprinkler; the free-running shoplifter and the man on the respirator… all tied together. One of the film’s most effective features is the use of brief montages which show variations on a theme around the world: how coffee is prepared and served in different cultures for instance, or the different types of people who read newspapers. There are montages of people (and animals) giving birth, of people using the bathroom, of eating, and of dying; there are glimpses of war and sadness, laughter and water – there’s a lot in there, and I found it not a film to study but rather to enjoy as it washes over you.

I had read the week before seeing Life in a Day, that should an alien species set about the task of cataloguing the history of life on Earth, mankind would feature as little more than a footnote. In terms of biodiversity and biomass we are the tiniest sliver of a percentage – far less interesting or significant than the comparatively colossal abundance of microorganisms. I couldn’t help thinking throughout Life in a Day what a visiting species could glean about humanity from watching the film. What would they make of us? Our strange passions; the way we behave when we’re alone; our genuine and our unfounded fears; our variety and the variety of our circumstances; the detail and spectacle of our beautiful, compromised lives.

–

Life in a Day is available to watch on YouTube here.