Insects' lives and videotape

FOR a few charmed weeks in the middle of spring, the insect world and I are on excellent terms. Later on, when the air thickens up with buzzings and whinings and little pointy feet start to tickle the back of my neck, I get paranoid about clegbites and move around in a miasma of repellent which sends everything swerving away.

But for these innocent days of May, before the great multiplications, I am content to stoop above a plant, or crouch at the edge of the pond, hoping for some small revelation from the world of gauzy wings and waving antennae.

It has finally clicked, for example, that wasps monopolise the nectar in the little pink bells of the cotoneaster because their tongues are too short to join the bumble-bees at the cranesbills. That needed a book to remind me. But much of my standing and staring is simply for pleasure. I am a watcher of hover-flies, enchanted by their colours and designs and the bright points of light they fix in the air.

As a child, lying in summer grass, I peered into the green forest, half-hoping, half-fearing what might meet the eye. The other morning, drawing the curtains against sunshine and bird-song, I sat down to watch an advance videotape of Microcosnios. a new masterpiece among nature films about that secret world of the meadow. Magnificent even on the small screen, in the cinema it should, as they say, blow your mind.

Microcosm as is the work of two biologists, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, who live in Aveyron, in the southern foothills of the Massif Centrale in France. Their inspiration was Jean-Henri Fabre, who wooed the popular imagination in the first decades of this century with his enthusiastic essays about ants and grass-hoppers, mantises and moths.

Mirocosmos, too, celebrates the everyday insects of field and stream and the events of a single day in summer.

Their chosen meadow could easily be in some lush, unspoiled corner of Co Sligo - Ireland has all the same insect families, if not always the same species. We have no processionary caterpillars, for example, trundling nose to tail; no praying mantis or great peacock moth.

What about that fantastic little aquatic spider, Argyroneta, gathering bubbles at the surface to fill its underwater diving bell? It is as much Irish as French. And the insect-devouring plant curling its leaf around the hoverfly? That's Drosera, the "sun dew" of Irish bogs.

The film's intimate, insect-level view was achieved with remote-controlled cameras, moving smoothly to follow the action as if hand-held by an insect crew. Behind the astonishing episodes are years of field study of insect behaviour and an almost obsessional patience. The directors knew not only what was going to happen, or how to make it happen, but how to be there, in focus, when it did.

How do you know when snails are ready to make love? The coupling in Microcosmos has to be one of the most tender and erotic in the history of cinematic sex: little foreplay taps with the tentacles; a rapt entwining of bodies shivers rippling down the skin.

Claude and Marie decided that there was too much violence in nature filming: that the world of insects, in particular, was too easy to show as cruel, amoral, terrifying. About the worst thing that happens in Microcosmos is when a pheasant wanders by and pecks up the ants. You see and hear this from the ants' point of view: beak like a pick-axe, wham! wham!. This is the insects being done to - no sense of their own dark nature, red in mandible and mouth-drill.

The soundtrack is its own rich work of art: almost totally devoid of commentary and floating a beautifully pastoral, Ravel-standard musical score (by Bruno Coulais) through seamlessly synchronized scratchings, buzzings, and flutterings, some of them real. There's great taste and subtlety to the sound perspective, subliminal thuds, rustles, faint footsteps creating a whole dramatic ambience deep in the meadow.

The ground-level view, intended to give us rapport with the insects and their problems inevitably means that some end up looking ridiculously like us. A scarab beetle rolls its ball of dung up a hill (it does this with its hind-legs, walking backwards). The ball runs onto a thorn and gets stuck, giving the beetle no end of trouble to find the right way to push. It's hilarious, I enjoyed it a little less for knowing that the beetle, was a captive, the only one that would perform.

A dramatic highlight of Microcosmos is the thunder-shower that hammers the countryside with huge raindrops. One feels for the ladybird bounced off its feet on the blade of grass, the pond-skaters capsized like canoeists, the ants flooded out with silt and rocks. Is there a way of telling this that would be any more true"?

Or take the wasps. We peer into the nest and find them feeding the larvae in their cells: little grubs with upturned baby faces and big eyes: "Aah!" Yet there's this powerful feeling of being there, all the stronger for the total lack of commentary. The wasps' feet make scratchy noises on the paper of the nest. They whirr their wings to fan the grubs with cooler air, like helicopters starting up. You're left to work out what they're at.

There's a sequence of the gathering ants - a busy throng bearing seeds below to the granary chambers of the nest. One carries a dandelion seed like a parasol who gave it to him? The camera moves below, to the granary, the sound of little feet goes on tramping overhead: only the strains of L'apprenti sorcier are missing. It's very clever: it's what gathering ants do. And that simple scene I found so touching, the ants lined up at the edge of a pool, sipping like gazelles: what was in it - syrup?

The 75 brilliant minutes of Microcosm 05 are edited from 80 kilometres of film. Without the original field observation, without the science and stage management, the patience for 40 takes knowing what the insect should do, these magical moments were impossible. Don't miss them. Take the whole school.