At first it seems like the problem with this six-minute video of a man in a black t-shirt and jeans doing what can only be called "action archery" is the narration. Or, anyway, the biggest problem besides the fact that it is 1) six minutes long and 2) features a man in a black t-shirt and jeans doing what can only be called "action archery."It's not just that the narrator keeps talking at a peculiar pace about ancient texts on archery in Extreme Narrator Voice, although that doesn't help. It's that he is talking about all these things while a dude who looks like the dang lead singer from Future Islands is running around doing alternately amazing and dippy archery things, many of which involve jumping and one of which involves rollerblades. Add the narration, and it starts to seem… well, not quite serious. Nothing in which this happens is serious, really.
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But it does take on a sort of warped documentary feel, which is, in turn, sort of distracting, because mostly we are trying to watch the strange fellow with the bow and arrow run around.The same goes for the video's delightful infomercial-style re-enactments, which recur with not nearly enough frequency and tackle pressing issues like the inconvenience of arrow-quivers with a just-so "don't you hate it when this happens?" tone. They are wonderful:
But also they serve to mediate what should otherwise be a more immediate experience. Ideally, this video would've been discovered by accident, like George Michael Bluth's light-saber footage, without any explanation or framing. Just turn on your computer and somehow there's the Not The Future Islands Guy catching an arrow that has just been shot at him and then firing it back at a target, or shooting a dang arrow that was just fired at him with another arrow, or hopping in the air and firing an arrow at a target wearing medieval-style chain mail.But then you watch it again—and I would recommend watching it again—and it becomes clearer. It becomes clear that the narration is in fact perfect, and that this is a documentary of sorts. It is a documentary about how big the world is, and how strange humans are, and about how unconvincing the words "ancient texts" are when used around images of a man shooting a bear-shaped target while using a bow and arrow with his feet. It's a document, at least. You have to agree that it's a pretty amazing document.[H/T and many thanks to Tom Ley/Deadspin]