| DVD Roundup November 2006
We’re Going to the Birds: Why We Love Films
About Them
 Last February, in the dead of
winter, I happened to notice a great horned owl making her nest. An enormous bird, she was
up 70 feet or so in a bare, wind-tossed tree on a city street -- hidden in plain sight,
you might say, because city people seldom look up. I started to check in on her
regularly and was surprised to find that households up and down the street were doing the
same. Come spring, we found her homely white nestlings under the tree, all four dead.
Wringing our hands, we stood around speculating why they’d fallen. The eminent
biologist E.O. Wilson speculates why we’d even care. The term he has coined for it is
biophilia: the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living
organisms.
The success of several recent films about birds seems to
give credence to Wilson’s theory. For example, the art-house favorite The Wild
Parrots of Telegraph Hill is an engaging documentary about an ordinary fellow, Mark
Bittner, who has an intimate affiliation with an unusual flock of birds in San Francisco.
Bittner’s life was one of voluntary simplicity. Living
rent-free and getting by unemployed, he gave his days over to "citizen science."
He fed, studied, charted, and bonded with a noisy flock of 45 wild cherry-head conure
parrots. He established affectionate relationships with all of them, giving each a name,
learning its unique quirks and disposition, and respecting the signals each gave him about
the distance it wanted him to keep. (Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man is a reproof
of Timothy Treadwell’s tragic violation of that distance.)
Bittner had a special feeling for a parrot he named Connor,
the single blue-headed conure living among the cherry-heads. Although Connor was a noble
protector of injured parrots and stray parakeets, he himself was lonely. Bittner felt the
poignancy of the bird’s dignified isolation and searched in vain for a female
blue-headed conure for him. When Connor was killed by a hawk, Bittner was unashamed of his
deep grief. "Other species are our kin," says E.O. Wilson.
"I don’t consider myself an eccentric,"
Bittner comments, and viewers won’t either, despite his long ponytail and marginal
lifestyle. If anything, the film presents Bittner as articulate and kind, even wise. The
film’s director, Judy Irving, reveres the intimacy between Bittner and the parrots;
her own love of birds guides both the film and its featurettes. At the end, we are
surprised and delighted to learn that although Connor didn’t find a mate, Bittner
finds one for himself. And the featurettes complete his story. The film is both
unsentimental and uplifting.
Then there’s March of the Penguins, which
won the 2006 Oscar for Best Documentary and grossed more than $77 million at US box
offices. Time Warner boasts that it is "the second-most-successful documentary of all
time." Typically, the most successful films about animals have been children’s
feature-length cartoons, a tradition that extends from Bambi to The Lion King to
the summer of 2006’s spate of animated films. We seem to have it in our heads
that only children could be interested in stories about animals.
When I saw March of the Penguins at the
theater, it was almost as if the parents needed their children to justify seeing the movie
themselves. The audience squirmed with children too young to follow the narrative of the
solemn, slow-moving penguins on the big screen. Time Warner, capitalizing on its success
with the adult audience, has since produced Happy Feet, a sweetened cartoon version
for kids: "Into the world of the Emperor Penguins, who find their soul mates through
song, a penguin is born who cannot sing. But he can tap dance something fierce!"
Children have an innate interest in animals just as they are. We have to question why the
animals in films for children are made so unnatural and so gosh-darn cute.
The makers of Penguins were surprised at the range
of reactions their beautiful film evoked. On one end is the Christian Right’s embrace
of the film as a parable of family values or as an argument for intelligent design. On the
other end is Farce of the Penguins, the upcoming cartoon "mockumentary"
with the tagline "What happens in Antarctica stays in Antarctica." Perhaps the
film’s tone is the reason: it is reverential in a way that invites both piety and
parody.
But Morgan Freeman, the film’s narrator, summarizes
its point in the simplest terms: "For millions of years, the penguins have made their
home on the darkest, driest, windiest, and coldest continent on earth. And they’ve
done so pretty much alone." To that amazing fact, the film invites our respectful
response. The special features of the DVD underline the great love and sacrifice,
especially of the two cameramen, that went into making the film.
But most astonishing of these films is Winged Migration.
Four years in the works, it follows the birds’ "amazing odysseys, in the
northern hemisphere and then the southern, species by species, flying over each
continent." Production involved 300 separate shooting trips, in all climates, and a
crew of 500, including 12 pilots, 15 camera operators, and a battery of ornithologists.
Viewers are given the gift of flying alongside migrating
geese, storks, ducks, and cranes over magnificent landscapes and familiar cityscapes. The
DVD’s features really enhance the film by explaining its background. Producer and
director Jacques Perrin used the renowned Konrad Lorenz’s research on imprinting
birds. He hired teams of young people to imprint small flocks on themselves and then, on
an ultralight plane or a boat, to accompany the birds and encourage them to keep flying
nearby while the cameras rolled.
The film was made with extraordinary care. For example, the
crew’s two months in the Sahara produced only one minute of footage that made the
final cut. Bruno Coulais’s musical score is ethereal and complex, shunning literal
interpretations of the birds’ movements. This inspired movie and its special features
will become a classic, still viewed and cherished decades from now. In every way, Winged
Migration is an amazement.
In its own way, each of these DVDs makes me want to look up.
...Charlotte Meyer
charlottem@hometheatersound.com |
