collected writings

Winged Migration

Nature and Greek mythology both affirm that man was not meant to fly - a lesson I learned early in life. No amount of exhaustive flapping, running, or jumping could ever keep me in the air for any extended period of time. Airplane travel only confirms this; it is surprising how many jet engines, security precautions, and stewardesses slinging peanuts are required for a routine flight.

And yet, there is simplicity to flight, natural flight, the seemingly "effortless" flight of birds, large and small. "Winged Migration," a new film by Jacques Perrinand and an international crew of over a dozen cinematographers, uses cameras mounted on gliders, balloons, and planes, high tech and low tech, to capture birds in their elements on every continent.

Birds flying, migrating, dying, living... pure ideas that the film sticks to religiously, shying away from conventional narration or any concrete intention to inform and educate. Like Perrinand's earlier work "Microcosmos," the result is outstanding. Rather than watching a nature documentary we become a different part of nature for a short while, from the perspective of a bird's eye, so to speak.

The necks of geese straining as they pump into a strong headwind. Feathers whistling slightly as each downstroke succeeds in overcoming gravity for another brief moment. Honking to the lead bird in each formation, offering encouragement and back-seat driving. The kind of sights and sounds that earthbound observers can only imagine. Jacques Perrinand takes us there, with the full technical language of film as our guide, camera movement and complex expert choreography.

"Winged Migration" is a simple film. It never pretends to inform us at the level of a National Geographic or Animal Planet presentation. Perrinand's sparse and urbane narration does not characterize or personify the birds, although we as an audience are of course completely willing and able to do so.

Their struggle to migrate, across thousands of miles above land and ocean, becomes our struggle. Geese cruise obliviously through pre-Sept. 11th New York on their way back home to Central Park. A bird trapped in industrial waste is left behind to suffocate. A wounded bird gets eaten alive by hordes of crabs. Life is hard: for a bird, exhausting; for a participant in the audience, the same.

Perhaps this review is getting too abstract, but "Winged Migration" is the kind of film that inspires abstract thought. There are no special effects, no scripted story beyond thousands of birds migrating when and where their instinct calls, a feeling we humans know nothing about but as filmgoers we become a part of over the course of the film. Some critics and audiences have derided this film for not living up to what they perceive documentaries to be: intelligent, educational, perhaps motivational or spiritual. In its unique way, "Winged Migration" captures all these moments with sublime grace, shedding natural beauty with every flap of a wing.

At points Perrinand's narration breaks through our thoughts, intrusive, unwanted. We are reminded during these breaks of our human-ness, and feel lucky that though we cannot fly, though our life is decidedly more complex than that of our winged brethren, we, beyond all other species, have the ability to appreciate moments of beauty, beauty like that in "Winged Migration."