After watching the special features on the Winged Migration DVD, I’m pretty sure that the film’s creators are hacks. The movie consists of brief, disconnected scenes of migratory birds. (The frilly narration, typified by hyperbolic statements about nature, is fortunately very sparse.) There is no apparent rhythm or structure to the sequence of scenes, which abut one another without relating to one another and which frequently begin or end with jarring abruptness. Many of them are presented as very short narratives, frequently emphasizing the tragic or frightening predicaments of various birds; one bird is threatened by a thresher, another is devoured by crabs. These scenes are filmed with trite overstatement, as if to create miniature suspense films. Their style seems absurd in the context of the surrounding elegant nature photography, and they are so brief that they seem to be abandoned in mid-thought, as if the editor just couldn’t be bothered with them anymore. At least three shots of birds flying impossibly high above the globe are obviously computer-generated—evidently because real birds simply wouldn’t allow for such a banal statement about the interconnectedness of all bird-kind. But what convinced me of the filmmakers’ hackery is this: they actually hatched hundreds of birds and trained them from infancy to follow the cameramen around; roughly half of the scenes of “migrating birds” were created by shipping trained birds (via airplane) to desired points on their natural migration route; many other scenes using wild birds were just as contrived. This strikes me as vaguely unethical, which I suppose I can forgive, but it also strikes me as vaguely insipid. The filmmakers went to such great lengths to gain control of their scenes of bird life, and they used that control to achieve disjointed artificiality?
But despite the filmmakers’ misjudgements, their trained birds allow something that I simply can’t resist: they allow the cameramen to fly alongside them. And this, in turn, affords the film its magnificence. For it shows us birds not from our fixed earthbound perspective, a perspective in which space is defined by a grouping of objects, but from a perspective that moves with the birds, a perspective in which objects are reduced to an ephemeral background, leaving only the birds and pure space. We are used to seeing birds fly above our fixed frame of reference. Even when they fly in our immediate vicinity, they fly through a space already contextualized by our surroundings. Kant described space as a fundamentally irreducible structure of our manifold of perceptions, and this is indeed how we typically experience it: as the form of our perceptions, as an elaborate representation of the transient relationship between a bird and the other objects that form the environs through which it moves (environs defined in our perception—our environs). It is something that we do not engage with, but which merely defines our possible engagements with other things in space. However, Winged Migration reveals space as something else: an arena of pure engagement; not merely something in which (or as which) we see things, but something in (and as and by) which we do (and are) things, something we ourselves are inextricably within and which we must grapple with. Frequently the film shows us birds flying at the edge of the frame, beating their wings with a desperate fervor, striving toward the empty space at the center of the frame. With minimal surroundings to contextualize their flight, their flight contextualizes itself. Space as something through which they move is defined not by their movement towards or away from any particular object, but by their pure act of flying. Their flight builds space around itself—space as a viscous fluid, as an arena of striving and will that is defined by that very striving.
So God bless artifice.
