Why people prefer the aisle when window seats are available has never been entirely clear to me. Yet there they are at every check-in counter: people eager to trade a view of the emerald countryside unfolding below like a magic quilt for a chance to be 35 inches closer when that scrumptious food cart rolls by. They're worried the good stuff will be gone?
If you are not one of those folks, if you are mesmerized by an eagle's-eye view of the world, don't miss "Winged Migration," a lyrical, Oscar-nominated documentary by French director Jacques Perrin, producer of the 1996 documentary "Microcosmos," a close-up view of the insect world.
Making Jacques Perrin's "Winged Migration" took five camera crews three years, following birds across 40 countries from the Amazon to the poles.
(Mathieu Simonet)
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Mysteries still surround many aspects of bird migration. This film unravels exactly none of them.
Rather, in some of the most remarkable footage you'll ever see, the film lets you look over the shoulders of migrating birds. You are so close to African white pelicans, whooper swans and snow geese as they sail over the countryside that you can see the little puffs of turbulence ruffle individual feathers on their wings.
It is not possible for human beings to know what it is like to course thousands of miles north on the cold edge of spring or to whistle south on the chilly winds of fall. But these pictures will take you as close as you're likely to get. It is a remarkable sensation. You hear the individual wing beats of the birds beside you. You watch the desert sands and the snowy peaks flow by beneath you. You marvel.
And that's what Perrin was after. The narration is confined to a few words telling you the name of the species you're watching and how many miles it flies in migration. That's it.
"I don't like narration," Perrin said in an interview this spring. "I don't like narration at all. If you are at a classical music concert, you close your eyes and you dream. The same thing with this movie, but you have your eyes open. If you explain, it is not a mystery. It's like love. Why do you love somebody? If you explain, it is not a mystery."
Of course, there is a second mystery: How could the filmmaker possibly have taken these pictures? The movie does not drop a single clue.
It turns out that capturing these effortless images of the liquid grace of birds was murderously difficult.
Making "Winged Migration" took five camera crews three years, following birds across 40 countries from the Amazon to the poles. Perrin and a platoon of cinematographers mounted cameras in traditional gliders, remote-controlled gliders, model helicopters, helicopters, delta wing gliders, ultra-light motorized aircraft and balloons.
There were other clever tricks. Perrin recruited 100 biology graduate students to hand-raise many of the species shown in the film. One of the peculiarities of the avian brain is that birds "imprint" on the individual who raises them, and they tend to adopt these foster parents no matter what they look like. By putting the graduate students in a glider or an ultra-light, the filmmakers were able to get the birds to fly along beside their aircraft.
The cinematographers were opportunistic, too. When they came across a bird with a broken wing hobbling across a beach, the filmmakers set up their cameras and captured the drama as sand crabs closed in, moving closer and closer to the disabled bird. Then, in the most horrifying shot of the film, we see a seething mound of crabs devouring their helpless victim in a frenzy.
If you see the movie with your kids, this scene could give them nightmares. But you might mention to them on the way out of the theater that at the last minute, the filmmakers rescued the plover and fed the ravenous crabs a dead fish -- which is what is at the bottom of the crab pile in that closing shot. Or so Perrin says.
A few other scenes convey the grim dangers faced by migrating birds. The camera never stays with one bird for very long; there are also shots of rock-hopping penguins, parrots in the rain forest and a flock of curious ducks waddling through East European industrial muck.
But mostly this is a film of beauty, a film that will leave you dreaming about what it would be like to step off the edge of the world and discover you could fly.
Winged Migration (89 minutes, at the Loews Georgetown, Landmark's Bethesda Row and Cineplex Odeon Shirlington; expanding June 20 to the Cinema Arts Theatre in Fairfax) is rated G.
