CINEMA - JANUARY 21, 2004

What’s it like to fly with the birds? ‘Winged Migration’ shows us

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

For several years, TV nature films have veered in an almost pornographic direction, showcasing a panoply of species-specific gross-out behaviors and all but clubbing the viewer with grisly, shark-eat-bunny facts of life.

‘Winged Migration’ Shown by the East Lansing Film Society at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21, at Hannah Community Center; 7 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. Friday-Sunday (Jan. 23-25) at MSU’s Wells Hall. Tickets for Wednesday’s showing are $4-$6. Tickets at Wells are $3-$5. For more info, go to www.elff.com.

The mucus-and-venom approach is an improvement over former nature show attitudes (“animals sure are funny when they faw down and get confused”), but it can also be as aesthetically punishing, and selectively misleading, as a supermarket tabloid. “Winged Migration,” presented this weekend at Wells Hall by the East Lansing Film Society, tells its story with an epic grace far more appropriate to the sweep of the big screen than the tinhorn titillation of TV.

The subject is simple: Each year, countless birds of myriad form and size take to the skies to perform incredible feats of navigation and endurance, migrating thousands of miles through every kind of climate and terrain the Earth has to offer.

Easy enough to pitch, but it took the intrepid filmmakers four years, 500 people and the cooperation of scores of nations on every continent to capture the idea on film. (It’s probably the only international project in which the United States and Libya have both participated.)

To do their job, the film’s creators resorted to a series of insanely difficult and dicey techniques. First, they raised a variety of birds from egg to adult, “imprinting” them with their own voices and forms to get them used to people and cameras. They then deployed an armada of lighter-than-air craft straight out of Jules Verne — all-terrain robots, paragliders, hot air balloons — to swoop, kite and soar all over the globe right along with their charges.

The result is a rare and precious gift to the world’s humans: a new experience. What would it be like to fly with birds? Here is the answer. This film’s transcendent images, elusive as flying dreams until now, come not from some artist’s imagination, much less a computer simulation. This is the real thing.

For an hour and a half, you fly right along with birds, in formation, an albatross eye to your right or a goose behind in front of you, as these amazing packets of life bank and veer over Saharan sands, Antarctic ice floes, wave-swept island beaches, even Manhattan’s East River.

Because the splendor of flying is more than rich enough to speak for itself, the film is wise to keep narrative devices to a minimum. For about half the film, we follow the birds to their various summer destinations. At the mid-point, a laconic narrator announces, “No more food; time to go,” and for the rest of the film we follow the birds back to their far-flung wintering grounds. That’s it. Human beings and their works appear only as bit players – a passing haycart, a crane shot of a crone feeding cranes, a stunning aerial image of the Great Wall of China.

One sequence, in which a group of birds rests at a beautiful oasis in the Libyan desert, subtly sums up the film’s unique way of turning the human point of view completely around. A babble of voices from distantly lit tents serves only as an enhancement of the scene, just as birdsong would in a movie about people. We never meet, or even glimpse, the tent dwellers.

Some sequences verge on environmentalist object lessons, as when geese are shot by hunters, a tern is stuck in the oily muck of an industrial Polish town, or a parrot frees itself from unseen Brazilian poachers. These events are presented not as overwrought dramas, however, but simply as things that happen to birds during migration. “Their migration is a fight for life,” sums up the narrator, and the miracle of this film is that it vacuums land-locked humans directly right up into this epic struggle.

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