This is a very quiet movie. From beginning to end, there are countless kinds of migratory birds flying, they are foraging and playing. There are few voiceovers, and occasionally subtitles flow out:
"Grey Goose, with a journey of 3,000 kilometers, from Mediterranean Basin (round trip) to Northern Europe"
"Gray crane, with a journey of 4,000 kilometers, Iberian Peninsula (round trip) is in the northern hemisphere forest."
"Yellow-billed Swan, with a journey of 3,000 kilometers, East Asia (round trip) Siberian tundra"
But the pictures and music are touching enough. French producer jacques perrin recorded the great migration of 27 species of migratory birds in three years with a 17 camera.
Every spring, some migratory birds from Europe and America fly to the North Pole and have children there. After a short summer in the Arctic, they have to travel thousands of kilometers to get back to their starting point. This film records the process of their great migration.
The lens language is clean and simple, only different kinds of birds fly with their wings, the infinite mountains they fly over, the vast plains with gorgeous colors, the contiguous castles in Europe, the turbulent sea and the endless desert. The most spectacular shot is set on the whole earth. Under the rotating angle, the blue ocean and brown land are reflected, and a large group of white birds are clearly seen moving slowly. With such a straightforward lens, putting a trivial bird in a big scene of thousands of kilometers shows that it is very shocking. What shocked me after watching it was the persistent spirit of migratory birds in the great migration, perhaps just like the voice-over at the beginning of the film. This is a struggle for life.
The music in this movie is pure. The humming of human voices in the grand melody, accompanied by the flight of birds under the long lens, sounded from time to time, from weak to strong. Nick cave's works in the film have a religious and sacred atmosphere, giving these migrating birds awe-inspiring power with sound.
The songs of different birds have been flowing in the film, which is very real and delicate. When watching movies, I feel like I am in a bird community, so I listen to their rich languages up close. It's strange that listening to the songs of birds will make you feel quiet.
The warmest scene is that migratory birds fly to the North Pole and give birth to their own birds. In a lively female voice humming, a little swan suddenly emerged from under her mother's feather lying on the ground and chirped. A black bird with white spots swims on the water with two newborn birds on its back. The little one is very comfortable looking at the water. There are four little swans between the yellow-billed swan couple, and a family of six swims gracefully on the water. A bird tried to climb on its mother's back, but it slipped down again and again. A chubby bird with yellow eyes and a yellow mouth walks forward. It looks at the close-up of the camera with yellow eyes, silly and lovely.
I have seen this scene many times, watching the bird family stay together warmly, which is infinite warmth: in the bird world, there is love and affection, and in the emotions that human beings can experience, birds also have it.
As the subtitles say, this is also a movie about bird protection. This film successfully makes the audience look at people from the perspective of birds, and tells us with silent lens that in this home of the earth, human beings have occupied too much and plundered too much. Under people's hegemony and arrogance, the world of birds has shrunk to a very small scope:
In the cold music, a huge harvester roared past in the distance, and a close-up of a lonely baby bird in the grass, which foolishly didn't know what was going to happen, had been run over by the harvester. ...
A few gunshots, a group of geese struggling to move forward fell from the sky, and their falling figures seemed to cross the water with long groans; Four poachers just put down their shotguns.
A Canadian goose in a cage watched her companion fly far away in the sky, and her black eyes behind the barbed wire were full of sadness.
In the music of despair, a flock of red-breasted geese flew over the heavily polluted city, the huge chimney and the gray city below.
The film magnifies the violence and terror in the eyes of birds and in the human world with a very nervous expression; In contrast, a large number of beautiful shots are used to show the beauty of the bird world: in the bloody sunset, cranes fall on trees with picturesque wings; Under the red clouds, thousands of birds chirped out of date, causing spectacular black smoke to rise in the sky. ...
When we look at these shots, we may think about a question: if there are no more birds' wings flying in the sky, will there be such vividness in our eyes?