WINGED MIGRATION (France/Germany, etc.2001)
Wednesday, 1st April 2009

WINGED MIGRATION (France/Germany, etc.2001)

Directed by Jacques Perrin from his own screenplay.
Photography (Colour): Pierre Bec and others. Music: Bruno Coulais. Length: 89 minutes.
Marking our 60th Anniversary we repeat the double bill which, although undermined by bad weather in 2005, nevertheless earned an 84.7% response for the Argentinian study of a 60s childhood and a 91.7% rating for the poetic French nature film.
WINGED MIGRATION: “One of the movies of the year” – The Independent.
“Such magical visuals...


Mini Season Presentation - Not part of the main season (See also "Valentin"

WINGED MIGRATION The other half of the double bill is a nature film from the team that brought us Micrcosmos and that fact should in itself recommend it to our members since we screened that earlier work in our 1998/1999 season when it was very well received (88.1% on the reaction cards) We pointed out at the time that however impressed one can be by nature programmes on television the impact becomes something else again when this kind of material is seen on the cinema screen. That was certainly the case with Micrcosmos, and it is no less true of Winged Migration which was filmed over a period of three or four years and which finds the chief directorial credit going to the actor Jacques Perrin who in the earlier film was simply credited as a co-producer.

The style of these two films is very much the same. That is to say that each is akin to a film poem, so that although they offer a few comments in voice over rendered in English they do not seek to give detailed information. It’s an approach that tends to treat music as part and parcel of the conception. Bruno Coulais is again the composer here and this time he sometimes uses a wordless text for a boy treble. His score has an extra function in that it plays a useful role in cementing images together to add to the sense of flow. It is, of course, the case that because it is centred on birds Winged Migration offers less variety of subject matter than did Microcosmos but it covers the world (there are brief recognisable glimpses of places as far apart as Paris, the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall of China). Indeed the only miscalculation structurally is that the film seems to come full circle after about seventy minutes, thus suggesting a close (we have traced spring flights going hundreds of miles north, paused there for variation and then seen the migration south before winter sets in). Audiences can only gain from knowing that the film will in fact continue with a wholly new and contrasted section taking in the Amazon and the Antarctic.

Winged Migration is not without its moments of drama whether provided by nature or by man or by a combination of both, but its power resides in the way that the latest camera equipment utilising model aircraft and gliders can take us up into the sky with the birds and make us gasp all over again at the wonders of nature. It may not be a perfect film (I for one could do without the songs by Nick Cave), but in view of what it achieves any reservations fade into insignificance.