Movies are a great medium for showing us other ways of life, human as well as animal. Yet the market-oriented movie producers are so convinced that audiences want only the same old melodramatized versions of existence that not only are stories set in foreign countries distorted to make other people over in our image, but even animal behavior is sentimentalized to reassure us in our ignorance.--Pauline Kael, "Movie for Young Children: Born Free and Around the World Under the Sea," Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968)
It doesn't happen only in America. March of the Penguins was made by a French team of documentarians who took their advanced video technology to Antarctica to capture the bizarrely arduous reproductive cycle of the emperor penguins. The filmmakers got astonishing footage of the birds on land and underwater, from a distance, overhead, and up close--"intimate" you might say if they weren't birds. Every step is documented: the annual journey inland to the grounds where the birds court and mate and where the females lays single eggs, which the huddling males keep warm against wintry blasts while the females waddle off for several months to feed; the hatching of the chicks; the return of the females and the departure of the males; and so forth. Because the filmmakers condense an entire round of generation into 85 minutes, March of the Penguins functions as a dream visit to the zoo. You aren't actually there, but you couldn't see more than this movie shows you if you were. In terms of visual information it's satisfying beyond imagining.
The material is totally absorbing, though because it's about birds I hesitate to refer to it as "dramatic." Such a qualm, however, doesn't stop the moviemakers from discussing the birds' behavior in human terms. Morgan Freeman, intoning the dreadful narration, tells us at the outset it's a story about "love" without, however, telling us how you determine the nature of penguin emotions. They plainly mean "love" in human terms, almost as baldly as Disney cartoons do. The narration also talks about the penguins' having "chosen" to remain in Antarctica after it broke off from the other continental land masses and drifted south, as if they were the hardy members of a green commune determined to tough it out in a changing environment.
Being a penguin is not a virtue, it's simply a fact. And despite the narration, what we witness can be explained as deriving entirely from the animals' biological instincts, which offer a far more interesting subject for speculation. For instance, I can see how the penguins' weird, wobbly, punishing ritual of reproduction might result as a random mutation among bird species, but it's awfully difficult to think of it as a superior form of adaptation. What were the competitively inferior species like? The wonder of March of the Penguins is that moviemakers who seem not to understand their subject nonetheless capture it faithfully. Though they sentimentalize their subject, the reproductive cycle gives it a natural shape that they respect. They're better moviemakers than they are naturalists, but they're such solid, orderly videographers that their work functions as naturalism despite their misguided intention to give us a "love" story.
Article comments
1 - Purple Tigress
March of the Penguins as we know it here is not how it was originally made. I understand the French version of the narration had a greater tendency to anthropormorphize the actions of the penguins. The French version is what was seen at Sundance.
Whether or not this is the feeling of the cinematographers is not evident. Perhaps they only wished to make this available to a wider audience. Perhaps this was a decision of the producer. So while the original narration may have bolstered your argument, interviews about the narration (both in English and French) would have further solidified your reasoning.
Also, you should note that while Timothy Treadwell claimed to spend 13 years alone, he was not always alone. There were girlfriends besides Jewel and Amie. That was part of his myth making and Herzog also alludes to this. There are also blogs that testify to tourists who were able to meet and talk with Treadwell while he was in the bush.
One point the documentary doesn't make clear is that they cannot prove that Treadwell was attacked and eaten by the same bear or even eaten by just one bear.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment. You're right that I have ascribed the flaws of the American version of March of the Penguins to the moviemaking "team," in which I include the director, screenwriters, and producers. I didn't have the information to ascribe it more particularly. It is also the case that the French version appears to have been worse. IMDB.com lists, for instance, French voice actors for the mother, father, and child penguins.
As for Grizzly Man, Herzog points out when Treadwell's girlfriend is holding the camera. He notes two instances of it. I assume that when he went through the footage he would have noticed the same telltale signs from earlier summers. Maybe not, though. I don't think it makes that much difference, however, if Treadwell was monologuing to someone behind the camera. The content of what he said is the same, even if the situation is somewhat different. Also, as I recall they found human remains and clothing inside the bear they killed. Yes, it can't be proven that that is the bear Treadwell had photographed, but I believe their theory about the bear being older and desperately hungry holds good as a general matter and seems likely. It may be wrong, but again it doesn't change that much. Treadwell was not "studying" the bears in any meaningful scientific way and plainly, judging from the results, was not an expert at reading bear behavior.
3 - ss
Alan:
Thanks for a great review.
'My Best Fiend', 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God', and 'Grizzly Man'
These are the only Herzog titles I've seen so far. I'm going to have to check out 'Fitzcarraldo'.
What's great about these movies, despite the plodding stories, is Herzog's valiant attempt to avoid simple themes in describing irreducibly complex situations.
His attraction to people who do simplify the world down into familiar, palatable terms, and his fascination with the ability these weavers of archetypal fairytales have to get other people to follow them, to their own mutual destruction, his ability to admit this fascination while not romanticizing these characters, makes for something unique.
You're right, he falls into the same trap himself with the nihilism, but perhaps this nihilism is what keeps him from romanticizing his charasmatic, destructive dreamers.
Without it, he might have shot 'Natural Born Killers' instead of 'Grizzly Man'.
4 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment. You got Herzog right--he strictly avoids the gratifying simplifications we're used to at the movies. His avoidance has its own pitfalls--cheerless rather than cheery simplifications--but even that is so rare in the movies that it can be bracing even when it's not exactly profound. It can also be lethal (Heart of Glass) but generally it's pretty stimluating. If you have a certain temperament, anyway. I've been watching one Herzog movie after another at home and my boyfriend thinks I've gone off my rocker, except to the extent he thinks I may have found the cure for insomnia.
I'm also glad you pointed out the way that certain of Herzog's mad characters get other people to follow them--the phenomenon that haunted mid-20th century Germany.
5 - ss
Not to mention the turn of the 21st century Muslim world, as well as early 21st century America.
Strange how a 'philosphical' film maker got to the heart of that one so much more cleanly than the 'political' film makers with their conspiracy theories and simple reductions of phantasmagoric situations.
6 - Alan Dale
Interesting. Yes, the direct route doesn't necessarily lead to the most satisfying results when it comes to political movies, as I think The Constant Gardener and Lord of War show.
7 - ss
I liked both those movies, but I walked away a little disappointed in in each case.
Feines death seemed to indulge the messianic urge a bit to much in CG,
and the first hour of LoW, the 'Blow' of gun running part, could have been better.
8 - Alan Dale
Stay tuned--I'm working on a review of Constant Gardener and maybe of Lord of War though I found the latter outright dull. I used to find Nicolas Cage outrageously amusing. What happened?