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Thursday, November 09, 2000
A crowd assembled at the Regent Square Theater for a recent showing of "Kestrel's Eye." As people chose seats, a few dozen stood talking and laughing in the aisle, as if they had all been to the same party beforehand. I groaned. I had been eager all day to slip into a zone of tranquillity. Four rows from the front, I steeled myself against the energy of all the people behind me. But my dread was unwarranted.
More amazing than the fact that the audience didn't utter a peep for 90 minutes was that one could become rapt by a movie in which the main characters don't talk, either. You may have read Ron Weiskind's review of this Swedish movie, an offering of the annual Three Rivers Film Festival, in last Friday's PG. It's what encouraged me to go. I thought it would be an exquisite bird-watching experience and a challenge, a test of my ability to be still.
I never dreamed it would be so easy. It was as if I was granted a great seat from which to spy a hyper-real world that my relative leisure cheats me out of sensing. You can know, as a science fact, that birds spend all their waking time on survival and still not know.
Kestrels are a type of falcon. My first "sighting" was of a stuffed specimen at a nature center in Oklahoma. It was mottled, a little larger than a mourning dove, and its sharp glass eyes focused in perpetual alarm.
European kestrels are larger. It's hard to tell how large because, from the camera's point of view, the two stars of this movie are larger than people, seen through the eyes of Mikael Kristersson, the producer, director, cinematographer and editor who studied and documented this pair over several years.
The perspective, from atop an old church, also shows us ourselves, the beneficiaries of idle time. From the kestrel perches, we are tiny Swedish villagers jogging by, walking dogs, vacuuming hedge clippings and painstakingly raking designs in the gravel around tomb stones. The vista from atop the church is of tablelands of grazing horses and cows that stretch a short distance to the sea. Above the fields, the kestrels stalk and dive-bomb their prey, mantling rodents and lizards in their talons before flying home, ripping at the meat, laying eggs, and clucking at each other.
In the cold, the female's layered beige-and-gray feathers fluff into the shape of an igloo. She has amber eyes that watch whatever it is she sees. At one point, she is back-lit in the darkness of her nook, poignant in her momentary solitude with a breeze rushing past her feathers.
As her eggs hatch and the membranous bodies turn gold with down, she frantically jumps from the ledge to meet her mate, grabbing the field mouse from his talons. She zips back to six golden heads bobbing in agony and rips for them little bites from the mouse.
One by one, the fledglings are big enough to fly. They sit at the edge of the nook and look out, their heads bouncing like bobble-head dolls, their eyes astounded -- what the imminent thrill of adventure looks like to our personifying minds. When one, not quite ready, gets too close and flaps to regain his footing, the audience connects and chuckles. Whoa, we know how that feels.
Then one by one, the fledglings take off, landing awkwardly in a crevice of the church. They all cluster there, still a brood, but with expressions that look like expressions we would make if we suddenly leapt off a ledge and realized we could fly.
The daily persistence of these birds goes on unnoticed from the ground. Dogs bark, church bells clang, car doors slam and people's voices trail off, but you realize, as you become increasingly transfixed by the birds, that these sounds begin to lose meaning.
From my seat, I try to watch the female bird as alertly as she watches the world, and soon I feel like the bird, puffed up against the knife of winter wind, the skirt of plumage around my legs rustling like a feather duster. I can hear the sound of my feet scuffling back and forth from the ledge. But my human patina is too strong to feel the bird's innate anxiety, her sentience, her raging heartbeat at rest. I can only sense these things. And when she launches into the sky with a ripping sound, she leaves me behind to watch her soar.
The movie ends without conclusion. On the sidewalk, I have resumed the perspective of a tiny human. But I wonder where the nearest good perch is, and I wonder what she in it sees.
Diana Nelson Jones receives e-mail at djones@post-gazette.com