![]() You could watch all of BIRDS OF AMERICA and never learn that Audubon owned slaves. You could watch all of BIRDS OF AMERICA and never learn that Audubon was born in Haiti. You could watch all of BIRDS OF AMERICA and come away convinced that Audubon was equally opposed to ecological destruction and slavery. We learn that Audubon was the poorest man aboard when his boat arrived in Natchez. We see photographs of enslaved people working in cotton fields. It implies that Audubon, the environmentalist hero, felt similarly. The film creates an explicit connection between the lives of poor people, people of color, and those of birds. BIRDS OF AMERICA tracks Audubon’s journey down the Mississippi, interviewing members of the Ojibwe, Osage, and Houma nations, as well as residents of the Louisiana community between New Orleans and Baton Rouge famed for its environmental racism, known as Cancer Alley. That push people and animals from land, that push land into the ocean. Human organizations that pursue and pursue and pursue. The–and I pause because this one was a twist–The Nature Conservancy. The bad guys of BIRDS OF AMERICA are Andrew Jackson. The bad guys of ANNIHILATION are aliens with beams of light. BIRDS OF AMERICA is more direct in its engagement with present-day American politics. All that’s missing is the oil tankers.ĪNNIHILATION is environmental by association–outside of a brief mention of a fictional (but plausible) chemical spill, the changes to the physical world are caused by mysterious alien forces, and any resonances with contemporary life remain obliquely allegorical. The physical environments portrayed in both are even oddly similar–ANNIHILATION’s swampy, Spanish-moss drenched Gulf Coast with its mythical Louisiana town of Ville Perdue would fit right in with the Audubon’s visits to Natchez and New Orleans. They track the loss and transformation of an ecosystem and the effects on the people who live there. A quarter of our way through the twenty-first century, what and who can we really be afraid of?īIRDS OF AMERICA and ANNIHILATION are both, in a sense, environmentalist movies. This mixing and merging of species alludes, perhaps, to the new flora and fauna that wait for us in our climate-changed future, as habitat loss and temperature change provide the means and the motive for experimental forms of interspecies mating.īut the hybrids in ANNIHILATION also felt, to me, like what you do as a director if you want to make an audience scared of an animal these days–you make it different, new, more of a mash-up. Inside a mysterious region known as “The Shimmer,” animal, plant, and human DNA mix and merge to create hitherto unimagined creatures: a plant that looks like the body of a person. What life we do see is beautiful, unusual, and terrifying–an explosive metastasis. In Alex Garland’s 2018 film ANNIHILATION, there are no birds, or at least none that we pay attention to. You are not, if you’re honest with yourself, accustomed to being scared of animals at all. If you are, like me, a resident of the 21st century Anthropocene, you are not accustomed to being scared of birds. ![]() It’s thrilling, and it’s also very weird. In Jacques L’Oeuille’s 2021 film BIRDS OF AMERICA, the camera lingers on Audubon’s portraits of these birds, and, for a time, they fill the screen. Birds who fight snakes and frogs, birds who win that fight. ![]() With their pointy beaks, sharp claws, and majestic wings, these are birds to fear. The birds of John James Audubon are metal as fuck. This article was commissioned as part of the series Science on Screen: Extinction and Otherwise, to accompany the screenings of BIRDS OF AMERICA and ANNIHILATION on at Museum of the Moving Image.
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