It's a bit odd: I just realized, I've only just met Mark Bittner on screen in a documentary last night--about 17 hours ago, to be exact, but I find myself thinking of him as someone I've known, and have known for a while. He's in the set of mental friends collected second-hand from books, movies, exceptional radio or other not-first-hand sources. A character fictional or non-fictional whom I may forget I don't ACTUALLY know, because some artful person has given me a sense of relationship to him, an unconscious kind of companionship.
In this case, that artful someone is Judy Irving, the documentary filmmaker of Wild Parrots.
Drawn to the film as a pair of people who have grown interested in birds, parrots especially, my partner and I went to this picture expecting it to be about birds. Of course it is, on the surface, however, in the best kind of way, Wild Parrots transcends its subject matter. I'm confident in saying it's not about birds. No more than anything is ever isolated and entirely separate from everything else--oh, just go and see Mark and the birds. He puts it eloquently, even while he's quoting somebody on this matter of the illusion of separateness. Life plagiarizes itself. Irving's film plagiarizes Bittner's book, and the best kind of taking, bird from human, human from bird, happens here.
P.S. isn't it a good thing reality TV, Academy Awards, or something else is causing this flourishing of documentaries, so we're seeing them in regular run movie houses and not only at film festivals?
In this case, that artful someone is Judy Irving, the documentary filmmaker of Wild Parrots.
Drawn to the film as a pair of people who have grown interested in birds, parrots especially, my partner and I went to this picture expecting it to be about birds. Of course it is, on the surface, however, in the best kind of way, Wild Parrots transcends its subject matter. I'm confident in saying it's not about birds. No more than anything is ever isolated and entirely separate from everything else--oh, just go and see Mark and the birds. He puts it eloquently, even while he's quoting somebody on this matter of the illusion of separateness. Life plagiarizes itself. Irving's film plagiarizes Bittner's book, and the best kind of taking, bird from human, human from bird, happens here.
P.S. isn't it a good thing reality TV, Academy Awards, or something else is causing this flourishing of documentaries, so we're seeing them in regular run movie houses and not only at film festivals?