Bird’s Eye View

Cinema collects all of our cultures’ most complex thoughts, concerns, attitudes, and spits them back out at us in a digestible way- creating a code we can all follow. A woman vomits, she’s pregnant; Someone coughs up blood, they’re dying. Angels with white wings are always good. It’s here in this language of cinema that we can really begin to understand just how diverse and complicated our perspective of birds as symbols are.  In the simple code of Hollywood, a flying bird means freedom! A higher power, the omnipresence of something holy and good, peace restored, perhaps a passed loved one offering protection. And, a bird means something sinister is about to happen, someone is losing it - instability! Evilness!  In a sense, there is no greater range.

Of course we never just see a dove in a movie and think, it’s just a bird.  

The same goes for a crow. 

Angels are always good however birds flip flop between being sinister and sacred: much like they are, alternating constantly between existing as beings of land and sky.

In this chapter, we delve into birds and angels as they appear in cinema through time and presence. We’ll see  fictional portrayals of the animal in film such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” depicting them as evil unholy creatures, as well as their representation of an unexperienced freedom in the documentary “Frontier of Dreams and Fears,” a film following living conditions under occupation. By the end of the chapter, we’ll have seen a range of the many different meanings and emotions that birds, and specifically their wings, carry within our cinematic dictionary.