BIRDS OF AMERICA - Review of Jacques Loeille's documentary

At the beginning of the 19th century, a French painter, Jean-Jacques Audubon, traveled through Louisiana to paint all the birds of the New Continent. The discovery of wide open spaces encourages the utopia of a young nation projecting itself into a world of incredible beauty. Since then, the American dream has been damaged and the work of Audubon forms an archive of the sky before the industrial era. On the banks of the Mississippi, Birds of America finds traces of these birds, now extinct, and reveals another story of the national myth.

Film critic

At the beginning of the 19th century, a French painter, Jean-Jacques Audubon, traveled through Louisiana to paint all the birds of the New Continent. The discovery of wide open spaces encourages the utopia of a young nation projecting itself into a world of incredible beauty. Since then, the American dream has deteriorated and Audubon’s work forms an archive of the sky before the industrial era. On the banks of the Mississippi, Birds of America finds the traces of these now extinct birds and reveals another story of the national myth.

This superb documentary film brings the incredible pictorial work of Jean-Jacques Audubon back to life and, thanks to a dynamic and inventive narration, bridges the two centuries that separate us from his exploration of the New World. A fictitious dialogue that draws, in hollow, a sad history of the American nation whose myth has never ceased to be built on the ashes of the living and of native peoples.

He is not, far from it, the best known of French painters, but Jean-Jacques Audubon has created a considerable body of work. Leaving for America to escape conscription in the Napoleonic army, he never ceased to document, for 30 years, the ornithological life of the American continent. In a naturalistic style which he considerably evolved, introducing life itself into his paintings, the artist has inventoried hundreds of families of birds, some species of which are now completely extinct. Jacques Lœuille followed in the footsteps of the adventurer, from the source of the Mississippi to its delta. In voiceover, an imaginary narrator speaks directly to Audubon across the centuries, using a friendly familiarity.

The director’s camera explores the paintings, detailing both the scientific precision and the breath that passes through them. The story makes a first stop to tell us the story of the traveling dove, immortalized by the brushes of the master before disappearing, exterminated. The last living female, nicknamed Martha in reference to the first first lady, Martha Washington, has long been on display at the National Museum of Natural History. Further south comes the turn of the ivory-billed woodpecker, of which there is an audio recording dated 1935. Several times, it was thought to be extinct and then it reappeared, so much so that, even today, scientists receive alerts but despite the trace it has left in the collective imagination, the bird does indeed belong to a bygone world.

Along the water, the film gives voice to Native American descendants. All of them, Ojibwe, Osage, Houma or Natchez nations, say both the importance of birds in their culture, the meaning and the symbols they embody and all testify to the common destiny that precipitated their ancestors in the back of history. . Three dates, three milestones are enough to recontextualize. 1802, Napoleon sells Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson (for a pittance), it is the promise of the exploitation of cotton and then oil, which, in turn, will enslave several generations of Afro-Americans. 1830, Andrew Jackson passes the Indian Removal Act which authorizes the American administration to move the native populations who would hinder the expansion of the country. 1923 (a century later, an eternity), first congress for the protection of nature.

Through the career of Jean-Jacques Audubon, Jacques Lœuille recounts much more than an individual destiny, extraordinary as it was. It connects the elements of a puzzle forever ransacked, taking up the myth of the Garden of Eden that the Gods would have entrusted to the American nation. Myth still persisting despite the ongoing ecological disaster. Every hour, the equivalent of a football field disappears from the banks of the Mississippi due to erosion. From “the trail of tears” to “the alley of cancer”, we cross a geography haunted by specters where the biggest polluters on the planet inject millions into greenwashing operations, such as this public park where a white parrot enrages with clipped wings. Like a spat in memory of Audubon, also celebrated as far away as New York, where vast murals compete in talent to pay homage to the work of the man whom Lamartine had described as “Buffon of genius”.

Among the unexpected virtues of the 2020 confinement, there was this reconnection to the birds whose songs, even in the city, filled the silence. Suddenly their presence seemed vital to us and the sky more reassuring. It is precisely the strength of this attachment that Marielle Macé explores in her latest essay, A Rain of Birds, just published by Corti. Birds of America is part of this current, holding up a guilty mirror to History. Did Audubon know that he was immortalizing endangered species, that he was crossing the last fires of a threatened New World? Jacques Lœuille’s splendid film, inhabited by a solemn voice, sends us back to the heartbreaking modernity of these questions.