Maryanne Murray December 11, 2010 Engdahl 5th Period UW Composition Coles Essay The Filtration of Images Everyone

sees the world in his own way. Sometimes, writers such as newspaper journalists or filmmakers who work on documentaries try to remain detached from what they produce, editing out their own views. But even in these seemingly objective works, the perspective of the writer affects the story that he tells, changing it to suit his ideals or opinions. How a filmmaker presents a picture affects the understanding that viewers have for the image. Famed author and psychologist Robert Coles argues that when film directors, authors, or anyone else who creates a representation of the truth views events, those events are filtered through a persons awareness.i Personal experience and cultural influences all have their own affects on the event, producing a version of an experience unique to the maker. In this way, the documentary film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill shows the same influences by its director, producer, and editor, Judy Irving. Before this film, Irving created several environmental documentaries, including the grim and intense Dark Circle, a film about the effects of nuclear weapons.ii She chose to create a film about parrots because the birds interested her, since she had enjoyed watching them with her grandfather in her childhood. This documentary tells the story of Mark Bittner, a former rocker from a generation somewhere between the beats and the hippies, who lived in San Francisco near Telegraph Hill. Bittner spent much of his earlier life performing odd jobs in order to make money, wandering around the Bay Area in hopes of gaining fame and fortune in rock and roll. He eventually realized that while his dream of becoming a rock

and roll star was impossible, he also valued his freedom too much to continue working. In this way, he came to rely on others to provide him with food and shelter. While living free of rent in a home near the Bay, Bittner started to observe native birds to pass the time. But after seeing his first wild parrot, all other birds came to seem boring to Bittner. Slowly gaining their trust, he started feeding the parrots sunflower seeds and observing their behavior. Through research, he discovered that the majority of the parrots in the flock belonged to a species called cherry-headed conures, and one resembled a mitred conure. A final parrot seemed entirely different. Although all of the other parrots had bright green bodies with scarlet faces, this parrot had a blue head and seemed aloof compared to the other, smaller parrots. This particular parrot becomes one of the main characters of this film. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill has a somewhat unique structure in that no narrator explains the film to the viewer; all the information that the listener obtains comes directly from interviews with the people in the film. Bittner explains that the odd parrot, which he named Connor, attracted him, and he attempted to befriend this bird more than the others. Initially, when Connor had a mate, he seemed fairly content and accepting towards Bittner. However, after his mate died, be became solitary, a lone, quiet blue-crowned conure in a world full of shrill, talkative cherry-headed conures. While many would see Connor as simply another bird, Irving viewed him as a symbol for Bittner. Just as Bittner accepted handouts from other people while taking time to feed and protect the parrots near his temporary home, Connor accepted handouts from Bittner and seemed to look after other parrots that the flock would not tolerate. Irving

shows Connor staying near a sick bird, paralleling how Bittner cared for the parrots when they became ill. Most significantly, for many years, Connor had no mate. At one point in the film, Irving asked Bittner the story behind his long hair. He explained to her that he had made an agreement with himself not to cut his hair until he found a girlfriend. Like Connor, Bittner had gone without love for some time. Since Irving had bird watched as a child, but did not have the qualifications of a scientist, she had no problem anthromorphizing birds in this way. Though many scientists would likely agree that animals feel attachment to their mates, some might think that humans cannot apply the word love to this attachment. Irvings depiction of potential love between Connor and a cherry-headed conure seems especially dubious. Bittner at one point remarked that he wished Connor would become the mate for Sophie, a cherryheaded conure whose mate died. After this comment, Irving used slow motion shots of the birds together to instill the idea that such a love could happen. Since Sophie and Connor came from different species and never have another scene together, the suggestion that they felt attracted to each other feels somewhat manufactured. The real giveaway for the illusion of love between these birds comes at the end of the movie. In the final scenes of the movie, a man cuts Bittners hair, meaning that he has found love at last. A shot of Irving and Bittner together follows; they have, in the words of Irving, become a pair.iii Irving probably hoped that Connor and Sophie could represent Bittner and herself. In the end, however, nature had its own ideas. Connor died after a hawk attacked the flock of parrots, and Sophie continued on her own. According to Robert Coles, in documentary work, after he and his fellow documentary makers have collected material, they begin the process of selecting images

that support their opinions. He states that [w]e who cut, weave, edit, splice, crop, sequence, interpolate, interject, connect, pan, come up with our captions and comments have our say creating a joint presentation for an audience.iv Documentary work consists of weeks or years of collecting, then of condensing everything from that collection into a film of appropriate length. The filmmaker must decide how to present the sections of film in the most meaningful way. In The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Irving conducted all of the filming without staging any of the actions by the birds, or replacing any of the birds with doubles. Images used in the film either came from filming conducted for the documentary, or from Bittners archives. A note at the end of the film claims that no postproduction editing took place. However, Irving chose to include several effects in her film that change the effect of the scenes taking place. For example, when a young parrot leaves the nest for the first time, Irving put the scene in slow motion, with a flourish of music. What otherwise would look like just another bird flying becomes a magical moment as a young animal experiences freedom for the first time. In another scene, Bittner places a parrot outside as punishment for biting his shoes. As the parrot sits on a branch, a chorus of crow caws, raven rasps, and hawk screams emerges, emphasizing that particular parrots fear of the outdoors. However, it seems unlikely to me that Irving recorded these calls from the wild at the same time that she filmed the images of the parrot. Ravens avoid cities, and crows tend to chase hawks away when they see them. Instead, Irving likely played a recording of these animal sounds to show the listener the source of the parrots fear, which changes what would otherwise simply be a parrot sitting outside into a parrot in danger until brought back inside.

Coles also asserts that the images, stories, and words that a director chooses to include in a documentary cause that work to take one of two focuses. Documentaries either center on the social and cultural and historical aspects of the subject, or the individual or idiosyncratic, depending on what the director chooses to include.v When talking about humans, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill takes a decidedly individual view of Mark Bittner. While Irving did conduct interview with other people who either knew Bittner or knew of the parrots, only Bittner appears multiple times throughout the film. Through this film, the viewer gains a sense of Bittners habits, his unique outlook on life, his insecurities, and how he changes throughout the course of the film as he falls in love with Irving. From watching this film, the viewer finds an intimate sense of the person that Bittner is. Minor details such as Bittners twice mentioned desire not to have people think of him as eccentric reveal volumes about his character. When I watched this film for the first time in junior high school, I felt disappointed; I expected the movie to be about wild parrots, not a man. But Bittners personal story says something about humanity as well. The level of acceptance that he found from Irving and the people living around him, even as he lived on handout and without income shows how society as a whole can react to people that it sees as vulnerable. Near the end of the film, the suggestions of citizens about what the city should do with the parrots after Bittner left also exemplified human nature, as a wide range of ideas from people as diverse as economists and environmentalists flooded the city council. Furthermore, even the behavior of the birds, in a metaphorical sense, could represent the behavior of humanity as a whole, especially in the way that Irving has portrayed them. However, the overall emphasis on the long view of humanity in this

documentary seems limited. Irving set out to film about one man and his birds, and for the most part, succeeded in doing that. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill supports Coless claims that what a documentarian chooses to put into a documentary is carefully chosen in order to fit the makers intent and that documentaries can either focus on the social and historical or the individual, but to different extents. I found myself wondering several times during this movie how another filmmaker would have treated Bittners story. Had Irving not fallen in love with Bittner, her portrayal of him would certainly differ from how she showed him in this movie. She could have chosen different sections of film that reflected more poorly on Bittner, or focused more on the birds, rather than the man. But because of her experience with him, she chose not to. Similarly, Irving decided to include mainly scenes that described Bittner himself, not humanity or culture as a whole. Still, I feel that Coless clean-cut distinction between documentaries that take a short view of a subject and those that favor the long view is too clean cut. Within this documentary, and certainly most, if not all others, exceptions exist that can make it easy to view a film both ways. Whether a documentary shows the short or long view of a particular subject depends not only on the viewpoint of the filmmaker, but also on the viewpoint of the viewer, who ultimately makes the crucial decision about what a film represents.

Coles Judy Irvings Bio iii The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill iv Coles v Coles
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