March of the Penguins

Luc Jacquet, France (2005)

They "walk" just like I do and "slip" on the snow just like I do. Amazingly precise their instincts call themselves to the place where they were born four years ago and they all march together to get there. Finally when they find their mate, they stand side by side peacefully. Once they have an egg, mother leaves to eat and father keeps the egg against severe weather for four months without any food. The severity bonds them to make a habitat with their own bodies in the open air. When mother comes back, she sees her baby and takes a turn to keep it warm under her body while father leaves for food. Finally, summer comes. All march back to the ocean and even the little chicks now should be independent. They no longer have their parents who have protected so hard. And their history continues.

I think of a documentary film about insects' life that I saw about a decade ago. I haven't seen insects with such intimacy before. Although I don't remember their life in detail any longer, beautiful vibrant colors full of screen still remain in me. I believe it was also made by Frenches, who even invented a special lens to show the tiny creatures. Do they have special eyes looking through lens?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sociology of Education in Canada

Wotherspoon, Terry. (2004). 2nd Ed. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. Sociology, which was first used by the French writer Compte in the nineteenth century to read the rapidly changing society after the Industrial revolution, is foremost a study of society and is divided into diverse fields which are determined by the perspective each study takes. Three major perspectives are structural functionalism--focusing on the orderly social structure, like a living organism, thus fundamentally aiming to stablize the structure by identifying and removing harmful elements in the social structure--interpretative analysis--emphasizing a micro level human interactions and social symbols on the basis that the world is socially constructed and the reality exists only through the member's relationship with other members, language, knowledge, etc--and critical sociology--as seen in Marxism and feminism, analyzes fundamental structural inequality of the society and aims to subvert the underlyin
Read more

A History of Violence

Directed by David Cronenberg (2005) Cronenberg had left me a sensation of nauseating horror from "Videodrome" and "Crash". (I am just amazed that he also directed "M. Butterfly", which is quite different from his other works.) Just out of curiosity about how he described violence, I went to a theatre on a rainly Saturday afternoon. The film begins with such a weary dialog between two murderers. The car slowly moves and so does the camera, then it reveals three murdered bodies uniquely. First is from the murderer's eyes when he entered the room, second is after his pushing an object in front of the camera, then the third is by taking a shot of a gun. This prelude, which could be an independent short movie, sets fire on this film. Tom Stall(by Viggo Mortensen), who is a business owner of a small restaurant in a small town, has those two murderes in his restaurant and comes to kill them to protect others. This somewhat secretly reserved guy becomes a nati
Read more

Bassist Stanley Clarke

Trio! Stanley Clarke, Bass Béla Fleck, Banjo Jean-Luc Ponty, Violin ...at Chicago Symphony Center A week ago, I told my friend that it was not easy for me to appreciate the bass itself because the tone tends to be very low and never predominant. But today, I need to change what I said. Most of all I haven't seen a more wonderful picture of a man with a bass than tonight. The big instrument always seemed to suspend the player in an awkward position. But Mr. Clarke dominates the instrument and plays with it. The gigantic instrument sometimes becomes a drum with trembling strings or sometimes becomes a guitar which seems to be passed onto a Spanish flamenco music player. All the time he looks much more passionate than any flamenco dancer. I am deeply impressed that one can explode such dynamic sound and rhythm from the bass. Mr. Ponty also presents violin sound which I never heard before. It seems that he doesn't care making beatiful melody and he likes to go beyond the tone withi
Read more