It’s not that Luc Jacquet’s documentary, MARCH OF THE PENGUINS, tells the penguin lover in all of us anything about them that we didn’t already know. It’s that he frames it in such a way that the audience is allowed to experience the emotional life of these birds in a way that is compelling, intimate, and almost wholly un-anthropomorhic. Sure, there’s no getting around ascribing human feelings to what is shown, but Jacquet has rendered that necessary convention into a touchstone, rather than a conceit, for the humans watching them.
The film follows one breeding season in the Emperor penguins chosen rookery, the bottom of the world and in the dead of the Antarctic winter. As they leap from the water, where they soar with a grace as great as any swallows or eagle, to begin their long trudge inland, it is as though they know that burden they bear to continue the species. It’s the way that they trudge, the long lines of them looking like nothing so much as office drones going to the subway after a long and not particularly pleasant day at the office. Yes, projection. Mostly it’s penguin anatomy that determines the gait. Still, you can’t help wondering if just a part of it is the knowledge of what’s coming from having lived it before as breeding pair or as a chick precariously clinging to life through equal parts luck and instinct. The cold, the storms, and the months on end without food carefully balancing a delicate egg on the tops of their feet where one wrong move, one moment too long in the cold, spells doom for the baby chick in its shell.
Jacquet doesn’t sentimentalize the birds here. Pairs mate once and then go their separate ways after the season is done. Chicks, once fledged and reasonably able to take care of themselves, are left to their own devices, probably never to see their parents again. Instead, he takes this most improbable of creatures, breeding in the most improbable of places and doesn’t just celebrate them, he positively exalts them. That long trudge is a marathon made on legs designed for anything but. Guarding the egg as the mate returns to the sea in search of food for itself and the chick is a test of endurance that staggers credulity. The way a parent finds its chick by the sound of its chirping is a miracle. The death of a chick plays as an unendurable part of the wheel of life. The way the tenderness of courtship seems to transcend the mere biological imperative to continue the species.
Such moments are complemented by the juxtaposition of intimate close-ups of the birds themselves with the wide and long shots of the unimaginable icy wastes in which they manage to thrive. Jacquet and his crew spent 14 months in the Antarctic to make the film, a remarkable fact considering that during that time, even the penguins returned home to the sea. But the familiarity that comes of that length of residence is present in every frame of film, there is wonder in the way looming, pastel-tinged ice mountains are captured on film, but also the sort of reverent wariness born of that.
The most remarkable thing about MARCH OF THE PENGUINS is what it reveals about the role of patience and cooperation in the penguin world. Throughout the Antarctic winter, the birds huddle together for warmth, forming a giant mass against the cold. Each bird has its turn on the inside of this huddle, and each has its turn on the edge, yet there is no squabbling, perhaps because such behavior is a waste of precious resources of energy. Still, it raises the way penguin society works beyond a mere simulacrum of the human one, it presents it as something to which humanity might consider aspiring as we all huddle together on this fragile globe.
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