FILM CHRONICLE
"Turning and turning in the wideni'ng gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
... "
227
These lines of Yeats describe the world the three packages open to us.
The first package contains a home projector and a movie entitled
"Strange Birds." From the very first moment we are in a world which
falls apart: Donald has trouble placing the film image upon the screen
where it belongs; it projects itself on his white backside and he has to
hump it up into place. No sooner is the screen world set up than the
natural barrier between that world and Donald's world is toppled, as
Donald's shadow startles a screen bird, as Donald and the narrator con–
verse, as the irrepressible aracuan bird hops right off the screen to shake
hands with him, hops back. Even the world in which we, as audience, are
situated, falls apart. Trespassing into the second section of
The Three
Caballeros,
the aracuan runs right off the film
we
are viewing: he runs
into sheer blackness, a bit of sound track sketched in to one side. On the
s~me
order, here in the first section when the North Pole appears on
Donald's screen, sketched in upside down, the narrator makes the sug–
gestion that the theatre be turned upside down. The image then rights
itself-and supposedly we are standing on our heads. Even within the
world of the film "Strange Birds" itself all natural barriers are down.
The narrator sometimes creates the image upon the screen as he talks:
he remembers climbing a rock as a little boy, and a rock materializes;
he changes his mind and decides it was a tree; the rock vanishes and
a tree appears in its place. He cannot decide which of the two it was,
and dismisses the whole matter, dropping the little boy down through
space-to land with a jolt on a ledge, from which he looks out at us
angrily. He converses freely with this image of himself as a little gauchito,
sometimes yelling at him to · carry out more accurately the gist of his
narration.
"Strange Birds" concerns itself briefly with some assorted birds, and
at greater length with two very particular birds: the cold-blooded pen–
guin and the winged mule. As the stories of these birds unfold, falling,
or falling asunder, is persistently a leitmotif. The gauchito's clothing
falls off him as he walks; the ornero bird falls off its branch; the flamin–
goes raise both legs at once and drop abruptly under water; or the little
penguin's boat of ice melts in the tropic sun, dissolves nightmarishly from
under his scampering feet. But it is not only in the compulsive repetition
of such details, it is in their underlying plots that these stories summon
up the image of a world that "cannot hold." Both main stories feature
quests. The quest of the cold-blooded penguin is for a warmer clime;
the quest of the gauchito is for capture and exploitation of the winged
mule. Both stories feature nightmare moments suffered in the course
of the quest. The penguin's boat melts from under him; the gauchito
