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Lisa Uddin

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary visual cultures of economic globalization and natural history by considering the popular French wildlife film, Winged Migration (dir. Perrin 2001). Through the small-scale of a single film's reception, the paper offers a critique of the Euro-American tendency to conceptualize the global world and the natural world in totalizing and mutually constitutive terms. How have images of a timeless and universal global world become a way of imagining the natural world, and vice versa? How has Winged Migration's circulation amongst an American popular audience reproduced, but also undermined, these joint constructions? Analyzing the film's central theme of transcontinental bird migration, I argue that Winged Migration presents viewers with an image of both a naturalized global world and a "globalized" nature. I demonstrate how multiple bird species participate in a visual narrative of touristic and commodity flows, dissolving borders and figuring the planet as, in the words of Director Jacque Perrin, "a one and only space." Following, I turn to reviews of the film's DVD version, posted on Amazon.com between May 2003 and April 2004, as examples that complicate the totality. Focusing on how the film is integrated into, and transformed by, the specific bodies, vocabularies and circumstances of its audience, I conclude that the symbolic universality of Winged Migration is seriously compromised. Its everyday viewing and popular criticism thus invite a two-fold reconsideration of globalization as a natural process and of nature as necessarily borderless.

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