Prof. Michael Gitlin’s film, The Birdpeople, will be screening (in beautiful 16mm) at the Anthology Film Archives, 2nd Ave and 2nd Street, on Saturday and Sunday, May 1 and 2 at 3:30 p.m., and again on Wednesday, May 5 at 7:00 p.m., as part of a series called “For the Birds.” A bit of information about the film is below. More
information on the full series and schedule details can be found at
http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/schedule/
About The Birdpeople (2004, 16mm, 61 minutes)
A loosely-knit community of birdwatchers in New York’s Central Park;
ornithologists with their specimen collections at a dozen different natural
history museums; bird banders gingerly extracting birds from mist nets and
collecting data in upstate New York; six people searching for a nearly extinct
bird in a Louisiana bayou: these are the strands that are woven together by The
Birdpeople as it documents a passionate fixation. Part cultural history, part
self-reflexive anthropology, by turns humorous and elegiac, The Birdpeople
examines the pleasures and problems of looking and naming, and investigates the
social construction of nature, centered on ornithology and its amateur
counterpart, bird watching.