New Releases: March of the Penguins

A shove in the back - that’s the image to remember from this film. The emperor penguins of Antarctica seem to understand that they are in the harshest environment on the planet, and they move in a tight phalanx, using their numbers to maximum advantage whenever possible. They are not shy about nudging, shoving, and barking orders. No dawdling is permitted, and the most striking visual captured by the camera crew is a single penguin, dismissed from the collective, as he walks off alone into the blinding white nothing of the Arctic blast furnace.

Before I went to the screening for March of the Penguins Thursday night, the only thing I had written in my notes was "Will they get in the way of the penguins?" Any attempts to personify or otherwise create a narrative for this film would surely make the whole business unendurable. Anthropomorphism is almost always the kiss of death for an animal movie. But it’s hard to avoid when you’re dealing with creatures who walk upright on two squat legs and, from a short distance, would make a stranded Antarctican traveler think he was saved.

Warner Independent Pictures and National Geographic Feature Films snatched up this penguin documentary at Sundance 2005 for around a million dollars. After that, it was immediately put through a de-Frenchifying process. The original title, La Marche de Empreur (The Emperor’s Journey), was scrapped. A wedged-in narrative, complete with male and female penguin voice-overs, was tossed and replaced with an informative, statesman-like narration by Morgan Freeman. (The penguins referring to each other as "soul mate" reportedly had people howling in the aisles in Park City.)

A Bjorkish Euro-pop score was also reportedly switched out, although I think that might have been more interesting. No matter: the changes don’t take away from the enormous work that went into the film. Backed by French documentary house Bonne Pioche, filmmaker Luc Jacquet took a crew to the scientific center of Dumont d’ Urville, near the very bottom of the world, and braved inhuman conditions in order to shoot the emperor penguins in super 16mm. Because of the inaccessibility, Jacquet and his crew had to spend 13 months on the Arctic plain, where hundred-mile per-hour catabatic cyclones are common.

Jacquet shot 120 hours of film to arrive at around 80 minutes; this includes some underwater footage which seems so difficult to have attained, I’d be interested to know if it had ever been done at all before now. Filming the birds up close also meant hauling heavy camera equipment around any time there was shooting to be done.

It would take quite a character to pull all this off, and director Jacquet doesn’t disappoint. Even though much of his extra-camera work was apparently elbowed out of the American release, he did complete a studio interview that was distributed with the film’s press materials, where he expounds in a very Frenchly way on the emperor penguins and their habitat:

"We are almost in the realm of biotics. There are no living cells in Antarctica, and in this white desert, the emperor is the sentinel, the last living element on the planet. Assuming we are still on the same planet. Although Antarctica is not yet space, it is almost no longer Earth! We are on the border between reality and fantasy." He then goes on to complain about how long it took him to "recover" from his ordeal.

The film is invaluable for the imagery it captures, some of which is actually startling; I’m thinking of a late scene of the penguins huddling together for warmth on the ice floes, while being bombarded by the Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights. It looks like some kind of Penguin Floyd laser show. It’s amazing simply for the fact that it reminds you that interesting stuff is going on in places on the planet where humans simply cannot get to without a huge financial and physical undertaking.

The crux of the story, if you want to call it that, is the exhausting mating ritual that these fish-birds go through once a year. It involves leaving their underwater habitats, where food is abundant, and marching until they reach their traditional breeding grounds. (Perhaps traditional because the winds are somewhat dampened by huge, surrounding ice cliffs.)

The mating process itself doesn’t need much comment: it’s essentially the same for these birds as it would be for any other members of the animal kingdom. The male hovers around for a while, observing the situation and sniffing out any interest. He then proceeds to ascertain the status of the female; if she is unmated, he will move in fast, so as to ward off any other bird-brains who might be trying to stick their beaks in.

Once the ritual is complete, we also get to see footage of the careful process of tending the eggs. After they are birthed, but before they are hatched, the eggs must be assiduously looked-after by the males, while the mothers take the opportunity to travel back across the sea of ice to get more food. The eggs balance and ride on the feet of the male penguins, like a child learning to dance on her father’s shoes.

When the mothers return with food for the newly-hatched chicks, the starving fathers begin the same march. All-together, the marching routine encompasses several hundred miles and is repeated over and over until the youngsters are ready to swim (and feed) on their own.

What’s most fascinating about the march of the emperor penguins is that it doesn’t seem at all routine or natural. Random penguins are periodically blasted away by the sheer exposure. They die, and are immediately covered over by snow. The others continue unabated in their routine. It makes you think that maybe these penguins are in-between evolutionary comfort zones.