Bird Man - A Life without Desire

The film begins with a devastating image as the camera tracks a cripple through the streets of India. His legs strapped to his back like ineffectual wings, the cripple struts, on his arms, chicken-like, through the most appalling squalor and human misery. His figure represents a most abject symbol of human suffering and vulnerability. The people are cinematically trapped in time and space, constantly moving yet never removing themselves from their agony.
A turning point is reached when the camera focuses in on a momumental Guru figure meditating, colossus-like on the hill. The rhythmically flashing images that follow represent a leap of transcendence beyond the agony, beyond the constraints of the human-condition, beyond the bounds of this life.

The film was originally shot on standard 8mm film and then reshot by means of an optical printer to 16mm (courtesy London Film Coop). The resultant hazy, loose grain effect enhances the haunting qualities of the film, which conveys something that cannot be described in words.

The India experience is in many ways beyond Western conception. Bird Man is a stunning visual document of the human condition as experienced in a journey across that impoverished land in the 1970's.

Particular thanks in producing this film to Sattva Kastel and Nellie Gilad.

Copyright 1978 Aba Kababa