"The Birds" has a very interesting structure: the first half of the film is mainly a family drama, and the second half is mainly a disaster film. At first glance, this seems to be a failed script structure, because generally speaking, a movie cannot have two completely different types of stories, otherwise it will be regarded as a digression, but this movie is an exception.
To explain why "The Birds" should be regarded as an exception, it has to be traced back to the essence of the movie. In the eyes of many people, a movie is an artistic medium that uses various audiovisual techniques to express a "story", but in fact, the ultimate expression of a movie should not be a "story", but rather an "emotion". The "story" is essentially just an expression. A carrier of "emotion". In other words, film is an artistic medium that uses various audiovisual techniques to express a "feeling/emotion" instead of a "story". Therefore, the most important thing in a movie is the continuity and completeness of the emotional flow, rather than the script and plot.
With this understanding, the script structure of "The Flock of Birds" will be a bit more eye-catching: this is essentially a movie that expresses the same emotion in two different types of stories. Whether it is the contradiction between the male protagonist and the mother + the contradiction between the male protagonist’s mother and the female protagonist (hereinafter referred to as the contradiction between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law) or the contradiction between the birds and humans, there is a kind of "seemingly unprovoked (or at least inexplicable) hostility. "It is this kind of "aggressive hostility" that links up the coherence of the entire film's perception.
So why is Hitchcock playing so fancy? I think it’s because, through this obscuration of the plot structure, Hitchcock tried to create a (in a sense) higher level that focuses more on the expression and display of human emotions and spirits—— Rather than the expression and presentation of the story-the movie. This reminds me of Tarkovsky’s "Andrei Rublev", they all achieved deeper emotional expression by breaking the conventional script structure, although Hitchcock’s way of breaking it is far. Than Tarkovsky is more friendly to the audience. Great masters will always have more or less ingenuity on some essential issues.
Even though I praised Xi fat so much, it does not mean that I think this movie is okay. In fact, the killing of birds is far more unfounded, more mysterious and inexplicable, more intense, and more hostile than the contradiction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. In addition, the reason for the contradiction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is picked out and the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law reconciled (all these make the family drama part of " The seemingly unwarranted hostility" completely dissipated), resulting in the unsmooth splicing of the two parts of the emotional stream, and the emotional fluidity of the entire movie is a bit blunt. Despite this, Xi Pang's idea is still extremely interesting, and it has indeed achieved partial success in practice.
View more about The Birds reviews
