Director: Bruno Sãnto
Running time: 4mins
Less is more, but sometimes more is better. Birds of Amsterdam is perched precariously on the borderline – a music video that almost takes an appropriately light touch too far, when it comes to complementing the majestic score that it accompanies.
Marcos Souza’s piano composition is rightly centre-stage in director Bruno Sãnto’s project. It is a piece to be swept away by, and would probably instinctively trigger a large portion of the audience to close their eyes, and simply imagine their own visualisations for this playfully swooping score. To a certain extent, then, my gripes with it might be completely irrelevant anyway.
But Indy Film Library is obviously not a music-review platform, so the eloquence of Souza’s musical flow is not really our concern. Whether or not it might conjure up wonderful sights and experiences in our mind’s eye is beside the point – we are here to discuss what Sãnto has done as a filmmaker, in correspondence with that source of inspiration.
The immaculate footage of Souza performing his music is without reproach. Sãnto’s camera and lighting serve to give us a pristine view of the artistry at play, at close quarters and from afar – while offering enough shadowy depth that the appropriate amount of mystery and intrigue remains in Souza’s abilities (as far as a musical no-hoper like me is concerned, this process is as familiar to me as a dog watching brain surgery).
But in this kind of edit – the kind you might be familiar with from Match of the Day’s various, emotive end-of-season montages over the years, once you have introduced the music and musician, and allowed them to begin capturing our imaginations, the following imagery needs to live up to that – or risk being made redundant by the wandering minds of the audience. Sãnto does offer up some nice drone footage over Amsterdam, a bird’s eye view appropriately living up to the music’s title. And he does also feature some highly-defined imagery of some birds.
This is where the film gets into trouble, though, because as nicely framed and sharp as the imagery is, it objectively fails when it comes to representing the subject matter. A viewer who hasn’t lived in Amsterdam would come away from this thinking it is a city of a billion seagulls, and not much else. And while you will find plenty of those here – attracted by the markets, the fish stalls on every street, or the bags of stale bread left by the canals for them to feed on – if you spend any amount of time in the Netherlands’ capital city, you will immediately be struck by the diversity of avian life at every turn. That’s an aspect of this place that has captivated me for almost a decade.
Every spring, the canals are littered with the nests of ducks, geese, moorhens, coots and great crested grebes; while cormorants sun their wings on the banks. Storks nest atop great pillars assembled by the city’s conservationists. Herons loom over every stretch of water, waiting to spear the schools of fish teeming in the murk beneath them. Hawks swoop through the trees surrounding the railways, preying on the multitude of doves and pigeons that the city hosts. An escaped population of green parakeets adorn the foliage of every park. And that is the kind of amazing imagery which, with a little more patience, would have provided a beautiful illustration for Souza’s music.
As it is, beyond the flocks of seagulls, we get one three-second clip of some distant geese, flying through a grey sky, and a murder of crows taking off in the distance, of about the same duration. While the chaffing of jackdaws is introduced when the music builds to a crescendo, meanwhile, there is far too little offered by Sãnto’s sound design as well. The ridiculous songs of the magpies outside my window (one regularly impersonates a car-alarm) suggest that there was also much more which could have been offered here.
Ultimately, then, as much as I love the music, and enjoy seeing a master like Souza at work on the piano, Birds of Amsterdam is a frustrating watch as a music video. It seems almost as if Sãnto was worried too much variety would upstage the pianist – although I find this highly unlikely – and erred on the side of caution to the extent that his images did not deliver even a snapshot of the fantastic abundance of birds we have in Amsterdam. That is a sadly missed opportunity.