A Murder of Crows (Susan Fleming, 2009): Canada/France

Reviewed by Paula Gomez. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2010.

Crows can recognize human faces! That is a great feature to have when cohabiting with humans and one of the mesmerizing research findings that A Murder of Crows reveals to their audience. The documentary praises the crow as “very intelligent, complex, and a lot like us.”

The director (Susan Fleming) takes the viewer through the works of various researchers conducting observational research on these birds around the world. This movie was watched at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The movie starts by stating that the crow has been observing us from above and in a way studying our moves without us knowing much about them in return. It reminds us that we do not think of the crow as a very clever bird and associate it instead with a noisy hazard to our cities. The movie then proceeds to show us how scientists are conducting research to find out more about the crows. In one of the studies, several individuals wearing masks walk around a university campus and detect the noises that the crows make when “ordinary” vs. “enemy” faces walk through their path. The results as seen through the video, support the hypothesis that birds do recognize individual faces and make sounds perhaps to warn other crows of threatening individuals. Further research findings on the behavior of crows are then portrayed throughout this documentary. In once scene, a crow is observed obtaining a tool to get a hold of another tool in order to obtain a piece of food. The main purpose of the movie is to show how clever these birds are and to promote respect towards them. It makes us reflect on our popular view of the crow and encourages us to start appreciating the talents of this bird.

It is surprising that the setting of most of the shots of these birds is the “urban jungle,” and not the forests or jungles of the world. It perhaps was more convenient to film the birds that were eradicating in the cities rather than to go deep into their natural habitat and film them there. Maybe, this was done to show the viewer that the natural and established territory of these crows is the cities in which we live in. They are part of our world as much as we have become part of theirs. There were various elating shots of flocks of crows in the distant sky but the most beautiful shots were the slow motion extreme close ups of these birds. The filmmakers made them gigantic on the screen and they looked gorgeous, like the animals from Planet Earth. This stance helped to reinforce the thematic idea of the movie that states that crows are great beings worthy of our respect. In a way, the documentary is also similar to many of the Desmond Morris documentaries that attempt to give the viewer a look into the complexities of animalistic behavior.

I agree that crows are beautiful creatures and should be respected, but not because we are finding out that they can recognize faces and are therefore more similar to us then we thought. We should cherish them just simply because they exist and because we are so dumb or so smart to know a little or a lot about them. I wished that the documentary would have taken a more personal tone because otherwise it attempted to tackle a topic too ambitious to cover in a two hour period. People interested in zoology might like this film. Those who are into the field of cognitive science might be entertained by this film. But, those who are interested in zoology, and cognitive science as well as film production might find it a little bit dull.