• horsesvisions > paintings — Birdland > Genesis

"But what he thought was a squadron of UFOs revealed itself to be a flock of blackbirds. This story haunted me, and when we recorded "Birdland", which was totally improvised, that's where the track went to".

In the past few months, when I began to work on Birdland, my research took me back to Patti Smith’s original poem obviously, but also led me to Peter Reich’s A Book Of Dreams, which I did not know and which I read carefully.

Everything then became clear for me, the once purely intuitive puzzle starting to gather concretely under my eyes. The correspondences between Birdland and The Birds finding support in many passages of Pattis Smith’s poem primarily, but also in some of Peter Reich’s strain-work, and of course that of Hitchcock’s film. My intuitive original combination relied on three parameters: the birds’ supernatural violence, attributable, among other causes, to the mystery of their intervention, respectively in the film and in Patti Smith’s composition. Then their multitude. And finally their appearance -that I interpreted as fascinating as malevolent : a "black bouquet", to quote Patti Smith’s wonderful and poetic metaphor in her text. Some load of poisonous ebony flowers whose petals invade the sky uncontrollably. A description that befits just as much the black swarms of Hitchcock's The Birds, these unpredictable, nefarious protagonists, ultimate murderers of an obscure tragedy of which no one possessed any keys, since it proffered no decipherable meaning.

Then a second convergence between the two works appeared to me. In the film’s symbolism, the black crows harass primarily a symbol : the Woman, and her multiple incarnations. I immediately identified these "Hitchcockian" avatars with the different facets of the mysterious "Tortured Woman" that Smith evokes in his poem. These different facets of the Woman fit to the "Tortured Woman" whom Smith mentions in her poem.

First, through the character of Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren), an archetype of a vain woman who tries to forget her existential inner emptiness with futile and decadent parties, but redeems herself when seeking true love, eventually fulfilling her ambition to become a simple loving wife (that of Mitch Brenner, played by Rod Taylor).