Story
After the death of his young daughter, Charlie "Bird" Parker, a famous black jazz saxophonist, attempts suicide. His white wife, Chan, admits him to a psychiatric emergency ward, but refuses to have him committed: a creator is entitled to an "unusual" life. From this situation, various interwoven flashbacks evoke the life of Parker, who elevated the saxophone to its highest level of expression and influenced his entire generation, but whose private life was a daily hell.
Les fiches du cinéma 2001
Review
Bird is an admirable film from every point of view. First and foremost, its narrative freedom. It is as if time does not exist in the story. It comes and goes like a musical theme. It descends to the bottom, to origins, only to rise abruptly and without warning to the surface of anguish and violence. It is a story "free" of any narrative or melodic constraints. Nor does Eastwood dwell on historical reconstruction. The image remains sober, carved out of the granite of black and white in color, where off-field light sources draw reflections on the actors' bodies and faces. The camera only captures that; no more no less.
Iannis Katsahnias, Cahiers du cinéma n° 409, June 1988, p. 54-55.
Clint Eastwood
Born in 1930, Clint Eastwood is without doubt the greatest American filmmaker of the last thirty years. Although his immense success came with Sergio Leone's westerns, Clint Eastwood developed a highly personal body of work very early on, in which he constantly challenged himself and his image. All his films, including his less personal ones, are driven by a single desire: to show an America in search of a lost unity, to work "on the body" of history and the American dream, to reshape its forms, contours and reliefs. In this dramatically rich cinema of doubt and false certainty, Clint Eastwood spares no effort, taking on both the solitude and the challenges he sets himself as an actor in his own films. At a time when American cinema tends to extol the merits of traditional values, Clint Eastwood's films play on clichés and cinematic genres, showing us battered men, mavericks, tough guys, victims of the world or of themselves, individuals tortured by their inner demons, tired heroes who come out of retirement to fight their ultimate battle. In addition, it is undoubtedly in this unique blend of cruelty and humanity, at the crossroads of Samuel Fuller and John Ford, that Eastwood's work draws its exceptional density.
Vincent Vatrican
