The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock is a stunning is a drama where the majority of the film is taken up by panoramic shots of the birds flying over Bodega Bay. When the birds are gathering planning to attack there is no music; there is also very little conversation, save the screams of the victims. These anguished howls and the caw of the birds seem to blend harmoniously to create a paralyzing cacophony of sounds that express terror far better than mere words could have. In the final scene there is the most poignant use of sound and disregard for words whereby the soundtrack fills with bird noises, punctuated by electronic shrieks.
This tendency veers into logophobia (fear of excessively using speech) in The Birds, which is about the futility of language. The more its characters talk among themselves, the more extreme their problems become. By contrast, birds cannot talk, write, or use language in any way that a human could identify; yet they seem ever more organized and unified in the movie. This pattern accounts for some of the film’s boldest scenes, as when Melanie and the others make their final escape only when Melanie loses the power of speech and effective movement after a particularly traumatic bout with the birds.
