Anyone who lived through the sweltering summer of 1976 will remember wearing as little as decently possible. Derek Bromhall spent it in swimming trunks but rather than basking in the sun, he was perched inside the tower of the natural history museum in Oxford. The zoologist, biologist and film-maker had become obsessed by a colony of swifts that were nesting there after reading Swifts in a Tower (1956) by Dr David Lack. All the motivation Bromhall needed for this purgatorial, not to say hazardous, summer confinement was to be told that swifts in flight were almost impossible to film because of their lightning speed. Disproving the accepted wisdom in the opening sequence, the film starts with a swift’s eye-view panning the rooftops of Oxford as

Source: The Times August 03, 2021 23:02 UTC