Whales are magnificent in size and graceful in motion, the great ballet dancers of the deep. In A Life AmongWhales, a documentary out now on DVD, the aquatic beasts are observed at play and overheard singing their eerie lamentations.
The discoverer of whale songs, Roger Payne, is the film’s subject. A biologist become activist, Payne has devoted his life to whales and their dolphin and porpoise cousins. “I want to change people’s perceptions of the wild world,” he tells his interviewer, A Life Among Whales’ director Bill Haney. His task has been Herculean and only partially successful. Despite protests and gradual curbing of whale hunting, industrial-scale whaling operations have nearly exterminated some species, leaving blood on the foam of the sea.
According to Payne, whales are gentle creatures, violent only in self-defense. The underwater songs he discovered have rhythmic repetition and even sonic rhymes, pointing intriguingly to the whales’ enormous brains whose capacities remain unmeasured.
