Taking Spectacle Seriously: Wildlife Film and the Legacy of Natural History Display (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2003
Natural history has long been a staple genre on British television. Encompassing a varied range of texts, the genre has managed to retain a foothold in an increasingly diverse schedule. However, generic codes and conventions have dramatically altered, and the author examines these changes. Using the concept of spectacle, she explores the many ways in which contemporary natural history is now presented.
Thinking about television audiences: Entertainment and reconstruction in nature documentaries
Documentary reconstruction is a creative production decision which involves reconstructing a reality or event rather than filming it as it occurs spontaneously. This article studies the use of the resource in the filming of nature documentaries for the series El Hombre y la Tierra. All of the action scenes in the series were reconstructions, which required rehearsals and involved a large amount of editing work. Without documentary reconstruction and the handling of animals it would have been impossible to film the majority of the hunting sequences, and the series never would have achieved the success that it did. Even today El Hombre y la Tierra is a point of reference in entertainment in nature documentaries and continues to raise debate about how to communicate the lives of wild animals in a respectful and truthful way to ever more demanding audiences, as well as about the need for, and boundaries of, entertainment in scientific television programmes.
2013
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the relationship between media representations of the animal kingdom and the increased demand for wildlife tourism products and destinations. The discussion will pay particular attention to the types and delivery of natural history programmes, the social representations of animals, the tendency towards anthropomorphism, animal performance and destination marketing. Animals play a very important part of the human imaginings. Throughout our evolutionary history man has had an extremely complex relationship with the animal kingdom. According to Franklin, animals are uniquely positioned relative to humans in that they are “both like us, but not us” (1999:9). Unlike trees, plants and rocks, they have the capacity to represent the differentiations, characters and dispositions of any given society. Indeed human-like characteristics particularly prevalent in mammals often reflect the extent to which mankind can empathise with animal behaviour or attributes and this in turn affects how worthy species are of the tourist gaze or even of protection or conservation. For a tourist, animals can become a focus of attention as they bring ‘action’, ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’ to an otherwise still or passive landscape. There is no doubt that television programmes, popular media, art and literature all play their part in how we conceptualise animals and their habitats. Out of these genres, natural history television programmes are arguably the most powerful in determining animal narratives and values due to their ‘up-close’, ‘real-time’ and ‘visual’ portrayal of the trials and tribulations of animal life. Davies (2000) plots the development of the this genre from its post-war beginnings until the 1960s during which an expert vision of nature that stressed the importance of field observation and scientific interpretations of animal form so revolutionised by the ‘scientific voice’ of David Attenborough were the order of the day. However, many would argue that this narrative has long since gone to be replaced by one which is more anthropomorphic and emotional; particularly in the light of deforestation, climate change and declining species. Today, the camera is a lens through which ‘real-life’ animals stories are told. Programmes such as the BBC’s Big Cat Diaries, March of the Penguins, My Family of Bears are gripping, emotional accounts of animal lives. The use of web-cam and film technologies that reveal the entire day to day life of species and allow audiences to follow the trials and tribulations of life as it unfurls have also been instrumental in capturing audiences. Indeed many wildlife tourist attractions also now incorporate webcam technologies to capture the imagination and interest of their visitors. The wildlife tourism literature frequently alludes to this inter-relationship between increased wildlife tourism demand and the proliferation of emotive natural history programmes; particularly those which depict charismatic, iconic, flagship or disappearing species (Newsome et al., 2005; Walpole and Thouless, 2005). Research recently undertaken in the United Kingdom confirms this relationship where in-depth interviews and survey data reveal how a popular, live, twice weekly programme on British wildlife has instilled or reawakened an interest in trip taking to see Britain’s wildlife. This correlation between interest in wildlife watching and media representations of nature is not surprising when wildlife programmes are watched by 52% of men and 51% of women in the UK (DCMS, 2009). Destination marketers have also been quick to exploit the demand to see iconic species. Tourist brochures are thus proliferated with photographs of endemic wildlife. These and popular natural history programmes culminate in animals being both symbolic of place and perhaps also symbolic of the anthropogenic impacts on our natural environment which subconsciously evokes a desire to ‘see them while you still can’.
Wildlife documentaries present a diverse, but biased, portrayal of the natural world
People and Nature, 2023
Wildlife-documentary production has expanded over recent decades, while studies report reduced direct contact with nature. The role of documentaries and other electronic content in educating people about biodiversity is therefore likely to be growing increasingly important. This study investigated whether the content of wildlife documentaries is an accurate reflection of the natural world and whether conservation messaging in documentaries has changed over time. We sampled an online film database (n = 105) to quantify the representation of taxa and habitats over time, and compared this with actual taxonomic diversity in the natural world. We assessed whether the precision with which an organism could be identified from the way it was mentioned varied between taxa or across time, and whether mentions of conservation and anthropogenic impacts on the natural world changed over time. Mentions of organisms (n = 374) were very biased towards vertebrates (81.1% of mentions) relative to invertebrates (17.9% of mentions), despite vertebrates representing only 3.4% of described species, compared to 74.9% for invertebrates. Mentions were highly variable across groups and between time periods, particularly for insects, fish and reptiles. Plants had a consistently low representation across time periods. A range of habitats was represented, the most common being tropical forest and the least common being deep ocean, but there was no change over time. Mentions identifiable to species were significantly different between taxa, with 41.8% of mentions of vertebrates identifiable to species compared with just 7.5% of invertebrate mentions and 10% of plant mentions. This did not change over time. Conservation was mentioned in 16.2% of documentaries overall, but in almost 50% of documentaries in the current decade. Anthropogenic impacts were mentioned in 22.1% of documentaries and never before the 1970s. Our results show that documentaries provide a diverse picture of nature with an increasing focus on conservation, with likely benefits for public awareness. However, they overrepresent vertebrate species, potentially directing public attention towards these taxa. We suggest widening the range of taxa featured to redress this and call for a greater focus on threats to biodiversity to improve public awareness.
Performing authenticity: The making‐of documentary in wildlife film's blue‐chip renaissance
People and Nature, 2021
Making‐of documentaries (MODs) for recent blue‐chip wildlife films are prominently featured as trailers, bonus features on DVD releases and websites, and televised segments within wildlife broadcasts. Prior research shows how MODs within mainstream cinema promote certain filmmakers as auteurs and as exceptional creative professionals. Earlier wildlife film MODs demonstrated filmmakers' mastery of nature and a licence to offer scientific knowledge, as well as many staging practices employed in wildlife filmmaking; this content moved to MODs as nature grew more pristine in wildlife films' main programming. Recent wildlife film MODs still celebrate filmmakers' professionalism and emphasize the remoteness of film locations, filmmakers' exceptional practical skills and scientific expertise under harsh conditions, and the technologies responsible for spectacular visuals. In the MOD for Chimpanzee (2012), these features work together to portray this wildlife species as chal...
‘As if eavesdropping on actual filming’: The origins of the wildlife making-of documentary genre
Journal of Science & Popular Culture, 2018
The wildlife making-of documentary genre has become a routine appendage to most prestige natural history series. However, the genre is a fairly recent one. The first attempt at producing a wildlife MOD was in 1963 the half-hour long Unarmed Hunter. The first wildlife MOD accompanying a natural history programme was in 1984 The Making of the Living Planet. In between these two films, the televising of natural history became a profession revolving around the technical mastery of the filmmaking apparatus. The article examine this history, and suggests that the MOD helped filmmakers to secure credibility as producers of knowledge.
Natural history films and technological advances
Natural history films and technological advances, 2022
Natural history films, a.k.a. ‘nature documentaries,’ are currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity, driven in part by distribution over streaming services such as Netflix and Apple TV+, and in part by sophisticated new filming technologies for creating spectacular images. This study aims to determine how, and to what extent, these technological advances are affecting natural history films, not just at the level of form, but also in their content. Some claim that a ‘revolution’ is occurring in the way these films are made, and, more importantly, in the types of stories that are being told. A competing claim is that the new technologies and distribution channels have led to a ‘blue-chip renaissance’ that depicts a nature that is untouched by humans. This shows a different view from the ‘revolutionary’ one, in which things are moving forwards into new, unexplored areas, as in the ‘renaissance’ things are moving backward by the revival of an earlier style. In contrast to both, there are films that confront climate change, which is a new ‘storyline’, and its making does not depend on new filming technologies. So, it is not revolutionary, but also not a blue-chip. These claims are evaluated here, by way of a close analysis of an extensive sample of recent films (2018-2022). The films reveal that despite the changes in technique and visual quality, there have been few changes in the choices of stories that are told and the way in which they are told. A notable exception to this, however, is a new emphasis on the urgency of addressing climate change.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies , 2019
This paper analyses how animals became devices of the public in the early years of ABC television. It investigates the challenges of how to make animals televisual and reflects on the various forms of public interest and environmental awareness these animals generated. Over this period most animal content on the ABC was imported from the BBC. By examining a 1956 episode of Attenborough’s Zoo Quest, we see how capturing wild animals on film was technically difficult and required a range of devices to contain and display animals for TV. These techniques provoked a form of viewing where the sovereign human gaze prevailed. We then examine an early ABC nature documentary, Dancing Orpheus (1962). It used techniques of visual capture that displayed lyrebirds ‘in the wild’ in what appeared to be a state of natural and spontaneous self-betrayal. However, in the final scenes these birds were problematised as living in a threatened environment and therefore vulnerable. Shifting from objects of natural beauty performing for audiences, these birds demanded public concern. We investigate how ABC animals and their publics were implicated in an environmental nationalism as it emerged over the 1960s and early 1970s. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XD8XZZU3CN36VIIMJTHM/full?target=10.1080/10304312.2019.1669533
Provoking Animal Realities on TV: Exploring the Affinities between STS and Screen Studies
This paper investigates the logistics of crafting and accounting for animal realities on television. Using the case of The Making of David Attenborough's Conquest of the Skies, a behind-the-scenes documentary about how the Sky TV series David Attenborough's Conquest of the Skies was created, it explores how the material reality of animals becomes a televisual reality. In seeking to challenge the lingering concern within many media studies critiques of wildlife TV about the constructed and manipulated nature of televisual animals, we propose an approach focused on how realities are provoked. This approach draws on recent debates within STS and screen theory about the contingent elements and accountability relations that become practically operative in making something real. Equally significant is the animal performer. How do the animals, often domesticated, that are used in television to simulate wildness or scientific facts participate in and resist the