Reframing perceptions of anthropomorphism in wildlife film and ...

CHAPTER 2) DOCUMENTING NATURE: THE SUBJECTIVITY OF FILM
‘A film about a jungle where nothing happens is not really what you turned the
television set on to see’
2.1) Wilderness on film: Reality versus Entertainment
- David Attenborough
Our anthropomorphic tendencies indicate that depictions of wildlife in film and
documentary cannot represent the reality of nature and indeed, it is difficult to find
evidence that they ever have. The ‗Wilderness‘ is arguably a human construct, a
concept of nature that is a product of a civilisation‘s particular cultural values (Cronan
1995, King 1996, Mitman 1999, Bousé 2000, Horak 2006). With the onset of
industrialisation, many of our immediate connections with animals were lost. The
majority of humans no longer directly interact with animals through traditional hunting
or subsistence farming and agriculture (Cronan 1995, Porter 2006). Once ‗tamed‘,
nature became a nostalgic world representing the ―antidote to our human selves‖
(Cronan 1995). Never is this more apparent than in wildlife film. Through the camera
lens ‗real‘ nature is translated into ‗reel‘ nature, a palatable excerpt of wild life based on
the social and cultural beliefs of the time (Mitman 1999, Bousé 2000, Pierson 2005).
Wildlife documentary has often been seen as a bridge between film and science (Apple
and Apple 1993, King 1996, Bousé 2000) and as such has caused controversy because
of the way the science has been manipulated for popular entertainment. This
development is evident even in the first widely distributed wildlife documentary,
Theodore Roosevelt‘s filmed safari expedition, Roosevelt in Africa produced in the
early 1900‘s. The film, despite its much-lauded educational and moral value, was a
disappointment to audiences because it lacked drama and excitement (Mitman 1995).
John Burroughs highlighted the emerging problems of balancing fact and fiction in his
1903 Atlantic Monthly article about ―nature faking‘, where he accused nature writers of
heightening moments of drama to make nature seem more exciting (Hedgpeth 1993).
Wildlife filmmakers, however, found that audiences craved drama over authenticity. To
engage viewers and be a commercial commodity, nature had to be made into melodrama
(Mitman 1999, Bousé 2000).
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