The Reason for Film

After a really LONG hiatus, I decided that I should get down to blogging again more regularly. I was going through my cities and modernity course where they were discussing the proliferation of photography in the 1800s, which led to me to remember about the nature-culture course I took last year when we discussed about natural history film making. (Don't you just love Geography? It's just so interdisciplinary). Anyway, getting back to the point, I thought that it would be interesting to understand the use of documentaries and how they fit into the wider picture of representations of nature and culture.

The rise of film as a mode of documenting the natural world probably started in 1955 when Sielmann's 20 minute film on woodpeckers was shown on British television. Broadcasted during a time of increased concern for nature and ecology, the film was a display of progress in scientific investigation into the life sciences. The visually appealing mode of documentation quickly became popular with viewers, and earned the television team that worked on the woodpecker documentary a permanent slot on the BBC television channel (Davies 1997). Why had videography of nature become so popular then and why is it so popular now? Personally, there is always something very appealing about seeing nature unfold before  you. In contract to a photograph that captures a moment in time, videos capture whole sequences of events that can be more instructive and provide a more holistic view of the event than a single photograph can. For example, seeing a photograph of a cheetah eating its prey visually gives an impression of the dominance of carnivours in the animal kingdom but hardly reveals the difficulty that they go through to choose and catch their prey that videography can reveal. The idea that natural history film are hence complete representations of nature is often played upon by people who are trying to promote their account of nature as "authentic". We do not doubt the value of natural history documentaries in giving mostly accurate data about the issue that they discuss, be it animal life, changing earth scenes or civilisations. Documentaries have often been used in classrooms and lectures as educational tools to discuss certain pertinent points. However, we must understand that film is an interplay of several "heterogeneous actors [such] as naturalists, scientists, film-makers, broadcasters, audiences, producers, conservationists, artists, cameras and animals [that] are woven together in the construction of an important episode in the narratives" of attitudes towards nature (Davies 1997).


That being said, we understand that documentaries, however hard they try to reflect a complete and whole truth, are still power laden and agenda driven. The producer of the film will probably try to produce a film that appeals to popular sentiments during that time, that would mean choosing scientists that have data to support that particular angle that he is aiming for, that would be translated to the cameramen or digital designers who would frame a certain part of the vast scenery to portray that point. The audience, as well, would interpret the film before them through the lenses of what they have been bombarded with on the news, work, school and internet, creating a plethora of meaning to the film that may or may not have been first intended by the film maker. This is not merely cynical view of documentaries. It is not that documentaries cannot be trusted, but that we should understand that when viewing any documentary, a mode of information that has always been perpetuated as a source of real, accurate facts, we should remember that they are often partial accounts of the whole picture out there.

One good example is blue-chip natural history films that were very popular in the 1900s. Blue chip films are "that kind of film, you know, which has got no people in it. Lovely, natural history. Nature in the raw. Beautifully filmed. High production values, good editing, good photography that sucks you into a place" (Sparks 1995). Previously, films that show the vitality of nature were popular and provided the public with a lot of information about the natural world, assuring them about a 'natural' order that still remains in our world today apart from civilisation. Today, however, we are more keen to watch documentaries on the demise of animal life and the destruction of our environment. Films like "The Cove" does display animal life (particularly dolphins), but in the frame of Japan's dolphin hunting, and the sufferings of the benign, helpless animal. The documentary won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Other films such as the "Inconvenient Truth" (which I still believe has more to do with Al Gore's political agenda than environmental agenda) won him the Nobel Peace Prize, and became the sixth-highest-grossing documentary film to date in the US. Why make such dismal accounts of nature now, when we could still be producing blue chip films? The answer is more complex than what I am about to provide, however, I do believe that such doomsday films feed into the popular concern about environmental degradation and the fall of animals to the ultimate human predator. 


I admit that film is diverse, and there are MANY different types of documentaries out there that may not conform to popular sentiments nowadays. But nevertheless, those films are subject to the same production process, and hence, same process of self censorship and selection. It is important to watch documentaries for information, yes, but also with a critical eye because humans are failable, as are human accounts of different worlds that we may not fully understand, including that of our own.

Davies, G. (1997) "Networks of Nature: Stories of Natural History Film-Making from the BBC", Thesis submitted for degree in Doctor of Philosophy, University College London