by Nils Lindahl Elliot
Few if any television genres can equal the combination of global reach and cultural authority that is enjoyed by natural history documentaries.
One gets a sense of the genre’s global popularity when one considers the fact that Discovery Communications’ Animal Planet channel reaches 207 million homes across the world (1). The same company’s Discovery Channel brand, which combines nature, science, technology, and history documentaries, is the most widely distributed cable TV channel in the US at 98 million subscribers (2). The BBC sold its recent Planet Earth series to 95 countries and regions, and the DVD version was the ‘highest ever TV DVD pre-order on Amazon’(3). These and other statistics suggest that as many as three-quarters of a billion people around the world may have ready access to the products of what I describe as the ‘nature media’: a triumvirate constituted by the BBC, Discovery Communications, and the National Geographic, which is responsible for the production and/or distribution of a majority of the mainstream nature documentaries on television.
The above statistics say something about the cultural authority of the genre. The documentaries offer extraordinarily vivid representations of nature, and in so doing purportedly ‘show what there is to save’. At a time when all that once seemed like solid public service broadcasting is melting in the air of commercialism, the genre conveys the sense that there is still a way of representing nature—indeed that there is still a nature—that has somehow managed to avoid the profit imperative. This impression may be strengthened by the notion that the documentaries are ‘science-based’, and by the respect garnered by presenters such as David Attenborough, the ambassador par excellence of the genre.
Given this prestige, it might well seem that the genre is beyond criticism. But of course, the opposite argument can and must be made: it is precisely the most successful forms of mass communication that need to be subjected to a critical analysis. Doing so may provide audiences with a more valid basis with which to arrive at a balanced judgement in regard to the possibilities and limitations of the genre. But it may also provide the producers with the kind of feedback that ideally creates the space for more critical forms of representation.
With both of these aims in mind, I would like to use this and the following post to raise questions about the ‘nature of the nature’ that is represented by the wildlife documentary genre. In particular, I would like to consider the characteristic forms of representation associated with the ‘blue chip’ documentaries. ‘Blue chip’ is the expression used by the industry to refer to the most prestigious of the natural history sub-genres, that is, the documentaries with the highest production values. While the advent of ‘wall-to-wall’ wildlife TV has generated the space for a variety of competing sub-genres—not least, the one personified by the late Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter series—the ‘blue chip’ documentaries shown for example in the Life on Earth series or indeed in the more recent Nature of Britain arguably remain the industry standard bearers.
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Much of the cultural authority of the natural history documentaries rests on the idea that the documentaries do no more than ‘show what there is to save’. While in recent years the genre’s producers and presenters have adopted a more explicitly critical stance vis-à-vis the contemporary environmental crisis, the rhetoric of the genre still rests on the idea of an objective, if not ‘value free’ form of representation: what I describe as the myth of the pencil of nature. I borrow the title of Henry Fox Talbot’s essay on the history of photography (4) to refer to the idea, at least as old as photography itself, that photographic technologies allow nature to ‘represent itself’.
This idea is not an entirely false one. A case can undoubtedly be made that the technology of photography (and cinematography) produces ‘objective’ representations of nature in so far as it involves indexical representations: representations that, in the vocabulary of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, refer to an object ‘by virtue of being really affected by that Object’(5). Peirce explains that while indexes involve an icon and so a resemblance vis-à-vis the object of representation, what makes them indexes is that they are actually modified by the object. On this level of analysis, it is true that the light that reflects off the surface of whatever object is filmed does make its way into a lens which then refracts it onto a photosensitive surface. In this sense there is clearly an indexical connection between the photographic or cinematographic image, and whatever object(s) it represents.
However, the notion that photography is ‘objective’ for this reason alone is clearly mistaken. In the case of the natural history documentary, at least four levels of the filmmaking process work to transform the genre into a cultural form, or what Peirce describes as a symbol: a representation ‘which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law’(6) or what might be described today as a social convention.
The photographic frame: when one freezes or ‘pauses’ any given part of a documentary, a frame appears that is the outcome of a process of selective composition. The cinematographer has pointed the camera at some things, and not at others, and has decided to do so from a certain angle, and not another. Even if it is true that what is ‘in’ the frame interacts with what is beyond the frame—what is known as the ‘out-of-field’ or what Gilles Deleuze has described as ‘what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present in any given framing’(7)—both aspects of framing are partial in so far as they involve, directly or indirectly, a process of selection. What is true for any given frame is true for the framing of the genre as a whole. Botanists, for example, have long worried that natural history documentary producers seldom devote the kind of attention to plants that they devote to animals; to be sure, certain classes and orders of animals get what might be described almost literally as the lion’s share of the filmmakers’ attention.
The shot: in the case of cinematography and videography, multiple frames are combined to produce shots, and the shots inter-relate two kinds of movement. The movement(s) of the elements within the frame; and the movement of the ‘whole’ or universe that is at once produced, and reproduced, by the shot(8). If, as Deleuze noted, the cinematographic technology produces a succession of ‘any-instants-whatevers’, then on this level too, the filmmaker engages in a certain form of selection in so far as s/he chooses—and indeed produces—some movements and not others, and in so far as s/he relates those movements to a universe of movement in a certain way, and not another.
The trailers for the major documentary series are a particularly good example of this partiality in so far as they reveal the extent to which the genre privileges what might be described as a hyperkinetic nature, that is, a nature that is not only dynamic (as any nature is) but appears to be engaged in a constant process of physical displacement that is visible to the naked human eye. Hyperkinesis works to make the documentaries more ‘intense’ in a TV world that appears to demand this kind of intensity. But it also transforms the character of objects not otherwise associated with hyperkinesis: for example, one of the BBC’s few series devoted to plants (The Private Life of Plants) used time-lapse photography again and again to make plants ‘behave’ more like animals. Many audiences may now also take for granted the idea that it is ‘natural’ to see birds, especially the larger waterfowl, flying in slow motion (9).
The montage: the editing of natural history documentaries works by assembling a sequence of shots to produce segments (10). Unlike, say, a fictional film that has been minutely scripted far in advance of the actual filming, natural history films tend to involve a somewhat tactical editing process in so far as the editors must build a story, or rather a string of ‘mini-stories’, based on whatever shots the photographers have been able to obtain in situ, in studios, or indeed in zoos, where many shots of ostensibly ‘wild’ animals are filmed. As I began to suggest earlier, the producers are, indeed must be mindful of the need to compete in a programming context where viewers can use the remote control to flick away to another channel as soon as they get bored by a TV show. In addition to the representation of hyperkinesis, the natural history industry has learned to compete by editing together a string of what have been described as ‘hey May’s’—‘Hey May, come and look at this…’: scenes with remarkable shots that maintain viewer interest. These and other ‘tricks of the trade’ suggest that the natural history sector is just as driven by the commercial imperative as is the rest of the TV industry; even the BBC, which is ostensibly a non-profit and public entity, sells its series overseas for vast sums of money, and so competes directly for audience share.
If the assembly of such sequences involves another layer of selection and partiality, so do the voice-over narration, the selection of sound effects (many of which are produced by artificial means in the studio), and of course the musical score. Anyone doubting the interpretive power of these aspects might wish to compare the French- and the English-language versions of The March of the Penguins. Alternatively, readers might wish to compare Meerkats United—reportedly the most popular BBC wildlife documentary ever produced—with Meerkats Divided. In the former, meerkats are represented as a socialist community where unnamed individuals work together to survive. In the latter, the meerkats are represented as named individuals in ‘urban gangs’ that ruthlessly fight each other in a kind of Thatcherite society.
The narrative: the last example points to a fourth level of convention, that of the interpretation given to nature by producers and audiences by way of a dynamic of narrativization. As I noted in last week’s post, to narrativize something is to give it a story structure that it does not have in itself. Narrativization, like framing, shooting, and editing, constitutes a form of anthropomorphism. The common sense understanding suggests that anthropomorphism only occurs inasmuch as someone projects human ‘values’ onto nature, e.g. treating meerkats as if they were urban gangs. In fact, if we go by the etymology of the word (anthropo-‘man’ or human, and morph-shape), then it is clear that, despite its indexical qualities, any documentary must be anthropomorphic if only because it involves ‘human made’ technology that imposes a certain frame, a certain shot, a certain montage, and a certain narrative onto whatever nature is represented. From this perspective, the problem is not to find ways of avoiding anthropomorphism, but to consider what forms of anthropomorphism do a better job of representing nature for a given context(11). Clearly, the forms of anthropomorphism that are valid for the documentaries are quite different from those that are valid for a scientific essay; this is nonetheless a point that is easily overlooked by those who would like audiences to think that the documentaries are scientific, and also by those who suggest that the documentaries are not sufficiently scientific.
* * *
If the above analysis is valid, then with Peirce we might say that the paradigmatic mode of representation of the documentaries is not the index, but the dicent symbol: simplifying somewhat, a representation that is really affected by what it represents, but which at one and the same time projects onto the object of representation an association of ideas (12).
Essays might be—and indeed have been—written on the kinds of associations of ideas—the kinds of discourses—that have been projected onto nature by the documentaries (13). Here it suffices to note that the documentaries tend to be premised on what I describe as a modern imagination of nature, that is to say, an imagination that is based on a concatenation of dualisms that transform nature into something that is entirely separate from human culture and society. Accordingly, nature is
- Non-human (or at any rate, not a matter of modern humanity);
- ‘Untouched’, ‘virginal’ and thereby tacitly ‘female’ (as opposed to ‘un-penetrated’, in what is historically a sexual metaphor that formed a key part of the classical science paradigm);
- Wild (as opposed to domestic, despite the fact that it could arguably be portrayed as being ‘domestic’ by those who live in or near it);
- Remote (as opposed to being ‘local’, again taking for granted the perspective of one who lives or views from afar);
- Abundant or ‘teeming with life’ (as opposed to an ostensibly ‘scarce’ and ‘dead’ or ‘less lively’ nature closer to ‘home’);
- ‘Sensational’ or intensely ‘sensual’ in the sense that the rainforest and other habitats are capable of enervating all of the bodily senses (as opposed to modern, urban contexts that are ostensibly unremarkable, and depress or flatten sensorial experience);
- Amenable to objectification and reification, if only for the purposes of its own conservation (as opposed to something that is so immanent to experience that it cannot be transformed into a ‘thing’, let alone be exploited);
- But, despite all of the above, nevertheless continuous with ‘naturalistic’ forms of observation, that is to say, that it can be faithfully observed and represented provided that the observer is ‘methodical’, patient, detailed, and so forth (14).
A number of authors have offered sustained critiques of this way of imagining nature (15) and I myself have written about the manner in which a variety of forms of mass mediation have helped to sustain the different dualisms (16). If I mention the dualisms here, it is to suggest that, far from merely ‘showing what there is to save’, the documentaries at once present, and represent a highly particular ‘version’ of nature, a version that is charged with particular cultural values, and which may well promote highly problematic ways of relating to nature amongst at least some of the documentaries’ audiences.
Here are some examples:
First, the tendency to represent nature as being something radically ‘other’ from the self, and from the own everyday life, may reproduce the very discourse that has historically enabled moderns to engage in what Carolyn Merchant has described as a symbolic—and not just symbolic—slaying of nature (17).
Second, the emphasis on a ‘remote’ nature may well have made it more difficult for some audiences to imagine that there is a nature in their own back yard that is equally deserving of attention, a point that I will consider in more detail in next week’s post.
Third, my research with visitors in zoos and in nature parks suggests that the characteristic techniques of observation employed by the filmmakers may well generate artificial expectations amongst people when they go to see nature, or something that passes for it, with their own eyes. Alternatively, the selfsame techniques may lead people to project the forms of representation produced and circulated by the natural history documentaries, onto whatever nature is observed first hand. In the Paignton Zoo, one child felt that the zebra enclosure was deficient because it lacked ‘some tigers and lions’; in Panama’s Barro Colorado Island reserve, an adult visitor conflated Crocodylus acutus, the American crocodile, with C. niloticus, the Nile crocodile (18).
Last but not least, insofar as the documentaries form an integral part of a context of mass-mediated consumption, then they may well promote a visual ‘tourism’ that may have direct material consequences for the wild lives that are represented. On the one hand, the actual filming process can result in the deaths of many specimens. Mike Linley, a wildlife cameraman who worked on Colin Willock’s pioneering Survival series and then for the National Geographic, was found guilty in 2003 by a court in Western Australia of attempting to smuggle out hundreds of specimens—marbled geckos, squelching froglets, cockroaches, snakes and western bearded dragons. The judge reportedly suggested that he found it ‘hard to understand’ why Linley would have done ‘such an incredibly stupid thing’(19). This was presumably a reference to the fact that Linley’s filming had won prizes for conservation, and that the judge regarded his documentary work as being devoted to this cause. Even though Linley himself suggested that he collected the animals to save them from death on Australia’s outback roads, his solicitor also suggested that Linley wished to film the animals in Britain under ‘controlled conditions’(20). How many specimens have been killed or displaced over the years by the genre’s need to film animals in ‘controlled conditions’?
On the other hand, the circulation of programmes about one or another habitat may work to promote tourism in the very areas that are represented as being at risk from development. Often, what passes for ‘ecotourism’ is just as disruptive as normal tourism. Some studies have suggested that even a minimal presence of tourists in some of the habitats may disrupt the natural patterns of behaviour of certain species. For example, one researcher, Rochelle Constantine at the University of Auckland, found that dolphins in New Zealand’s north-eastern coast rested as little as 0.5 % of the time they would normally do so when there were three or more tourist boats in the vicinity, as compared to 68% of the time when in the presence of a single research boat. For their part, Markus Dyck and Richard Baydack at the University of Manitoba found that signs of vigilance among male bears increased nearly sevenfold when vehicles were around (21). While any number of counter-examples of the benefits of ecotourism might be offered by the filmmakers, the point I am making is that ‘showing what there is to save’ is not necessarily conducive to the kind of conservation practices that the genre is almost automatically associated with.
As this brief essay begins to suggest, the consequences of the blue chip nature documentaries are rather more ambiguous than the expression ‘show what there is to save’ suggests. The point is not to deny that the documentaries produce marvelous representations, or indeed representations that may well encourage many people to become interested in nature, or in a certain version of nature. Rather, the point is to suggest that a closer examination of genre quickly raises troubling questions about the extent to which the documentaries really do manage to represent environments in ways that escape the consumerism of our times, or what I described earlier as the ‘profit imperative’.
In the next post (which will be published on Tuesday, February 12), I will consider what may be a significant shift in the filmmakers’ representational strategy, one which involves making documentaries about a nature that has thus far remained largely unimagined by the genre: a hybrid nature, or a ‘recombinant ecology’ such as may be found in the ‘feral’ spaces constitutes by disused railway lines, abandoned industrial wastelands, or the car- and lorry-blown verges of motorways.
*Note: This and the following post constitute a ‘popularized’ version of a paper presented at the ‘What’s Wrong with Nature’ symposium organised by the Estonian Naturalist Society and by the Jakob von Uexküll Center at the University of Tartu, Estonia. My thanks to Riin Magnus, to Morten Tønnessen, to Riste Keskpaik and to Kaie Kotov for the invitation to speak, and for the hospitality shown during my visit. My thanks also to Kalevi Kull, the head of department, for making me aware of the outstanding work of the Department of Semiotics at Tartu University.
References
(1) Discovery Communications, http://corporate.discovery.com/brands/animalplanet.html, accessed January 18, 2008.
(2) As estimated by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. www.ncta.com/Statistic/Statistic/Top20Networks.aspx, accessed January 18, 2008.
(3) BBC Review of the Year 2006/2007. http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/review/planetearth.shtml, accessed January 18, 2008.
(4) Talbot, H.F. (1992) ‘The pencil of nature’, in M. Weaver Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography. Oxford: Clio Press, pp. 75-104.
(5) Peirce, C.S. [1931-58] Collected Papers, Volume 2, paragraph 248. Edited by C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
(6) Peirce, Collected Papers, Volume 2, paragraph 249.
(7) Deleuze, G. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: Athlone, p.16.
[8] Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 18.
(9) for more on the subject of anthropomorphism and movement, see Lindahl Elliot, N. (2001) ‘Signs of Anthropomorphism: the case of natural history television documentaries’, in Social Semiotics, 11(3), pp. 289-305. Online version available at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/csos/2001/00000011/00000003/art00004
(10) Ellis, J. (1992) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. 2nd Rev. Edition. London: Routledge.
(11) Lindahl Elliot, ‘Signs of Anthropomorphism’.
(12) In Peirce’s words, a sign ‘connected with its Object by an association of general ideas, and acting like a Rhematic Symbol, except that its intended interpretant represents the Dicent Symbol as being, in respect to what it signifies, really affected by its Object, so that the existence or law which it calls to mind must be actually connected with the indicated Object’ in Collected Papers, Volume 2, paragraph 262.
(13) See for example, Crowther, B. (1995) ‘Towards a feminist critique of television natural history programmes’, in P. Florence and D. Reynolds (eds.) Feminist Subjects, Multimedia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 127-146.
(14) Lindahl Elliot, N. (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge International Library of Sociology.
(15) see for example, Ulrich Beck’s critique of the naturalistic fallacy of nature in Beck, U. (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, translated by Amos Weisz, Cambridge: Polity.
(16) Lindahl Elliot, Mediating Nature.
(17) As Carolyn Merchant puts it her classic The Death of Nature, ‘The mechanists transformed the body of the world and its female soul, source of activity in the organic cosmos, into a mechanism of inert matter in motion, translated the world spirit into a corpuscular ether, purged individual spirits from nature, and transformed sympathies and antipathies into efficient causes. The resultant corpse was a mechanical system of dead corpuscles, set in motion by the Creator, so that each obeyed the law of inertia and moved only by external contact with another moving body’ in Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature, London: Harper San Francisco, p. 195.
[18] See Lindahl Elliot, N. (2007) ‘Of Signs and Crocodiles’ at http://cmcee.org/case_studies/bci_documents.html.
(19) ‘Fine for reptile-smuggling Briton’ in BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3313385.stm, accessed January 31, 2008.
(20) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3313385.stm, accessed January 31, 2008.
(21) Ananthaswamy, A (2004) ‘Beware the ecotourist’, New Scientist 6 March, pp. 6-7.
Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
