Regarding Life

Animals and the Documentary Moving Image

Belinda Smaill

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438462486, 9781438462493
• eBook ISBN: 9781438462509
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc., the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is becoming markedly more complex and increasingly more involved with pivotal ecological debates over species loss, food production, and science. While attending to some of the most discussed documentaries of the last two decades, including Grizzly Man; Food, Inc.; Sweetgrass; Our Daily Bread; and Darwin's Nightmare, the book also draws on lesser-known film examples, and is one of the first to bring film studies understandings to new media such as YouTube. The result is a study that melds film studies and animal studies to explore how documentary films render both humans and animals, and to what political ends.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Released in 2005, March of the Penguins (La Marche de l’empereur), a French film about the cyclical mating habits of Antarctica’s emperor penguins, became the second highest grossing documentary in cinema history. Grizzly Man was also released in 2005 and it became a breakthrough film of a different kind—it brought the work of German auteur, Werner Herzog, to a wide audience and became one of the most discussed and critically acclaimed documentaries of the decade. While employing very different approaches, the two films share a fascination with nature as an arena for storytelling with animals playing a central role. Herzog began his next documentary, the Oscar winning Encounters at the End of the World (2007) set in Antarctica, with the proclamation that he was not going to “come up with another film about penguins.” The reference to the French documentary was clear to most—penguins had become draw cards of the big (and small) screen.

Although penguins have achieved particular star status, the allure of documentaries focused on animals has extended well beyond this single species. March of the Penguins and Grizzly Man represent two high-profile examples that punctuate a much broader terrain of television and film. Referring to wildlife and nature onscreen, Gregg Mitman makes the case that there is a contemporary “green wave” of film and television, enabled by the popular penchant for “eco-chic” (214), underpinned by not only commercial, but also ethical and environmental concerns. He cites that of the “$631 million in gross revenues earned by 275 documentaries released between 2002 and 2006, $163.1 came from eight wildlife documentaries” (216). Another term that has gained momentum in the popular press is “eco-doc” or “eco-documentary,” which describes a broader body of films tasked with critiquing corporate dominance and investigating and advocating on issues concerning the decimation of the environment and its natural resources.1 Bringing a critical perspective to this body of films, Helen Hughes identifies its iconography and principle characters, posing the environmental documentary as a distinct subgenre (Green Documentary, 7–9). These developments in the documentary representation of environment and animals dovetail with the increased popularity and circulation of feature-length documentaries more broadly over the past two decades.

The period Mitman describes, 2002–2006, was a particularly important phase for the genre, labeled by scholars and the popular press as a “boom” or “renaissance” in documentary.2 A cluster of documentaries achieved unprecedented box office success over this time; however, beyond a small number of French and British films this group was overwhelmingly American.3 While commentators are still, albeit with less regularity, proclaiming a new era for documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and March of the Penguins have maintained their position as the most commercially successful documentaries produced in decades. Nevertheless, nature documentaries, especially those produced under the Disneynature brand, are following closely behind.4 Further, while other examples of “animal-led” documentaries such as Blackfish (2013) and Darwin’s Nightmare (2004) may not rank in lists of high-grossing films, they have found sizable audiences on the festival circuit and DVD distribution.

While the documentary boom and the subsequent decade have proven to be a significant time for animals onscreen, to focus on the growing (commercial) prestige and high circulation won by a small group of feature-length documentaries is to recognize only a fraction of a wider phenomenon. This book demarcates the contours of a rapidly expanding documentary terrain in which the representation of animals is becoming markedly more complex and multilayered. There is a new tide of ecologically inspired film work that expands beyond blue chip nature documentaries and beyond the auteurist vision of Werner Herzog. It includes a range of wildlife natural history film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction and developments in new media. Observing this breadth, I am less concerned with proposing a new subgenre than exploring a certain momentum that exists across a range of nonfiction modes and approaches.

The energy of this impulse to represent the nonhuman5 is also genre-specific—documentary is increasingly the preeminent format for rendering nature, especially animals, onscreen. Moreover, one of the most striking features of these films is the growing emphasis on paradigmatic debates about anthropogenic knowledge or use of animal life, whether it concerns food, agriculture, science, exploration, or species loss. The growing awareness in the twenty-first century of the human impact on the nonhuman world has influenced this contemporary archive of documentary. Films and filmmakers have become centrally concerned with the intersection between the institutions and practices of modernity and the life and death of nonhuman animals.

This book elucidates how the momentum of film and media I have described works to structure knowledge of animals and the relations between humans and animals in the contemporary epoch. It begins with the question of how particular films instantiate humans and animals and to what ends—do they center the human in familiar ways, supporting anthropocentrism, or do they offer examples of animal difference, suggesting avenues for the recognition of the distinctiveness of animal being in ways that question the privileging of human identity? Cinema functions across multiple and intertwined registers, engaging both the cerebral/political and the intimate/corporeal. I propose an approach to this question of anthropocentrism that perceives cinema as an aesthetic practice, a social artifact that trades in ideology and cultural norms and a medium that inheres with sensuous meaning, sustaining a sensory and epistemological relation with the viewer. By the end of this book it should be clear how nonfiction examples appeal to the horizon of experience of viewers in ways that reference the history and conventions of documentary film, the desire and expectation it evokes. An inquiry that explores how animals are recognized or disavowed, how nonhuman life is regarded, observed, or acknowledged and, crucially, how it is respected in its otherness, is pivotal to an understanding of the contemporary role of the moving image.

Rather than simply examining how animals onscreen are visualized, this approach coalesces around the proposition that the systems of knowledge that produce debates about life and its uses subjectify humans and animals. This notion dovetails with the idea that both humans and animals are positioned and made sense of by the apparatus of cinema, and other media, and the conditions of reception. Fully grasping this concept relies on identifying the human subject-centric or anthropomorphic conventions of film and documentary in particular. For Adrian Ivakhiv, cinema is anthropomorphic “because film shows us human or human-like subjects, beings we understand to be thrown into a world of circumstance and possibility like us” (9). Building on Ivakhiv’s formulation, I argue that the task for cinema and media studies, in thinking beyond the human, is to consider anew how the properties and economies of documentary center the human, relying on its form and subjectivity for identification and social purchase. Only through interrogating this powerful anthropocentric impulse is it possible to theorize the fissures in this representational order and ascertain documentary cinema’s capacity to show and express all life, not only the human.

Film Studies and the Nonhuman

Growing constellations of scholarship are wrestling with how to understand the nexus of film or media and the nonhuman environment. One of the most influential studies has been Sean Cubitt’s EcoMedia (2005), a book that follows multiple theoretical pathways in order to explore the problem of technology and mediation in relation to ecological thought and environmental politics. Cubitt identifies developments across media forms media since the 1980s. This work poses new interdisciplinary conceptual tools with which to consider the mutually constitutive relation between nature, technology, and the human, largely through examining popular cultural texts, including blue chip natural history film.6 I take inspiration from Cubitt’s interdisciplinarity, but argue for the value of considering a more specific field of production and circulation, elucidating the documentary as a discreet form with particular histories (intellectual and industrial) and modes of audience address. There are specific pleasures and expectations associated with nonfiction that warrant a close examination of the documentary form in its different guises.

John Blewitt’s Media, Ecology and Conservation: Using the Media to Protect the World’s Wildlife and Ecosystems (2010) addresses the media as an even broader phenomena, attending to photography, advertising, the Internet, and television. Within this he focuses on a number of important documentary examples, again including blue chip wildlife films. Blewitt is chiefly concerned with the potential for media to operate pedagogically, examining media literacy and the role of communication in the conservation movement across international sites. With its concentration on politics and animals, Blewitt shares with my study a sense of responsibility to our “nonhuman others” (11). He elaborates on this responsibility by determining how conservation movements gain purchase in the public sphere. Helen Hughes offers the first book-length study of environmental documentary, bringing much needed attention to the genre. Like Blewitt, she takes up the problem of communication, couching her work in debates about environmental education and psychology. The concise body of documentary she discusses is assessed in relation to questions of rhetoric and argumentation, rather than the narrative and aesthetic work of genre.

This book is not only more concerned with animals, but also more attuned to documentary aesthetics than the work of Cubitt, Blewitt, or Hughes. It draws on film studies and documentary studies with a view to considering the properties, circulation, and history of the form, while also extending the boundaries of the genre as they are normatively understood. Scott MacDonald has been one scholar to consistently address the aesthetics of the moving image in shaping our perception of place and nonhuman nature. His book, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place (2001), might be seen as an early example of eco-film criticism, one that takes historical American avant-garde cinema as its object. His recent American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (2013) continues this focus, exploring pioneering approaches to ethnographic-inspired documentaries and many of the filmmakers he discusses turn their cameras to the nonhuman as much as the human world. Moreover, MacDonald explicitly advocates for an eco-cinema, an aesthetic and industrial alternative to the mainstream that might offer an “Edenic respite” (“Toward,” 109) from the contemporary media apparatus. I take a cue from MacDonald in observing the importance of a film historical perspective, one that values traditions and conventions of filmmaking and what can be gained by understanding the changing form and circulation of images. Unlike MacDonald’s work, however, this study encompasses both the alternative and the mainstream, making a case for the importance of popular culture in the field of documentary culture.

I use the conditional phrasing “documentary moving image” not to isolate a single (visual) dimension, but to indicate that many of the examples I discuss fall outside documentary proper. They either predate the invention of the term in the 1920s or sit as much in categories of new media, television, or avant-garde and essay film. The following chapters explore an array of forms of nonfiction, both valued and devalued, in order to find productive sites where the canon can be put in dialogue with popular commercial cinema (or consumer-generated content). The most relevant of these “devalued” forms, for my purposes, is wildlife film and television, particularly in its “Disneyfied” expression. In a 1998 essay Derek Bousé makes a case that while the film industry and television schedules nominate “documentary” as the preferred category for wildlife film, in accounts of film history and in film and media studies more widely this mode, beyond some notable exceptions, has been excluded because it occupies an ambiguous location (“Are Wildlife Films,” 116). Bousé discusses this ambiguity in terms of the assumed disparities between wildlife film and that of documentary, most notably the perceived lack of social relevance of “nature films” and their associations with entertainment, artifice, and fictionalized storytelling (“Are Wildlife Films,” 118–132). Since the time Bousé made these observations a number of scholars have critically engaged with wildlife and natural history film and television, instituting it as a subfield of film and media studies and distinguishing the diverse makeup of this category.7 Despite this attention, the form continues to sit outside the field of documentary studies, attracting little interest from documentary scholars.

Jan-Christopher Horak’s article, “Wildlife Documentaries: From Classical Forms to Reality TV,” crucially intervenes in the erasure of wildlife film from the canon of documentary film studies. Horak brings the weight of archival research to his survey, bringing early cinema, television documentary, and reality television under the umbrella of documentary. In charting the transformation of the narratives that structure wildlife film, Horak identifies and critiques strategies of anthropomorphism that are a feature of increasingly entertainment-oriented wildlife film and media. In a different way, Cynthia Chris’s influential book, Watching Wildlife (2006), maps the development of wildlife as a distinct moving image form, firmly establishing the significance of wildlife film and television as “a prism through which we can examine investments in dominant ideologies of humanity and animality, nature and culture, sex, and race” (xiv). This book builds both on Chris’s assertion and the attention to documentary traditions in Horak’s work while taking in a broader notion of the animal in documentary, including and moving beyond animals in the wild.

While I explore examples from an array of moving image contexts, all confront the intricacies and challenges posed by anthropocentrism and its manifestation in cultural artifacts. Chapters thus contribute to a groundswell of critical approaches in animal studies, a body of interdisciplinary scholarship that has been referred to as the “animal turn.”8 The most influential pockets of this work emerge from Continental philosophy and are occupied with the being of animal life, the distinctions between humans and animals and the status of animals in (human) society and culture. Anat Pick has been a decisive figure in bringing a consideration of critical animal studies to bear on film studies analysis. In her groundbreaking work, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (2011),9 Pick formulates an account that is founded in extensionism (extending moral considerations to animals), and the recognition of the corporeality and vulnerability of animal existence (Creaturely, 2–3). Creaturely Poetics establishes a mode of scholarship that this study is indebted to—it brings the question of the animal to cinema by foregrounding poetics and acknowledging the central role of aesthetics and form in unmasking the anthropocentrism of cinema. This poetics is one that recognizes the significance of embodiment and vulnerable animal materiality. For Pick, “notions of embodiment—the material, the anonymous, and the elemental—provide a powerful antidote to anthropocentrism” (Creaturely, 6). Moreover, she examines key documentary examples, such as the work of Fredric Wiseman and Werner Herzog, testifying to the importance of the genre in this context. This book orients the emphasis on aesthetic considerations established in Creaturely Poetics toward the sociohistorical positioning of animals while mapping a contemporary body of film work.

Finally, I wish to address Jonathan Burt’s considerable contribution to the field. His 2002 book, Animals in Film, was the first to outline how animals might feature as a disciplinary concern in film studies and the related arena of visual culture. Elaborating on a history of moving images across a range of genres, Burt brings a cogent analysis, rich with examples, to the relationship between film, animal imagery and ethics. His book is a forerunner in a field that is still young. Nevertheless, recent analysis in film and media studies has profoundly extended how we think about animals and the environment. In turn, this book argues that we must consider the specificity and importance of the documentary form, how it powerfully shapes audience expectation and produces knowledge of the (nonhuman) world. I extend this intervention with a double-edged approach, one that asks how the materiality and immediacy of the documentary moving image and histories of documentary representation that work to organize and subjectify life impinge on one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Labor, Agriculture, and Long Take Cinema: Working on the Surface of the Earth
• Chapter 3 Meat, Animals, and Paradigms of Embodiment: Documentary Identification and the Problem of Food
• Chapter 4 Arctic Futures and Extinction: Loss, the Archive, and (Wildlife) Film
• Chapter 5 Antarctica, Science, and Exploration: Encounters at the End of the World
• Chapter 6 The Nonfiction of YouTube and “Naturecams”: Posthumanism and Reflections on Agency
• Chapter 7 In Conclusion: Documentary, Science, and the Umwelt
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover