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79
Jan-Christopher Horak
Film History: An International Journal, Volume 18, Number 4, 2006,
pp. 459-475 (Article)
Published by Indiana University Press
DOI: 10.1353/fih.2007.0000

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/fih/summary/v018/18.4horak.html

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Film History, Volume 18, pp. 459475, 2006. Copyright John Libbey Publishing
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

Wildlife documentaries:
from classical forms to
reality TV
Wildlife documentari es: from classical forms

to reality TV

Jan-Christopher Horak
Take a good look. Were not going to see this
kind of thing much longer. It already belongs to
the past.1
Thanks for vast herds of Bison to kill and skin,
leaving their carcasses to rot in the fields.2

e are now observing a paradigm shift in the

functionality of wildlife documentary films
and television programs. For nearly eighty
years, filmed images of the natural world
conformed to the classic documentary aesthetic.
Such images were perceived to be an expansion of
human vision, a means of entering into a world that
was invisible to the human eye, an extension of the
physical body of the subject, allowing for the creation
of pleasure by bringing animals in their natural habitat
closer to humans through the act of visualization in
moving image media. And while the visualization of
animal life entailed particular narrative conventions
that also communicated overt and covert ideologies,
as was the case with all classic documentary forms,
audiences still believed in the iconic nature of that
experience. Today, the impulse to document nature
is augmented by the much higher stakes endeavor
of preserving animal life in a virtual world. Looking
over the precipice of an earth depopulated of its
wildlife, the goal of nature filmmakers becomes the
capture of animals, at least in images, so that society
and science have a record of what was lost. Every
moving image can potentially be the last living
image of a species, in the truest sense of the word.
We can compare this phenomenon in the natural world to the work of Edward S. Curtis, the photographer and documentary filmmaker who made it his
duty to document Native American cultures in North
America before they became extinct. In the first quote

above George Bird Grinnell is speaking to Edward S.

Curtis as they watch a Sun Dance ceremony of the
Blackfoot, Algonquin, and Bloods tribes in 1900.
Curtis was convinced of his mission to preserve
photo-chemically through images a dying race and
its culture. The great documentarian, Robert Flaherty, made similar statements about capturing a
nearly extinct culture, when he produced Nanook of
the North (1922). Human societies living close to
nature were indeed the first victims of modernization
and the capitalist exploitation of natural resources.
In the not so distant future, our culture will
possibly only see wild animals virtually or in special
game reserves and zoos, much as we put native
peoples in reservations. Michel Foucault has in a
posthumously published lecture defined zoological
and botanical gardens as heterotopias. In these
other spaces, whether real or virtual, as in wildlife
films, wildlife has been collected, ordered, and systematized to create a space that is other, another
real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.3 Outside these heterotopias, other wildlife may
be wiped out, probably without a Thanksgiving
Prayer, as composed by William Burroughs.
Through a remorseless government policy, American bison were lead to the very brink of extinction in
the late nineteenth century. Killing the buffalo was
Jan-Christopher Horak is Acting Director of the
Moving Image Archives Studies Program at UCLA. He
is Founding Editor of The Moving Image (University of
Minnesota Press), and has published numerous books
and over 200 essays and reviews in English, German,
French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish,
and Hebrew publications.
Correspondence to jchrishorak@aol.com

FILM HISTORY: Volume 18, Number 4, 2006 p. 459

460

Jan-Christopher Horak
part of a campaign of genocide against Native Americans. Almost immediately the nascent moving image
suggested that the remaining species be saved by
placing them in zoos. A Lubin Film Company catalogue comments on Buffaloes Born in the Zoo Gardens (1907): Here is all that remains of the once
numerous buffalo of North America, the species being almost extinct.4
As a casual subject of moving images, animals
have been present ever since Edweard Muybridge
photographed his animal locomotion series, yet
within classical documentary forms, animals have
seemingly remained ghettoized in the scientific and
educational sphere, only intermittently the subject of
mainstream theatrical experience. The filmed adventures of famous explorers, big game hunters, or
scientists (or pseudo-scientists), like Jacques
Cousteau represented exceptions, even if they became box office hits, like the German wildlife film,
Heia Safari (1928) by Martin Rikli, which out performed Fritz Langs Spies in some markets.5 With the
introduction of television and cable, with its insatiable
demand for content, wildlife documentaries have
become ever more popular and ever more numerous. Countless animal film festivals are in operation
these days, giving animal lovers, ecology freaks, and
the movie-going public an opportunity to commune
with nature, whether the Festival International du Film
Animalier in Albert, France, the Jackson Hole Wildlife
Film Festival in Wyoming, the Japan Wildlife Festival
in Tokyo or the European Nature Film Festival Valvert
in Brussels, Belgium. The production of animal films
for television has expanded geometrically with the
establishment of a number of cable channels specializing in such fare, notably Animal Planet, the National Geographic Channel, and The Discovery
Channel. These networks broadcast animal documentaries almost 24 hours a day. There can be no
doubt that these programs are popular, given the fact
that National Geographic Channel has expanded into
dozens of new markets since its founding seven
years ago.6 In the winter of 2006, the French documentary La marche de lempereur (The March of the
Penguins, 2005, Luc Jacquet), which took anthropomorphism to new heights, earned over $80 million in
the domestic American market, making it the second
highest grossing documentary of all time.
In crass contrast to the insatiable fascination
that viewers bring to the experience of viewing wildlife
films, the rate at which animals are becoming extinct
is accelerating, victim of a civilization that places little

value on natural habitats. The faster humanity ruins

the natural environment through deforestation and
the establishment of urban centers in previously untouched areas, the more rapidly certain species expire. According to the ongoing surveys of the
International Union for Conservation of Natural Resources, the so-called Red Lists, more than 16,119
species are threatened with extinction, including
1003 kinds of mammals, i.e. 20 per cent. Also endangered are 31 per cent of all amphibians, 12 per cent
of all bird species, four percent of all reptiles, and four
percent of all fish.7 In the United States 236 animal
species have already become extinct. Many indigenous fish species are no longer present in European
and American waters, many bird and fish species are
suffering declining populations, due to insecticides
and other ecological influences. Particularly at risk
are our closest relatives in the animal world, the
primates: of 296 primate species, 114 are critically
endangered.8
One can therefore legitimately ask whether the
growing obsession to document visually the animal
world isnt at least partially a desperate act to save
wildlife for a virtual world? Certainly an appeal to
viewers to participate actively in preserving the natural environment is a narrative element in many modern wildlife documentaries, but these are usually
depoliticized, calling for individual action, rather than
social struggle. As Derek Bous notes, there is little
evidence to support the notion that wildlife films have
contributed to saving nature.9 Meanwhile, the urgency with which the end of nature is present in the
master narratives of many recent wildlife documentaries, indicates that the worst fears of humanity are
no longer unthinkable and may even become a reality. Animal film producers are seemingly preparing
the public for the day when all wildlife will merely be
seen in zoos, wildlife reserves, aquaria or virtually as
moving images. The fact that so many wildlife programs on television focus on zoos and wild life reserves underscores this assumption.
It is noteworthy that while Edward S. Curtis was
documenting Native Americans, a first generation of
filmmakers was attempting not only to document the
lives of animals, but was also particularly fascinated
by their death. One of the most famous and controversial films of early cinema is Electrocuting an Elephant, produced by the Edison Manufacturing
Company in January 1903. The viewer watches the
elephant Topsy being executed: electric plates are
attached to its feet and then the current is repeatedly

FILM HISTORY: Volume 18, Number 4, 2006 p. 460

Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV

461
Fig. 1. Paul J.
Raineys African
Hunt (1912).
[Richard
Koszarski
Collection.]

turned on, until finally the animal falls over and dies.
However, before the elephant dies, it dances in
pain as smoke rises from the burning flesh on its
giant feet. Such horrific scenes were hardly a rare
occurrence in early cinema, since their sensationalism drew audiences in droves. Ten years earlier, the
Edison filmmakers W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise
had shot a series of films about the extermination of
rats: In Rat Killing (1894), a fox terrier is let loose in a
rats nest, the camera capturing a gruesome carnage
as the terrier does its work.10
The perverted visual pleasure in seeing living
things being slaughtered is apparent throughout the
history of cinema and seems to have increased significantly in the late twentieth century.11 While animals
in nature spend much of their lives resting or in static
poses, moving images portray them in ceaseless
activity. This emphasis on violent thrills is endemic to
wildlife documentaries, at least those produced under commercial imperatives, because such images
are perceived to hold an audiences attention. According to Bous:
Anyone who spends time outdoors has probably realized that most real experiences of the
natural world, away from cities and develop-

ment, tend to be experiences of serenity and

quietude. Yet stillness and silence have almost
no place in wildlife film, because stillness
and silence are incompatible with the social
and economic functions of film and television.12
It is also characteristic of nature documentaries that despite their intention to reproduce the real
iconically, they are never strictly documents of animal
activity, but are artificial constructs which are largely
dependent on classical documentary film techniques. Indeed, many wildlife films emphasize in their
publicity how much time, energy and money was
spent in production. Narrators state flatly that filmmakers have waited patiently in the jungle for years
in order to capture an animal on film. Directors,
however, spend much more time in the studio and in
the editing room than on location, since many species can only be filmed in studio terrariums (a least
until the advent of fiber optic cameras), for instance
when filming ants in their underground colonies. The
constant use of telephoto lenses to create close-ups
of animals that are far from the camera, and the use
of slow and fast motion, as well as other optical tricks,
affords the audience views of animals they would not

FILM HISTORY: Volume 18, Number 4, 2006 p. 461

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Jan-Christopher Horak
see in such detail in nature, but also helps to create
an artificial emotional relationship to animals. Just
as important is the work of the film editor, since
animals seldom follow directions, while repeating a
scene in nature is also impossible. As a result,
nature filmmakers produce at very high shooting
ratios, then construct specific events through editing,
utilizing images which may indeed have no spatial
and temporal relationship to each other and may
involve dozens of animals, rather than the one example ostensibly being depicted. Indeed, the unity of
space and time is only established artificially through
cutting, much as is the case in classical documentaries.13 It matters little whether the film in question is a
scientific documentary or a nature film that emphasizes entertainment values. What kinds of relationships do they construct between the animals and
audience? Animals in documentaries are constantly
subject to misuse.
Obviously, a scientific film constructs a different set of audience expectations than many entertainment-oriented wildlife documentaries. However,
some animal film commentators have concluded
that wildlife films should not be considered documentaries at all, while others, including Greg Mitman,
note that seeing animals on film cannot be equated
with knowledge of animals in nature, despite the
ideology in classical documentary that equates seeing with knowing.14 Like most classic documentaries,
wildlife documentaries rely on narrative to construct
meaning from disparate shots of nature, and to allow
for viewer identification. In point of fact, wildlife films
conform to most of the tenets of classical documentary as we now understand them: the creative manipulation of real images carrying with them highly
charged ideological texts. As Cynthia Chris notes,
animal documentaries and television are always informed by ideology: The wildlife genre in particular,
and the extra-media discourses that inform it, are
sites of both purposeful ideological work and unconscious elaboration of beliefs so normalized as common sense about nature, animals, race, gender,
sexuality, economic and political formations .15
Only in recent years, as a result of reality shows
have cinema verit techniques crept into the formal
and technical arsenal of wildlife filmmakers, yet
these, too, transport ideology within narratives.
My goal here is to survey wildlife documentaries that have been screened in theatrical and commercial television contexts, while outlining the
transformation of their master narratives in recent

reality television programming from documentation

to rescue. And while I briefly discuss theatrically
released avant-garde films, I have consciously excluded from my discussion scientific and academic
films about wildlife, since one of my lines of inquiry
concerns the kind of anthropomorphism that has
become ever more present in commercially produced wildlife images. Finally, Im attempting to locate the transition from classic documentary forms
to modern cinema verit techniques, as manifested
in much reality tv programming, given its focus on
animals in captivity.

The beginnings
Even in the earliest actualits at the end of the nineteenth century, animals were subjects of interest.
Oskar Messter, the pioneering German film producer, lists four films with animal subject matter in his
catalogue of 1898: Auf dem Hhnerhof (On the
Chicken Farm), Junge Lwen im Zoologischen
Garten (Young Lions at the Zoo in Berlin), Die zahmen
Affen mit ihrem Wrter (Tame Monkeys with their
Trainer), and Der dressierte indische Elephant (A
Trained Indian Elephant).16 As indicated by its title,
the first film was shot on a chicken farm, and, like
numerous other titles in this category from the United
States and France, was probably conceived as a way
of presenting urban audiences with scenes of farm
life. Edison, as well as Siegmund Lubin and American
Biograph, also shot films on an ostrich farm (Ostrich
Farm at Pasadena, 1901), since at the time there was
an attempt to create a market for ostrich meat.17
Selig, meanwhile produced a series of approximately
sixty films in the Chicago stockyards, which visualized the industrialized process of animal slaughter
and meat packaging (e.g. Koshering Cattle, 1900).
The other three Messter titles mentioned
above were shot in a zoo (probably the Berlin Zoo).
As in the case of other actualits, the goal was not so
much the scientific observation of animal behavior as
the creation of interesting views, especially for audiences far from urban zoological gardens. As Kerstin
Stutterheim notes, filming in zoos would become a
tradition.18 Some of the most well-known animal
documentarians in Weimarer Germany and the Third
Reich were either former zookeepers or zoologists,
including Lola Kreuzberg, Wolfram Junghans and
Ulrich K.T. Schulz, all of whom then raised animals
or established film zoos, in order to produce their
documentaries more efficiently. Filmed zoos had
become a global phenomenon by the turn of the

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Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV

century. The Lumire Brothers shot Lion, London Zoo
(1895), Biograph produced Pelicans at the Zoo
(1897) and Elephants at the Zoo (1898), while Path
Frers (Au jardin zoologique, 1904) and Gaumont
(Zoo at London, 1906) distributed their own zoo
pictures. The catalogue description for Edisons
Scenes at the Zoo (1904), probably a dupe of the
Path film, indicates the character of these early
films: After a procession of elephants, wild beasts
are shown in their cages. A zookeeper teases a lion
with a stick.19 Filming animals in a zoo was, of
course, much easier and more convenient than
chasing them in the wilds with a camera, especially
since telephoto lenses had not yet been invented. As
Stutterheim notes, the filmmakers actually believed
that animals would behave in a zoo the same way
that they would in the wild, a notion that is now
considered scientifically untenable.22 The Monkeys
Feast (Biograph, 1896), for example, pictures two
monkeys eating bananas, but the fact that they are
tame and living in a zoo is left unsaid. The producer
William Selig established a film zoo and jungle in
Lincoln Park, Los Angeles, in 1909, almost at the
same time that the American film industry began to
move the center of its operations from the New
York-New Jersey area to southern California. Seligs
wildlife films were extremely popular both domestically and internationally, whether outright fakes, like
Hunting Big Game in Africa (1909), or imbedded in
fictional narratives, e.g. Pansy: The Story of a Bear
(1912), Capturing Circus Animals in the African Wilds
(1913).21
Perhaps, of more importance than the actual
existence of zoo films, is the fact that the scopophilic
relationship between humans and animals in a zoo
is visually reproduced in such films. In most zoos,
animals remain at a distance, framed by their cages,
just as the viewfinder of the camera places animals
on display for visual inspection. As John Berger
reminds us, The zoo to which people go to meet
animals, to observe them, to see them, is in fact, a
monument to the impossibility of such encounters.22
Berger is referring to the fact that as a result of
modernity the schism between man and nature has
grown to such an extent that our attempts to experience animals in zoos are doomed to failure. While
humans in previous centuries lived with animals,
imbuing them with both real and symbolic significance, humans have now been completely separated from the animal world. They have become mere
objects of scopic desire.

One of the oddest zoo films was undoubtedly

Lyman H. Howes Wild Animals Impression of Music
(1909), which was shot at the Washington Zoo in
September 1909. Howes cameraman filmed the reactions of zoo animals listening to various sounds,
which Howe captured and played back in the program with his own sound system.23 A mixture of
science and vaudeville, the approach was also common to actualits of circus and vaudeville animals,
who appeared repeatedly in early films as an attraction. Lubin, for example, distributed Carlisles Trained
Dogs (1904) as well as Cake Walking Horses, Feeding the Rhinoceros, and Burlesque Cock Fight. The
last three films were shot during a visit of the Forepaugh-Sells Circus to Philadelphia in April 1902. As
early as 1894, W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise
photographed Professor Harry Weltons trained animals in Edisons Black Maria Studio in Orange, NJ:
The Wrestling Dog and Boxing Cats. The latter is a
thirty-second film showing Welton manipulating two
cats with boxing gloves on their front paws in such a
way that they are seemingly fighting one another
while standing on their hind legs. Violent spectator
sports, such as cock fights, also proved to be extremely popular in the cinemas earliest years, possibly because such fights were banned by many
municipalities. Edisons crew had filmed at least two
different cock fights in 1894, shooting the roosters in
front of black velvet and then a white canvas, in order
to make them more visible to the camera.24
Another film topic that became saleable internationally, after audiences tired of the initial actualits, were films that depicted the hunting of wild
animals. As in the case of cock fights or elephant
executions, such films offered bloodthirsty pleasures
to those audiences seeking them out. Hunting films
also offered ready-made narratives, since the ups
and downs of stalking, finding, and killing animals
was inherently dramatic. Path Frres distributed a
whole series of such hunting films which they sold
well beyond the borders of France, including Une
chasse a lours blanc (Hunting the White Bear, 1903),
Hunting the Hippopotamus (1909), and Hunting Sea
Lions in Tasmania (1910). However, as Mitman has
pointed out, hunting films often had a conservationist
aspect to them. For example, the production of
Roosevelt in Africa (1910), which documented Teddy
Roosevelts year-long hunt netting over 40,000
specimens for the taxidermists knife, was financed
by the Smithsonian; like other hunting films, it was
supported by naturalists.25 Such hunting films,

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463

464

Jan-Christopher Horak

Fig. 2. The cover

of Martin
Johnsons
Camera Trails in
Africa (New York:
Century, 1924).

whether shot in Africa, South America, Asia, or on a

Hollywood back lot, connect to a long tradition of
safari films, as can be seen from the extreme popularity of Paul Raineys African Hunt (1912) as well as
the Osa and Martin Johnson films in the 1920s and
1930s, including Trailing African Wild Animals (1923)
and Congorilla (1932).26 Simba: The King of the
Beasts (1928) shows the couple tracking a lion for a
whole year in East Africa. Naturalists, however, decried the crass commercialism and outright fakery of
the Johnson films: For them, the preservation of
wildlife on film served as a lasting record for future
generations of a natural heritage that was being
erased by modernizing forces of civilization.27
Showing evidence of a more scientific character was a German film, produced by Oskar Messter
in 1900, Der Film der fallenden Katze (Film of a Falling
Cat), in conjunction with Prof. Dr. Spiess of the Berlin
Urania. Demonstrating a cats ability to always land
on its feet, the experiment repeated a similar film
made by Jules-Etienne Marey in 1884.28 Charles
Urban (London) also produced a series of short
actualits, which, based on their titles, reveal a scientific impulse: Circulation of Protoplasm in Waterweed (1905) and Circulation of Blood in a Frogs Foot
(1907). Both probably consisted of shots taken with
a microscope, which would have provided a view not
visible to the human eye and therefore could poten-

tially be of interest to nickelodeon audiences. Urban

had distributed a series of fifteen scenes under the
title The Busy Bee as early as 1903, which visualized
every phase of bee keeping, including the gathering
of a bee swarm, the construction of a beehive, and
the search for flowers.29 Bees remained a favorite
subject for educationals, particularly in Germany.
After World War I, the Germans in fact became
leaders in the production of scientific wildlife documentaries, thanks to the founding of the UFAs Kulturfilm-abteilung (Documentary Unit) in 1918.30 In
the beginning, the unit only had enough funds to
shoot small animals in a studio. By 1921, the UFA
was producing as many as twenty wildlife shorts a
year, including Raupenstudien (Caterpillar Studies),
Seidenspinner (Silk Spinners), Der Rapsglanzkfer
(Rapeseed Beetles), Der Kohlweissling (Cabbage
Butterfly), Unser Hausstorch (Our Stork on the Roof),
Der Mehlkfer (Flour Beetle), Der Zoologische Garten
in Mnchen (Zoological Garden in Munich). A similar
series was produced in the United Kingdom, Secrets of Nature (192233, British Instructional Films)
by Percy Smith, Mary Field and Bruce Woolfe.31 As
the partial list above demonstrates, the animal stars
were for the most part common insects that could be
filmed in a studio terrarium, and which would have
been well-known to German audiences. Stutterheim
notes: Until the middle of the 1920s, animal documentaries were primarily concerned with native animals, known to local audiences, but with the help of
modern film techniques their lives were shown in a
way that would have been invisible to the casual
wanderer in the woods.32 In 1923 the Kulturfilmmakers purchased a telephoto lens, allowing them
to capture on film wild animals in natural habitats.33
One of the UFAs most successful films in
America was Mungo, der Schlangentter (1927, Ulrich K.T. Schulz), which was released by Paramount
under the title, Killing the Killer. Shot in a terrarium,
the film shows a mongoose killing a cobra. Many of
the shots were taken in slow motion, in order to better
visualize the mongooses ability to jump out of
harms way. Despite the ferocious look of the cobra,
the film ends with the mongoose burrowing its sharp
claws and teeth in the back of the snake. The film was
so popular that it not only remained in distribution for
decades, but a fragment was also cut into Paramounts feature film, The Letter (1929, Jean de
Limur), starring Jeanne Eagels.34
The UFA also broke new ground in the use of
microscope cinematography. As early as 1920, Fritz

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Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV

Khler produced Der Wasserfloh (The Water Bug).
After the UFA constructed a studio, complete with
microscopes, other films followed, including Mikrokosmos im Reiche der Natur (Microcosm in the Kingdom of Nature, 1924, Ulrich K.T. Schulz).35
Meanwhile, in other parts of Europe microscopic
films found an appreciative audience among the
emerging film avant-garde. Dr. Comandon studied a
water flea for ten years in France, producing a short
film, Dytiscus (1925); the film was shown at the
London Film Society, one of the earliest cine-clubs.36
In Holland, J.C. Mol began production of scientific
films with microscopic views in 1924, which were
regularly shown in the programs of the Dutch Filmliga, and in 1928 were screened in the famous Paris
avant-garde cinema, Studio 28. Avantgardists recognized the aesthetic proximity between the abstract,
absolute film and Mols work, including Zwerftochten door een waterdruppel (Life in a Drop of Water,
1928), Uit het rijk der kristallen (In the Kingdom of
Crystals, 1928) and Strijd in het insectenleven (Battles
in Insect Life, 1930). They pointed out that the microscope camera view revealed scenes hidden from the
naked eye, constructing a uniquely cinematic image,
while displaying the abstract beauty of nature.37 Similarly to Mols films, the scientific underwater films of
Jean Painlev were critically received as little masterpieces of avant-garde cinema, including La Pieuvre
(The Octopus, 1928), Les Oursins (Sea Urchins,
1929) and Microscopie bord dun bateau de pche
(Microscope Aboard a Fishing Boat, 1936). Georges
Sadoul wrote about Painlevs films: This former
doctor understood how to raise the photography of
microbes and the tiniest forms of life to a real art;
With the help of a film camera and micro lenses he
discovered a foreign, romantic world, which resembles the abstract paintings of Kandinsky.38
While German nature films from the Weimar
Republic depicted the struggle for survival in Darwinian terms, wildlife documentaries made during the
Third Reich transported ideological and racist content, which directly contradicted the scientific theses
formulated by Charles Darwin. Especially in films like
Der Ameisenstaat (The Ant Colony, 1935) and Der
Bienenstaat (The Bee Colony, 1937), analogies were
drawn between the social efficiency of these animal
species and the German fascist state. Stutterheim
notes in reference to the latter film:
The commentary to this film is formulated in
military jargon, the language of discipline and

order clearly underscores the societal analogy. The little state of the bees is organized in
a manner in which the National Socialists
would like to have theirs organized every
member takes his appointed role, without worrying about the meaning or purpose of his
actions. Each role is fulfilled, even if certain
death is the predictable outcome.39
In fact, while the production of wildlife films
flourished in Germany thanks to its ideological function as metaphor for nationalist and fascist messages, the genre languished in 1930s America, the
victim of repeated scandals, as those swirling around
Osa and Martin Johnson.40
Like the Nazi films, many wildlife documentaries made by European and American filmmakers in
the first half of the twentieth century were primarily
concerned with visualizing animals that would have
been familiar to local audiences from their immediate
surroundings and could also function as expressions
of nationalist sentiment. This was also true for the
Swedish filmmaker, Arne Sucksdorff, who, in a series
of films produced between 1941 and 1957, created
intimate portraits of the animals of his native country.
For En sommarsaga (A Summer Story, 1941)
Sucksdorff photographed wildlife around a small
lake during one Swedish summer. The Swedish film
historian Gsta Werner comments on the film: The
individual images are not only beautiful, they are
romantic and glowing in their dreamy beauty. At the
same time, they are surrounded by a dense aura of

FILM HISTORY: Volume 18, Number 4, 2006 p. 465

465

Fig. 3. Det Stora

ventyret (The
Great Adventure,
1953), directed
by Arne
Sucksdorff.

466

Fig. 4. Disney
True Life
Adventure
photographer,
Stuart Jewel.

Jan-Christopher Horak

fantasy.41 In The Hunter and the Forrest (1945), on

the other hand, Sucksdorff is concerned with the
brutality and ruthlessness of nature in a winter landscape, a theme to which the filmmaker will be repeatedly drawn. In his magnum opus, the feature length
Det Stora ventyret (The Great Adventure, 1953), the
director depicts a whole year in the life of a Swedish
forest by taking the subjective view of two farm children who have rescued an otter. Letting the audience
experience the various seasons through a child-like
subjectivity, the film tends to a certain degree of
anthropomorphism, which is particularly prominent
in the musical accompaniment. The composer, Nils
Gustav Orn, in fact received exact instructions, practically from image to image, as to what kind of music
should be heard in conjunction with the many animal
characters in the film.42 The scenes with actors notwithstanding, Sucksdorff was still primarily focused
on the visualization of various forest animals, which
he spent two years documenting in the woods. Positioned somewhere between the lyrical romanticism
of his first film and the horrific eat or be eaten view
of his later nature shorts, The Great Adventure became a worldwide box office hit.43
American wildlife documentarians, too, stayed
close to home. Shortly after the end of World War II,
Walt Disney inaugurated a hugely successful series
of True Life Adventures, in which nature in the
continental United States is depicted. The series got
off the ground with On Seal Island (1948) and Beaver
Valley (1950), both shorts directed by James Algar,
who would carve out a niche for himself as Disneys

nature specialist, producing many of the subsequent

films in the series. There followed the feature-length
documentaries The Living Desert (1953), The Vanishing Prairie (1954) and White Wilderness (1958), which
established a definite Disney style in this genre and
virtually monopolized the nature film market in 1950s
America.44 Other nature films copying the Disney
style were the Irwin Allen productions, The Sea
Around Us (1952) and The Animal World (1956). The
last named feature attempted a history of animal life
on the planet, beginning with the dinosaurs, created
by special effects director Ray Harryhausen, and
moving through to the present, often utilizing stock
footage to save production costs.
The Living Desert begins with endless Technicolor images of an arid and dry desert landscape in
Death Valley, consisting of sand, stone, and burning
sun. But as narrator Winston Hibler tells the audience
a few moments later, nature creates life even in the
desert in ways that are often gruesome, sometimes
beautiful. What follows is a series of little docu-dramas, involving turtles mating, a tarantula family, wild
boars, and various snake species, etc. The film is
edited in a classical Hollywood style, creating unities
of space and time where none exist, and constructing
synthetic stories out of heterogeneous filmed material, stories which position the subject within the
drama and allow the audience to believe that the
events occurred in nature as filmed. While Disneys
publicity may have touted the fact that Disney cameramen spent months in the wilds to capture a particular animal or mating ritual on film, the truth
probably lay elsewhere. They were certainly
equipped with the best technical apparatus and had
unlimited amounts of raw film at their disposal, allowing them to produce at fantastic shooting ratios, but
in fact the direction occurred primarily in the editing
suite. The music on the soundtrack is also matched
perfectly to the images, supporting in an often humorous fashion the human interest angle of the
stories, which function primarily through the device
of anthropomorphism. For example, in one sequence we hear and view a square dance while two
scorpions complete a mating ritual, or we hear a
tarantella in a scene with tarantulas. Such cute
musical accompaniments were demanded by Walt
Disney personally, e.g. in reference to the turtle sequence he wrote to the producer: They look like
knights in armor, old knights in battle. Give the audience a music cue, a tongue-in-cheek fanfare.45
Meanwhile, the narrator drones on over each

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Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV

and every sequence, explaining the obvious to the
viewer, continually emphasizing that this is all part
and parcel of the great arc of life and death in nature.
The natural world is presented as autarkical, following only its own laws. However, at the same time, the
film glosses over the more gruesome aspects of
nature, creating a harmonious vision of nature
through editing, music, and commentary. Viewers
are encouraged to root for one species over another,
while identifying with the cuter animals through an
immature anthropomorphism, and thus downplaying
the mysteries in nature.46 This leads to what Steve
Baker has called the Disneyfication of all animal life
in our culture. Animals, reduced to mere images, are
made stereotypical and stupid: The image of the
animal seems to operate here as a kind of visual
shorthand, but a shorthand gone wrong, a shorthand
whose meanings intermittently veer from or turn
treacherously back upon that of the fuller form of the
text.47 Of course, Disney was not the first to engage
in this kind of anthropomorphism for commercial
ends. Bous complains that once sound was available the British wildlife filmmaker Cherry Kearton had
committed unpardonable sins by having his animals
talk.48
The Disney style influenced virtually every wildlife film made for theatrical release or television in the
next twenty years. The influence of human civilization
on the natural environment was not yet an agenda
item, even though interstate highways (invisible in the
film) already criss-crossed Death Valley at the time
of The Living Deserts production. All this would
change at the end of the 1960s with the arrival of an
ecological movement in the political landscape.

Wildlife documentaries after 1970

With the establishment of an ecological consciousness in the last thirty years, modern societies have
become acutely aware of the endangered environment, leading not only to an expansion in the number
of wildlife documentaries being produced, but also
to the setting of wholly different agendas in their
narratives. While in classical animal documentaries
nature was depicted as an autonomous entity, unaffected by the hand of humanity, with scientists and
explorers only appearing as observers who enter into
an alien sphere, modern films have created a very
different paradigm. Natures harmony has suddenly
been thrown out of whack. Nature is now being
destroyed by humans, while environmental factors in
turn seemingly threaten man and civilization. More

and more often wildlife documentaries make the

point that animals are disappearing from the natural
environment as quickly as man expands into former
wildlife habitats. Ever more wildlife documentaries
focus on the establishment and maintenance of animal parks and reservations, in which animals can
roam freely and are subject to visual display. As in
the case of classical zoos, but on a larger scale, such
parks allow humans to experience animals visually
and in a mediated fashion; the observer views animals from a distance and often through binoculars,
just as the telephoto lens of a film or video camera
captures animals in its viewfinder. The reestablishment of a balance between untouched regions of the
globe, in which nature can take its course without
hindrance, and the agricultural and industrial development of land hardly seems possible anymore.
Seminal in this respect was Walon Greens
The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), which disseminated
the sensationalist thesis that humanity was not only
on the brink of destroying the environment, but also
itself. Only the world of insects would survive, because they have been genetically programmed to
survive the worst nuclear and environmental holocausts. The film is narrated by a supposed scientist,
Dr. Hellstrom, played by an actor who articulates the
films thesis in no uncertain terms: Insects are present at the beginning and at the end of the evolutionary cycle, because they are thoughtless followers of
their own instincts, and because for 200 million years
they have continually improved the perfect military
machine. While human civilization has formed and
deformed its environment, insects simply adapt to
every new situation and are thus able to survive every
kind of human or natural catastrophe. And they are
big eaters. Insects are thus direct competitors to
human beings, since the planet can only produce so
much food. In conjunction with these apocalyptic
theses which helped the film become a huge box
office success, The Hellstrom Chronicle presents
extremely graphic and impressive images: Hundreds of red and black ants on a battlefield fighting
for the corpse of a bee; millions of locusts in Africa
who within minutes turn a lush green landscape into
a desert; billions of army ants forming a fifteen mile
long column, overrunning and eating every living
thing in their path; two queen bees fighting to the
death for control of a hive; mayflies dancing their
nightly mating ritual, laying eggs, and expiring. Utilizing extreme close-ups and highly saturated colors,
the film displays a world both beautiful and terrifying.

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Jan-Christopher Horak
Again and again the film points to the fact that humanity is the only species not living in tune with the
natural environment, while insects are super-attuned, often changing colors or behaviors within a
few generations, in order to better fit in. The insect
world lives only to feed, to reproduce, and to die,
while human beings always behave egoistically. Civilization still has the upper hand, but not for much
longer, the film claims.
In the same year that The Hellstrom Chronicle
opened, Blue Water, White Death (1971), directed by
Peter Gimbel, appeared as the first of many films to
deal with the great white sharks. As the title indicated,
the film depicted an animal who represented both a
mystery and a mythical threat to man. The great white
shark is stylized as a symbol of the unbridled violence
in nature, just as Steven Spielberg would in his fictional feature film, Jaws (1975). However, much of
the film visualizes the hunt of several divers for the
great white shark, while only the last reels of the film
actually show audiences underwater footage of the
shark. As is the case with many modern documentaries, the line between real and fictional scenes is
purposely blurred, in order to stoke the fears of the
audience. The film offers a vision of nature that is both
unpredictable and uncontrollable, while attempting
in its final scenes to prove the opposite.
The demonization of sharks is, of course, an
attempt to control nature through anthropomorphism
at a time when it seems that civilization has lost all
control over the environment. A regressive film like
Animals Are Beautiful People (1974) by Jamie Uys
must also be seen against this background, since it
pretends in the best Disney fashion to introduce the
Kalahari Desert and its wildlife to movie audiences.
As in The Living Desert, the filmmaker succumbs to
the temptation to anthropomorphize every creature
depicted, whether through narration, musical accompaniment or editing. Tchaikovskys Nutcracker
serves as a background for gazelles jumping and
Baboons dancing, while the bobbing heads of ostriches visualize Bachs Toccata, Smetanas
Vltava provides acoustics for crocodiles swimming
in the river, and Wagners Meistersnger gives a
cloudburst mythic stature. The triviality of these musical analogies is on par with the banality of showing
almost every animal in the desert behaving just like
a human being, whether a porcupine that has lost its
mommy or a mother duck that manages to theatrically distract a hyena from her own brood by playing
a wounded animal. According to Bous: the

portrayal in wildlife films of the animals family and

social relations presents a kind of vast Rorschach
pattern in which culturally preferred notions of masculinity, femininity, romantic love, monogamous marriage, responsible parenting, communal spirit can
all be read.49
Furthermore, the fact that much wildlife feeds
on other animals to survive would have been too
disturbing for the films intended young audiences.
Apart from the death of numerous little pelican babies that get stranded and are unable to fly away
when a desert lake dries out, death has been banned
from the film. The natural law of eat or be eaten
remains invisible, since most of the animals depicted
are vegetarians. Clearly, every animal is portrayed as
a cute little toy, while parents need not fret about their
offspring seeing violent images of nature. Significantly, the native Bushmen are shown in an equally
patronizing fashion as funny little human beings without a lot of clothes. The animal kingdom is thus
camouflaged as a harmonious paradise, and as the
narrator notes: In paradise, even the worms are
cute.
At the other end of the spectrum we find a film
like The Animals Film (1981), produced in the United
Kingdom and directed by Myriam Alaux and Victor
Schonfeld, which depicts the planet as one huge,
man-made slaughter house and/or experimental
laboratory in which animals are tortured to death. As
narrator Julie Christie notes, capitalism breeds many
more animals than are actually needed, in order to
maximize profits. Animals suffer unbearable pain,
e.g. when the beaks of chicks are removed, so that
they can be squeezed together in mass cages without pecking each other to death. Even though twenty
grams of vegetable protein is necessary to produce
one gram of animal protein, Americans, in particular,
insist on excessive portions of meat, a dietary concept that they would like to propagate even in vegetarian cultures, such as India, thanks to the global
domination of McDonalds. The latter corporation
makes an appearance in a scene in which the filmmakers document the production of a hamburger
commercial. Meanwhile, millions of animals are sacrificed for scientific research, even though the filmmakers maintain that many fewer animals would be
necessary to achieve the same results, e.g. monkeys
are exposed to deadly doses of radiation, as are
donkeys and pigs, even though the effects of X-rays
have long been known and scientifically studied.
Other monkeys are exposed to deadly doses of LSD.

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Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV

469
Fig. 5. Animals
Are Beautiful
People (1974),
directed by Jamie
Uys.

Japanese footage demonstrates medical experiments in which a dogs head and legs are attached
to the back of another dog. Finally, the film points to
the fact that Americans abandon twenty million
house pets a year, who then of necessity land in the
gas chambers of the humane societies for lack of
families willing to adopt them. Furthermore, 250 million animals are hunted and killed by either hobby
hunters or professionals working for the fur industry.
Never has so much blood flowed in an animal documentary.
Much more consumable for television audiences was the twelve-part television documentary
series produced by Keenan Smart and David Attenborough for the British Broadcasting Company, The
Trials of Life: A Natural History of Behavior (1990),
which depicted nature in complete harmony in terms
of its structural logic. The film theorizes a planetary
system in which every force is matched by an equally
powerful counterforce, while human beings are depicted as a relatively insignificant element in this
system. The production of the series took more than
two and a half years, during which Attenborough
supposedly traveled 250,000 kilometers. Wildlife on
the planet is minutely dissected, from the tiniest fleas
to the largest primates, as the titles of the individual
thirty-minute episodes clearly indicates: 1. Arriving,

2. Growing Up, 3. Finding Food, 4. Hunting and

Escaping, 5. Finding the Way, 6. Homemaking, 7.
Living Together, 8. Fighting, 9. Friends and Rivals,
10. Talking to Strangers, 11. Courting, 12. Continuing
the Line. The narrative structure of each part remains
the same, because the filmmakers are most interested in visualizing the myriad solutions for survival
that evolution has brought forth, the almost countless
forms of life on the planet. In Hunting and Escaping
Attenborough first points to birds that eat the eggs of
other birds, who are in turn hunted and swallowed
whole in mid-flight by even larger sea birds. Next, the
viewer experiences sea lions going to shore to bear
their young, and in the process are attacked by killer
whales, who literally throw themselves onto the
shore, in order to capture their prey and consume
them. In the ocean the orcas play with sea lions like
cats with a mouse. However, larger or stronger species dont always prevail. For example, a particular
species of frog simulates the sounds of cats in order
not to become the victim of a possum, while salamanders and skunks secrete poisonous odours to
similar effect. Next Attenborough introduces animals
that hunt in groups, whether army ants or chimpanzees, who surround and capture smaller but faster
monkeys. After the society of chimpanzees manages
to capture their prey, all of them, including the fe-

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Jan-Christopher Horak
males and children who have not taken part in the
hunt, let out a victory hoot. Attenborough concludes:
blood lust and team work is also a sign of human
activity. And because these primates are so close to
humans on the evolutionary chain, the scene has an
uncanny feel to it.
On the other hand, signs of human civilization
are completely invisible in the series, apart from
Attenborough as on camera host. Typical, not only
for this particular BBC series, but for wildlife documentaries in general over the past twenty years, the
narrator is no longer heard from off camera, but s/he
relays her/his impressions to the audience by directly
addressing them on camera. Influenced by cinema
verit, filmmakers foreground their own activity, in
order to also convey a sense of immediacy and
reality, even when much of the surrounding footage
is still captured by traditional documentary means. In
other words, documenting nature is communicated
to be a subjective experience, whereby the narrator
directly relates all the difficulties involved in the production, rather than leaving that task to the publicity
department. During the chimpanzee hunt, for example, the camera focuses both on the monkeys giving
chase, as well as on the narrator Attenborough huffing and puffing, in order to keep up with the hunting
party. Filming is thus integrated into the adventure.
The narrator establishes a personal relationship with
the animals, as well as with the viewers by maintaining eye contact with the camera. The narrators subjectivity becomes that of the audience.
This technique is especially effective in films
where the narrator is directly appealing to the audience to support the work of naturalists and filmmakers, e.g. in Orangutans: Grasping the Last Branch
(1991), made by David Root and Evelyn Gallardo.
Shot in the jungles of Borneo, in areas where the last
known Orangutans still live in the wild, the film communicates a horrifying message to the viewers: Due
to massive clearings of the primal forest, the numbers of orangutans has shrunk to a few thousand.
Soon they will only survive in zoos. The narrator, Betty
Thomas, begins her story of the orangutans with her
own involvement: In 1985 she journeyed to Indonesia
to see these animals in the jungle, before they are
finally exterminated. Since, unlike gorillas or chimpanzees, these primates do not live in social organizations, but rather as solitary individuals, they are
particularly susceptible to attack. As the film documents, the orangutan babies are captured and sold
to zoos in Eastern Europe or to individuals as pets,

with as many as half of them dying in transport. The

mothers are usually killed, in order to capture the
babies. Business is good. An orangutan baby
bought from natives in Indonesia for $400, usually
can be sold in the international black market for
$40,000. The film closes with a plea to create political
pressure to stop the deforestation of the orangutans
natural habitat.
The same filmmakers could be seen in September 2003 on the cable network Animal Planet in
the program Jungle Orphans, in which they rescue
orangutan mothers and their babies. The filmmakers
track down orangutans that are being held captive
as pets and either purchase them from the owners
or free them from their captivity by slightly less than
legal means. The animals are then cared for, and
eventually brought to a wildlife refuge in the Indonesian jungle, where they live in close proximity to other
freed orangutans. It is one of many reality TV programs on Animal Planet, which feature animals being
rescued from intolerable conditions. It is in fact a
strategy of commercial television to create rescue
scenarios that feed into a collective imaginary, while
suturing over the perceived trauma of the inevitable
extinction of many animal species.

Animal TV
In 2006, American television offers animal documentary programming almost 24 hours a day, seven days
a week. Founded in 1996, the cable television network Animal Planet consists exclusively of animal
shows, which in terms of their narrative construction
and style not only mimic regular television fare, but
even parody it.50 Animal Planet broadcasts news and
magazine programs (The Most Extreme on the
Planet), variety programs (Pet Star), crime dramas
(Animal Cops, Houston), reality shows (Jeff Corwin Experience), comedies (The Planets Funniest
Animals), hospital soap operas (Emergency Vets)
and family programs (Thats My Baby). In the Star
Search styled Pet Star, we see trained animals do
their tricks for the camera, with contestants competing, as if on American Idol, while viewers vote for
which animal makes it to the next round. In The
Funniest Animals, amateur videographers send
tapes of their favorite pet tricks. A young moderator
introduces the videos with a few jokes, and then
provides a running commentary over a laugh track.
Twenty per cent of air time consists of commercials
for products that speak to animal lovers, including
cat and dog food from Purina, or Meow-Mix. Insur-

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Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV

ance commercials for Mutual of Omaha recall its

long-standing sponsorship for one of the most famous animal programs of the 1960s and 1970s,
Wild Kingdom. Wendys hamburgers are for people, but the new Subaru fits more than a few dogs,
who need animal vitamins and the many varieties of
flea collars. National Geographic Television offers a
similar program of animal documentaries, sandwiched between their traditional geography programming: Crittercam, Dogs With Jobs, Be the
Creature, Living Wild, as well as many animal
documentaries in their series Classic Geographic.
Apart from the fact that such programming is
primarily created for entertainment while pretending
to serve broadly educational purposes, what many
of these animal series have in common is an almost
obsessive involvement with animal rescue, during
which pets are saved and given new masters or wild
animals are placed in zoos and/or wildlife refuges. At
the local level this narrative is played out in Animal
Precinct (200105), a weekly reality series which
followed the exploits of the animal police in New York
City. The statistics which introduce each episode are
impressive: New York, 8 Million human beings, 5
Million pets, exactly ten paid animal control officers.
In other words, the animal cops are totally understaffed and completely over-worked, but they do
their best to rescue animals in the big city. Each
episode is an amalgamation of little melodramas in
a reality TV format: a kitten locked into a store; an

emaciated dog sleeping in its own feces in a box; a

Chihuahua with a whole catalogue of ailments,
whose owners cant afford a veterinarian. It is reality
television in the streets and housing projects of New
York. Viewers are warned at the shows beginning
that they might witness horrific scenes of animal
cruelty. However, such scenes are diffused by the
constant insertion of advertising, addressed to animal lovers, so that each story must have a happy end
to keep consumers pliant. The dogs recover at the
animal hospital, while the perpetrators are arrested
and other animals find new homes and adoptive
parents. Rescue arrives every week. In Animal
Cops: Houston (200305), also broadcast on Animal Planet, the action is moved from the ghettos and
boroughs of New York to a completely different
American landscape, namely Texas along the Gulf of
Mexico, while Miami Animal Police (2004) visualizes the Florida adventures of animal control officers.
While the flat dusty suburbs and subtropical environments present viewers with a different set of problems, the stories are often similar and invariably end
in the rescue of some cute little animal.
Other Animal Planet programs that play out the
trope of animal rescue are Adoption Tales, which
focuses on finding new owners for stray dogs and an
occasional sea otter, Amazing Animals Ultimate
Rescue Special, Animal Miracles (2001), and
Emergency Vets (1998).51 In every case, animals
are rescued on a one-by-one basis (that is, in the

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471

Fig. 6. Dolphins:
The Wild Side, a
1999 television
documentary
directed by Paul
Atkins.

472

Fig. 7. Disneys
The Vanishing
Prairie (1954),
directed by
James Algar.

Jan-Christopher Horak

private sphere with private means), thus giving viewers a sense that society is making progress in this
sphere and deflecting any discussion of collective
political action to save the environment.
In Awesome Pawsome (2000) the rescue is
narrativized in slightly different form: four white tiger
kittens are raised as house cats, so that as adults
they will play with their keepers in a zoo. The viewer
experiences their first birthday. Despite now being full
sized tigers, they behave like overgrown kittens, instead of like wild animals from the jungle. Again and
again a narrator off camera emphasizes that if these
cats create sympathy in viewers and zoo visitors,
then maybe tigers in the wild will not be doomed to
extinction. In this non sequitur it is not clear just how
this is to occur, or what the connection is between
tame tigers in zoos and wild tigers in nature, possibly because the camera remains exclusively focused on the cuddly tiger children. The rescue of
tigers from extinction, this program, too, tells us, is a
matter of setting up zoos and wildlife parks. In
Crocodile Hunter Diaries (2002) Animal Planet visited the large private zoo of the late Steve Irwin, who
became a celebrity through his show and his insurance advertising. Both Steves wife and new child
were also actors in the show. Indeed, Iwin made
newspaper and television broadcast headlines when
on camera he held his baby in one hand, while
feeding a crocodile with the other, thus exposing the
baby to an unnecessarily dangerous situation.52 But
mostly this show dealt with house-keeping matters
in Irwins Australian zoo, like training camels not to
spit at guests or cleaning a forty-foot python, while in
his other show, Crocodile Hunter, he went out in

the wilds to get up close and personal with all manner

of wildlife.
Similarly, The Jeff Corwin Experience
(2001) resembles classic wildlife hunting documentaries in terms of narrative, while the cinma verit
reality-TV format allows the narrator to address the
audience directly and foreground the mechanics of
the hunt. Shooting seemingly off the cuff, the scientist searches for exotic animals in the jungle, in
the desert, or in other dangerous wildlife settings,
and captures his experience on digital video. Corwin
demonstrates and talks directly to the camera/audience, oftentimes holding animals to point out physical characteristics or behavior quirks. Wearing khaki
shorts and boots, Corwin in one episode hunts down
the most poisonous snakes in Mexico, ostensibly to
gather venom for scientific research. At the beginning of the same program, Corwin films an old man
who has lost a finger, toes, and a leg to a snake bite.
The focus on the dangers of hunting/filming is of
course a staple of the genre, going back to the silent
period. Furthermore, poisonous snakes are apparently particularly attractive to viewers, since another
Animal Planet show, Venom ER (2004), centers on
a snake bite unit in Arizona, while National Geographic features Natures Most Dangerous Killers.
As a general manager for Animal Planet noted, There
has to be something incredibly exciting every few
minutes.53
In contrast to traditional wildlife documentaries, then, in which the explorers or animal wranglers
remain invisible, the hosts of these shows directly
address the audience, animals in hand. The result is
the illusion of a personal relationship between audience and animal through the medium of the narrator.
Television consumption thus not only directly establishes an intimate relationship between animal, audience, and on camera narrator, but also creates the
illusion that these animals have now been rescued at
least digitally.
One may then justifiably ask, to what degree
do wildlife documentaries on television or on movie
screens contribute to a change in consciousness
about the natural environment, whether they appeal
to the political conscience of the audience or not? As
demonstrated in this essay, it appears that the great
majority of broadcast and cable television programming dealing with animals and wildlife is produced
exclusively for entertainment purposes, and not to
motivate the electorate to change the US government position on, for example, the Kyoto Agree-

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Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV

ments. In other words, animal documentaries, particularly on television, have no other ambition than to
allow for the consumption of images (of animals),
interspersed with advertising for products bought by
animal lovers.
Anthropomorphizing animals is a simple strategy to further identification with the idea of animals,
which, however, does nothing more than create a
renewed desire for the continued consumption of
animal images. So the Disneyfication of animal images through extreme anthropomorphy continues
unabated and in fact has been naturalized through
new digital technologies. While Cherry Kearton, Walt
Disney, and Jamie Uys were merely adding voices to
wildlife, digital manipulation now allows filmmakers
to animate animals, so they not only are heard, but
also seen talking. For example, a commercial released during the 2005 Baseball World Series shows
various nocturnal animals, including owls, rats, and
a snake (all filmed with an infra-red lens), singing the
pop tune All Night Long, in support of a new caffeine-laced soft drink, Mountain Dew MDX, and ending with the tag line: Be Nocturnal. Without the
soundtrack, these images could be mistaken for a
nature documentary on nocturnal wildlife, but are we
to actually read them as iconic or simply as cute
images, drained of any reference to the real world?
In fact, real animals are here semantically reduced to
animal toys for consumption rather than observation.
While much animal programming discusses
the near extinction of many wildlife species, solutions
to end the slaughter of wildlife are limited to exclusively private forms of action: single animals are
rescued and then placed in zoos or wildlife refuges.
At best, a program or film may make an appeal to
support the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace or
other philanthropic organization dedicated to animals. What is rigorously excluded from such discussions, however, is any debate about the political
methodologies and strategies necessary to turn the

tide of government policy or change the parameters

of acceptable behavior in society, whether in the
United States or Third World countries, where economic development always takes precedence over
concerns about the environment. The catastrophic
situation of wildlife on the planet remains hidden or
is repressed, because the reality is too horrible to
contemplate in an entertainment media.
Thus, the popularity of wildlife documentaries
has been increasing steadily over the last one hundred years, and seems to be expanding on television
in inverse proportion to the number of animals surviving on the planet. The seemingly insatiable demand for such programming originates in several
competing impulses. Originally such commercially
released wildlife documentaries, especially those
that explored unknown or inaccessible environments, satisfied the curiosity of audiences and the
desire for exotic images. Today, the migration of
nearly extinct animal species into the digital world
can be seen as a virtual rescue from the uncomfortable reality of the natural world. The trope of animal
rescue is obsessively played out in the sphere of the
private, allowing audiences to feel as if progress is
actually being made, while the more difficult larger
questions go unanswered. In the digital world of
animals, viewers glimpse the exotic and the familiar,
the dangerous and the uncanny, the sweet and the
cute, while anthropomorphism allows viewers to consume both the cute and the threatening without discomfort. While the parameters between scientific
films and programs with an entertainment character
were relatively visible in classic documentaries, the
boundary has all but disappeared on Animal Planet,
National Geographic and other programming dedicated to infotainment. As it was at the dawn of
cinema over 100 years ago, fiction and reality,
authenticity and fantasy now exist on virtually the
same plane, i.e. animals will continue to live in
images.

Notes
1.

Quoted on the webpage: http://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/Curtis/

2.

William Burroughs, A Thanksgiving Prayer, in:

Dead City Radio (CD, 1986).

3.

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopia, first published as Des Espace Autres, in:
Architecture/Mouvement/Continuit, October 1984,
translated
by
Jay
Miskowiec,
http://fou-

cault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.hetero
Topia.en.html
4.

Quoted in the AFI Catalogue of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, Film Beginnings
18931910 (London/Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow
Press, 1995), 129.

5.

Email to the author from Prof. Dr. Kerstin Stutterheim,

25 May 2004.

FILM HISTORY: Volume 18, Number 4, 2006 p. 473

473

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Jan-Christopher Horak
6.

Telephone interview with Laureen Ong, President,

National Geographic Channel, a network co-owned
by National Geographic and Newscorp. 12 May
2004.

7.

The Redlist webpage includes numerous charts and

tables, which are updated yearly to reflect the newest
population numbers. The numbers given here are
for
2006:
http://www.redlist.org/info/tables/table1.html

8.

See
Redlist
table
for
Primates:
http://www.redlist.org/info/tables/table4a

9.

Derek Bous, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), xiv.

10.

See Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures,

18901900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 123. Path
Frres produced a similarly described film, Chiens
et rats (1904). See AFI Catalogue: 18931910, 276.

11.

Gail Davies, Networks of Nature: Stories of Natural

History Film-making from the BBC (unpublished
PhD. thesis, University College London, 1998),
quoted in Jonathan Burt: Animals in Film (London:
Reaktion Press, 2002), 48; Bous in fact equates the
killing of animals on film with the obligatory cum-shot
in hardcore film pornography, kill scenes being a
wildlife films chief guarantor of authenticity. See
Bous, Wildlife Films, 43.

12.

Derek Bous, Wildlife Films, 4.

13.

On this point, see Burt, Animals in Film, 92ff.

14.

See Bous, Wildlife Films, 22ff; Greg Mitman: Reel

Nature: Americas Romance with Wildlife on Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),
204.

15.

Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xix.

16.

See Special-Catalog No. 32. Reprint edited by Martin

Loiperdinger in KINTOP Schriften 3 (1995), 69,
7879.

17.

18.

Ostriches were hunted nearly to extinction in the

eighteenth century, due to the high demand for
feathers in womens wear. By the mid nineteenth
century, ostriches had been domesticated, with
farms supplying the market for feathers, as well as
for meat.
Kerstin Stutterheim, Der Tier- und Naturfilm im Kino
der Weimarer Republik, in Klaus Kreimeier, ed.,
Geschichte und sthetik des dokumentarischen
Films in Deutschland 1895 bis 1945, Bd. 2: Weimarer
Republik (Berlin: Reclam Verlag, 2005). Thanks to
Prof. Dr. Stutterheim, who made a pre-publication
galley available to me.

19.

Quoted in the AFI Catalogue 18931910, 949.

20.

Stutterheim, Der Tier- und Naturfilm.

21.

Seligs international appeal is documented by the

fact that most of these animal films only survive in

foreign film archives, such as the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, which has a substantial
collection.
22.

Why Look at Animals? in John Berger, About Looking (London: Pantheon Books, 1980), 19.

23.

Charles Musser with Carol Nelson, High-class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era
of Traveling Exhibition, 18801920 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 205.

24.

Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 94, 114.

25.

Mitman, Reel Nature, 58; see also Chris, Watching

Wildlife, 12.

26.

For further information on Rainey and the Johnsons,

see Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West, and the
Wilderness (New York: Knopf, 1979), 406, 464471;
See also Pascal James Imperato and Eleanor M.
Imperato, They Married Adventure: The Wandering
Lives of Martin and Osa Johnson (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

27.

Mitman, Reel Nature, 27. See also Bous, Wildlife

Films, 4953.

28.

A fragment of the film survives in an Ufa anniversary

film, Als man anfing zu filmen (When the filming
started, 1934). Thanks to Martin Loiperdinger, who
emailed me this information, 28 October 2003. On
Mareys film, see Burt, 110.

29.

Urban was himself a bee keeper. See Burt, Animals

in Film, 123ff.

30.

Kerstin Stutterheim, Natur- und Tierfilme, in:

Geschichte und sthetik des dokumentarischen
Films in Deutschland 1895 bis 1945, Bd. 3: Drittes
Reich, hrsg. von Peter Zimmermann und Kay Hoffmann (Berlin: Reclam Verlag, 2005).

31.

See Bous, Wildlife Films, 59.

32.

Stutterheim, Der Tier- und Naturfilm. Translated

from German by the author.

33.

Michael Tteberg, Wie werde ich stark. Die Kulturfilm-Abteilung, in: Hans-Michel Bock and Michael
Tteberg (eds): Das Ufa-Buch (Frankfurt am Main:
Zweitausendeins, 1992), 65.

34.

Thanks to David Stenn, who is restoring The Letter

for Warner Brothers for this information. Phone interview with the author, 22 May 2004. In fact, the film
includes nothing more than a few seconds of the
documentary, showing the moment when the Mongoose strikes and buries his jaws in the back of the
Cobra.

35.

Stutterheim, Der Tier- und Naturfilm.

36.

London Film Society Program Notes, 17 January

1926, The Film Society Programs, 19251939 reprint
(New York: Arno Press, 1972), 141.

37.

Henrik Scholte: Nederlansche Filmkunst (Rotterdam,

FILM HISTORY: Volume 18, Number 4, 2006 p. 474

Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV

1933), 43ff; S. Hot., J.C. Mol. Pionier der Nederlandse cinegrafie, in: Film Forum (Amsterdam),
Mrz 1953; J.C. Mol van Mulitfilm overleden, in:
Haarlems Dagblad, 12. Oktober, 1954. See also
Jan-Christopher Horak, Discovering Pure Cinema:
Avant-garde Film in the 1920s, in: Afterimage, 8:1/2
(Summer 1980).
38.

Georges Sadoul, Geschichte der Filmkunst (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982),
286. German translation of LHistoire du Cinema
(Paris: Editions Flammarion, 1955).

39.

Stutterheim, Natur- und Tierfilme. Translated from

German by the author.

40.

Chris, Watching Wildlife, 2527.

41.

Gsta Werner, Die Geschichte des schwedischen

Films (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum,
1988), 145.

42.

Ann Ronell, Notes on The Great Adventure, Film

Music, 15, 1 (September/October 1955), 3.

43.

Werner, Die Geschichte des schwedischen Films,

151f.

44.

Mitman, Reel Nature, 110. See also Mitman for a

description of Disneys marketing strategy of the
True-Life nature films. Both Mitman and Bous (Wildlife Films, 64) note that Sea Islands success helped
Disney secure important bank loans in 1949.

45.

Richard Schickel, The Disney Version. The Life,

Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York:
Touchstone Books, 1985), 288. As Bous (Wildlife

Films, 67) notes, contemporary critics complained

about Disneys musical comedy.
46.

See also Bous, Wildlife Films, 167168: Among

wildlife films, Disneys, of course, are legendary for
their similar projections of human family systems and
values onto nature.

47.

Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity

and Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2001), 175.

48.

Bous, Wildlife Films, 171.

49.

Bous, Wildlife Films, 157. Similarly, Mitman, Reel

Nature, 140144, discusses televisions Zoo Parade
series in the 1950s in connection with proscriptive
behavior for American fathers in TV sitcoms like Ozzie
and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Father knows
Best.

50.

For an excellent study of the institutional frameworks

surrounding wildlife films on television, including the
founding of the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet,
and National Geographic Channel, see Chris, Watching Wildlife, 79121.

51.

See Animal Planet programming at http://animal.discovery.com/schedu le/a2z.jsp

52.

Irwin Defends Croc Feeding Stunt, The Age, 3

January 2004. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/03/1072908951073.html?oneclick=t
rue

53.

Quoted in Chris, Watching Wildlife, 203.

Abstract: Wildlife documentaries: from classical forms to reality TV,

by Jan-Christopher Horak
For nearly eighty years, filmed images of the natural world conformed to the classic documentary aesthetic:
Such images were perceived to be an expansion of human vision, a means of entering into a world that
was invisible to the human eye. Today, the impulse to document nature is augmented by the much higher
stakes endeavor of preserving animal life in a virtual world. Looking over the precipice of an earth
depopulated of its wildlife, the goal of nature filmmakers becomes the capture of animals, at least in images,
so that society and science have a record of what was lost.

FILM HISTORY: Volume 18, Number 4, 2006 p. 475

475