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Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics
Reel Nature : America's Romance With Wildlife on Film
Americans have had a long-standing love affair with the wilderness. As cities grew and frontiers disappeared, film emerged to feed an insatiable curiosity about wildlife. The camera promised to bring us into contact with the animal world, undetected and unarmed. Yet the camera's penetration of this world has inevitably brought human artifice and technology into the picture as well. In the first major analysis of American nature films in the twentieth century, Gregg Mitman shows how our cultural values, scientific needs, and new technologies produced the images that have shaped our contemporary view of wildlife. Like the museum and the zoo, the nature film sought to recreate the experience of unspoiled nature while appealing to a popular audience, through a blend of scientific research and commercial promotion, education and entertainment, authenticity and artifice. Travelogue-expedition films, like Teddy Roosevelt's African safari, catered to upper- and middle-class patrons who were intrigued by the exotic and entertained by the thrill of big-game hunting and collecting. The proliferation of nature movies and television shows in the 1950s, such as Disney's True-Life Adventures and Marlin Perkins's Wild Kingdom , made nature familiar and accessible to America's baby-boom generation, fostering the environmental activism of the latter part of the twentieth century. Reel Nature reveals the shifting conventions of nature films and their enormous impact on our perceptions of, and politics about, the environment. Whether crafted to elicit thrills or to educate audiences about the real-life drama of threatened wildlife, nature films then and now reveal much about the yearnings of Americans to be both close to nature and yet distinctly apart.
274 pages, Hardcover
First published December 15, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 23, 2021
Reel Nature is one of those books that feels like it sprawls out into a topic too big for its author to chew just because it's one of the few books tackling its subject. That means there is a ton of interesting stuff in here, but it raises a lot of interesting angles that IMO aren't especially well explored, and its coverage feels increasingly strained as it advances chronologically.
The biggest benefit for me was just to get the lay of the land in the early history of nature film. I didn't expect so much of the book to focus on film from so early in the century, and I was basically entirely ignorant of everything it covers. The most interesting stories were the ones that deviated most from the mold of conventional nature programming, but those were also the ones that felt the least relevant to the main themes of the book and least developed relative to their fertile possibilities. The racial exploitation films before WWII, conservation exclusion of native Africans, the role of conservation films as international propaganda in the Cold War, and most of all the dolphin thing, stand out. All of these stories feel like big, distinct topics that Mitman ends up spending more time explaining on their own merits, but still not enough time, and then neglecting to really touch on their relevance to the films themselves. The dolphin chapter is great but mentions the films involved only tangentially.
Otherwise, the book focuses on film as a nexus of conflicting ideas of nature and the unique pressures of the medium and its markets. Some of the ideas that come up here and fairly perennial and not hugely interesting to me, like the question of "authenticity" in presenting footage or the tension between scientifically accurate content and pandering. What I find more interesting is the way the particular content of both science and pandering change over time, and the iterative tension between audiences and creators in shaping those ideas. The book is full of creators who set out to use film to impose their views and values on the audience, but found themselves thwarted or constrained by the fact that the public already had its own values and expectations and only supported wildlife film that fit within those constraints.
The result was the development of the relatively narrow vocabulary of subgenres that we still have today, and it's broadly interesting to see where each of those came from and how they've evolved over time. There's a narrow set of stable niches that nature content can exist in: stuff that sells the "what if wild animals were your pets?" fantasy, the "sublime beauty of creation" genre, polemic jeremiads, and over-the-top sensationalism. It was really remarkable for me to read that there was a movie called "The Dying Plains of Africa" made in 1961, then to go and watch an equally polemic jeremiad from the BBC in 2021. So much has changed and yet the story we're telling, the story we seem to want to be told, feels like it has gotten stuck.
I think, fairly obviously, that Reel Nature would have benefited from a companion reel of clips from its subjects, so I sought out a few and watched them. One of the big takeaways for me was just how bad some of these early attempts were to watch. The Disney True Life Adventures, for instance, or at least the main one entry Mitman talks about, Nature's Half-acre, is very obviously cobbled together from random footage, has an overbearing narrator who doesn't have much to say but never stops saying it, and is full of egregiously didactic anthropomorphization. There is just so much overt disinterest in the subject, using it only as a screen for unrelated political struggles, openly in the scripts of this material. It's almost odd that the debates about authenticity seem to ignore that in favor of focusing on the narrow matters of misleading production contrivance.
Overall I'm glad Mitman stayed so focused on telling historical stories, but the epilogue, which jumps through the decades of film history since the 1980s and mentions a ton of analytic angles that never came up in the book, made me really wish he had explored those angles more. Environmental historians are well suited to doing that, far more so than environmental humanities people IMO, and while I was relieved this didn't end up having the bad flavor of some media studies stuff I've read, I think he could have done it justice. Ultimately it just demands like, a second or third or fourth book. If those have been written, though, I haven't been able to turn them up.
I was generally surprised by the lack of Attenborough content overall--Planet Earth gets one mention in the epilogue, and Mitman seems to lump it in with everything else, as if it doesn't have a meaningfully distinct perspective or impact. It's obviously just too recent to fall within the scope of the book but it would still be interesting to read a comparable chapter about it.
The biggest benefit for me was just to get the lay of the land in the early history of nature film. I didn't expect so much of the book to focus on film from so early in the century, and I was basically entirely ignorant of everything it covers. The most interesting stories were the ones that deviated most from the mold of conventional nature programming, but those were also the ones that felt the least relevant to the main themes of the book and least developed relative to their fertile possibilities. The racial exploitation films before WWII, conservation exclusion of native Africans, the role of conservation films as international propaganda in the Cold War, and most of all the dolphin thing, stand out. All of these stories feel like big, distinct topics that Mitman ends up spending more time explaining on their own merits, but still not enough time, and then neglecting to really touch on their relevance to the films themselves. The dolphin chapter is great but mentions the films involved only tangentially.
Otherwise, the book focuses on film as a nexus of conflicting ideas of nature and the unique pressures of the medium and its markets. Some of the ideas that come up here and fairly perennial and not hugely interesting to me, like the question of "authenticity" in presenting footage or the tension between scientifically accurate content and pandering. What I find more interesting is the way the particular content of both science and pandering change over time, and the iterative tension between audiences and creators in shaping those ideas. The book is full of creators who set out to use film to impose their views and values on the audience, but found themselves thwarted or constrained by the fact that the public already had its own values and expectations and only supported wildlife film that fit within those constraints.
The result was the development of the relatively narrow vocabulary of subgenres that we still have today, and it's broadly interesting to see where each of those came from and how they've evolved over time. There's a narrow set of stable niches that nature content can exist in: stuff that sells the "what if wild animals were your pets?" fantasy, the "sublime beauty of creation" genre, polemic jeremiads, and over-the-top sensationalism. It was really remarkable for me to read that there was a movie called "The Dying Plains of Africa" made in 1961, then to go and watch an equally polemic jeremiad from the BBC in 2021. So much has changed and yet the story we're telling, the story we seem to want to be told, feels like it has gotten stuck.
I think, fairly obviously, that Reel Nature would have benefited from a companion reel of clips from its subjects, so I sought out a few and watched them. One of the big takeaways for me was just how bad some of these early attempts were to watch. The Disney True Life Adventures, for instance, or at least the main one entry Mitman talks about, Nature's Half-acre, is very obviously cobbled together from random footage, has an overbearing narrator who doesn't have much to say but never stops saying it, and is full of egregiously didactic anthropomorphization. There is just so much overt disinterest in the subject, using it only as a screen for unrelated political struggles, openly in the scripts of this material. It's almost odd that the debates about authenticity seem to ignore that in favor of focusing on the narrow matters of misleading production contrivance.
Overall I'm glad Mitman stayed so focused on telling historical stories, but the epilogue, which jumps through the decades of film history since the 1980s and mentions a ton of analytic angles that never came up in the book, made me really wish he had explored those angles more. Environmental historians are well suited to doing that, far more so than environmental humanities people IMO, and while I was relieved this didn't end up having the bad flavor of some media studies stuff I've read, I think he could have done it justice. Ultimately it just demands like, a second or third or fourth book. If those have been written, though, I haven't been able to turn them up.
I was generally surprised by the lack of Attenborough content overall--Planet Earth gets one mention in the epilogue, and Mitman seems to lump it in with everything else, as if it doesn't have a meaningfully distinct perspective or impact. It's obviously just too recent to fall within the scope of the book but it would still be interesting to read a comparable chapter about it.
September 26, 2008
Right from the start, this book is delving into questions of authenticity, nature, and representation, which is good for me and my interests. Capturing animals on film is a challenge, but can we ever do it authentically? This author seems skeptical of the possibility, and I agree. I look forward to the questions that the rest of the chapters raise.
May 5, 2015
While the prose is not my favorite and a bit repetitive at times, his subject matter, his way of putting things, and his wit make this book fantastic to read. Solid arguments and just a flat out informative book. I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews