Performing authenticity: The making-of documentary in wildlife film's blue-chip renaissance
Handling Editor: Sarah Crowley
Abstract
- Making-of documentaries (MODs) for recent blue-chip wildlife films are prominently featured as trailers, bonus features on DVD releases and websites, and televised segments within wildlife broadcasts.
- Prior research shows how MODs within mainstream cinema promote certain filmmakers as auteurs and as exceptional creative professionals. Earlier wildlife film MODs demonstrated filmmakers' mastery of nature and a licence to offer scientific knowledge, as well as many staging practices employed in wildlife filmmaking; this content moved to MODs as nature grew more pristine in wildlife films' main programming.
- Recent wildlife film MODs still celebrate filmmakers' professionalism and emphasize the remoteness of film locations, filmmakers' exceptional practical skills and scientific expertise under harsh conditions, and the technologies responsible for spectacular visuals. In the MOD for Chimpanzee (2012), these features work together to portray this wildlife species as challenging to locate and film in nature, accessible only by filmmakers with the right skills and technologies.
- I argue that current blue-chip wildlife MODs are a performance of authentic, non-interventionist filmmaking. Recent MODs increase viewers' behind-the-scenes access to filming conditions but have not disclosed certain staging practices such as the use of composite animal characters.
- Despite their prominence as marketing and peripheral material, MODs remain segregated from wildlife films' main programming. They contribute to a blue-chip construction of nature as pristine and not inclusive of human beings, even though their expeditionary narratives show more complex human–nature interactions.
A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
1 INTRODUCTION
In the first decade of the 21st century, wildlife films underwent a transformation. Thanks to a confluence of market forces, enhanced visual technologies, and the advent of home flatscreen televisions and DVD players, nature was showcased on film in spectacular, ambitious programmes epitomized by the BBC Natural History Unit's Planet Earth (Louson, 2018). This blue-chip renaissance marked a pivot away from lower-budget wildlife programming featuring human presenters and a return to the prestige and scale of mid-20th-century natural history series. This programming followed the genre's conventions, showcasing a splendid, timeless and pristine nature populated by charismatic mega-fauna within dramatic storylines, while eschewing human presenters, traces of civilization or political topics (Bousé, 2000, 14–15). The BBC's Natural History Unit, an established and esteemed purveyor of televised nature programming, was joined by newcomer Disneynature, a wildlife film subsidiary of the Walt Disney corporation, in offering viewers spectacular visions of never-before-seen nature. Wildlife documentary production companies committed money and complex logistical efforts to send teams of filmmakers to remote locations worldwide, capturing compelling footage of wild animals and, in so doing, transforming what wildlife films looked and felt like. ‘British style’ natural history documentaries and ‘American style’ wildlife films, despite their historical differences in storytelling and scientific content (Bousé, 1998), converged during this period on a shared subject matter, a distinct visual language of a spectacular nature, a rhetoric of unobtrusiveness and even some of the same filmmakers and footage. They also shared the strategy of prominently showcasing their on-location behind-the-scenes material in making-of documentaries (MODs).
Wildlife film producers from this period showcased their filmmakers on location with the extensive use and positioning of MODs, which are documentary films about filmmaking. They offer audiences behind-the-scenes access to the production context within which filmmakers operate (Hight, 2005). The Planet Earth Diaries were a key early example: these 10-min featurettes showed Planet Earth's filmmakers at work in extreme locations, demonstrated the dangers to filmmakers posed by wild animals and focused on innovative camera equipment or technologies. In 2006 and 2007, Planet Earth included their Diaries segments as the final 10 min of each episode. Despite this unprecedented prominence of this behind-the-scenes footage, the programme maintained a strict demarcation between these human, expeditionary narratives of filmmakers at work and the purely ‘nature’ footage that is the stock-in-trade of the blue-chip genre.
Making-of documentaries are an under-theorized element of recent wildlife filmmaking. These MODs are distinct from the blue-chip programming of their ‘parent’ films in tone and content, telling stories about humans attempting to film nature. Wildlife films show us a spectacular nature that does not include people, while their MODs show people travelling to nature to film it. These MODs highlight the challenges of capturing never-before-seen places, organisms or behaviours on film. In this article, I analyse the wildlife film making-of documentary as a way to flesh out and complicate the ways in which wildlife films represent animal behaviour and tell stories about nature; the inclusion or exclusion of people from those stories is the result of genre-specific motivations and constraints. Paradoxically, these MODs shore up wildlife films' credibility as offering hard-wrought, expert and unmediated views of nature while concealing any human presence from their finished products, reinforcing an understanding of nature that excludes people and human activity. This contributes to current research on wildlife films by identifying the distinct role of recent blue-chip wildlife film MODs and characterizing how their components contribute to their authenticating function for those programmes' footage and claims. I aim to integrate recent blue-chip wildlife films' MODs into the ongoing scholarly treatment detailing the ways in which our experience of nature has been culturally constructed.
In what follows, I show how MODs allow filmmakers and broadcasters to authenticate their wildlife footage by making its context of production more public and transparent. I draw on discussions of MODs and of wildlife filmmaking from the disciplines of film studies, documentary theory, the history of natural history and its film traditions, and science and technology studies' explorations of nature and culture. Individually, these disciplinary approaches increase the points of access for my analysis of wildlife film MODs; collectively and interactively, they allow a holistic vision of wildlife film MODs to emerge in their sometimes-messy hybridity and better illustrate how MODs support wildlife films' contemporary portrayals of nature. Through a case study of the promotional MOD trailer for the Disneynature film Chimpanzee (2012), I argue that the unprecedented prominence of recent MODs for wildlife films involve a performance of authenticity. In contrast to the ‘claimed artificiality’ (Gouyon, 2016) of earlier wildlife MODs which revealed certain staging practices, more recent MODs conceal staging practices that might undermine their films' authenticity; specifically, the use of composite animal characters. The MODs of the blue-chip renaissance instead emphasize the remoteness of film locations, filmmakers' exceptional skills under harsh conditions and the technologies responsible for spectacular visuals to offer a portrait of non-interventionist filmmaking. As a result, viewers are shown wildlife species as remote and challenging to locate in nature, accessible only through filmmakers' skills, patience and use of advanced technology.
2 A HISTORY OF MODs
Making-of documentaries have accompanied feature films throughout the history of filmmaking, with the first identified MOD (Making Motion Pictures: A Day in the Vitagraph Studio) produced in 1908 (Arthur, 2004, 39). Hight has argued that the making-of documentary ‘has become a key means of conveying large amounts of information about a film's production in easily accessible ways for home audiences’ (2005, 5). The information-conveying role of MODs has been contrasted with their use as promotional material, where many bonus features are similar to the electronic press kits (EPKs) released to the media alongside a feature film's release (Hight, 2005, 7). As a result, MODs are relatively understudied despite their ubiquity; perhaps because ‘at first glance, their purpose as a marketing tool is transparent’ (Sullivan, 2008, 69).
A confluence of factors has contributed to the current prevalence of MODs as peripheral material for film releases in general. The advent of the digital video disc (DVD) format for home viewership meant there was unprecedented storage room for supplementary materials compared to previous formats (Hight, 2005, 4). Following the critical and commercial success of the Criterion Collection of film releases, which accustomed viewers to ‘a range of exhaustively researched additional materials that attempt to deliberately position a film within its industrial, social, and political contexts’ (Hight, 2005, 5) including director commentary and storyboard frames, film studios amended a variety of bonus materials to film releases on DVD, particularly when packaged as the film's ‘special edition’, as they were generally more expensive than the standard release and needed to seem worth the money (Reesman, 2001).
The efforts and abilities of the creative personnel featured in the documentary are depicted as exceptional and unique. Everyone seen or mentioned by name in the featurettes is shown making seemingly critical decisions, and even the tiniest details are portrayed as significant creative choices. (Sullivan, 2008, 79)
Making-of documentary narratives promote creative professionals, especially film directors, as ‘auteurs’ based on their unique contribution to the creative direction of the film (Arthur, 2004; Brookey & Westerfelhaus, 2005, 40). Sullivan describes auteurship rhetoric in MODs for other categories of creative professionals, including actors, writers and producers: ‘the accolades exchanged by key Hollywood personnel function to define creative labour as unique and exceptional, requiring enormous commitment, expertise, and perseverance’ (2008, 77). As a result, the MOD genre overlooks the majority of film professionals, many of whom are highly skilled and specialized, yet work in increasingly precarious, freelance positions (Wasco, 2003). The neglect of less-prestigious film crew categories and the vocabulary of creative exceptionalism are both observable in the Chimpanzee making-of trailer described further on, as the named filmmakers lavish praise on each other's specific abilities while several crew and camera operators are not identified and do not appear as talking heads.
3 EARLIER NATURAL HISTORY MODs AND ‘CLAIMED ARTIFICIALITY’
Making-of documentaries from wildlife films have the same aims as those from films in general, as well as specific aims involving those films' representation of animal behaviour. Wildlife film historian Gouyon, whose research explores the ways in which natural history filmmakers have positioned themselves as both authoritative sources of footage of nature and producers of new knowledge about the living world (Gouyon, 2011a, 2011b), has more recently investigated the earliest wildlife MODs from the BBC's Natural History Unit. The BBC employed MODs as early as the 1960s to showcase their filmmaking practices and technologies to make nature visible in new ways (Gouyon, 2016). Gouyon positions wildlife film MODs as emerging during the transition between earlier amateur naturalist filmmaking and the professionalization of wildlife filmmaking around the 1960s and 1970s in Britain. The MODs of this period, including the BBC's The Making of a Natural History Film (1972), focus not on promoting realism, but on illuminating the staging practices (sometimes performed in-studio) and technical skills required to grant viewers proximate access to animals that could not be otherwise obtained, as well as to enrol filmmakers and their science consultants into a collaborative enterprise of knowledge production (Gouyon, 2016, 96). Gouyon describes this attitude as being a stance of ‘claimed artificiality’ where filmmakers ‘own up to’ their staging practices, such as the construction of enclosures. In such MODs, viewers are enlisted as ‘virtual witnesses’ (Gouyon, 2016, 85) exposed to ‘film-makers’ “property of skill,” their capacity to control nature so as to generate valuable knowledge from it’ (Gouyon, 2016, 85; see also Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). In such MODs, the construction of enclosures within a film studio was framed not as artifice, but as affording new windows into the workings of nature based on the professional expertise of natural history filmmakers.
To illustrate the emergence of ‘claimed artificiality’ within wildlife film MODs, Gouyon compares two wildlife films on migratory birds. The first is The Flight of the Snow Geese (1972), directed by Des Bartlett and Jen Bartlett and produced by Colin Willock for the Survival series, which intersperses footage of wild and tame geese and includes the narrative of the rearing and training of orphaned chicks by the filmmakers themselves. Gouyon also examines the more recent film Winged Migration (2001, dir. Jacques Perrin) whose extensive use of tame birds is not discussed within the film but instead in a lengthy MOD The Making of Winged Migration (2002). The MOD reveals and legitimates the film's extensive staging practices (including the imprinting of tame birds and the transportation of those birds to different film locations around the world) as firmly part of the film's knowledge production activities, having contributed to research conducted by one of the film's scientific advisors, Henri Weimerskirch, during the film production process (Gouyon, 2016, 91). This MOD is necessary, contends Gouyon, because trends in wildlife filmmaking mean that there is no longer space for human filmmakers within the main narrative of the film.
4 BLUE-CHIP WILDLIFE FILMS AND NATURAL HISTORY DISPLAY
How have MODs been deployed in more recent wildlife films? Gouyon's ‘claimed artificiality’ is a useful category which adds to the analysis of MODs that reveal particular staging practices to the audiences of wildlife programming. However, more recent wildlife films deploy MODs with contrasting motivations. Within the blue-chip renaissance, there is both a new prominence of MODs and a return to claims of non-interventionist filmmaking in the explicit marketing materials of wildlife programming: their emphasis on filmmakers sent to remote locations, on wildlife filmmaking ‘firsts’ and on film technologies designed to minimize any mediation between viewers and animals (Louson, 2018). As a result, many of these MODs do not subscribe to the ‘claimed artificiality’ seen by Gouyon within earlier examples of MODs that showcase particular staging practices such as the building of enclosures or the use of imprinted animals. Viewers are unlikely to be aware of any enclosures employed in wildlife programming from the contents of that programming alone, save for those described in the aftermath of allegations of staging, such as the one constructed to film the birth of the polar bear for Frozen Planet. And while series' websites may offer videos describing the staging of particular footage reminiscent of the BBC's early MODs, such disclosure is generally a reaction to periods of critical attention following allegations of staging. Unprompted disclosure does not occur with nearly the same frequency (Palmer, 2010).
Today's MODs not only present specific new film technologies but also offer expeditionary narratives that are no longer as prominent in mainstream wildlife filmmaking. They emphasize filmmakers' hardiness, the difficulties of filming in extreme environments, and in particular, the challenges of locating and filming specific animal behaviour. These correspond to the traits of naturalists dedicated to observation, the nonprofessional natural history filmmaker operating as ‘silent watcher’ or ‘unarmed hunter’ (Gouyon, 2016, 96, 95). These MODs do not in general showcase filmmakers' mastery of nature by offering the details of staging techniques, but offer additional evidence that the filming on location took place as advertised. Such content reflects the blue-chip renaissance's movement away from the acceptability of ‘interventionist’ wildlife filmmaking (Gouyon, 2016, 87): while it is true that wildlife filmmaking is a literal construction of images of nature, and direct interventions still occasionally take place to generate filmable animal behaviours, the acceptability of such interventions has seemingly vanished, given the criticism engendered by allegations of staging episodes (Palmer, 2010).
Wildlife film MODs also have the same aim as MODs in general: showcasing the exceptional professional qualities of filmmakers. Newer wildlife MODs engage in discourses that both highlight the very qualities that Gouyon describes as belonging to an earlier, pre-professional period of natural history filmmaking, as well as echo characterization of the auteurship and exceptionalism of the filmmakers involved (Sullivan, 2008). As I will show in the Chimpanzee case study, this exceptionalism is employed in service to the MOD's observational realism and its positioning of difficult-to-film chimpanzees as the charismatic targets of the cinematic endeavour. Questions about MODs' ability to authenticate footage are also linked to the legacy of documentary films' claims to represent reality. The authenticity of wildlife footage is thus bound up in the rich history of both documentary authenticity and natural history display.
Gouyon contends that the claimed artificiality of MODs developed in response to the gradual Latourian ‘purification’ of wildlife films into the blue-chip genre (Gouyon, 2016, 86). Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), describes modernity's overarching desire to classify and distinguish according to a nature–culture binary. For Latour, this compulsion aims to generate scientific accounts and representations of nature that have been purified of social influences, belying their hybrid state as co-constructions implicating both nature and culture. Gouyon describes how the human narratives were relegated to MODs thanks to their banishment from the blue-chip genre's purified visions of wildlife: the MOD ‘arose from the necessity to remove from the [wildlife] films everything that could destroy the atmosphere filmmakers were trying to create and therefore reduce viewers’ pleasure' (2016, 97).
The move towards non-interventionist wildlife filmmaking, and the subsequent purification of human narratives from blue-chip wildlife programming, can be interpreted through Hugo Reinert's account of the ‘constitutive withdrawal’ of bird-watchers tracking the international migration of endangered Lesser white-fronted geese. Reinhert describes how the conservation effort for this species has shifted from human observers in the field to a less-present form of wildlife surveillance: radio telemetry. These birds’ endangered status gives them a fragility that must be met with ‘a human presence that conceals itself in the exercise of its power—preserving its elusive object’ (Reinert, 2013, 22). The blue-chip renaissance's focus on technological innovations that facilitate a decreased mediation in capturing footage of wildlife offers a parallel to this constitutive withdrawal, and the MOD narratives championing these non-interventionist technologies position them as minimizing their effects on the wildlife being surveilled. These camera technologies, of course, have a material reality that undermines rhetorics of unmediated perspectives of nature: this materiality emerges within MODs featuring filmmakers’ innovation at solving technical challenges of filming on location, bolstering the sense that wildlife films offer an unfiltered view of nature.
The natural history illustration depicts a decontextualized, isolated specimen upon the white background of the page, a background that both frames and erases. Given the impressive powers of the naturalist's eyes to identify and classify, it is remarkable just how much these trained eyes chose not to see and not to show […] Efforts to make global nature visible always involved making parts of it invisible. (Bleichmar, 2011, 392)
As a result, contemporary blue-chip wildlife films recapitulate traditional natural history display in eliding both particular contexts and the human labour involved in capturing images of wildlife, which finds a new life within MODs.
5 AUTHENTICITY, STAGING PRACTICES, AND TRANSPARENCY
How then do MODs contribute to authenticity in wildlife filmmaking? While there is no discipline-independent or consistent definition of the complex concept of authenticity, with respect to wildlife filmmaking it has generally referred to films that show nature accurately or as it ‘really is’; much scholarship focuses on the ways that wildlife films misrepresent, stage or otherwise ‘fake’ their footage. Scholarly critics of certain narrative practices or filmmaking techniques (such as anthropomorphism, staged interactions or composite animal characters) argue that they contribute to misrepresentations of nature (Bousé, 1998), while filmmakers have justified a variety of staging techniques to show a more ‘real’ nature than could be filmed otherwise (Mitman, 2009). Indeed, elsewhere in this special issue, conservation scholars argue that an anthropomorphised ‘soap opera’ portrayal of animals in jeopardy undermines the public understanding of conservation (Somerville et al., 2021). Complicating this account, evolving camera technologies have expanded the ways in which filmmakers can visualize nature and natural processes: high-definition helicopter camera mounts made Planet Earth's distinct aerial views of nature possible (Louson, 2018) while microphotography, time-lapse photography and other innovations have acclimatized viewers to visions of nature that could not be perceived otherwise (Scott, 2003). What counts as authentic footage of nature thus depends on historical and technological contexts of the wildlife genre.
Since MODs are documentaries about filmmaking, documentary scholarship's treatment of authenticity can also contribute to our understanding of their authenticity. The authenticity–artifice divide is especially relevant to documentary studies' changing standards about what constitutes appropriate representation of its subject matter. Bruzzi argues that ‘documentary does not perceive its ultimate aim to be the authentic representation of the real and that instead we find within documentary films the dialectical conjunction of reality and filmmakers consisting of the event and its representation’ (2000, 9). Bruzzi disagrees with Nichols’ (1991) canonical framing of documentary modes, within which performative documentaries were denigrated for obscuring their content and drawing attention to the filmmakers. Instead, for Bruzzi, the performative documentary genre of ‘journey film’, of which these MODs are a subspecies, are both describing and performing an action. Wildlife documentaries face even greater scrutiny about their representational claims than do documentaries in general, thanks to the genre's explicit claims of showing real nature and its educational mandate about nature. Drawing on this notion of performance, Gouyon has described MODs as constituting ‘scientific performance’ in that they offer ‘evidence of film-makers capacity to control nature to generate valuable knowledge of it’ (2016, 98). Following Gouyon and Bruzzi, then, I interpret recent wildlife MODs as films that both describe by showing filmmakers at work and perform by showcasing noninterventionist filmmaking and wildlife filmmakers' exceptional commitment to obtaining the right footage.
Wildlife MODs' observational realism in support of their ‘parent’ films is linked to the blue-chip renaissance's emphasis on their non-interventionist filmmaking and the inclusion of rare or never-before-seen footage of animals in the wild. Chris claims in the introduction to Watching Wildlife that the wildlife film genre has passed through three main historical stages: it ‘shifted from a framework in which the animal appears as object of human action [...] to an anthropomorphic framework, in which human characteristics are mapped onto animal subjects, to a zoomorphic framework, in which knowledge about animals is used to explore the human’ (Chris, 2006, x). Chris’ periodization roughly maps unto early wildlife films of travelogue or hunting expeditions, which involved narratives of seeking out desired animals, especially big game (Mitman, 2009), followed by televised nature programming epitomized by the Disney True-Life Adventures which heavily anthropomorphized animal life (Bousé, 1998, 2000; MacDonald, 2006), to more recent wildlife programming that positions human beings within a continuum of animal instincts and naturalizes certain social and gendered categories (Mills, 2013). However, the prestige of 21st-century blue-chip wildlife programming is linked to its claims of delivering authentic content, evidenced through behind-the-scenes footage of dedicated filmmakers facing the challenges of obtaining rare footage on location. As a result, the narratives within MODs are similar to those from early expeditionary wildlife films. I contend that the blue-chip renaissance represents a return to the animal-as-object for filmmakers, which has accompanied the promotion of non-interventionist filmmaking practices through MODs' observational realism. Wildlife MODs are similarly structured as journey films whose viewers are enlisted to celebrate the destination as the hard-won achievement of footage of specific animals or behaviour. Within the blue-chip renaissance, MODs highlight the on-location hardiness of exceptional filmmakers during the journeys leading to these prize ‘firsts’.
Mitman's (2009) treatment of wildlife films within environmental history describes the shaping of wildlife filmmaking's conventions and how techniques of natural history artifice operated within the genre's changing contexts of authenticity. Such staging techniques have included deliberately generated sequences of animal behaviour, the construction of enclosures that were not disclosed to audiences or the use of used tame animals as a substitution for wild ones. The most notorious early example of staged animal behaviour is from White Wilderness (1958), a Disney ‘True-Life Adventure’ documentary about life in the Arctic that involved a fabricated storyline culminating in a staged dramatic scene of lemmings leaping to their deaths. Wildlife experts and ecologists overwhelmingly attribute the propagation and public acceptance of what is now referred to as the ‘lemming suicide myth’ to White Wilderness, although the film itself was not the original source of this explanation for their behaviour (Woodford, 2003). Wildlife filmmakers have promoted the authenticity of their content through implicit and explicit appeals to institutional prestige, filmmaker trustworthiness and technological innovations in filmmaking practices and equipment (Mitman, 2009). Current MODs have an especially prominent role in validating wildlife footage in recent wildlife films of the blue-chip renaissance, including their use as promotional trailers, bonus features on DVD releases, accompanying websites, and in particular their novel positioning within the broadcast of the wildlife film itself. This shoring-up of authenticity makes public and central the practical and technical conditions of wildlife film production to an unprecedented degree.
The enhanced positioning of behind-the-scenes material is a transparency-enhancing strategy on behalf of wildlife film producers because viewers can witness filmmakers at work on location and receive additional context surrounding the conditions under which footage was achieved. However, not everything that takes place behind the scenes is recorded. MODs only selectively showcase certain aspects of filmmakers at work and their equipment, due to a film production's magnitude, logistics and costs, as well as the time constraints and financial resources devoted to the MOD itself (Hight, 2005, 6). It is not reasonable or desirable, for instance, to expect 300 hr' worth of behind-the-scenes footage of BBC Planet Earth cameraman Paul Stewart in a hide as he attempted to capture the remarkable full courtship display of the bird of paradise. A shortened MOD from the Planet Earth Diaries which had been posted on the Discovery Channel's website, ‘Making Jungles’, condensed Stewart's eight weeks of filming into 40 s, including Stewart's boredom and frustration, to emphasize how the eventual capture of the desired footage was such an achievement. Stewart's experience epitomizes Park's characterization from the history of scientific observation wherein ‘the pleasure and exaltation when the tedium of the observational routine was interrupted by the occasional spectacular sighting’ (Park, 2011, 35).
More recent high-profile instances of filmmaker staging illustrate complex interactions between filmmaker reputability, audience expectations, and evolving standards and transparency on behalf of broadcasters. For example, the BBC's Frozen Planet series (2011) included novel footage of the birth of a polar bear that was filmed in a specially constructed zoo enclosure while the narration refers to wild polar bears in their Arctic environment. There was a MOD showing the construction of the zoo den enclosure located on the BBC's website (BBC, 2011) which the BBC pointed to as evidence of the broadcaster's transparency following criticism about the undisclosed enclosure. However, critics pointed out that the MOD would not have been seen by all viewers of Frozen Planet because the ‘hard-to-find video’ (Gladdis, 2011) was not broadcast as a Diaries segment following the programme (BBC News, 2011). The lower prominence of this MOD suggests that the practices of transparency within the blue-chip renaissance do not occupy the same stance of ‘claimed artificiality’ described in Gouyon's (2016) characterization of the Winged Migration MOD. It is not the case that sophisticated staging practices no longer occur; instead, thanks to a shift in the broadcast landscape's orientation, ‘claimed artificiality’ is no longer an acceptable stance for these productions.
6 THE MAKING OF CHIMPANZEE
Analysing a recent wildlife MOD shows how the above historical and conceptual elements operate within an MOD whose components work together to support its parent film's authenticity. The promotional trailer ‘The Making of Chimpanzee’, which preceded the release of Disneynature's 2012 wildlife film, combines a series of elements to portray filmmakers meeting the challenges of filming in a remote and difficult location to deliver a scientifically accurate as well as emotionally satisfying film narrative. The MOD employs the language of creative exceptionalism, showcases the telenaturalist legacy of filmmakers at work, situates their expedition for chimpanzees as an animal-as-object quest, emphasizes the role of film technology and draws from the reality-TV genre to heighten the dramatic impact of environmental elements. However, this making-of trailer does not describe how filmmakers constructed the character of Oscar, the star of the film, from footage of multiple young chimpanzees over several years of filming.
‘I've made wildlife films on almost every animal on this planet, in almost every habitat on the planet. By far the most challenging is working with chimpanzees in the rainforest’ [0:07]. This quote, superimposed over stirring music and crisp wildlife footage, is spoken by Alastair Fothergill, director of Chimpanzee, at the beginning of the film's behind-the-scenes trailer, ‘The Making of Chimpanzee’ (Disney Movie Trailers, 2012). Fothergill, along with Keith Scholey, founded the blue-chip wildlife film production company Silverback Films in 2012. The company has produced four Disneynature wildlife films, as well as several series for television. Fothergill was a long-time series producer at the BBC's Natural History Unit, involved in the Planet Earth and Blue Planet series and their associated films Earth and Deep Blue, contributing to the visual and thematic continuity between those series and Disneynature's theatrical releases. Fothergill's opening narration sets up chimpanzees as the target of the film production expedition, in line with Chris' (2006) characterization of the animal-as-object in travelogue wildlife films. The trailer, lasting 4 minutes, 20 seconds, was shown in theatres prior to Chimpanzee's release, and is available on Disneynature's website, as well as on YouTube. It is also included in Chimpanzee's DVD and Blu-Ray releases as a special feature titled ‘On Location: The Making Of Chimpanzee’ advertised with the description: ‘Experience The Daunting Obstacles Filmmakers Encountered On Their Three-Year Quest To Capture This Extraordinary Story’.
The trailer shows the challenges involved in making Chimpanzee, including the remoteness of the rainforest location of the Ivory Coast's Tai National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, muddy roads, narrow paths through dense vegetation and a base camp that attracts unwanted visitors: scorpions, army ants and pythons. Showcasing the remoteness of their film location contributes to this MOD's performativity as an expeditionary ‘journey film’ (Bruzzi, 2000). Chimpanzee's directors Fothergill and Mark Linfield, field producer James Reed, and principal photographers Martyn Colbeck and Bill Wallauer (who also acted as a scientific consultant) appear in the trailer as talking heads, describing the difficult filmmaking conditions in the Ivory Coast and the hardiness of the crew while facing these challenging conditions: ‘On most days’, said Fothergill, ‘the cameramen will get seconds of footage’ [3:37; emphasis in original]. Those talking-head images of the filmmakers are in sharp contrast to their behind-the-scenes appearances in the rainforest, where they are muddy, sweaty, knee-deep in water or surrounded by dangerous, charging chimpanzees.
In a particularly intense shot, the filmmakers are beset by a swarm of bees, who crawl on Reed and two unnamed crew members’ clothing and faces. Borrowing from the tropes of reality TV, the drama of this episode is heightened through the use of intensified music and buzzing, and close-up camera shots of their frustrated faces. The filmmakers attempt to swat them away, until Reed makes the decision to end filming. ‘It's got intolerable’, he explains, ‘I’ma leave it. We're out of here. Had enough’ [1:47]. Despite these setbacks, the trailer portrays the filmmakers to be enjoying themselves. ‘There must be easier ways to make a living’ asserts Colbeck, walking through a stream, ‘but they're not as much fun’ [2:20]. Throughout the behind-the-scenes footage, the on-location filmmakers demonstrate their capability through telenaturalist values of patience, hardiness, skill locating animals and, most strikingly, the ‘bodily suffering’ endured by the film crew under challenging jungle conditions (Gouyon, 2016; 97).
The trailer acts to showcase the filmmakers’ professionalism, positioning them as unique in possessing the practical, technical and scientific skills required for the challenging production. Fothergill praises the astonishing abilities of the film's principal photographers, employing the language of creative exceptionalism (Sullivan, 2008): ‘The most important thing we did was to choose the best wildlife cameraman in the world. Martyn Colbeck is absolutely the top of his game. The quality of images that he got out of that forest are frankly startling’ [1:58]. Also key to the project's success was hiring a scientific consultant who would be able to obtain excellent footage of chimpanzees. Fothergill explains that ‘Bill Wallauer's very fast in the forest, and he understands chimpanzees’ [2:24]. Chimpanzees as film subject present their own particular difficulties: Wallauer explains that ‘The biggest challenge in capturing chimps is to move faster than the chimps, predict where they're going to come through, and to keep a safe distance. They're in a life-and-death situation’ [2:28]. Fothergill clarifies ‘That's very important for the action sequences of the film’ [2:37]. Colbeck's voiceover, above footage of loud and fast-moving chimpanzees, adds ‘It's pandemonium, those inter-group encounters. Really quite frightening, because you've got these enormous animals, running all around you, screaming. You don't know what's going on’ [2:41]. By emphasizing Wallauer's speed and his understanding of chimpanzee behaviour, the MOD positions Wallauer's unique combination of expertise with the film's species of interest and his skill as a cameraman as essential for obtaining the type and quality of footage the film required.
The trailer also emphasizes a technological solution to the challenge of filming rainforest vegetation from within and above: a moving camera on a cable-pulley apparatus fixed high in the treetops. Colbeck explains in a voiceover how the rainforest environment makes filming chimpanzees difficult: ‘This was the most challenging project I've ever done. The canopy is very enclosed, vegetation is very thick at ground level. I was always trying to find this little tiny window through the vegetation’ [2:09]. Later in the trailer, narrating over crisp, HD-quality footage of waterfalls, the forest canopy, and individual raindrops bending and bouncing off a leaf, Fothergill explains that ‘We were very keen to make sure the beauty of the rainforest was brought to the big screen’ [3:18]. Reed elaborates how ‘In order to bring the trees to life, you need to sort of fly the camera through the forest’ [3:23]. Over footage of the moving camera in action, Fothergill describes the technical setup: ‘We'd put cables in the canopy of the rainforest, and ran specially-designed cameras to contract through the rainforest and it's a beautifully smooth shot’ [3:27]. The scene culminates with 3 s of footage of the rainforest canopy from the cable-mounted camera. The contraption allows for the capture of spectacular footage of nature that diminishes the traces of filmmakers, allowing footage of jungle vegetation that is not impacted by wind from a helicopter's rotors. Showcasing this and similar mediation-diminishing technologies within MODs is a staple of the blue-chip renaissance (Louson, 2018).
Three types of footage, which occur within virtually all MODs (Sullivan, 2008, 71), are included in this MOD to fulfil the trailer's purpose of showing how Chimpanzee was made and to support the film's authenticity. The first is that of talking-head interviews, where the filmmakers speak into the camera in front of a rainforest backdrop. Their first appearance includes a caption of their name and production title. As talking heads, the filmmakers promote each other's particular and exceptional skillsets; the MOD positions them as having the right characteristics to find and film their subject matter. The Chimpanzee making-of trailer both follows the pattern of MODs in the film industry more generally and contributes to the emphasis of wildlife filmmakers' professionalism furthering the perceived authenticity of the resulting footage that is portrayed as only being possible through their exceptional expertise and hardiness.
The second is the behind-the-scenes footage, which is of lower visual quality and shows the filmmakers at work or travelling, their camp, their equipment or the rainforest setting. Through its use of observational realism techniques, including the close following of action as it unfolds and the unobtrusive filming of the Chimpanzee crew, this type of footage offers contextual evidence of the filmmakers on location and authenticates the resulting wildlife footage because filmmakers and chimpanzees are shown together in the same shot; Richards describes this as a ‘two shot’: ‘a device long used as a means of authenticating wildlife footage’ (2014, 8). The behind-the-scenes footage also serves as a performance of their hardiness and durability within an expeditionary ‘journey film’. It emphasizes the challenging conditions that impede their quest for footage of chimpanzees, the object of their filmmaking journey (Chris, 2006). The challenges shown in the MOD render the filmmakers' success more satisfying to viewers. This portrayal is in line with the traits needed by ‘telenaturalists’ of the pre-professional era of wildlife films, emphasizing ‘such themes as patience, self-discipline, self-restraint, bodily suffering, communion with nature, and the ability to outwit animals’ (Gouyon, 2016, 97).
Finally, the making-of trailer includes clips of high-definition (HD) footage from the Chimpanzee film: terrain, vegetation or animals. The latter is of higher quality than the behind-the-scenes footage and does not include any filmmakers, equipment or signs of civilization. This footage demonstrates the filmmakers' success on location at obtaining the shots needed for the film. As a result, these observations of nature ‘combin[e] performance and product’ (Secord, 2011, 440).
The three types of MOD footage in the Chimpanzee trailer work together to support the authenticity of the finished footage as well as reveal the labour and skill present in the human narratives but purified from the final blue-chip product. For example, in the segment explaining the canopy-cable apparatus, Fothergill and Reed each appear as talking heads describing the need to showcase the beauty of the rainforest and how the apparatus was built. Those descriptions are interspaced with behind-the-scenes footage of filmmakers and equipment on location as the camera moves on the cables (from below as it climbs the cable, moving on a lower-strung cable about 6 feet above ground level, and from the side moving horizontally on the cable at treetop height). Finally, the HD-quality footage filmed using the cable-canopy apparatus at the end of the segment demonstrates the successful visual results of the apparatus’ ‘specially designed cameras’: a smooth, unbroken shot of the forest canopy. Because the camera is moving within the forest canopy, not above it, this type of shot is visually distinct from other technologies employed in the blue-chip renaissance and publicized within its MODs: the HD-heligimbal setup of aerial helicopter footage from Planet Earth or the smooth vertical climbs of the cinebulle balloon camera technology from the 1990s (Louson, 2018). Knowing more about the canopy-cable apparatus, including the location-specific challenge it could solve, offers viewers a chance to appreciate the filmmakers' deployment of this technology as well as the apparatus' key role in the visual language of the finished film. The equipment and filmmaking techniques described within the MODs of the blue-chip renaissance serve the genre's aims; they help to acclimatize viewers to new incarnations of the camera as an objective lens for viewing nature, in the same way that the BBC Natural History Unit gradually acclimatized viewers to novel technologies such as time lapse and microphotography (Scott, 2003).
The making-of trailer also includes references to the main narrative event of the film, the adoption of baby chimp Oscar by Freddy, the alpha male of the group. The filmmakers' description of this never-before-filmed event is framed to reinforce Chimpanzee's authenticity, emphasizing that both the tragic death of Oscar's mother Isha and the adoption were unexpectedly witnessed on location. Linfield alludes to the violent inter-group encounter that leads to Isha's death by saying ‘At one point something terrible happens to this little boy's mother’ [2:51]. Jane Goodall, associated with the production as its ‘chimpanzee conservation ambassador’ and who appears in the trailer as a talking-head participant, explains ‘Oscar completely on his own in the forest wouldn't have survived’ [2:57]. Isha's death had potentially dire consequences for the production of Chimpanzee, which had until that point been focused on Oscar growing up in the rainforest. Fothergill explains the event from a producer's perspective: ‘You know, when that happened, we thought the film was over. We were about to ring up Disney and say ‘Guys, we haven't got a movie’. And then the most unpredictable thing happened: the adoption of our star by Freddy, the alpha male. Never filmed before in the wild’ [3:00]. This voiceover is combined with footage of Reed (on location) with his forehead in his hands in disbelief, and then of Oscar climbing onto Freddy's back [3:08].
The family-friendly story of Oscar's adoption cements Chimpanzee within the emotionally satisfying Disney canon; Disney has produced and distributed many films with plots featuring unlikely adoptions and men or male animals assuming primary parenting roles, such as Three Men and a Baby (1987) and the animated Brother Bear (2003) and its 2006 sequel. The production team understands their audience's potential emotional resonance with the chimpanzees on film: ‘You just live for those golden moments, every now and again where it all comes together’ explains Reed, over footage of a chimpanzee's face bathed in sunlight, with a butterfly floating overhead. ‘You know, I think it's gonna touch people the way it touched us when we were there filming it’ [3:41]. Reed's ‘golden moments’ comment is reminiscent of the instructions to early Disney cinematographers to seek ‘nuggets’ or sequences of behaviour revealing a wild animal's personality within a larger narrative; Walt Disney considered animal behaviour to show the ‘instinctive beginnings of the deepest, most basic human emotions’, and therefore a film's capacity to engender those emotions allowed the audience to both connect and identify with the animals presented (Mitman, 2009, 119–20). Disneynature's nostalgic approach thus resonates with Disney's legacy of emotionally satisfying storytelling (Molloy, 2013).
The charisma of the Oscar character and the unlikely adoption narrative featured prominently in the film's marketing, including a social media campaign with the label ‘#MeetOscar’: the trailer's unnamed narrator encourages viewers to participate in discussions about the film on social media: ‘Everyone is talking about Oscar. Join the conversation’. But Chimpanzee received criticism when film producers revealed that multiple young chimpanzees had portrayed Oscar over the 4-year film shoot. Wildlife films have commonly employed composite animal characters, where a single, sometimes named, animal character is edited together from footage of multiple, interchangeable animals (Richards, 2014). Bousé's (1998, 2000) criticism of the creation of these composite animal characters motivates his scepticism that wildlife films belong within the genre of documentary. Responding to the controversy, Fothergill explained ‘What is important to us is […] that it is scientifically accurate. There's nothing contrived or artificial […] We constructed it to a certain extent. But it's not a fake. It is a true story’ (quoted in von Leszczynski, 2013), echoing similar justifications by wildlife filmmakers embroiled in media attention over staging practices. The construction of the composite Oscar character does not feature within the MOD, as it would undermine the portrayal of filmmakers on location being fortunate enough to discover such an emotionally satisfying and true adoption story in the wild. The difference between the approaches to such disclosure for Chimpanzee and Winged Migration may reflect the latter's bird imprinting's contribution to knowledge-production activities and the former's requirement for an emotionally compelling narrative within a multi-year filming schedule. In addition, transparency about Chimpanzee's composite character would undermine the message that the adoption of an orphaned chimpanzee was a true story, which had featured so prominently in the film's publicity campaign.
Overall, the Chimpanzee MOD serves as a window into the film's context of production in service to its authenticity. It emphasizes the filmmakers' struggles and responses to the specific bodily challenges of on-location filmmaking: their rugged capability, patience and hardiness in the face of environmental challenges. It promotes the production's use of the treetop canopy camera rig, which is a similar narrative of technological innovation leading to improved visuals of nature described in the promotion of Planet Earth's heligimbal camera mount. The MOD showcases the filmmakers' (and in particular, cameraman and scientific consultant Bill Wallauer's) skill and patience at locating and filming chimpanzees for painstaking seconds at a time; their exceptional professionalism is framed as necessary to obtain footage that would otherwise be impossible. This professionalism, combined with the MOD's focus on the filmmakers' unexpected discovery of Oscar's heartwarming adoption story, works to cement the filmmakers as having ‘the authority to speak for nature’ (Gouyon, 2011a, 26). Such authority is especially important within the blue-chip renaissance's context of media discussions surrounding the acceptability of staging practices, as well as the damage control by Chimpanzee producers following the revelation that more than one chimpanzee played Oscar (von Leszczynski, 2013).
7 ANOTHER COMPOSITE CASE: Planet Earth II's IGUANA-SNAKE CHASE
A similar case from a more recent wildlife programme emphasizes both the role of MODs in publicizing on-location filmmaking and the use of composite animal characters. In the fall of 2016, a piece of footage from the BBC Natural History Unit's landmark series Planet Earth II gained remarkable popularity on the Internet. In the sequence, from the series’ first episode, ‘Islands’, a newly hatched iguana makes a treacherous journey across a sandy beach and volcanic rocks of Isla Fernandina in the Galapagos Islands (BBC Earth, 2016a). The iguana is set upon at every turn by a seemingly endless swarm of racer snakes emerging from their hiding places. The snakes pour out from all sides, narrowly missing the iguana as it races and leaps up the rocks. During the harrowing chase, the snakes’ snapping jaws repeatedly miss the iguana's limbs and tail. All seems lost when the iguana gets ensnared in a cluster of snakes, whose many coils loop around its body [1:23]. But the iguana manages to break free and scamper up the rocks, with more snakes still in pursuit; the chase footage includes a close-up of the iguana as it leaps, portage-style, up a vertical crevasse and from a rocky peak to the safety of a higher ledge where the snakes can't follow [1:52]. ‘A near-miraculous escape’ describes narrator David Attenborough in his characteristic hushed whisper. The video, titled ‘Iguana vs Snakes - Planet Earth II’, was uploaded November 8th, two days after the episode's UK premiere. It had been seen nearly 7.4 million times on BBC Earth's Youtube channel by the end of 2016 (BBC Earth, 2016a) and won the popular vote for the Virgin TV Must-See Moment BAFTA Award (Holmes & Lambert, 2017).
It is understandable that so many people have been fascinated and terrified by this footage. One snake hunting prey is usually enough to transfix us and engage our instinctive mammalian fear of snakes. But a mass of them hunting is the stuff of nightmares! I think the reason this sequence has generated so much attention is because people are naturally rooting for the cute and innocent hatchling iguanas, which face a truly horrifying situation. So when one little marine iguana miraculously escapes the inescapable the relief we feel is tangible. (Wollocombe, 2016)
In addition to furthering popular interest in the chase scene as well as Planet Earth II, these MODs were an opportunity for the BBC to showcase their filmmakers on location, supporting the authenticity of their ‘never before filmed’ achievement in natural history filmmaking. An exchange in another comment section of an article about the chase (anecdotally) connects MODs to staging practices: User ‘chazwomaq’ commented: ‘Fantastic cinematography. Just try not to remember that the crew probably dropped that lizard into the pit of snakes in the first place’ while user ‘Cardinal Fang’ replied ‘Do you have any evidence whatsoever for that claim? Because I've just watched the behind the scenes footage of that, where they basically just set up the cameras and see what happens’ (Hooton, 2016). However, echoing the charismatic orphan Oscar from Chimpanzee, the tenacious iguana turned out to also be a composite character. Subsequent media reports describe how the episode's director Elizabeth White admitted at London's Media Production Show that the sequence included footage of multiple iguanas, edited together (Holmes & Lambert, 2017; Hooton, 2017; Mitchelson, 2017). Although each segment had been filmed on location, the whole chase was not a singular event. And once again, this creation of a composite animal character was not described within either of the Planet Earth II MODs; it would undermine the programme's self-portrayal of authentic and spectacular wildlife footage captured on location.
8 WILDLIFE FILMS' IMPACTS ON VIEWERS AND CONSERVATION
By covering over and denying the ways that humans create the nature onscreen – both immediately, through the artistic and technical creation of the documentary, and more broadly through participation in the natural and cultural forces acting on the animals and ecosystems presented – these programs deny our interconnections with non-human nature and establish us in fixed, dualistic relationships with the natural: viewer and viewed, elf and other, subject and object. (Armbruster, 1998, 232)
One demonstration of this erosion of concern is the anecdote of a potential donor who told filmmaker Hardy Jones ‘I watched Blue Planet last week and the oceans seem totally healthy […] Why are we bothering to raise money?’ (Palmer, 2010, 159). Viewed in this light, MODs that support the conventional blue-chip construction of a pristine nature contribute to a misrepresentation that nature is timeless, abundant and disconnected from human activity.
[…i]f you muted the series, it would look almost identical to any other wildlife documentary. You could sit back, content and relaxed, gawping at nature's splendor. But Our Planet seems to have no interest in letting you be contented. Though the film is still entertaining and beautiful, its narration imparts its shots with a more complex emotional flavor. (Yong, 2019)
Similarly, MODs that portray embodied and embedded filmmakers within local contexts may have the capacity to bolster environmental attitudes, because they highlight human interconnectedness to non-human nature and could encourage a more participatory and cooperative attitude towards nature (Armbruster, 1998, 236). Further research is needed on audience reception of wildlife films in general, and the influence of their MODs in particular. It remains to be seen what role MODs will play in future wildlife films and how they might reinforce or undermine notions of human beings' interrelations within the natural world.
9 CONCLUSION
While MODs in general present an exuberant appreciation of a film and its creative workers, within wildlife films of the blue-chip renaissance this enthusiasm was focused on filmmakers' adherence to the qualities of hardiness, patience and knowledge about wildlife location and behaviour. MODs, in juxtaposing footage of filmmakers at work attempting to capture particular animal footage with that same animal footage, enlist viewers as witnesses not only to the authenticity of that footage, but also to the context of its production. As a result, and within a broadcast climate occasionally containing well-publicized, substantiated allegations of the staging of wildlife footage, MODs shore up the authenticity of their films and programmes by employing observational realism, foregrounding filmmakers' exceptional skills and providing some of the contextual evidence that the filming occurred as advertised. My analysis of the character of blue-chip wildlife MODs extends Gouyon's (2016) historical treatment of earlier MODs which illustrate filmmakers' mastery of nature and licence to offer scientific knowledge. I have shown how these elements are employed in the case of Chimpanzee's making-of trailer. By showcasing the on-location physical hardships undergone by the crew, their professionalism and expertise about wild animal behaviour, their technological solutions to filming in the jungle, and the production's ability to adapt to events that drastically impacted the planned storyline, the MOD contributes to a portrait of filmmaker exceptionalism that reinforces Chimpanzee's authenticity but that does not disclose the use of composite animal characters. MODs' prominence within the blue-chip renaissance and their elevation of the cinematic capture of never-before-filmed wildlife is part of the complex ways in which people represent and understand nature in the 21st century.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Sarah Crowley and Matthew Silk for organizing this special issue, as well as Katey Anderson, the editors at People and Nature, and both anonymous reviewers for their feedback and useful suggestions. I also thank the York STS ‘Immutable Mobiles’ writing group organized by Jamie Elwick. I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this article at meetings of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and the History of Science Society. Funding for this research was provided by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Programme. Publication support was provided by Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Open Research
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
No data were used for this work.
