viewers the capacity not just to travel to any part of the natural world in the proverbial blink of an eye, but to travel across time. As Attenborough put it in his memoirs, “Sometimes I came back having been filmed speaking the first half of a sentence that fitted neatly on to a second half that we had filmed on another continent two years earlier” (2002, 294).
If ubiquitization enabled such seamless transcontinental narrative displacements, it also allowed the series to reveal, equally effortlessly, the most recondite “secrets” of nature (for the gender politics of this discourse in wildlife documentary, see Barbara Crowther 1995). The audiovisual narrator took its cotravelers, which is really to say covoyeurs into all manner of natural spaces never before seen on television and, in some cases, never even studied by scientists: a Kowari (Dasyuroides byrnei) giving birth to her pups is one example highlighted by Parsons himself in his memoirs, True to Nature (1982, 319–322). These and other innovations were highly acclaimed; if Parsons and the NHU had already produced a number of well-received series, Life on Earth inaugurated a period during which the BBC came to be regarded as the world’s premier natural history broadcaster.
Now the burgeoning cultural authority of the BBC’s blue-chip wildlife documentaries was undoubtedly bolstered by the remarkable technical ingenuity of the programs, the beauty of their images, and indeed Attenborough’s oft-celebrated style of presentation. It is, however, clear that this authority also relied on a problematic form of naturalism. To explain how and why this is the case, a somewhat detailed excursus on the blue-chip documentaries’ characteristic naturalism is now required.
The naturalism in question has often been conceived as a form of representation that is, as the title of Parsons’s (1982) memoirs says, “true to nature.” Within the wildlife filmmaking industry, such a truth has often been portrayed as being both “science-based” (Davies 2000) and the outcome of the exploitation of the ostensibly objective qualities of cinematographic technologies – qualities thought to be capable of revealing “nature itself.” As Colin Willock, the head of Anglia Television’s competing Natural History Unit once put it in his own memoirs, “Nature as it really exists is our line of business” (1978, 41).
Aspects of this understanding of the cinematographic/televisual process go at least as far back as the emergence of photography, and involve the myth of the pencil of nature (Lindahl Elliot 2008, 11; see also Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 145). I refer to Henry Fox Talbot’s term for the new art form whose execution took place “without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil” (1844, 1). Versions of this discourse continue to this day and cannot be entirely dismissed. From the perspective of Peirce’s semeiotic theory, a case can be made that blue-chip wildlife documentaries do have an indexical dimension. Indexes are signs that, in Peirce’s vocabulary, refer to an object “by virtue of being really affected by that Object” (Peirce 1998, 291). Peirce explains that indexes are actually modified by the object; as such, they can be said to characterize the semeiotics of documentary films, which ostensibly involve a natural process: light reflects off the surface of an object, and makes its way into a lens which refracts it onto a photosensitive surface which is transformed accordingly. Thus, it can be argued that there clearly is an indexical relation between the cinematographic image, and whatever object(s) it represents.
It would, however, be a mistake to reduce documentary films to a matter of indexes. In the case of the natural history documentary, at least four levels of the filmmaking process work to embed any indexes within cultural forms, or what Peirce calls symbols – signs which refer to the objects that they denote by virtue of a “law” or “rule,” or a social convention (Peirce 1998, 292). I have described the four levels in some detail elsewhere (Lindahl Elliot 2008); here it suffices to list them. The levels in question build on the work of Gilles Deleuze (1986) and are the frame, or a single image captured by cinematographic means; the shot, in the sense of multiple frames giving rise to movement; the montage, the linking of two or more shots; and the narrativization, which is to say the forms used to organize frames, shots, and montage into a story.
For each of these levels, it is possible to claim that wildlife documentaries of the kind produced on film by the BBC (and indeed other organizations such as the National Geographic) are purely indexical. However, on each of the levels, it is the symbol that arguably prevails: for example, even if what is “in” the frame interacts with what is beyond the frame – the “out of field” – framing is always partial insofar as it involves not only selection, but also a symbolism in the Peircean sense of a convention. There is, for instance, a relatively restricted menu of subjects thought to be worthy of a wildlife documentary; over the decades, megafauna and apex predators have been represented out of all proportion to their numbers relative to the earth’s biodiversity.
On the level of the shot, the cinematographic management of movement is also the outcome of a selective and a symbolic process: the filmmaker chooses some movements and not others, and engages in a variety of practices that work to relate those movements to a “whole” in accordance with particular conventions. The trailers for the BBC’s major documentary series are a particularly good example of this relativity, revealing the extent to which the genre privileges what I term a hyperkinetic nature (Lindahl Elliot 2008), that is, a nature that is not only dynamic (as any natural phenomenon invariably is) but appears to be engaged in a constant process of visible physical displacement. Hyperkinesis works to intensify the natural world for a TV world that demands this kind of intensification. But, in so doing, it transforms the character of objects not otherwise associated with hyperkinesis: for example, The Private Life of Plants (1995), one of the BBC’s very few series concerned mainly with plants, used time-lapse photography again and again to make plants fit the generic requirement for hyperkinesis, and, in so doing, arguably made them “behave” more like animals (Lindahl Elliot 2001).
What is true of frame and shot is also true of montage and narrativization. Much of the narrative logic of blue-chip wildlife documentaries rests on the production of “Hey Mays.” Unlike, say, a fictional film that has been minutely scripted far in advance of the actual filming, blue-chip wildlife films tend to involve a tactical editing process. The editors must build a story, or rather a string of “mini-stories,” constructed around whatever shots the wildlife cinematographers have been able to obtain. Such mini-stories must be compelling in the context of a TV medium where a ruthless competition for audiences prevails. Over the years, this has meant that the editing has often been structured as strings of scenes designed to provoke responses of the kind “Hey May, come and look at this,” and these have been achieved via anthropomorphic narratives of predation, familial relations, or humor (Lindahl Elliot 2001; 2006a).
By anthropomorphism, I do not mean the common sense understanding of the term which suggests that it occurs only when someone explicitly projects human values onto nature. Instead, the etymology of the word (anthropo, “man” or human; morph, shape) suggests that, despite its indexical qualities, any aspect of a wildlife film as film must be anthropomorphic if only because it involves humanmade technology that imposes not just a story but humanized forms by way of the levels of frame, shot, and montage onto whatever nature is represented. From this perspective, the problem is not to find ways of avoiding anthropomorphism, but to consider what forms of anthropomorphism do a better job of representing nature for a given context (Lindahl Elliot 2001).
The more general point I am leading to is this: the paradigmatic technique of observation employed by the BBC’s blue-chip wildlife documentaries revolves not around the index, but around what Peirce terms the dicent symbol: a representation which is really affected by what it represents but which, at one and the same time, projects onto the object of representation a conventional association of ideas (Peirce 1998, 295). While the NHU’s wildlife documentaries are celebrated for their indexical qualities, their success was also a matter of their symbolism, and with it the manifold anthropomorphic transformations imposed on the natural world. Such transformations have ranged from relatively subtle semeiotic refigurations of the kind just outlined on the levels of shot and frame, to the construction via audiovisual montages of what
