Regarding Life

Belinda Smaill

Description

As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc., the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is becoming markedly more complex and increasingly more involved with pivotal ecological debates over species loss, food production, and science.

While attending to some of the most discussed documentaries of the last two decades, including Grizzly Man; Food, Inc.; Sweetgrass; Our Daily Bread; and Darwin's Nightmare, the book also draws on lesser-known film examples, and is one of the first to bring film studies understandings to new media such as YouTube. The result is a study that melds film studies and animal studies to explore how documentary films render both humans and animals, and to what political ends.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Labor, Agriculture, and Long Take Cinema: Working on the Surface of the Earth

3. Meat, Animals, and Paradigms of Embodiment: Documentary Identification and the Problem of Food

4. Arctic Futures and Extinction: Loss, the Archive, and (Wildlife) Film

5. Antarctica, Science, and Exploration: Encounters at the End of the World

6. The Nonfiction of YouTube and “Naturecams”: Posthumanism and Reflections on Agency

7. In Conclusion: Documentary, Science, and the Umwelt

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Science
• Film
• Electronic
• History of film
• Mathematics
• Visual culture
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 21 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438462509
• Langue: English

Extrait

REGARDING LIFE
Also in the series
William Rothman, editor, Cavell on Film
J. David Slocum, editor, Rebel Without a Cause
Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema
Kirsten Moana Thompson, Apocalyptic Dread
Frances Gateward, editor, Seoul Searching
Michael Atkinson, editor, Exile Cinema
Paul S. Moore, Now Playing
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film
William Rothman, editor, Three Documentary Filmmakers
Sean Griffin, editor, Hetero
Jean-Michel Frodon, editor, Cinema and the Shoah
Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis, editors, Second Takes
Matthew Solomon, editor, Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination
R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, editors, Hitchcock at the Source
William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Second Edition
Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition
Marc Raymond, Hollywood’s New Yorker
Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel, editors, Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground
Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, editors, B Is for Bad Cinema
Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors
Rosie Thomas, Bombay before Bollywood
Scott M. MacDonald, Binghamton Babylon
Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine
David Greven, Ghost Faces
James S. Williams, Encounters with Godard
William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, editors, Invented Lives, Imagined Communities
Lee Carruthers, Doing Time
Rebecca Meyers, William Rothman and Charles Warren, editors, Looking with Robert Gardner
REGARDING LIFE
ANIMALS AND THE DOCUMENTARY MOVING IMAGE
BELINDA SMAILL
Cover Image: Sweetgrass (2009), directed by Ilsa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Courtesy of Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab/The Kobal Collection
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY , NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smaill, Belinda. author.
Title: Regarding life : animals and the documentary moving image / Belinda Smaill.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2016] | Series: SUNY series, horizons of cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007286 (print) | LCCN 2016015188 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438462493 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438462509 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films—History and criticism. | Animals in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 S555 2016 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007286
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Introduction
Chapter 2
Labor, Agriculture, and Long Take Cinema: Working on the Surface of the Earth
Chapter 3
Meat, Animals, and Paradigms of Embodiment: Documentary Identification and the Problem of Food
Chapter 4
Arctic Futures and Extinction: Loss, the Archive, and (Wildlife) Film
Chapter 5
Antarctica, Science, and Exploration: Encounters at the End of the World
Chapter 6
The Nonfiction of YouTube and “Naturecams”: Posthumanism and Reflections on Agency
Chapter 7
In Conclusion: Documentary, Science, and the Umwelt
Notes
Works Cited
Index
List of Illustrations Figure 2.1. Fish flood into the hold in a slivery flow in Raw Herring (2013). Figure 2.2. Shots in Sweetgrass (2009) are composed to draw the eye to the placement of different species in the frame. Figure 2.3. Two boys prepare a donkey to carry a load across a mountain path in Los Herederos (2008). Figure 3.1. A chicken lies on its back, breathing heavily, unable to stand because its frame cannot support its accelerated growth in Food, Inc. (2008). Figure 3.2. A worker trims chicken necks and the visceral is juxtaposed with the hard surfaces of the production line in Our Daily Bread (2005). Figure 3.3. Farmer, Steve Hook, speaks in gentle tones to his prize cow, Ida, in The Moo Man (2012). This is just one instance of his close relationship with the animals on the farm. Figure 3.4. A misty morning with farmer and cows in the fields— The Moo Man (2012) conveys agrarian harmony and the tactile experience of being in the presence of animals. Figure 4.1. Nyla and her baby, Rainbow, are shown nestled among husky puppies. Aligning baby and puppies contributes to the primitivization of the Itivimuit in Nanook of the North (1922). Figure 4.2. In Arctic Tale (2007) Nanu’s mother, we are told, gives her cub a menacing look to drive her away as she cannot find enough food to support both of them in the warming climate. Figure 4.3. The next shot in Arctic Tale (2007) depicts Nanu responding to her mother, stationary for a moment before she bounds off into the snow. Figure 5.1. A male Adélie pengiun lays stones at the female’s feet, preparing a nest in The Great White Silence (1924). Figure 5.2. Stop motion techniques appear to speed up the penguins’ progression to the sea in Frozen Planet (2011). Figure 5.3. The much discussed apparently “disoriented” penguin in Encounters at the End of the World (2007). Figure 6.1. A hawk swoops down to unsettle a drone that has flown nearby and in the process reorients the horizon line of the camera in YouTube clip “Hawk vs. Drone! (Hawk Attacks Quadcopter)” (2014). Figure 6.2. In a YouTube clip titled “Marmot Licks GoPro ” (2014) a marmot approaches the tripod, hesitating for a moment before licking the camera.
Acknowledgments
A number of people have contributed to the writing of this book in a number of different ways. Portions of the book have benefited from specific feedback and on this count my heartfelt thanks go to André Dias, E.J. Cartledge, Guinevere Narraway, Scott Richmond (in his capacity as the editor of a special issue of Film Criticism ) and special thanks to Kelly Donati. Others have offered support, encouragement, and time at crucial moments during the development of the project and for this I thank Therese Davis, Julia Vassilieva, Con Verevis, Rebecca Hill, Lesley Stern, Tania Lewis, and Patrick Smaill. Over the course of writing a number of research assistants have given their time and energy, especially Kirsten Stevens and Rob Letizi. My colleagues in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University have been consistent in offering the intellectual community that is vital for any scholarship to flourish in the present day academy.
The three anonymous reviewers for State University of New York Press read the manuscript with great care and generosity and I greatly appreciate their feedback. Their insights have been vital in bringing the project to its fullest fruition. I would also like to thank Murray Pomerance for his encouragement and careful reading. I thank Alexa Weik von Mossner for organizing the “Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion and Ecocinema” workshop at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich in 2011. This event planted the seed of an idea from which the book grew. It has been an undertaking close to my heart for the past three years and over difficult times.
A version of chapter 3 , titled “New Food Documentary: Animals, Identification and the Citizen Consumer,” has been published in Film Criticism 39.2 (2015): 79–102. Portions of chapter 1 and chapter 2 have been published in an essay, titled “Documentary Film and Animal Modernity in Raw Herring and Sweetgrass ,” in Australian Humanities Review 57 (2014).
Belinda Smaill November 2015
Chapter 1
Introduction
Released in 2005, March of the Penguins ( La Marche de l’empereur ), a French film about the cyclical mating habits of Antarctica’s emperor penguins, became the second highest grossing documentary in cinema history. Grizzly Man was also released in 2005 and it became a breakthrough film of a different kind—it brought the work of German auteur, Werner Herzog, to a wide audience and became one of the most discussed and critically acclaimed documentaries of the decade. While employing very different approaches, the two films share a fascination with nature as an arena for storytelling with animals playing a central role. Herzog began his next documentary, the Oscar winning Encounters at the End of the World (2007) set in Antarctica, with the proclamation that he was not going to “come up with another film about penguins.” The reference to the French documentary was clear to most—penguins had become draw cards of the big (and small) screen.
Although penguins have achieved particular star status, the allure of documentaries focused on animals has extended well beyond this single species. March of the Penguins and Grizzly Man represent two high-profile examples that punctuate a much broader terrain of television and film. Referring to wildlife and nature onscreen, Gregg Mitman makes the case that there is a contemporary “green wave” of film and television, enabled by the popular penchant for “eco-chic” (214), underpinned by not only commercial, but also ethical and environmental concerns. He cites that of the “$631 million in gross revenues earned by 275 documentaries released