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ABSTRACT
This essay explores how a recent controversy about the use of artifice in natural history films is animated by a double fascination – with nature and the moving image – on which the genre has been premised since its formation in the early cinema period. Building on recent scholarly interest in the genre, I use the case of the BBC’s 2014 series Hidden Kingdoms to explore how this fascination is a unifying feature of natural history films that invites us to 1) rethink the genre’s foundational documentary impulse, and the controversies that surround it, in terms of histories of aesthetics, formalism, and modernism in the cinema that might otherwise seem far afield; and 2) to reimagine the genre as a vehicle for reinforcing ‘cinematic’ ways of seeing nature.
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Colin Williamson
Colin Williamson is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Cinema Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He serves on the Executive Committee of Domitor, and as Reviews Editor for Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (ANM). He is the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (2015) and has published in such books and journals as Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (2019), Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (2016), Discourse, ANM, Film History, Leonardo, Early Popular Visual Culture, and The Moving Image, among others. Colin received his PhD from the University of Chicago.