Abstract
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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