If there is one area of the film business where Britain has always retained an
enviable reputation, that is the natural history or wildlife film. As
soon as pictures could move, naturalists were desperate to capture on film the
subjects of their obsession - birds, bees, flowers, animals and plants of all
kinds. Pioneers such as Oliver Pike, Percy Smith, F. Martin Duncan and J.C.
Bee-Mason invented the genre, invented their own equipment and methodology,
developed techniques and braved the elements to capture images that still
fascinate us today. All three had long and fascinating careers as filmmakers and
effectively launched the genre that eventually led to such pinnacles of
achievement as Planet Earth (BBC, 2006-).
The first views of animals on film in the 1890s cannot really be described as
natural history or wildlife films. These were principally views of captive
animals, sporting events, hunt gatherings, parades, agricultural shows, farming
processes, zoo films and animal acts, where the cameraman was photographing an
existing spectacle. Film technology was not sufficiently developed in the 1890s
to cope with anything more than this. The length of film (less than a minute)
would not allow for the patient recording of the unpredictable movements of wild
animals, and there were issues too with focus and manoeuvrability. The noise of
the camera was another problem when filming nervous wildlife, and similar
methods had to be employed as during the transition to sound film.
The first British film featuring animals in a deliberate set up was made by
William K. Dickson for his Biograph Company in London in December 1899, and
featured a fight between a tarantula and a scorpion - although arguably this was
an opportunistic film of an existing animal act. The first deliberate attempt to
portray wildlife on film was Charles Urban's 1903 Unseen World series, drawing
mainly on the talents of sequence photographer and lecturer F. Martin Duncan.
The series dealt primarily with microscopic creatures delighting in such names
as Volvox Globators or Rotifers, mostly delivered straight but some with a
surrounding narrative (based on the 1901 W.R. Booth trick film) of a scientist
having lunch and examining his cheese under a microscope to find it crawling
with mites. The mites were real, and this microscope shot is all that now
survives of the film.
Urban's personal mission to use film for education was an important factor in
his fostering the careers of wildlife filmmakers such as Percy Smith, and in
1907 he developed the Kineto brand specifically to promote scientific and travel
subjects. Oliver Pike, an unusually 'driven' nature photographer with technical
flair, made his own film In Birdland (1907), which played at the Palace Theatre
in London for six weeks and sold an impressive 100 prints. Pike was picked up by
Pathé and contracted to make several films with considerable investment and high
production values including beautifully subtle stencil colouring, for
distribution all over the world. These set a high standard, and must have had
considerable influence on other filmmakers.
These first natural history filmmakers seem to share several traits: a
passion for wildlife and the natural world from an early age, technical
inventiveness and competence as well as knowledge and, often, physical courage
(Oliver Pike, for example, relates tales of filming seabirds from an overhanging
cliff). Reflected in the autobiographies and writings which accompany some of
the films is a view that this genre of filmmaking has a 'boy's own' quality,
conflating healthy outdoor pursuits, adventure, hunting, exploration and fame.
J.C. Bee-Mason's films of the Arctic and the 'Green Hell' jungles of Bolivia are
indeed exploration films during which he nearly always forgets about the human
explorers in favour of the wildlife he encounters. The very act of capturing the
glories of nature on film is a noble endeavour and underlying this is the
filmmakers' absolute conviction that the public would want to see the resulting
images. They were not wrong.
Nature films had a long shelf life and were very popular. Moreover the
British filmmakers over long careers developed a 'voice', a mode of expression
that was intimate, personal (the films are nearly always one man talking as if
to one audience member) and respectful. The hushed voices employed by
contemporary naturalist broadcasters, from Sir David Attenborough to Bill Oddie,
as they describe some fascinating species is a development of the same approach.
The coming of sound led to a slight hiatus in this style. The sound track to
Magic Myxies (1931) experimented with a light-hearted, populist and slightly
jovial tone, which was quickly slapped down by the educationalists, and although
the anthropomorphic tendency creeps back in occasionally, this is, in Britain at
least, generally greeted with disapproval. The personal and authoritative style
of nature filmmaking was here to stay, and all of the efforts of global players
such as Disney could not change it.
Bryony Dixon
|
