2.3 (July 2002): 273-288
© 2002 National Communication Association

Nature on Screen

Daniel J. Philippon

Derek Bousé. Wildlife Films. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. xv + 280 pages. Chronology, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

Gregg Mitman. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. viii + 263 pages. Notes and index. $29.95.

David Ingram. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 2000. x + 182. Notes, filmography, bibliography, and index. $64.95.

American attitudes toward the environment have traditionally been traced to several sources, including books of nature writing and environmental advocacy, such as Walden and Silent Spring; landscape paintings and photographs, such as those of the Hudson River School and Ansel Adams; and, of course, people’s primary experiences of the nonhuman world, whether it be in a backyard garden or a national park, an urban zoo or a wilderness campsite. Compared to these much-discussed subjects, films and television shows about nature and wildlife have received surprisingly little critical attention.

Fortunately, three recent books have begun to fill this gap, offering welcome insights into the aesthetic, scientific, political, and economic issues that accompany the representation of nature through motion-picture technology. Wildlife Films, by Derek Bousé, is the most focused of these three studies, looking specifically at wildlife and natural history films as a genre and asking how genre conventions have both helped and hindered science education and nature conservation. Reel Nature, by Gregg Mitman, covers much the same ground as Wildlife Films but with a broader brush, approaching its subject from the disciplines of environmental history, history of science, and cultural studies and placing the history of natural history films into the center of contemporary debates about the idea of wilderness. Finally, Green Screen, by David Ingram, takes an even wider view, examining not only wildlife films but also films about wild and cultivated lands and the humans who exploit and conserve them, arguing that the wide range of films that could be called “environmental” engages an equally wide range of contradictory discourses.

Whether considered wildlife films, natural history films, or environmental films, motion pictures about the natural world are at least two orders of magnitude removed from what we might call “first nature,” the world of primary human experience. The initial recordings could be said to represent “second nature,” a reflection of the world from a particular perspective, much like Thoreau’s journal entries reflect his perception of the environment surrounding Walden Pond. The finished film, spliced and overdubbed, could likewise be said to represent “third nature,” existing at a further remove from second nature, much like Walden is the heavily edited product of Thoreau’s journals. Unlike Walden, though, and unlike the photographs and visual art with which the American environment is also identified, motion pictures add the important variables of camera motion and a soundtrack. They also differ in their method of delivery, which is in a theater or on a television screen to a mass audience. Products original to the twentieth century, motion pictures also reflect the demands of the sophisticated industry that has grown up around the production and distribution of mass culture. In other words, as Derek Bousé observes in the introduction to Wildlife Films, “How film and television depict the natural world often has far less to do with science or real outdoor experience than with media economics, established production practices, viewers’ expectations, and the ways each of these influences the others” (1). This fact—that film is no more transparent a medium than the printed word or image—is the major claim made by all of these books about nature on screen. How they go about illustrating and deepening this central observation depends on the discipline and methodology of each particular author.

For Derek Bousé, who is both a filmmaker and an academic, wildlife films are interesting examples of a particular genre of film, one whose conventions are shaped more by the aesthetics, economics, and technology of filmmaking than by the interests of environmental science or politics. The strengths of Wildlife Films thus reside in its attention to the formal aspects of wildlife filmmaking, the production demands of a competitive industry, and the details of film history. (Bousé received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his M.A. thesis on “The History and Tradition of Wildlife Films in America” and his Ph.D. dissertation on “The Wilderness Documentary: Film, Video, and the Visual Rhetoric of American Environmentalism.” Wildlife Films is based on both of these texts.)

Wildlife Films contains six chapters, the first being an overview of what Bousé calls “The Problem of Images,” or the nature of what I have called “third nature.”  Film and television, writes Bousé, “are about movement, action, and dynamism; nature generally is not. Film and television also have little tolerance for what is normal and usual in life, thriving instead on what is rare and unusual” (4). As a result, Bousé observes, “the image of nature found in wildlife and natural history television has been molded to fit the medium” (4). The issue, of course, is a familiar one: is realism a reproduction or is it artifice? Wisely, Bousé describes wildlife film as “an entertaining art that operates according to its own codes and conventions” (7), and he expresses more concern about the cumulative effects of films’ artifice upon an unwitting public than about the accuracy of their reproduction. “The question,” he emphasizes, “is whether, or to what extent, audience members recognize” the codes and conventions of a wildlife film (11). To ensure that his readers have a better understanding of those conventions, Bousé catalogs what he sees as the chief tendencies of “blue chip” wildlife films, which include their depiction of megafauna; a background of magnificent scenery; the presence of a dramatic storyline; and the absence of such subjects as science in practice, controversial issues, historical reference points, and people (14-15).

In particular, Bousé argues that wildlife films are closer to dramatic narratives than to documentaries, claiming that, “in wildlife films it is nearly always story that matters most” (36). He illustrates this, for example, through a detailed discussion of the close-up, which he claims is used in wildlife films “to create characters, to promote feelings of intimacy and involvement with them, and to integrate them into a narrative structure” (29). Close-ups, Bousé explains, were possible only after the 1920s, when the introduction of the telephoto lens enabled filmmakers to simulate a physical proximity to creatures it would otherwise have been impossible or imprudent to obtain. Close-ups not only allowed filmmakers to isolate one animal from another and thus provide each with an individual identity; they also made possible a new editing technique—now taken for granted—that enables unrelated look-offs, point-of-view shots, and reaction shots to be assembled into what appears to be a continuous narrative. Such technological advances affected other aspects of filmmaking as well, such as the need to fabricate the sounds of wildlife in the studio. Since the telephoto lens was positioned at a considerable distance from its subject, recording the sounds that actually accompanied the images became virtually impossible. “When you’re filming with a long-focus lens,” Bousé quotes David Attenborough as saying, “you can’t record the real sounds; many of those horrible bone-crunching noises are actually done by a man in a studio, carefully crunching bone in front of a microphone” (32).

Bousé’s second chapter, the longest in the book, offers “A Brief History of a Neglected Tradition,” tracing the development of wildlife films from Eadweard Muybridge’s locomotion studies of Leland Stanford’s racehorse through the formation of several categories of wildlife films, including the safari film, the scientific-educational film, and the narrative adventure film. As in the previous chapter, Bousé is at his best here when describing the effect of changing technologies on the evolution of wildlife filmmaking, such as when he observes that because mid-nineteenth-century still photographers had trouble getting animals to stay in place during the several seconds of exposure time their films required, most photographers ended up taking pictures of dead animals instead. Life, he notes, “was the very thing that both motivated and hindered” these early efforts at wildlife photography (40). While the many names of filmmakers, film titles, and release dates Bousé provides in this “brief history” will be of certain use to film scholars, general readers may find themselves overwhelmed by so much detail.

In the remainder of the book, Bousé turns to three of the most prominent issues in wildlife film criticism: the relationship of fact and fiction in nature representation, the classic narrative model used by most wildlife films, and the family romance at the core of that model. Chapter 3, “Science and Storytelling,” most reveals the book’s academic roots, as it consists largely of a historical survey of fact and fiction in nature representation, the definitive treatment of which appeared in Ralph Lutts’s The Nature Fakers (1990). In this chapter, Bousé makes an observation similar to one David Ingram makes in Green Screen, noting that wildlife films “are the products of a vastly complex, heavily mediated global culture,” and as such “can give rise to a number of different ‘readings,’” which both reinforce and challenge dominant social values (94). Unfortunately, Bousé does not develop this observation in as much detail as Ingram by considering the various social functions these films might serve. Instead, he maintains his focus on the ways in which wildlife films consist of “traditional narratives that are repackaged for sale to popular audiences, . . . elements of folk cultural forms that have been appropriated and offered back to us at a price” (129).

In particular, in chapter 4, Bousé surveys examples of what he calls the “classic model” of wildlife films, which features versions of either the “separation-initiation-return” structure Joseph Campbell identified as the myth of the hero in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) or the “journey-struggle-exaltation” structure Northrop Frye discussed as the form of the romance in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Bousé traces its presence through Disney’s Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), True-Life Adventures (1948-60), and other films; yet, as he eloquently points out, such structures “may all be among the categories by which we make sense of the natural world, but we project them onto it just as surely as we look into the stars and see a giant dipper” (129). Bousé expands on this idea in chapter 5, exploring how wildlife films reflect a range of family values, social mores, and behavioral norms. “Whether or not it is appropriate to apply such notions to animals has seemed to matter less than that they offer audiences a way of making sense of things, and a vision of a world in which things do make sense,” Bousé observes. “What makes popular film and television ‘popular,’ after all, is that they do not pose concerted challenges to deeply held values, or to beliefs about the way the world works” (152). Such an observation may lead one to explore, as Bousé does, the particular moral orientations through which animal portrayals are almost always filtered, but it may also lead one to reflect, as Bousé fortunately also does, on the pragmatic reasons for an emphasis on family life in wildlife films. “Species with a unified family life most resembling those of their television audiences,” Bousé notes, “are simply easier to film than are nomadic creatures” (166). In keeping with his belief that a discussion of the representation of nature on screen can never be divorced from the technology that makes it possible, in his final chapter Bousé surveys the future of wildlife film and television, pointing to the challenges posed by high-definition television (HDTV) and the image manipulation made possible by digital technology.

In an appendix, Bousé provides a chronology of highlights from the history of wildlife and natural history films that, to some extent, reflects the strengths and weaknesses of his book as a whole. On the one hand, the detail of Bousé’s appendix reflects the scholarly thoroughness that makes Wildlife Films the most comprehensive book of its kind. On the other hand, that same attention to detail prevents Wildlife Films from placing its subject into the broader cultural and environmental context it so clearly demands. If it is true, for instance, as Bousé declares on the penultimate page of the book, that “there is little evidence that the state of wildlife and the natural world today is directly related to wildlife film and television” (192), the reader is left to wonder why anyone should care about wildlife film and television at all.

Fortunately, Gregg Mitman asks and answers this question extremely well in Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film—and with a prose style that, for all of his attention to narrative, Bousé cannot match. A professor of the History of Medicine, History of Science, and Science Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Mitman is especially well positioned to place film history in dialogue with the history of American popular culture. His previous book, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950 (1992), applied a similar method to the history of science, examining how the disciplines of evolution and ecology were shaped by the social and political concerns of early twentieth-century American society. In Reel Nature Mitman examines the way nature films, “like naturalistic displays found in animal theme parks, museums, and zoos, have sought to capture and recreate an experience of unspoiled nature” by blending “scientific research and vernacular knowledge, education and entertainment, authenticity and artifice” (3). Mitman’s select focus is on the relationship of wildlife films and the idea of wilderness, and he is especially interested in how categories of human difference—such as “race,” class, and gender—affect this relationship. (He pays particular attention to class, noting, for instance, that in the early twentieth century, wildlife films were “patronized by an expanding urban middle and upper class who were drawn to depictions of distant nature as well as its conservation” [3].) Unlike in Wildlife Films, in Reel Nature the films themselves are only part of a much larger story about the representation of nature; Mitman relies less on the films’ content and technological features and more on their historical and biographical origins and impacts to tell his story. Filled with case studies and based on extensive archival research, Wildlife Films leaves no doubt as to why we should care about wildlife films. “Whether crafted to elicit thrills or to preserve and educate audiences about the real-life drama of threatened wildlife, nature films then and now reveal much about the yearnings of Americans to both be close to nature and yet distinctly apart,” Mitman writes (4).

Organized chronologically as well as topically, the eight chapters of Reel Nature begin slightly later in time than those of Wildlife Films, starting not in the late nineteenth century with photography but in the early twentieth with the advent of silent films. (There is overlap between the two books, but Reel Nature is on the whole much less detailed, intended for the intelligent general reader as much as for the academic specialist.) In chapter 1, “Hunting with the Camera,” Mitman surveys the tension between authenticity and artifice evident in the early hunting documentaries of Paul Rainey, William Douglas Burden, and others, while in chapter 2, “Science and Showmanship on the Silent Screen,” he explores the ways in which this tension developed into the dueling demands of scientific accuracy and commercial success in the later travelogue-expedition films made by Burden, Merian Cooper, and Martin and Osa Johnson. Mitman quotes the Hollywood writer Julian Johnson, who observed that, just as the motion picture “depends for its life upon mass production, a picture equally depends for its life upon mass favor.” Audiences, Johnson wrote, had “to be catered to, to be fostered, to be cajoled.” As a result, Mitman notes, “In the interests of mass appeal and economic profit, nature had to conform to the conventions of Hollywood entertainment” (54). In Simba (1928), for instance, a film about lions in Africa, the Johnsons spliced scenes of an actual Maasai lion hunt into scenes of Lumbwa spearing lions that they had staged for the camera. But what distinguishes Reel Nature is the attention it pays to the reception history of such films. While the audience for Roosevelt in Africa (1910) varied along class lines, with working-class viewers looking for amusement and middle-class audiences expecting edification, the reception of the wildlife film Chang (1927) varied according to geography, faring poorly in rural areas, where residents had ready access to animals, but well in cities, where the back-to-nature movement was in full swing.

Chapters 3 and 4 of Reel Nature invite comparison to chapters 4 and 5 of Wildlife Films because in each of them Mitman studies the impact of motion picture technology upon scientific research and wildlife conservation efforts. In chapter 3, “Zooming in on Animals’ Private Lives,” Mitman observes that film provided a means for scientists to study animal behavior, particularly animal motion and visual communication. But film technology tended to promote certain types of research over others, since “the organisms chosen as model systems for studying behavior were also photogenic ones,” such as the black-crowned night heron or great-crested grebe (72). Even more than Bousé, Mitman is concerned about the multiple and often conflicting effects of film on both scientific and general audiences. One result of the development of motion pictures, Mitman notes, was that “a sense of the dramatic prevailed over the mundane,” even for scientists. “The experiential knowledge that united scientist and photographer—the endless hours spent in the field, immersed in the senses, waiting and watching for that rare moment to capture on film—was left on the editing room floor” (61). In chapter 4, “Wildlife Conservation through a Wide-Angle Lens,” Mitman extends this question further, asking whether “the recreation of nature in zoos, in the national parks, and on the motion picture screen [was] turning nature into artifice or rendering a public service in the interests of environmental education, recreation, and research.” One of the strengths of Reel Nature is Mitman’s awareness of historical contingency; he notes that the answer to this question “depended on the observer’s focal point and whether humans, in the balance of nature, were inside or outside the panoramic frame” (87).

In chapters 5 and 6, Mitman applies this perspectival approach to the two most influential wildlife interpreters of modern times: Walt Disney and Marlin Perkins. In his detailed examination of Disney’s True-Life Adventures, Mitman observes, like Bousé, that Disney “presented a sentimental version of animals in the wild that sanctified the universal ‘natural’ family as a cornerstone of the American way of life” (111). But Mitman’s analysis cuts deeper, tracing the success of Disney’s films not only to his embrace of what the photographer Lois Crisler called “nuggets”—rare action sequences that captured what Disney called the “seeming personality of an animal”—but also to his involvement in 1950s containment culture, which naturalized Judeo-Christian morality and the domestic ideals of the nuclear family (119). Most notably, Mitman sees both the technological and ideological components of Disney’s films as reflecting “a fantasy of pristine wilderness” that cut both ways for conservationists (108). “Environmental organizations may have appropriated Disney for their own ends,” Mitman observes, “but behind Uncle Walt lay a major corporation that contributed substantially to the creation of the very mass society that leaders of the conservation movement assailed” (124). In Marlin Perkins, the genial television host of Zoo Parade (1950-57) and Wild Kingdom (1963-82), Disney’s version of pristine nature found a second advocate, one who helped to further the domestication of nature by making wild animals seem more like pets and distant lands seem more like tourist attractions. Through television, Mitman writes, “Perkins globalized the work that Disney began” (154).

Mitman’s two final chapters offer case studies that address the international implications of wildlife films on a particular sea creature (the dolphin) and a particular non-Western continent (Africa). Chapter 7, “A Ringside Seat at the Making of a Pet Star,” explores how “the dolphin’s affectionate image was made, not bestowed by nature, as a result of the entwined and sometimes conflicting interests of science, the military, environmental organizations, and the commercial film and entertainment industries” (158). In the book’s most detailed attempt at explaining why we should care about wildlife films, Mitman recounts the dolphin’s transformation from its early twentieth-century identification as the “pig fish” or “herring hog” to its current glamour-species status as a playful pet, a change that was largely the work of Marine Studios in Florida. Similarly, in chapter 8, he recounts the ways in which wildlife films helped to transform “seemingly unproductive lands in developing nations . . . into gainful recreational economies, . . . fulfilling the dreams of Americans to experience a type of nature not found in their backyards” (181). The problem, of course, was that everyplace is someone’s backyard, and by representing Africa as “an animal paradise, devoid of human inhabitants,” wildlife films such as Below the Sahara (1953) “reinforced the perceived need to exclude human inhabitants from African national parks and game reserves” (195-96).

Given the similarities between Reel Nature and Wildlife Films, which are especially apparent in the brief epilogue to Reel Nature, it is important to note that Mitman’s book appeared before Bousé’s, which may account for some of the overlap. Mitman, like Bousé, cites the case of Marty Stouffer, the filmmaker who produced the television series Wild America (1982-96) and who was accused in 1996 of staging scenes in his nature documentaries. The charges made national news (Bousé exaggerates their impact as eliciting “a wave of critical indignation” [87]), but their meaning goes well beyond the issue of “nature faking” for profit, as Mitman nicely articulates.

Our uneasiness with the exploitation of nature for financial gain reveals how much we wish nature to appear pristine, set apart from the hands of man. Nature films, naturalistic habitat displays, and animal theme parks like Disney’s Animal Kingdom capitalize on our desire to be close to nature, yet curiously removed from it. By making animals into spectacle, rather than beings we engage with in work and play, nature films and other recreations of nature reinforce this dichotomy of humans and nature. In nature as spectacle, the animal kingdom exists solely to be observed, objectified, and enjoyed. We have our world and they have theirs. This voyeurism precludes any meaningful exchange because we remain at a physically and emotionally safe distance, far removed from the shared labor of animals and humans, whose interactions have made such vicarious experiences possible. We no longer work with animals; instead, we predominantly watch them. And film—as a technology of art, science, and entertainment, but above all vision—overwhelmingly has come to mediate our relationship with animals and the natural world. (206)

Such claims represent the best of what humanistic studies can do, which is to place detailed, well-researched analyses of particular cultural forms into broader contexts that have meaning for academic and nonacademic audiences alike. In Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, David Ingram has a topic that could allow him to do just that, but the price of the book, which is available only in a cloth edition for $64.95, ensures that his study will reach only major libraries and the most devoted academic readers. This is unfortunate, since Green Screen is written, for the most part, in an accessible prose style, and many of the films it analyzes would be familiar to general readers. While most of the films and television shows discussed in Wildlife Films and Reel Nature are now either dated or obscure—so much so that both books would have benefited from a DVD of related film clips—those discussed in Green Screen are recent and well-known, having been made since the 1980s by the global, multimedia conglomerates that make up the “New Hollywood.” Despite its contemporary focus, Green Screen most resembles Wildlife Films in approach, in that it is primarily an academic study, a survey composed of a series of close readings. Like Bousé, Ingram is a filmmaker who is also an academic, a lecturer in American Studies at Brunel University. Also like Bousé, Ingram is hesitant to speculate about the effects of films on “actual” nature, claiming that such a concern is “beyond the scope of this study” (72). (He quotes Martin Lewis, who argued in Green Delusions that the cause of environmental damage is much more readily found in the application of bad technologies than in ideas, particularly the idea of human distinctiveness from the nonhuman world [35]). Yet by failing to speculate about the effects of the ideas advanced in environmental films—without the kind of “real world” engagement Reel Nature gives us—Green Screen, like Wildlife Films, leaves the reader asking why anyone would care about environmental films at all.

According to Ingram, Hollywood environmentalist movies matter because they are “ideological agglomerations that draw on and perpetuate a range of contradictory discourses concerning the relationship between human beings and the environment” (viii). While this is a good, safe thesis—who could possibly disagree?—it does little to advance our understanding of what “New Hollywood” movies really mean. The most trenchant critique in the book comes not from Ingram but from Andrew Ross, who observes that Disney CEO Michael Eisner earned “over $200 million from salary and stock options in 1996, which, at $97,600 per hour, amounted to 325,000 times the hourly wage of the Haitian workers who made Pocahontas, Lion King, and Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirts and pajamas, and who sewed on Mickey Mouse’s ears” (21). To be sure, Ingram is aware that Hollywood’s environmental sensibilities “are always likely to be moderated by its vested interest in promoting commodity consumption as a social good” (181), but he does not do nearly enough to address this fundamental aspect of Hollywood as a capitalistic image-making industry. The closest he comes is observing that such films as FernGully (1992), The Lion King (1994), and Pocahontas (1995) all evoke “an ecological rhetoric of nature to put in place a conservative social and political ideology” (43).

In terms of subject matter, Ingram certainly deserves credit for broadening the field of environmental film studies from a focus on wildlife and natural history films to an analysis of several different kinds of environmentalist films. Much like the recent turn in ecocriticism from representations of nature in nature writing to discussions of the nonhuman world in almost every kind of written text, Green Screen looks not just at wild animals in Hollywood cinema (the subject of the book’s second part) but also at images of wilderness (in part 1) and land use and development (in part 3). The book is still limited by its definition of an “environmentalist” film as “a work in which an environmental issue is raised explicitly and is central to the narrative,” but Ingram recognizes that such films are only part of a spectrum that also includes “the vast majority of films in which representations of the environment serve merely as background to the central human drama” (vii). The “merely” is the sticking point here, since the relegation of the environment to “background” is significant in itself, but a critic must start somewhere, and Ingram’s focus is broader than most.

Ingram begins Green Screen with an introduction that explores, like the first chapter of Wildlife Films, how the conventions of realism and melodrama have shaped the approach of Hollywood to environmental issues. As Ingram explains, “popular accusations of misrepresentation presuppose a realist interpretive context, in which a film is judged against a particular conception of reality, and is found wanting” (1-2). The majority of Hollywood movies, of course, employ not realism, but melodrama, which occasions two particular criticisms: “Firstly, the tendency of melodrama to construct environmental issues as individualized, Manichean conflicts between one-dimensional villains and heroes is seen to simplify the complex, often ambiguous allocation of blame and responsibility in such matters. Secondly, the closure effected at the end of a melodramatic fiction, when the hero resolves the narrative problem through decisive action, may appear too pat and glib a response to environmental crises which, in the real world outside the cinema, do not have their loose ends neatly tied up” (2). Linda Williams, whom Ingram quotes, sees melodrama differently, finding in it the aesthetic means for the “dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action” (177). But even Williams’ articulation of the strengths of melodrama reveals its simultaneous weakness: its displacement of environmental concerns with human social relationships, “thereby making those concerns conform to Hollywood’s commercial interest in anthropocentric, human interest stories,” as Ingram indicates (10).

Part 1 of Green Screen, in which Ingram surveys the idea of wilderness in Hollywood cinema, opens with a chapter on the discourses of nature and environmentalism, summarizing the difference between mainstream and radical environmentalism and exploring the discourses at work in three films: Valley of the Giants (1927), Bambi, and The Lion King. This introduction is followed by a chapter on the cinematography of wilderness landscapes, which blends Mitman’s concern with the social construction of nature with Bousé’s interest in the technology of film. One of the strongest readings in the book appears here, when Ingram explores Phillippe Rousselot’s Oscar®-winning cinematography for A River Runs Through It (1992), noting that “the cinematic construction of natural landscape as pristine is based on an aesthetics of exclusion, that omits from landscape images all signs of human intervention in nature, such as roads, buildings, walls, machinery, telegraph wires, and litter. Film aesthetics in this way continue the processes of selection and idealization that shaped earlier forms of landscape imagery, from paintings, dioramas and stereoscopes to popular photography at the start of the twentieth century. Nature tends to be shown only at its pristine best, a tourist gaze from which what is undesirable or ugly is omitted” (26). Bousé and Mitman both offer more extensive treatments of their subjects, but Ingram is clear that he intends no more than a survey in Green Screen, one he hopes will “indicate directions for further research” (ix). Thus, the remainder of part 1 features individual chapters that outline some of the ways in which gender issues, ecological Indians, and Amazonian rain forests are represented in film.

Part 2, which concerns wild animals in film, most resembles Wildlife Films and Reel Nature in subject, but Ingram’s focus is on representations of wildlife in films meant primarily for entertainment, rather than the scientific-educational films discussed by Bousé and Mitman. Ingram expands on his previous discussion of the ecological Indian in the first chapter of this section, which concerns North American anti-hunting narratives, noting that just as filmmakers tend to mythologize native peoples as having a more harmonious relationship with nature, they also tend to represent native hunters as spiritual beings whose killing is ecologically benign (as opposed to white men, whose hunting is seen as predatory [74]). Two of the following chapters on North American ocean fauna and African wildlife compare most closely to Mitman’s final two chapters, the first of which Ingram cites, although Green Screen lacks the historical and biographical depth of Reel Nature. An intermediate chapter exploring the changing images of wolves and bears is a helpful contribution to the literature, but as with many of Ingram’s chapters, it could have benefited from some introductory or closing remarks. A brief introduction does precede all the chapters in this section, but each individual chapter could be better organized.

Of the book’s three parts, the last—on “Development and the Politics of Land Use”—may be the most compelling, as it concerns films that address, in Ingram’s words, “the effects that the processes of modernity have had on the land and its peoples” (139). In other words, its subject is everyday life: not the wilderness or wild creatures of parts 1 and 2, but the struggles over land use that characterize much of day-to-day life for those living in the urbanized, industrialized West. After another short introduction, Ingram begins by comparing representations of the country and the city, looking at cattle ranching, family farming, and urban power in such films as Chinatown (1974), Days of Heaven (1978), and The River (1984). A creative but brief chapter on “the ecology of automobile culture” follows, exploring films about the quest for fuel, such as On Deadly Ground (1994), and about critics of the automobile industry, such as Tucker (1988). A final chapter on nuclear power looks in detail at The China Syndrome (1978) and Silkwood (1983). As Ingram points out, all the films in this section not only dramatize, but also “displace, elide and mystify” the power relations involved in land use conflicts in the United States—a fact that depends not only on the conventions of realism and melodrama, which Ingram acknowledges, but also on the film industry’s itself being a product of the very same forces of modernity whose conflicts it seeks to dramatize, which Ingram doesn’t address in nearly enough detail.

Despite their individual weaknesses, taken together these books go a long way toward filling the gap in scholarship regarding the representation of nature on screen. What remains to be addressed, and what may always remain unanswered, is the central dilemma of communication in any medium: how can we share our private experiences with one another? How can I—as director, cinematographer, or sound editor—convey my “vision” about the environment in film? And how can you—as viewer—possibly understand what I am trying to say? A related, and equally important, question is: how can we share a common experience, a public history, if our social and cultural differences determine that none of us will ever perceive the same thing—whether it be the environment or an environmental film—in the same way as another? If films about the environment are not one but two orders of magnitude removed from “first nature”; if they are complicated further by video and audio technologies; if they come to us as a mass cultural form on a theater or television screen; and if they arrive heavily mediated by the interests of a multi-billion-dollar industry; how much more difficult are all of these questions to answer? While film may be no more transparent a medium than written words or static images, its opacity is surely unique, and if we are even to begin to understand its power—and ultimately one another—we had best pay close attention to what each of these books is trying to tell us.

Daniel J. Philippon is assistant professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Lewis, Martin W. Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992.

Lutts, Ralph H. The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1990.

Mitman, Gregg. The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. 1854. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.