‘You Can’t Make a Film About Mice Just by Going Out into a Meadow and Looking at Mice’: Staging as Knowledge Production in Natural History Film-making

Abstract

Jean-Baptiste Gouyon interrogates one of the most fascinating and controversial aspects of natural film-making: the “faking” of footage that audiences presume to be gathered in natural and untouched environments but which were in fact staged by the film-makers. Focusing attention on the period from the 1970s to the 2000s, Gouyon reveals that such practices were very often new modes of scientific investigation, and were recorded in “making-of” documentaries that detailed the work undertaken by production teams and naturalists. In particular the close relationships that film-makers often formed with the animals they were recording gave new insights into the relationships between the animal and the human, and between different forms of epistemology in natural history.