Close Encounters with Nature

Films about nature has long been a popular documentary genre. Originally shown in cinemas – and Sweden has a rich tradition from the silent era and onwards – nature films are these days mostly viewed on TV or on the web. We asked Malin Wahlberg to tell us more.

Nature film is a source of knowledge and excitement, beauty and entertainment. It provides documentation and denomination with scientific legitimacy, but it also and to an equal extent utilises cinematic possibilities for dramatic narration and designed images beyond the reach of the human eye. Nature film can offer insights about animals and ecological diversity and it can suggest inspired and detailed information about plants and creatures we rarely or never experience in real life. As popular science and documentary entertainment, it is a media phenomenon and an image culture related to the illustrated lecture, the science film and the expedition film. Here, nature photography meets documentary and the experimental short film all as one.

Nature film belongs to the wider documentary media landscape, a spin-off of the information film, and has long been in symbiosis with the television nature program and the digital landscape of user-generated images of our time. The spectacular motifs of nature film is reflected in videotaped snapshots such as dramatic fishing adventures, shaky sequences depicting encounters with sharks, crocodiles, snakes or perhaps wild animals that have fared badly and are now heroically rescued. In recent years, the historical connection between protest films and nature films has become increasingly apparent. Film projects drawing attention to the direct impact of the climate crisis on land, at sea and in ecosystems borrow narrative stylistics and poetic expressions from nature filmmaking. Man’s inadequacy in the face of the threats to the environment he himself has caused may for example meet the dizzying time perspective of the primeval forest, or the importance of a special, rare species of lichen (About the Forest, Peter Magnusson, 2021).

Nature film embraces and represents something central to documentary filmmaking as a portrayed film narrative and educational entertainment genre: the significance of chance, the skills of the photographer and the ability of imagination and poetic expression that gives life and meaning to the depicted landscapes and nature events at hand. To an even greater extent than in any other genre, these film narratives are edited from of a very large body of material consisting of takes, retakes and sound recordings; a selection marinated in difficult shooting situations and the time-consuming work of simply waiting for the reclusive animal, the perfect light, or the fleeting moment when the bird of prey makes its dive. Once the selection of sequences is balanced and organized, the poetic treatment is added. An insightful text, the sound editing and the interpretive role of film music are combined with the tone and feeling of the added narrator voice. What would nature film as a television experience be without, for example, Jan Lindblad’s subtle perspective on the greatness of small things, or David Attenborough’s mighty BBC voice? As a film experience, the magical change of scale of the nature film means that the attention that is directed at the underwater worlds or insect life cycles not only offers facts and knowledgeable recognition of unknown realms, but also a meditative dream world to get lost in.

In the early days of cinema, where title cards and live music emphasized the dramaturgy of the images, the combination of spectacular motifs and a dramatised testimony becomes even more apparent. In Abu Markúb och de hundrade elefanter (“Abu Markúb and the Hundred Elephants”, Bengt Berg, 1925) we get to follow events and scenes artfully arranged for the cumbersome tripod camera. The dizzying views and animals of Sudan are in the spotlight, but it’s just as much about Berg’s own adventure and the risks to which he exposed his Sudanese co-workers in the pursuit of the perfect image. When the film had its international premiere in Germany in 1926, it was shown to live music accompaniment with German captions. The pianist always has the power to interpret, to emphasize, to tone down, or to redirect our attention on the screen. Thus, lots of tense silence and tragic notes can accompany the meaningless death of a three-metre-long crocodile because of the film shoot, or the excitement when the elephant herd, as it was alleged, “attacked Bengt who was perched on a wooden ladder in order to film the herd up close.”

Like the scientists who returned from expeditions with lucrative photographic shots, exotic objects and exciting stories, the history of nature filmmaking is also marked by the significant role that media technologies and documentary images played in the white, Western colonization of the world. Not only is the world thus represented in moving images, but it is also created and conquered through the film story’s prevailing gaze through selected image sections and attributed meanings. The all-knowing narrator of the information film, or “lecturer”, is regularly legitimized by the scientist and the truthful claim of the photographic image. Cinema’s colonial history, for example, becomes apparent in old nature films from the Lapland area. In Med Stig Wesslén i Lapplandsfjällen (‘With Stig Wesslén in the Lapland Fells,’ Stig Wesslén, 1940), subtitled “A documentation of the Lapland animal world”, the encounter with the Sami – in the film called “Lapps” or “wilderness lasses” – is presented, as was typical for the time, among the other exotic displays of natural phenomena; such as the reindeer herd, the mountain stream and wild sceneries. The film offers us perspectives that are unreflectively categorised beforehand; human and non-human, “Swedish” or “wild”.

Central to the dramaturgy of nature filmmaking is also the tendency to project social perceptions and human behaviours on aspects of the animals’ unknown communication patterns, experiences and emotions. There’s no limit to the poetic imagination used in these films, while elements of humour and jocularity have contributed to the attraction of nature film as film and television entertainment.

The short The Gull (Arne Sucksdorff, 1944) combines beautiful cinematography from the Stora and Lilla Karlsö islands off Gotland with Sucksdorff’s masterful staging. Through cuts, effective close-ups, Hilding Rosenberg’s music and Willy Peters’ voiceover, the living conditions of birds are depicted in a barren environment and the constant presence of death. At the centre of the drama is a colony of murres, the odd razorbill, a “defiant” grebe with “84 stolen chicks” and the immediate threat to their eggs and newly hatched offspring that have given the film its title, i.e. the gull. This threat is typically portrayed as an individual and a cruel phenomenon. The crosscutting between the gull’s light predatory gaze and the cute “fluff balls”, or the lone chick who hesitates for a long time on the rock shelf in front of the “dizzying depths of the cliff”, becomes typical natural scenes of beauty and violence. The cinematic experience is perfected in the gap between what is shown and what the scenes emotionally evoke. The symbolism of this struggle between “perpetrators and victims” was so overwhelming that some interpreters saw the film as an allegory on Nazism.

At the dramatic nesting site of the murres, the camera pans over the limestone and the “steep time sections” of the rock wall. A close-up reveals bedrock and fossils, which the narrator emphasizes through suggestive words about “the stalks of the sea lilies” that have solidified “in the middle of a rolling motion”, or “coral bowls” that lived here “300 million years ago”. Rosenberg’s string arrangements go from quiet nostalgia to dramatic thunder: “The land is raised and the rocks crumble.” As in other Sucksdorff films, there are also distinct elements of natural sound recorded directly on the site: the waves that powerfully hit the rocky shore and the shrill sound of the bird colony enhance the more lingering views and the powerful contrasts between light and dark in the monochrome cinematography.

Knowledge and emotion, directed attention and a poetic ear are qualities of nature film, which at best can remind us that man is not necessarily the centre of everything. In nature films, attention is turned to the richness of the species and life stories in a microcosm we rarely give a thought or which we may not even know exists. It does not even have to be about breathtaking sea depths or unknown primeval forests; instead perhaps the stage for the spectacle is the birch tree outside our own house. In Light Year (Mikael Kristersson, 2008) the camera and the microphone are directed at “the giant hawthorn”, “the gnarled apple tree” and “the life of the wasps inside the birch tree trunk”. The cyclical rhythm of life in sync with the passage of the seasons is attentively reflected in the form of the film narrative and the time-span of the extended shoot. Kristersson’s films represent nature filmmaking as an innovative cinematic experiment. Here, the commentary is replaced by an uncompromising nature film aesthetic where silence can be heard and where the camera is given time to explore worlds beyond the human eye. It is common to talk about the spectacular moments of adventure and excitement in nature films, but at least as characteristic is the intensity with which quiet events are transformed into a captivating pageant. In a cinematic equivalent of nature poetry, the quote is combined as a respectful gesture with the wait and the tuning in of processes of life and existences to appreciate and to cherish.

(published in Swedish in September 2021 and in English in January 2022, translation by Jan Lumholdt)