Wildlife Documentaries: From Classical Forms to Reality TV

For nearly eighty years, filmed images of the natural world conformed to the classic documentary aesthetic: Such images were perceived to be an expansion of human vision, a means of entering into a world that was invisible to the human eye. Today, the impulse to document nature is augmented by the much higher stakes endeavor of "preserving" animal life in a virtual world. Looking over the precipice of an earth depopulated of its wildlife, the goal of nature filmmakers becomes the capture of animals, at least in images, so that society and science have a record of what was lost.