Film Lecturing On Behalf Of The National Audubon Society: Roger Tory Peterson's Wild America

Starting in 1943, and for the next four decades, the National Audubon Society promoted a seasonal film lecture series, the Audubon Screen Tours, to members of bird clubs, youth groups, natural history societies, social clubs, museums, and academic departments.¹ The Screen Tours represent a case study in functional or "useful cinema" as defi ned by Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, wherein "cameras, film and projector are taken up and deployed—beyond questions of art and entertainment—in order to satisfy organizational demands and objectives, that is, to do something in particular."² That "something" entailed nationalizing the National Audubon Society via the "branch plan" and expanding the organization's focus beyond bird preservation with the goal of inspiring in increasingly suburbanized Americans a mass consciousness regarding the conservation of soil, water, plants, and wildlife.³

The success of the Screen Tours established a ready market for 16mm color natural history films, prompting more than forty nature lovers from all walks of life to get into filmmaking.⁴ Screen Tour participants produced their own films, on their own dime. They worked on a shoestring budget and were amateurs in the true sense of the word: motivated by love rather than money. "For this reason some of the films may have lacked a high degree of professionalism," admitted renowned bird artist and field guide author Roger Tory Peterson, a Screen Tour participant.⁵ Amateurism in filmmaking is typically associated with small-gauge home movies of the point-and-shoot variety, but Screen Tour films were exhibited to public audiences beyond the home and might therefore be considered "advanced amateur" films, in accordance with Charles Tepperman's definition.⁶ Broadening the scope, we might say that Screen Tour filmmakers worked in the "community mode" rather than "home mode" or "mass mode" of production as described by Ryan Shand, given that they exhibited their advanced amateur films in "ambivalent" spaces between the home and commercial movie theater.⁷

Although many of the Screen Tour films are now likely lost to history, those of Roger Tory Peterson, ornithologist Olin Sewall Pettingill Jr., and naturalist Fran William Hall are archived in the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, New York.⁸ The films are composed of pleasingly picturesque shots of birds, animals, flowers, trees, insects, landscapes, geological formations, and other scenic wonders. Like home movies produced before the advent of synchronized sound, the films are silent, largely dependent for their meaning on the contributions of the lecturers who produced and narrated them.

Screen Tour lecturers produced their own films but are referred to as "speakers" rather than filmmakers in the National Audubon Society business records. The implication is that the Tours were "performer oriented" rather than "film oriented," a mode of exhibition Rick Altman associates with cinema in its formative years, when films were incorporated "like props" in a live theatrical performance.⁹ Perhaps more pertinent than the analogy with early cinema exhibition is the mode of "pastoral exhibition" identified by Ronald Greene as prominent in nontheatrical, educational film exhibition, wherein a cultural authority guides the audience in their experience of watching a film.¹⁰ Here film is less a theatrical prop than a "moral technology," with the lecturer acting as a model for imitation, extracting value from the movie that exceeds its semiotic and narrative content and instilling in audience members the proper moral disposition toward the film and its contents.¹¹ The concept of "exhibition as performance" championed by Rick Altman and expanded upon by Tom Gunning allows us to understand the Screen Tours as performance art comprising not only the film(s) but also a lecturer and audience.¹² According to Gunning, it is "the lecturer's role as performer, as a contact between the film and the audience, that enlarges our sense of the object of film history."¹³

Figure 1.

Roger Tory Peterson, originally appearing in Audubon Magazine. Photograph by Betty Jane Nevis.

Oral performance can be challenging to trace, as Germain Lacasse notes—akin...