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12. Nature, the Film
- Michigan State University Press
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173 CHAPTER TWELVE Nature, the Film In 1973, Hayden White published METAHISTORY, a systematic study of a nexus of aesthetic constructs that underpin the historiographical text.1 White contended that the historian, conditioned by preconceptual layers of historical consciousness, selected and organized “data from the unprocessed record” of the historical field into a “process of happening” with a beginning, middle, and an end “in the interest of rendering that record more comprehensible to an audience.”2 In other words, the historian, either consciously or unconsciously, unifies disparate elements within the historical field to create a rhetorically constructed prose narrative. Roland Barthes had broached the idea twenty years earlier in “The Discourse of History” (1967), remarking that historical narratives were figurative representations—stories—created out of “a web of signifiers and signifieds projected onto a referent.” White, however, proposed a more formal system—a grid—that contained the various elements that structured historical narratives. These modes of explanation, he ventured, “are embodied in the narrative techniques, the formal argumentation, and the ethical position developed in the historiographical discourse.”3 White’s ideas generated a firestorm of criticism, which prompted one pundit to remark that Metahistory is more famous for the debates it generated than for the ideas themselves.4 But because natural history film developed as a hybrid form that conflated both historical and literary traditions, however, it occupies a middle ground between documentary and fictional narrative. On the one hand it assumes the posture of the documentary by claiming an indexical bond, a correspondence between the thing being represented and the thing itself. On the other hand, it employs traditional dramatic devices such as the development of structure (a beginning, a middle, and an end), character, and conflict. Putting aside the more contentious aspects of his theory of historical work, White’s modes of explanation provides a viable method for examining the different ways in which films about nature encode cultural and political dogma within these dramatic narratives. White divided the modes of explanation into three categories: ideological representation, argument, and emplotment. By conducting an archaeology of these modes of explanation, we can inquire how a historically situated set of social, technological, and visual practices constructed landscapes and the people and animals that live within them. 174| Chapter Twelve IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION The American discourse about the natural world purports to use the incontestable objectivity of science to discover the morality that is fundamental to nature. Such discourses, argues White, are laden with ideologies that reflect the historian’s assumptions about how the past relates meaningfully to the present. “By the term ‘ideology,’” White explains, “I mean a set of prescriptions for taking a position in the present world of social praxis and acting upon it (either to change the world or to maintain it in its current state).” Typically these prescriptions claim the authority of science or realism.5 African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History is deeply infused with social ideologies about race, family, and gender and political ideologies about strength, wealth, and power that instruct the roles nature has assigned to males and females, parents and children, and citizens of the state. These beliefs focus on social ideas that relate to racial segregation, gender, family, and physical exceptionalism. After 1936, films about nature embraced these same ideologies, where they remain largely in tact to this day. The segregation of species in African Hall reinforced the atomization of nature by presenting animals in a biological periodic table of life with each species residing within its own nomenclature , within its own square juxtaposed to other squares.6 Its celebration of Africa promotes taxonomy over taxidermy by separating the kingdom of nature into its racial components. Of the twenty-nine dioramas in African Hall, only four mingle species in a common space— Libyan Desert, Upper Nile, Serengeti Plain, and Water Hole—and even then the animals almost always mix with their own “kind.” The diorama Libyan Desert, for example, combines two species of antelope with a gazelle. Other than a viper, which is half-buried in the sand, there are no other animals in the scene. Similarly, the animals that congregate around the tree in Serengeti Plain mix five species of antelope and gazelle with one species of zebra. No other animals appear in the frame.7 In Akeley’s Eden, animals keep to their biological selves. Only three dioramas divide space equitably with different biological families: ostriches with warthogs; leopards with bush pigs; and hyenas and jackals with...