Les Cinéastes animaliers: enquête dans les coulisses du film animalier en France by Maxence Lamoureux (review)

The year 2004 was the best of times and the worst of times for cinéastes animaliers, or French wildlife filmmakers. Luc Jacquet was completing La Marche de l'empereur (The March of the Penguins), which would shortly break global box-office records and exemplify the popular renaissance of French-made animal cinema. The école de cinéma animalier des Deux-Sèvres (also known as the Institut francophone de formation au cinéma animalier de Ménigoute, or IFFCAM), dedicated to training students in the art and ethics of wildlife filmmaking, admitted its first class. But Canal+, one of the major private television channels, announced that it would cease funding original wildlife content, a decision that threatened to foreclose a robust future of the genre in France. These overlapping events form key points of reference for Maxence Lamoureux's fascinating three-part study of French wildlife media. Part One draws upon thirty feature films made between 1954 and 2014 to sketch a 'socio-history' of the film animalier, which the author defines as camera-made (non-virtual) documentary and fictional media featuring non-domestic animals (p. 44). Part Two provides a sociology of wildlife filmmakers as a class of professionals. The final part conducts case studies of two emergent organizations: the degree-granting IFFCAM and the advocacy group Réalisateurs naturalistes animaliers refusant de disparaître (RENARD), founded by director Marie-Hélène Baconnet in response to the Canal+ funding retraction. Lamoureux provides a detailed panorama of wildlife media production, distribution, and exhibition during what may come to be known as the trente glorieuses of the genre (1990–present), due to the increase in productions characterized by a highly cinematic 'French touch' (p. 63; in English in the original) born of the specificities of a funding system where properties were made for release on the big screen with subsequent programming on television. The author's double competencies as an IFFCAM-trained filmmaker who also holds a doctorate in sociology are effectively put into conversation across the book's fourteen chapters. The methodology combines a sociology of creative labour that draws upon anonymized interviews with forty filmmakers with thick descriptions of the specific techniques for filming animals and poetic passages evoking the milieux where the films are made. As the title suggests, the focus is primarily on a typological analysis of the professional cinéastes who make wildlife media — their sense of identity, ethos, work experiences, and professional networks — and not on the films or the animal life captured by the camera. Lamoureux treads lightly through the literature and methods of cinema studies proper and leaves it to the reader to consider reverberations with the rich theoretical and philosophical writing on animals and animality contemporaneous with the period examined. Scholars writing on animals and media in the French context would do well to inform themselves with the practical concerns of the métier covered in this book. My sense is that those who will benefit most from Lamoureux's welcome contribution to the small bibliography on the subject are current and future students of IFFCAM, although the text certainly merits a wider readership from advanced students and scholars working in the overlapping fields of cinema and media studies and animal studies.