REEL NATURE. America's romance with wildlife on film. By Gregg Mitman. 263pp.
Harvard. Pounds 18.50. TLS Pounds 15.50 - 0 674 71571 3
Staging scenes in his documentaries, mistreating animals, and defiling public lands" - these were allegations levelled against the popular American wildlife film-maker Marty Stouffer by the Denver Post in 1996. Other accusations followed: that he used caged, tethered and tame animals. He was not the first film-maker to be "outed". The legendary Marlin Perkins, whose Wild Kingdom series was sponsored by an insurance company, apparently "insured" against failure by shooting many sequences in enclosures, while Disney cameramen described the faking of two of the most spectacular scenes in the old Disney
movies. The unforgettable lemming "suicides" in White Wilderness were said to have been achieved by using a whirling gramophone turntable to launch tame lemmings at the camera and the mating "dance" of the scorpions in The Living Desert was allegedly the result of printing each step backwards as well as forwards so they could be cut to mirror each other.
It is ironic that wildlife film itself began, to some extent, as an antidote to fakery in another genre, that of nature writing. At the beginning of the century, Theodore Roosevelt questioned the credibility of animal stories by the hugely popular Jack London and William Long. Truth, he believed, was interesting for its own sake and need not be dressed up in sentiment.
Consequently, when, after his Presidency, he set off for Africa, he arranged for his famous safari to be recorded on film. Roosevelt in Africa, shot by the British photographer Cherry Kearton, was released in 1910. It was not only one of the earliest true wildlife films, it was also one of the most boring.
American wildlife film-makers subsequently abandoned truth in favour of more alluring lode stars. Reel Nature is an admirable history of why they did so.
The commercial imperative of entertainment was the most obvious and enduring seducer. To mass audiences, imaginary
terpsichorean scorpions would always be more appealing than real ones that merely scuttle. Nevertheless, the industry soon set limits on what could be falsified. The notorious 1930 blockbuster Ingagi, for instance, which purported to document gorillas cohabiting with naked African girls and which grossed
$23,000 in one week in San Francisco, was banned, as Gregg Mitman points out, not for its obscenity, but for its fakery.
Another, more subtle reason, however, emerged for modifying the truth in nature films. The Living Desert, the first full-length cinema feature in Disney's True-Life Adventure series, was released in 1953 and grossed $4 million in its first run, surpassed in the Disney stable only by Cinderella. But the film was criticized for being too red in tooth and claw, so despite its commercial success, Disney ensured that his next release, The Vanishing Prairie, was much less violent. It did, however, include one
