Features: October 2009

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Frames from Wildlife on the Deserts of America's Great Southwest (a.k.a. Wildlife on the Desert) (no date).

Frame enlargements courtesy of the University of Southern California Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive.

Films that depict mammals, birds, insects, plants, and other natural history subjects have always been a staple of cinema. Many film historians date the birth of the industry to the well-known experiments in animal locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, who pioneered series photography as both art and science in the 1870s and 1880s. In a more popular vein, beginning in 1891, Thomas Edison’s employees W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise made numerous films of animals for Edison’s peephole Kinetoscope viewer—often of animals fighting, such as The Boxing Cats (a trained vaudeville act) and The Cock Fight, both produced in 1894.

It wasn’t until around 1907, when British wildlife photographer Oliver Pike made In Birdland, that nature films began to depict animals, plants, and their habitats with more care. In 1908, Great Britain–based producer and distributor Charles Urban, who specialized in educational films on travel and science, began releasing films made by F. Percy Smith, later to become famous for his Secrets of Nature series, popular in the 1920s. Smith’s films, such as The Acrobatic Fly (1910), in which a fly “juggles” a variety of objects, were hugely successful.

The depiction of natural settings, whether real or simulated, became perhaps the most important characteristic of the nature-film genre by the 1910s. At the beginning of that decade, it was still unclear what business practices or film subjects would be the most profitable, and there was a brief moment when some in the industry hailed educational film subjects as the commercial future of cinema. Wildlife was the selling point for dramatic feature films such as Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) and Simba: The King of the Beasts (1928). Some films, such as A Murderous Midget Fish (no date) and Wing, Claw, and Fang! (1946) presented nature as a strange and ferocious domain: a space to be tamed. Efforts to establish educational films as profitable theatrical ventures were largely unsuccessful, however. Instead, films with more plainly descriptive titles—such as Bees and Spiders (1927), Trees (1928), and Beavers (1930)—were configured to suit classroom use.

By the early 1930s, classroom films were becoming less of a novelty and more of a “standard piece of instructional technology.” One study estimated that in 1931 there were 350,000 “non-theatrical” projectors in the United States. A 1934 U.S. government report stated that “thirty-two of our forty-eight States have film libraries of varying qualities under the supervision of educational directors.” The new nontheatrical field may not have been as profitable as the theatrical side of the movie business, but it was more stable.

Some early nature films were made to illustrate individual scientific concepts, such as The Struggle for Existence (1925), which very loosely deals with one part of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Others focused on a group of organisms populating a given region: for example, Wildlife on the Deserts of America’s Great Southwest (no date) documents both plant and animal life in the Colorado Desert of southern California. But the largest number of nature films from this era focus on just one organism, or several closely related organisms. These films, such as Frogs, Toads, and Salamanders (1932), present the life cycle, physiology, and environment of their subjects in the style of early biology textbooks.

Natural history topics made for ideal classroom films, uniting the competing needs of education and entertainment. Animals in particular, as both enduring science fare and a favorite of children, were perhaps an inevitable cornerstone of the medium. Filmmakers such as the producers of Eastman Classroom Films strove to represent animals as they were, not to judge them in human terms.

The early nature films may not have entirely succeeded in modeling scientific objectivity for their young audiences. But then, the goal of pure objectivity was by definition unattainable even in the realm of advanced scientific practice. The fact that, as early as the 1920s, children and young adults were exposed to a cinematic version of natural history in the classroom was itself a remarkable development. Encounters with film at school may have been as significant for viewers of the time as going to the movie theater.

Read Nature's Avant-Garde: an interview with the directors of Microcosmos, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou