| Representations of animals have been found in film and television from each medium's earliest days, and even earlier, if one locates the origins of moving picture technologies in the late 19th century motions studies by photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey. Expedition travelogues and other variations on the wildlife genre from the early 1900s through the 1930s tend to approach animals as fitting objects of the acquisitive colonial gaze; as self-perpetuating, abundant natural resources ripe for exploitation; and as remarkably resilient under even the most brutal circumstances. In contrast, many more recent popular filmed representations of wildlife depict wildlife as precious, sometimes fragile, and often rare phenomena threatened by human destruction but deserving of human stewardship. The contemporary wildlife documentary, which is based on conventions largely codified by the Walt Disney Company's postwar True-Life Adventures, may contain strains of both of these views of nature, embodying a paradoxically stable but at the same time internally conflicted category of media content, Although cinematic and televisual images of animals have been commonplace, wildlife films and television programs constitute a relatively little studied genre. This dissertation uses political-economic and textual analyses to trace the genre's history, from its photographic precursors to travelogues of the 1920s; its dissipation in formulaic sensationalism in the 1930s and its resurgence engineered by Disney in the 1940s; its adaption as a television genre in the 1940s, -50s, and -60s; and its volatile cycles of production and retrenchment from the 1970s to the present. Paying particular attention to recent representations of animal sexual behavior, mating and reproduction, the author shows that the genre is not only a site for public discourse regarding the environment, but also, by its allegorical strategies and its interpretations of current scientific theory, a medium that circulates discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and power. |
