FACTORES-COMPORTAMIENTOS DE RIESGO
7. CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES
Life on Earth provided a form of natural history programme through which the networks of natural history film-making could be secured. The associations involved in the production of the programme involved support from the BBC, co-production finance and the assistance of scientists. These enabled the Unit to enrol audiences at home, markets overseas and, most importantly, animals into the networks. Control of the networks was managed by a new professional ethos of broadcasting, professional presenters and producers. This ability to enrol new entities into networks involved the redefinition of other expertise and entities through new processes of translation. The production of Life on Earth involved linguistic translations as a new language of professional natural history was developed, and geometric translations as the genre of blue-chip natural history extended over space. These translations not only changed the internal experiences of the Unit, they also introduced external pressures.
The genre of wildlife films still owed much to pioneering processes of inscription at the Natural History Unit, developed during Look. This focused upon naturalistic forms of film-making where effort is invested in being in the right place at the right time to witness animal behaviour. However, these skills could only be extended by dividing expertise of finding the animals and filming the animals between the now professional activities of animal ethology and natural history film-making. This enabled the point of inscription to be removed from the point of production, yet this expansion did involve exclusions. Natural history film-making was no longer about being a naturalist. Indeed, Gareth suggests that these skills now had to be largely forgotten in order to succeed as a film-maker.
"When you start work you're doing research and you just go to the library and you're looking up papers and you're phoning scientists and you're employed as a biologist to start with. That's why so many people in this Unit are actually biologists with zoology degrees or PhDs, because initially you're not employed as a film-maker, you're employed as a biologist. But as time goes on you get more and more film experiences and forget all about your biology that you leant. And it all becomes a bit of a sort of haze from the past. And you then become a film- maker. And you get to the stage where you're making the programmes. And you're employing someone to do the research for you and find out what the latest information on snakes or whatever is" (Gareth, interview 11.7.95).
David Attenborough himself regrets the distance that this brings between film-making and the thrill of scientific discovery: "I have never had that [I have been] watching other people do it. But I haven't done it." (David Attenborough, quoted in Burgess and Unwin, 1984: 111).
Life on Earth also involved geometric translations, as the networks of natural history film- making gain an increasingly global reach upon nature. In an era which saw the development of the American and Russian space programmes, the first photographs of the earth from space (Cosgrove, 1990), and the first awareness of global environmental change, Life on Earthtakes its place in documentary and environmental history, re-visioning global awareness and introducing a new view of the world.
"In the earliest years of documentary we saw the explorer-documentarist lead the way providing glimpses of the exotic and faraway. The new technologies vastly expanded his role. He could take cameras into undersea worlds of astounding beauty, and also into other worlds. He could show, from regions of the moon and beyond, shots of our own earth, a green oasis in endless nothingness. [...] Such ventures stirred increasing concern for spaceship earth and its blessings, seemingly so unique and perhaps more fragile than was thought. Addressing this concern was one of television's most awesome achievements, the BBC TV series Life on Earth (1979), in which David Attenborough criss-crossed the globe, pinpointing the rise and decline of innumerable species" (Barnouw, 1983: 297).
However, whilst the geometric translations of the networks of the Unit criss-crossed the globe, they did so through specific sites whilst also leaving spaces. This global reach on nature was not a surface, but was simultaneously global and local through nodal points within these new geographies of knowledge. The locations of filming tended to be site specific, and film-makers returned to the same sites on the basis of research stations, contacts and previous experience. For many filming trips California thus became the desert, North Carolina the swamps. The rainforest is represented by Costa Rica, and Panama. Borneo represented Asian tropical forest. There were various sites in Europe and Australia and, of course, there was the Serengeti, where groups of wildlife cameramen became permanently located. These were the areas where nature could be best controlled for film-making practices, yet they were also the ones presented as the wilderness settings for most wildlife films.
This was the contradiction of the new global scope of the natural history. Within these global networks of nature, supported by blue-chip natural history film-making, there is little opportunity to articulate local solutions to the fragile sense of responsibility their global vision suggests. The new professional qualities of wildlife footage and the international focus of the markets for natural history films meant it becomes difficult for an individual country to produce a programmes featuring its own wildlife. As Adrian explains:
"It’s hard to make English programmes. Just as it’s hard for the Germans to make German programmes or Norwegians to make Norwegian programmes because
there isn’t enough money to do it properly, just from their own countries, it has to be international in terms of making a profit" (Gareth, interview 11.7.95).
These exclusions also caused problems for the production of films with an environmental focus. The separation of nature and culture within blue-chip natural history films constructed a view of nature that is neutral, value free; a nature without people, and a commodity without language problems. Environmental issues could not be addressed within these programmes. The Natural History Unit's account of the environmental responsibility of its films, thus becomes incorporated into the blue-chip values. As David Attenborough suggests: "My job as a natural history film-maker is to convey the reality of the environment so that people will recognise its value, its interest, its intrinsic merit and feel some responsibility for it" (David Attenborough, quoted in Burgess and Unwin, 1984: 106). Either that or "you do different programmes" (Attenborough, quoted in Burgess and Unwin, 1984: 108). However, the associations developed through the networks of natural history film-making mean that it is now more difficult for the Natural History Unit to make different programmes.