Reality of Reels of Nature

After watching Winged Migration, I found it to represent nature better than Zoo Parade and Wild Kingdom as described in Greg Mitman’s Reel Nature. The French film portrayed the flight of birds in their natural state, and almost even in their bird’s-eye-view. With Perkins’ Zoo Parade and Wild Kingdom, the films showed nature through the perspective of humans, rather than the perspective of the animals. For example, the polar bear scene anthropomorphized the polar bears as playful children with a sense of humor and wit. Also, the Perkins’ films created subjective representations of the animals, describing situations that the audience could take from the film that were not necessarily true. For instance, the video stated the lemmings were in a scurried frenzy while running from their predators, leading them to eventually dive off of a cliff. In this case, the narrator cannot possibly know for sure the motives and thought processes of the lemmings, so the descriptions are surely subjective. In Winged Migration, however, the narrator does not use judgmental language or subjective descriptions of the birds. The facts are mostly true data and there does not seem to me any anthropomorphism when viewing the birds. In fact, humans play a very little part in Winged Migration compared to Zoo Parade and Wild Kingdom. In the French film, the perspective is from the birds in the sky, and humans seem to merely be passersby on the journey of the winged animals. It is not until the middle and end where we see the role of humans, when hunters shoot at the birds and industrial waste sites of Europe kill the migrating birds. In the Perkins’ films, however, it is as though humans are the center of the focus and perspective. For example, the helicopters and narrators on-screen describe and actively participate in the nature being displayed. It is as though they filmers are taking the audience on an adventure with a tour guide.
From this, I make the point that movie-based films and documentaries such as Winged Migration are more successful in portraying the natural state of animals compared to the mass-mediatized versions of nature as seen in the Perkins’ films. This is because the focus is more on the animals and their perspectives rather than how we as humans interact with the natural world. In more current nature films, I have seen that the better technology and removal of the roles of humans have enhanced the “realness” of nature (such as Planet Earth). It is then by having a “bird’s-eye-view” in a sense of the animal that films capture the essence of nature and portray it without bias. Ultimately, however, no matter how much we distance ourselves from the filming and how great the bird’s-eye-view is, we will never really be able to capture the real nature of the world, since through filming, we are essentially creating a selection bias and implementing our own (or the filmer’s own) perspective of nature.