Experts in the wild natural history film-making as a culture of knowledge-production

This thesis is about natural history film-making and how it relates to the public
understanding of science. The word 'public' in the phrase is taken to designate
in the first place the film-makers. The study is thus one which investigates how
natural history film-makers negotiate their identity and situate their knowledge
with relation to sciences. Drawing on an examination of the history of the
development of natural history film-making in Britain, and on two case studies
of contemporary examples of natural history films, this thesis first suggests that
the culture of natural history film-making should be regarded as an offshoot of
the Victorian culture of amateur natural history, thus as a form of knowledge production
in its own right, instead of a form of popularisation of science. In
this perspective, natural history film-makers appear as spokespersons for nature
and not for science. Their relationship to scientific practitioners would be aptly
described as one of co-existence on either side of a border, peopled with such
objects as animals, plants, and the motion-picture camera. Natural history film-makers'
cognitive authority stems from their status as amateurs naturalists-deriving
their knowledge of the natural world from their capacity to engage
intimately with it-as well as from their ability to use the film-making
apparatus convincingly. The types of evidences supporting the claims to
trustworthiness to be observed in natural history films do not appear to relate to
the values and beliefs of professional science but to the culture of amateur
natural history and to the conventions of the film medium. In order to account
for the type of authority to speak for nature embodied in the culture of natural
history film-making, this thesis proposes to use the word "telenaturalist".