From Kearton to Attenborough: Fashioning the Telenaturalist's Identity

Gouyon, Jean-Baptiste

doi:10.1177/007327531104900102

Cited by 23 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…5 Enter the cine-scientist Key to this history is a gallery of individuals whose biographies stand as evidence that throughout the first half of the twentieth century, simultaneously as cinematography was developing into a technology for producing entertainment, it retained advocates within the scientific community (Landecker, 2006). Frenchmen Jean Comandon (Garandeau, 2012), Jean Perrin (Bigg, 2010) and Jean Painlevé (Beattie, 2008;Bellows and MacDougall, 2000;Fretz, 2010); Englishmen Percy Smith (Boon, 2008), Cherry Kearton (Gouyon, 2011a) and Francis Martin Duncan ; or the Italian Roberto Omegna (De Ceglia, 2011), all are European examples of the 'cinescientist'. 6 Working towards fashioning film-making as a legitimate technique for scientific investigation, they were at the same time producing footage for non-specialist audiences.…”

Section: Film As the Mechanical Reproduction Of Scientific Observationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…16 But reliance on individual animals had been natural history filmmakers' stock in trade since the first decades of twentieth century. All of them from Cherry Kearton to David Attenborough, through to Armand and Michaela Denis had brought forward named individual animals to support their claims to cognitive legitimacy (Gouyon, 2011a). This is not to mention camera techniques such as the close-up shot which isolates individuals and creates subjects with whom viewers can engage emotionally (Bousé, 2003).…”

Section: Film-making As a Participation In Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Science and film-making

Gouyon

2015

Public Underst Sci

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The essay reviews the literature, mostly historical, on the relationship between science and film-making, with a focus on the science documentary. It then discusses the circumstances of the emergence of the wildlife making-of documentary genre. The thesis examined here is that since the early days of cinema, film-making has evolved from being subordinate to science, to being an equal partner in the production of knowledge, controlled by non-scientists.

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Section: Film As the Mechanical Reproduction Of Scientific Observationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Film-making As a Participation In Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Science and film-making

Gouyon

2015

Public Underst Sci

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“…They not only represent the public image of science as described above, but also that of natural history and its particular research traditions, conveying to audiences the authority, wonder and spectacle of nature (e.g. Mitman, 1999;Gouyon, 2011;Rader and Cain, 2014). Such displays have therefore shaped understandings of what is considered to be natural, an idea which has often been used to support arguments about politics, the social order, and how individuals should act (Hansen, 2006;Longino, 2013).…”

Section: Interrogating Sexual Naturementioning

confidence: 99%

Sexual Nature? (Re)presenting Sexuality and Science in the Museum

2016

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The past 15 years have seen dramatic changes in social norms around sex and sexuality in the UK and worldwide. In 2011, the London Natural History Museum (NHM) contributed to these debates by opening the temporary exhibition Sexual Nature, which aimed to provide 'a candid exploration of sex in the natural world' whilst also drawing in an under-represented audience of young adults. Sexual Nature provides an opportunity to explore Macdonald's 'politics of display' in the mutual construction of (public) scientific knowledge, society and sexuality, at a time of intense contestation over sexual norms. Whilst Sexual Nature both reflected and contributed to major reframings of sexuality and what science can say about it, the assumption that it would be possible to present this topic as morally neutral, reliable and uncontested, in line with traditions of public science, proved to be problematic. The language of the exhibition moved back and forth between human/animal similarity and difference, and between scientific and cultural tropes as the NHM tried to maintain epistemic authority whilst also negotiating the moral boundaries of acceptable sexual behaviour. The topic of sex pushed the museum far beyond its usual expertise in the natural sciences towards the unfamiliar territory of the social and human, resulting in an ad hoc search for, and negotiation with, alternative sources of expertise. Boon et al.'s co-curation approach to exhibition building has the potential to extend the NHM's audience-driven strategy, whilst also producing a more coherent and nuanced exhibition about the science of sex.

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“…In the early 1950s David Attenborough revived Kearton's project on British television and displaced, in the public eye, the Zoological Society as the bearer of authority on animals in the field. 8 In this paper, focusing on the establishment of the BBC Natural History Unit (NHU), we will examine how, in the period extending from the early 1950s to the late 1970s, natural history filmmakers set and maintained a frontier between their practice and most notably ethology, defining the NHU as a natural history institution, able to collaborate with field researchers in the life sciences but not subservient to them. For one key feature of the period seems to have been the development of a publicly visible field science of animal behaviour.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%