All art is artifice and involves key decisions of what to include and
what to exclude. In the case of wildlife recording, and filming for
that matter, including anthropogenic material is a matter of artistic
judgement. There are no truly wild places left and no truly wild
animals living free from either human encroachment or human
protection. Excluding the human element could be regarded as more of a
misreprentation than including it, even if it is regarded as
irrelevant or perhaps especially if it irrelevant but the truth.
Wildlife has to coexist with anthropogenic interference and
certainly the fish in the hold of the distant boat didn't have their
say in whether or not the boat was irrelevant to their seascape. Is
there a distinction between selection by timing, editing, or
eliminating non-wildlife sounds by filtering? Anyone with a live mic
knows that anthropogenic sounds are almost everywhere, so is it not
more honest to portray the wildlife as having to live with these
sounds, including the train roaring through their landscape? I'll tell
you what Mark's train did for me - it gave me a vivid sound image
portrait of that bit of countryside.
The recent BBC series 'Frozen Planet' came in for criticism for not
captioning a polar bear sequence which included shots of a newborn cub
in captivity. An edited film uses artifice from start to finish, often
cutting together sequences spaced widely in location and in time. Take
notice of coat patterns in films portraying the life of one supposedly
singular animal. The word "cheating" is often used by filmmakers
because that is how interesting films are put together. I can usually
tell which sounds have been dubbed on later and which were recorded
sync, like birds in the tops of trees on a very long lens with
expertly dubbed matching close sound. Adventure documentaries are
prone to showing a heroic figure battling on alone against the odds,
not drawing attention to the fact that he or she is obviously being
followed by a film crew. A series on flight currently being shown here
uses trained birds filmed from a microlite to link sequences.
I see no harm in some occasional honest realism, like
including distant motors or close trains which would still
have been part of the "natural" soundscape even if edited
out.
It's an interesting debate and it brings to mind a film my
wife set up in China about integrated agriculture and the good
use the Chinese were making of some long-ravaged parts of
their land. However the Tiananmen Square massacre intervened
between shooting and cutting, and a very different film got
shown using the same shot footage. Which was truest?
David
David Brinicombe
North Devon, UK
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum - Ambrose Bierce
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