394 EURAMERICA participants.9 Like Gouyon, Derek Bousé in his history of wildlife films argues that the two-dimensional recorded media of television and film, as well as their commercial obligation to entertain, militate against any truthful representation of in situ wildlife. Instead, they perfect the illusion of documentary realism with increasingly sophisticated filming and editing technology. Bousé also notes, however, that after the first decade of the twentieth century, as wildlife films were becoming more commonplace, they differed in the US and Britain: Two somewhat distinct ‘tendencies’ were emerging. These might be called, for purposes of schematic simplicity, the American and British models—though they are by no means geographically bound, and elements of each can be found in wildlife films from around the world. (2000: 125-126) The American wildlife film “has tended to place more emphasis on dramatic action . . . the American tradition has also tended in the direction of filming in controlled conditions (pens and other enclosures, including zoos), and the depiction of dramatic events often constructed in the editing, or even through a bit of provocation or staging” (126). “Dramatic action” refers to both violence, such as in prey-predator chase scenes or males in combat, but also to a dramatic structure imposed upon animal lives.10 Buck develops what the earlier hunting films initiated, and accentuates what Simon Cottle suggests was to become a standard in American wildlife filming: 9 Twenty-first century wildlife films often include a MOD, making-of- documentary, a short clip tacked on at the end of the film to show their filming process. In this way they have adopted what Buck and Durrell described in their post-film books, but it is also a ploy to earn the viewer’s trust by revealing some aspects of the process while still inevitably keeping others concealed. 10 Michael Fuchs (2018: 1) writes that while Peter Steinhart finds similarity between the moment in which a predator takes down its prey and the “money shot” in pornographic films, he sees contemporary wildlife documentaries centering on large predators remediating horror film aesthetics.
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