400 EURAMERICA convincing. Precisely. Film is not reality. The discrepancy between Buck and Denis’s written accounts is not from differing personal perspectives about what happened, but two separate events—Buck describes the original event while Denis remarks upon its replay for film, in which everyone is acting, even the dead tiger. Whether the tiger was alive or dead made no difference if it appears to be as alive and menacing on film as Buck originally wrote in his book. Denis thought he would be making a documentary of actual events as they happened; Buck was recreating the scenes that he had already experienced and told. Daniel Bender commenting on that particular scene in the film writes: “Too fantastical, too superhuman to be real, the capture was pure fraud” (2016: 105). Unfortunately, Bender and Bousé do not clarify that they refer only to the cinematic re-enactment, and therefore imply that even the original capture described in the book was not merely exaggerated but faked too. David Attenborough (1961: 98) offers an explanation for Buck’s practice, attesting that early wildlife films, even so-called documentaries, were understood by the aesthetics of the day to be theatrical film, fictional creations, rather than the hyperrealism of today’s technologically enhanced wildlife film.13 More disconcerting than the blurred demarcations between factual and fictional animal representation, however, is the image of Buck himself. Coming across as a savvy businessman, entertaining raconteur, brave capturer, and conscientious animal caretaker in the books, he appears as a rather clumsy pudgy white man clothed in his signature shorts and pith helmet—that even the Variety reviewer at the time found ridiculous and called his “boy scout getup” (Media History Digital Library, 1934). In the film Wild Cargo, he is seen flapping his hands foolishly at the Malays who are doing all the work. Viewing the films from the current views of colonial 13 Attenborough credits the need for literal honesty in documentary film to the rise of television because a large portion of programs were “live.”
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