The baby sea iguana holds perfectly still on the pebbles, blinking, waiting for the right moment to make its move. The ground is slithering with hungry predators, but if the iguana up can reach the rocky outcrop, it will be safe.  “A snake’s eyes aren’t very good,” narrates Sir David Attenborough, “but they can detect movement.” One snake approaches our hero, licking its lips. The iguana holds fast until the snake touches its tail, and then the baby reptile bolts. Legs swinging, it races towards the high rocks, a growing horde of serpents hot on its tail.

This moment went viral, a highlight from “Islands,” the premiere episode of BBC’s Planet Earth II. The 2016 nature documentary series is a sequel to the original Planet Earth—at the time, the most high-definition and expensive nature documentary ever made—which aired a decade earlier, in 2006, to widespread acclaim. At least so far, Planet Earth II has lived up to the ambitious original; its iguana chase sequence is perhaps the most thrilling in nature documentary history.

“The world’s next great action hero is a baby sea iguana,” writes Blair Marnell on The Nerdist, in an article with the title “Planet Earth II’s Sea Iguana and Snake Chase Captivates The Internet.” But why is this scene so exciting for us to watch? Why do we care what happens to the iguana and not the other reptiles, the snakes? Why do people empathize so deeply with this animal and not the cows or chickens herded by the millions through America’s meat industry? The answer lies in our relationship to other creatures, and specifically, how that relationship is mediated by film.

 

 

A traditional way of thinking about the difference between humans and animals is that we are unique in our use of tools, although this distinction has been compromised by the discovery that many animals, from chimpanzees to crows, similarly repurpose inanimate objects for their own designs. Nonetheless, there is something distinctly “human” about the use of complex technologies, and the camera is one such electronic device. To what purpose do we turn our cameras on animals?

To answer this question, perhaps it would be best to start at the beginning: “In California in 1886, a man took a photo of a horse.” This man was Eadweard Muybridge, an image-making pioneer whose fascinating life and influence is detailed by Rebecca Solnit in her book River of Shadows. Funded by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford to study motion through photography, Muybridge crafted a new system—using electronic shutters, multiple cameras, and advanced chemistry—to preserve quick movement for the first time in history. The prevailing photographic technique of the moment, the daguerreotype, was so slow and motion sensitive that Solnit describes how “people sat for portraits with braces to hold their head steady, and in those old portraits fidgeting children are often a blur.” Before anything else, motion pictures first required the ability to capture motion.

 

 

“In California in 1886, a man took a photo of a horse.” The horse in question was named Occident, and its portraits formed the most famous and influential series from Muybridge’s motion studies experiment. Sixteen still jockeys ride sixteen still horses—though they are all images of the same jockey on the same horse. The only difference in each image is the position of the horse’s legs; together the photographs reveal the creature’s once-invisible pattern of locomotion. This consequence of the camera’s invention—a newfound ability to show that which was always there, but we could not see—is explored by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Benjamin writes:

Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object.

Muybridge’s “Horse in Motion” offers a perfect example of this unique ability of the camera to offer new ways of seeing. With his images, Muybridge was able to prove for the first time that while a horse is trotting, for a split-second, all four of its hooves are simultaneously in the air (reportedly winning a bet for Stanford). Because Muybridge’s photographs were early experiments in motion picture technology, it follows that the medium from the very beginning had an interest in looking at animals in order to see what the naked eye could not. However, just as the camera is able to reveal, so too is it able to control—altering, even distorting our perception of the world.

It is true that the sea iguana sequence in Planet Earth II takes advantage of our prepared fear of snakes, but we are also made to empathize with the baby iguana by the way the camera focuses on it in close-up and follows the creature, making it into an underdog hero—it races alone, while the snakes are numerous, accompanied by ominous music, and indistinguishable. Or rather, due to decisions of cinematography and editing, they are not distinguished.

This other quality of the camera—its ability to focus and thus reconstruct—is illustrated by art critic John Berger in the first episode his television series “Ways of Seeing,” in which he expands on Benjamin’s thinking. As the camera pans across an enormous painting, “The Procession to Calvary” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, he explains how “in a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously. The spectator may need time to examine each element of the painting but whenever he reaches a conclusion, the simultaneity of the whole painting is there to reverse or qualify his conclusion. The painting maintains its own authority.” However, when faced with complex scenes, the camera inevitably narrows and constructs a new narrative. According to Berger, “a film which reproduces images of a painting leads the spectator, through the painting, to the film-maker’s own conclusions.” While Berger is discussing works of art, the documentarians of Planet Earth II use their cameras to apply the same technique to animal life.

For example, later on in the “Islands” episode, we visit the remote and volcanic Zavodovski Island, uninhabited by humans but home to one of the worlds largest penguin colonies. Out of a sea of chinstraps, one individual can be seen making a perilous journey to provide fish for his family. If not for the camera’s ability to follow this single penguin, his story would have be lost among the masses, a dot of ink in a black sea.

 

 

We learn by way of narration that other penguins do not complete their journey; apparently, they are slaughtered in troves, dashed on the island’s cliffs as they try to climb back up to their families. But in the episode, we do not see any penguins die, in spite of one behind-the-scenes account that “the beach in the afternoon was just a scene of death and destruction.” Why are these images of death withheld, while we see see fish swallowed whole by the same predatory penguins?

The answer appears simple: penguins “look too much like little people,” claimed an insider on the show. “They look like little men dressed up in dinner jackets.” Yet, I argue that if the camera had been following the fish all along with a disembodied British voice narrating their struggle, we would have been upset to see them perish, caught and swallowed by the penguin’s beak. Although Zavodovski Island is certainly part a complex ecosystem containing a multitude of creatures—each with their own story to tell—we root for the protagonist of the story the camera shows, regardless of whether or not he is wearing a bowtie. But either way, empathy with filmed animals clearly has more to do with appearance, with image, than it does with their reality.

But what is the reality of animal life? This, it seems, is what Planet Earth II seeks to reveal—the secret lives of animals—normally hidden away in some jungle or desert, but newly available by means of cameras and television. In one sense, the series tells the same stories again and again, regardless of which species or habitat is being depicted. We visit a Caribbean island where a pygmy three-toed sloth slowly pursues a mate, while on another island an albatross awaits its long-distance lover it has not seen for nearly a year; we witness the baby sea iguana evade snakes, while the chinstrap penguin fights its way up a perilous cliff to reach its family. These are the stories universal to all creatures, those of love and death.

And yet, these stories still manage to center the human experience. Although the series deliberately avoids depicting humans (excluding Sir David Attenborough’s narration, the only humans appear in behind-the-scenes features at the end of each episode) we are meant to empathize with the animals because of how their stories resemble our own; we too, seek love and avoid death.

However, these stories are by no means the definitive realities of animal life; we have no way of actually knowing those realities. “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” asks philosopher Thomas Nagel in an essay about the limitations of reductionist thinking. In other words, Nagel argues against human attempts to objectively understand the natural world as a sum of its measurable parts; he finds subjectivity inherent to experience, and uses bats to prove his point.

Hanging upside-down at night and improving ones hearing so as to use echolocation might approximate the lived experience of the bat, but Nagel argues that this would be insufficient. “It tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” In the same way, when watching animals in nature documentaries like Planet Earth II, we are only able to imagine their lives through the lens of our own experience, never understanding what it would actually be like to live as a bat, or a sea iguana, or a chinstrap penguin. Human subjectivity is unavoidable in films of animals, both because we as humans are the ones crafting the images by way of specific filmmaking decisions, and because we as humans are the ones that ultimately watch the scenes from our own point of view.

However, while Planet Earth II seeks to obscure the observer in its motion pictures, artist Diana Thater uses installations to draw attention to human presence in nature documentary. In a show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, titled “The Sympathetic Imagination,” the artist takes hold of entire rooms through her enormous video projections of the natural world. In one room, a hooded falcon the size of an elephant floats down a wall. In another, hexagonal patterns form the hive and a colorful backdrop to a chaotic swarm of giant, dancing bees. But Thater’s enlarged projections do not simply serve to revere animals, they also force audiences to come to terms with their own roles as spectators.

 

 

For example, in an installation titled “Life is a Time-Based Medium,” Thater displays videos of rhesus macaques outside of a temple. The entrance into the theater space is illuminated by a projection of the holy structure, and the physical doorway itself is carved to resemble the temple’s door. On the inside, the “temple of the monkey god” features a larger-than-life projection of a macaque. But this would-be shrine is complicated by one surprising element—between the enlarged monkey and the viewer is a projected theater space, complete with armchairs. To reiterate, this theater within the temple is not real, it is also a projection, standing in between the viewer and the “screen,” drawing attention to the medium used to represent the animals.

Additionally, in the aforementioned projection of honeybees, “knots + surfaces,” Thater forces the viewer to perceive human subjectivity in a different way; by placing the projectors low so that walking in front of them casts ones silhouette over the enlarged insects, making the human presence visible. Moreover, because ones silhouette inevitably blocks the videos and draws attention to their artificiality, the work also demonstrates how human observation mediates and distorts the natural.

This compelled projection of the viewer’s body onto the videos through silhouette is a repeated motif throughout “The Sympathetic Imagination,” and perhaps the most poignant example can be found in a 1992 work by Thater called “Oo Fifi, Five Days in Monet’s Garden Part 2.” The video of flowers appears to be one single projection, but when the viewer steps closer, they inevitably step in front of the three projectors and cast three distinct silhouettes onto the wall—one red, one green, one blue. Like a television screen, the complete image is assembled from these three colors, and once combined, the three form one multicolored, indistinguishable whole. However, when ones silhouettes split the three colors, the viewer is made not only aware of their presence as viewer, but also of the construction of the medium through which they are perceiving the natural world. In this way, Diana Thater complicates the process of admiring nature on a screen—Planet Earth II, on the other hand, seeks only to immerse the viewer in the impossible dream of nature unmediated by human touch or technology.

 

 

Though, to be fair, the television series largely succeeds; the animals depicted seem to live their natural lives as if the camera was not there, and so we too forget the presence of the camera and its operator. Besides, what harm could arise from filming animals going about their daily business?

Here, again, we must go back to the start. Although Muybridge’s motion studies were certainly precursors to film, a contemporary of his was perhaps equally important in the early history of animal documentary: Étienne-Jules Marey. While Muybridge’s use of multiple cameras to take each multiple images of an animal in motion was innovative, Marey took the next leap towards our film cameras of today by recording successive images with a single device. In his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, media theorist Friedrich Kittler writes that this machine’s name, “the chronophotographic gun,” Marey’s own invention, “spoke nothing but the real truth.”

 

 

The device, fashioned after a semiautomatic rifle, allowed its user to “shoot” animals using a sequence of quick exposures. Marey’s resulting photographs are as beautiful as they are haunting: moving animals reiterated and overlaid, forming ghostly shapes. “With the chronophotographic gun,” writes Kittler, “mechanized death was perfected: its transmission coincided with its storage. What the machine gun annihilated the camera made immortal.” Though on the surface, Marey’s animal studies appear analogous to those of Muybridge, they point to another unique quality of film; its relationship with death, and in particular, its ability to preserve the life of those perished (the death of Harambe, made infamous through images, comes quickly to mind).

 

 

 

In fact, many extinct species of animals—the Tasmanian tiger, the western black rhinoceros—live on to this day in grainy films, pointing towards a bleak possible future for nature documentaries like Planet Earth II. At the television series’ release, its animal stars survive, but many (the adorable pygmy three-toed sloth for example) are already critically endangered due to our harmful hands. To preserve may not be to kill, but it does on some level precede extinction. In all of its celebration of nature, Planet Earth II is rarely accusatory of us, of the detrimental effect we have had on the other life forms that share our planet.

One could argue that in the “Islands” episode, a crab is shown to be eaten alive by an invasive species of ant that had been introduced into the ecosystem by humans. But even here, the violence of humanity is depicted only indirectly through the effect of one animal on another. To be fair, the final episode of the new season (which, as of my writing this, has yet to be released) will have the title “Cities” and depicts the natural ecosystems that have formed around our newly constructed world. In an interview, Fredi Devas, a producer on the show said, “It would be naive to make a film about urban wildlife that only said, ‘Isn’t this a great new habitat for wildlife?’, because for so many animals it has created so much suffering.” It appears that here, at last, the series may take a stronger stance regarding our responsibility to animal life.

But in spite of its past failure to accuse, Planet Earth II surely succeeds in its propensity to foster empathy with those creatures it captures in high definition. In spite of the complex relationships at play between human and animal—relationships that are for better or worse mediated by the camera—our love and care for the diverse life on this planet is real. Within our sympathetic imaginations, the baby iguana racing towards the safety of that high rock is me, is you, is us. Hopefully we all, iguanas included, can escape our snakes.