CANE TOADS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 154

Frazier's approach differed from conventional wildlife documentaries, which
usually frame animals from the height of an average human or from the back of a
truck, with the result that they tend to literally look down on their animal
subjects. 12 By contrast, Frazier got down on the ground so that he was eye-to-eye
with the cane toads he filmed. He also developed a set of lenses that allowed him
to get incredibly close to cane toads, while still keeping the background of the
image in sharp focus. This cinematic innovation, combining a wide breadth of field
with incredibly deep focus, later gave rise to the Panavision/Frazier lens system,
now widely used in wildlife cinematography and Hollywood cinema. With the aid
of these lenses, Frazier was able to film cane toads against an array of different
landscapes—farms, rainforests, wetlands, suburban backyards and cityscapes—
depicting cane toads as part of broader environmental ecologies. He was also able
to visually evoke the toad's journey through the use of roving point-of-view shots,
in which the camera appeared to jump forward, mimicking the toad's advance into
new territory.
In a wildlife television industry that was, even in the mid-1980s, already in thrall
to charismatic mammals, Lewis elevated the toad, showing that its gleaming eyes,
leathery flesh and pulsating throat could at times be equated with a kind of beauty.
Although, in keeping with Lewis's distinctive documentary style, it is an unsettling
and unnerving kind of beauty. His film also gave a rare voice to invasive species,
which are almost completely disenfranchised by the market dynamics underlying
the wildlife genre's restrictive focus on 'natural' environments, untouched by
human culture and habitation. In his depiction of cane toads, Lewis charts a pre-
carious course between anthropomorphism and searing cultural critique. Without
ever actually slipping into anthropomorphism, or allowing the toad to stand as a
straightforward metaphor for other things, he focuses on the cultural and political
appropriation of the toad as a means of legitimating and furthering various social
and political agendas from immigration to environmental politics and conservation.
When talking about the multiplicity of issues that play across the figure of the cane
toad in his film, Lewis remarked:
Is it about the globalisation of invasive species and how we deal with this? Is
it about bigotry? Is it about racism? Is it about immigration? Is it about
refugees? Is it about all these different things that are popping up in our
society? To some degree, many of these issues have got some sort of relevance
or an analogy back to the toad. That was again, you know, the joy of the toad;
it gave you a lot to work with.
(Lewis, 2012)
Lewis's depiction of cane toads can be understood through what Cynthia Chris
calls a 'zoomorphic framework, in which knowledge about animals is used to
explain the human'. In this framework, as Chris argues, 'representations of animals
articulate and reinforce new understandings of not only animal life but also human
behaviour' (2006: x). This strategy of using knowledge about animals as a means