CANE TOADS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 156

cane toad amplexus as a thoroughly ironic 'romantic love vignette' set in an idyllic
wetland (ibid.: 23).
This is a far cry from the scientific vision of the natural world offered in David
Attenborough's wildlife documentaries. In many respects, Lewis's films provide the
perfect antidote to Attenborough. 'If you're telling a story, you want people to see
it', he revealed. 'I just found a lot of documentaries very dry and boring' (Lewis,
2012). In his own witty and campy way, he warns us about the artificial constraints
of traditional wildlife and science documentaries. But beneath the humour there is
far more going on.
Eco-documentary: subverting science and wildlife documentary
The disruptive power of Lewis's films emanate from their style. His approach of
interweaving the often-contradictory perspectives of a wide range of interview
subjects serves to destabilise the model of scientific expertise on which conventional
wildlife and science documentaries depend, seeding doubt to the notion that
science or ecology can provide the most salient perspectives on cane toads. But
rather than eschewing this model altogether, his films self-reflexively engage with
the idea of expertise, offering scientific facts while simultaneously playing with the
notion of scientific and environmental expertise in ways that extend this knowledge
into complex cultural and political contexts.
I suggest that Mark Lewis's distinctive documentary style provides an exemplary
model for eco-documentary. These films do not represent a new genre of
filmmaking. The success of Lewis's approach relies on the unique qualities of cane
toads, as creatures that are simultaneously loved and reviled, and as homophilic
animals that enjoy human contact and exhibit almost no fear in the presence of
humans, allowing them to be filmed more easily. Lewis has successfully modified
this approach to make films about rats and chickens, but beyond domesticated
animals or synanthropic animals (wild animals that live in close proximity to
humans) his approach has limited scope as a new format for wildlife documentary.
What it does do is overturn conventional wildlife and science documentary formats,
and in doing so it illustrates more refined ways of dealing with the complexities of
environmental problems and the politics of invasive species.
Jennifer Ladino provides a framework for understanding the precise ways in
which documentaries that focus on and complicate human-animal relationships
display 'a companion species ethic', which she argues decentres the human-centric
or speciesist perspective of many films and documentaries. She focuses on films,
such as Morris's Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005),
outlining how they use experimental cinematography to collapse the distance
between humans and other animals. For example, by allowing them to 'co-inhabit
the cinematic space'; showing animals 'watching back'; using minimal dialogue or
language to invoke the non-human world; and 'including zoomorphic footage and
commentary', recalling Chris's conception of representations of animals that
provide us with new understandings of animals and ourselves (Ladino, 2013: 131).