Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the viewer, or simply watching on as the different stories the interviewees tell about
them reveal the diverse ways in which people relate to cane toads. This strategy
continues in Cane Toads: The Conquest , where the combination of spectacular 3D
footage adds another dimension to the toad's story. In numerous shots, toads are
framed against a shifting array of different backgrounds, huge skies, storm clouds,
and vast, seemingly empty, vistas of arid scrublands and wetlands. Peter Hobbins
argues that the depiction of cane toads against a variety of different landscapes, often
emptied of people and other animals, has the impact of 'rhetorically naturalising
them while glossing any local biotic accommodations or displacements' (2012: 86).
In other words, it serves to obscure the ecological impacts of cane toads. This is
certainly the case, though the wider narrative of the film enumerates the ecological
impacts of cane toads. But these animal-eye-view shots also serve another purpose.
By inviting viewers to focus, if only for a moment, on the shared animality of
humans and cane toads, Lewis attempts to show us the vulnerability of the toad,
not as a creature that has reached plague proportions, but as an animal that was
introduced by humans and is now, all too easily, killed by them.
Through this 'creaturely poetics', to use Anat Pick's (2011) term, Lewis reminds
us that the toad is powerless against ecological discourse. The threading of this
second type of animal-eye-view shot throughout the films is used to suggest a
critique of the cane toad's situation, adding an ethical dimension, which invites
viewers to reflect on the cane toad's suffering. The shared animality of humans and
cane toads is invoked most powerfully in scenes depicting the killing of cane toads.
This is particularly evident in Cane Toads: The Conquest , where Lewis sets aside the
ambiguity of the first film in favour of a more sympathetic portrayal. In the first
film, Lewis chronicled the attempts of lone individuals to eradicate cane toads,
occasionally veering into comedy as he showed Brent Vincent deliberately running
toads over in his van (following Lewis's ethical stance against staging violence for
the camera, the toads in the film were actually potatoes); or encouraged Dr Michael
Archer to narrate the excruciating pain he endured from being hit in the eye with
bufotoxin, jettisoned after he struck a toad with his geology pick. These acts of
violence were constructed or reimagined for the camera. But in the 23 years since
the first film, attempts to control the cane toad have blossomed into a full-scale
industry, backed by scientists and politicians, and the violence Lewis portrays is
more often than not real.
The film shows Northern Territory residents following local government advice
to kill cane toads more humanely by freezing them and members of the Kimberley
Toad Busters, a community group trying to stop the spread of cane toads, setting
out on organised events to round up cane toads and gas them en masse. In
examining the casual violence that is meted out to toads, Lewis never succumbs to
the cinematics of slaughter. Each time a cane toad is killed, whether it is run over
or gassed, this portrayal of real or constructed violence is undercut, either by the
stories the interviewees tell or by the symbolic foreshadowing, achieved most
powerfully in the toad holocaust scene, that violence against animals is closely
related to violence against humans.
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