CANE TOADS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 163

6 Mark Lewis has built his career on films that focus on human-animal relationships,
including: The Wonderful World of Dogs (1990), Rat (1998), Animalicious (1999), The
Natural History of the Chicken (2000), and Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010). He has also
produced two television series, The Standards of Perfection (2006), which focuses on show
cats and show cattle, and The Pursuit of Excellence (2007), which includes an episode on
ferrets and their owners.
7 A photograph of Monica and her pet cane toad Dairy Queen was widely published in
Australian newspapers in the mid-1980s. Lewis was intrigued by this photo and he used
it to 'sell' his programme idea to potential funders and distributors. Cane Toads: An
Unnatural History was eventually funded by Film Australia and the BBC for a budget of
around $160,000 Australian dollars. It was later broadcast nationally in Australia on the
ABC in 1988 (Lewis, 2012).
8 Morris's Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) documents the lives of four men whose work
is reliant on non-human animals: George Mendonça, a gardener at a topiary garden in
the US; Dave Hooper, a wild animal trainer; Ray Mendez, a naked mole rat expert; and
Rodney Brooks, a robot scientist from MIT.
9 Morris's 'interrotron' is analysed in numerous analyses of the documentary genre. For a
detailed account of his filmmaking practice, see Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris,
Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch (Rothman: 2009), and Cunningham's interview with Errol
Morris (2005).
10 The most notable exception to this is Brian Winston's account in Claiming the Real (1995),
in which he cites Mark Lewis's Cane Toads: An Unnatural History as an important new
direction for the future of documentary, which revives the tradition of 'biting social
satire', seen in embryonic form in films such as Land Without Bread (1933). However, he
makes no mention of Lewis's 'mirror box' (Winston, 1995: 255).
11 The disciplines of animal studies and ecocinema studies have spawned numerous analyses
of the ways in which Herzog's Grizzly Man (2008) challenges traditional understandings
of human-animal relationships. See, for example, Ladino (2013), Pick (2011) and Henry
(2010). For a detailed analysis of how Fast, Cheap & Out of Control represents a
'companion species ethic', see Ladino (2013).
12 The wildlife docusoaps that came into vogue in the mid-1990s, spearheaded by the
success of the BBC's Big Cat Diary (1996), provide one of the most notable exceptions
to this. Docusoaps broke with the conventions of blue chip programmes, which had up
to this point dominated the wildlife genre, by filming their animal subjects on hand-held
digital cameras and often getting down on the same level as the animals they were
featuring.
13 The term 'blue chip' has typically come to refer to programmes that depict spectacular
visions of wild animals set in pristine and timeless wildernesses, devoid of any reference
to human culture and politics, including environmental politics or conservation, which
might date the programme or reduce its commercial appeal. As I have argued elsewhere,
the marginalisation of environmental issues in the wildlife genre arises from the narrow
scientific paradigm of natural history and the market dynamics of the wildlife television
industry, which collude to ensure that controversial and politically challenging issues are
suppressed (Richards, 2013).
14 Lewis's technique of placing his interviewees in specific contexts, for example, framing
scientists in labs with white coats and politicians behind desks adorned with flags, added
another layer of meaning. Rather than emphasising the power of their official positions,
the clutter and regalia that surrounded them were used to demonstrate that their expertise
was 'not necessarily as all-encompassing as they might like to think' (Lewis, 2010: 23).
15 Science documentaries, typified by the BBC's Horizon series (1964-present),
conventionally use on-screen interviews with scientists and other experts to represent the
contours of particular scientific debates. Horizon , in particular, has been praised for its
ability to scrutinise science as a dynamic process, in which controversies erupt and wider
social and cultural forces play a role (Silverstone, 1984; Jeffries, 2003; Darley, 2004). But
as Andrew Darley observes, Horizon still presents viewers 'with assured and univocal