Contends that the narrative and aesthetic qualities of the documentary genre enable new understandings of animals and animal/human relationships.
As indicated by the success of such films as
March of the Penguins
and
Food, Inc.
, the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In
Regarding Life
, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is becoming markedly more complex and increasingly more involved with pivotal ecological debates over species loss, food production, and science.
While attending to some of the most discussed documentaries of the last two decades, including
Grizzly Man
;
Sweetgrass
Our Daily Bread
; and
Darwin's Nightmare
, the book also draws on lesser-known film examples, and is one of the first to bring film studies understandings to new media such as YouTube. The result is a study that melds film studies and animal studies to explore how documentary films render both humans and animals, and to what political ends.