Paper short abstract:

In my paper, I scrutinize the audiovisual narration of nonhuman agency in two nature documentaries. Hidden in the context of documentary sobriety, the first film reveals a forest malleable to an individual's endeavors and the second an uncontrollable nature, subordinate to coincidence.

Paper long abstract:

My paper discusses the audiovisual narration of two nature documentaries presented by the Finnish public broadcasting company, under the series of Avara luonto (Nature's wide world). The first one is a documentary film of animals in two different forests (Hidden Kingdom, episode two: Secret Forests, BBC 2014) and the second one is a film about extraordinary plants around the world (Life, episode nine: Plants, BBC 2009).

An analysis of the audiovisual narration of these films reveals subtlety that makes a difference. One contains a story of individual animals learning to survive due to their cleverness and diligence, the other is an episodic entity of plants having evolved due to circumstances and coincidence. Both stories can be understood to have main characters, but the difference in understanding and presenting this nonhuman agency creates either a nature malleable to an individual's endeavors or a collection of habitats with interrelating actors, and subordinate to happenstance.

Hidden in the context of documentary sobriety (Nichols 1991, 3), the audiovisual narration suggests very different kinds of ideas than the information delivered by the voice over. The interwoven narrative does not seem to carry the audience's heavy demands of documentary authenticity or clarity of argument. Thus, the audiovisual narration can either construct a forest where anthropocentric morality and causality prevails or a collection of habitats where even plants have agency, but no one alone controls the entity.