A representação da natureza selvagem no cinema: Jacques Cousteau, Adrian Cowell e Werner Herzog

Abstract

Since prehistoric times, humans have made images representing the natural world around them. From Paleolithic art, through modern painting and photography to cinema, different people have tried to represent nature according to the ideas they had of it at a given time. The concept of nature is plural and conditioned by the period and place from which it is expressed; I am based on the concept formulated by the West, which imposed its ideas on the majority of the people it colonized. Wildlife and natural history films have grown in popularity and have become an important source of scientific information and entertainment, particularly for a society that is uneducated in matters relating to the natural world. However, we can see that, in aesthetic/narrative terms, many of these documentary films were ignored by critics and film and television scholars. Based on this finding, the objective of the research is to specifically analyze cinematographic and television language and investigate how the different narrative and aesthetic discourses of films and TV series about wild nature evolved from the emergence of the first productions of the genre at the end of the century XIX, to the present day. The work of three directors who influenced (and still influence) several directors will be highlighted: Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Adrian Cowell and Werner Herzog, each with their own peculiar way of representing wild nature.