Visiting Professor of Film History Scott MacDonald has published an article titled "Up Close and Political: Three Short Ruminations on Ideology in the Nature Film," in the current issue of Film Quarterly.
In the article MacDonald considers why nature film, a genre that has been around as long as filmmaking and that is "widely admired by a public audience and…frequently utilized in academic contexts has been so thoroughly ignored by film critics, historians and theorists…" MacDonald then challenges the widely-held assumption that nature films reveal no particular point of view, other than fascination with non-human species, and therefore cannot be considered as more than cinematic documents. MacDonald continues, "I cannot help but wonder whether the tendency on the part of the first generation of academic film teachers and scholars to ignore the history of cinema devoted to scientific exploration and explanation might be, at least in part, a reflection of a repressed fear of confronting those dimensions of the physical world around us that might frustrate our desire for an unambiguous, stable political consciousness and for definitive theoretical solutions to complex social questions."
