Spectacular Nature : applying the "cinema of attractions" to the natural history film genre

Abstract

The natural history film genre has long been reliant on the commoditizing of nature's beauty as visual spectacle. Associating Tom Gunning's "cinema of attractions" to the nature film genre therefore is an appropriate way to dissect the techniques that maintain its popularity. After understanding the basic rhetorical traditions that nature films employ, it is revealed how the same outdated and over-idealized portrayals of nature continue to be recycled as new technology in methods of production and exhibition continually reinvent the nature film experience.