Introduction

Why did South Africa and the Kruger National Park (KNP) in particular not become a major early locus for African wildlife filmmaking? Why was the most visited and best-known African wildlife reserve, the place which probably drew more tourists than the rest of the continent’s wildlife reserves combined, not the continent’s first and most prominent locale for wildlife filming?

A first obvious point is that the KNP is in many ways a difficult place to see animals and to film them – at least compared to the savannahs of East Africa, or the waterholes of Etosha. The road network for tourists covers only a small part of the total surface of the park and limits access to most of the park. Trees block views and animals can disappear easily. For most of this period, almost all of the park was closed for the summer months because of dangers of contracting malaria. Anybody filming animals is likely to be disturbed by other tourists viewing or vying for good viewing spots. The Kruger Park also has obvious signs of human shaping: roads, rest-camps, telephone wires and fences. These too may have discouraged filmmakers looking to create an illusion of an untouched wilderness.

A neat example of the problems filmmakers faced and the ways they tried to liven up footage could be found in a French television news item aired on the 1 July 1954, with the title ‘Sans Barreaux’ or without bars. In this insert, reporter Jean Hudelot is shown entering the park at an entrance gate. Animals are photographed from the car window. A sleeping lion is roused by the reporter banging on the car to wake him up. Inserted in this is a sequence of the intrepid reporter hiding behind some bushes to view the game and then moving fast back to his car. One scrupulous editor somewhere annotated the sequence: some scenes were shot in the Bois du Boulogne! Clearly a series of shots of a rather portly reporter in a car and animals rather more distant than they would be in a zoo were not felt to be entertaining enough, and the journalist or editor in Paris decided to add drama by having the reporter out of the car.

I am sitting in a wooden chair on the partly covered porch of a cabin at the historic Miller Farm that is an extension of Bend's High Mountain Desert Museum. I am wearing a pair of wireless headphones so that I can hear pianist Hunter Noack against the backdrop of a thunderstorm. Suddenly, there is a flash of lighting and a crack of thunder. Another flash of lighting followed immediately by thunder and then an onslaught of rain. As I listen to the music through the headphones, I try to remember exactly how many seconds exist between lighting and thunder to determine the storm's closeness. I think about leaving but note that no one else is leaving, so I focus on the music and reflect on a concert in a landscape as a combination of stormy weather, the music coming through the headphones and the landscape of this nineteenth-century farm at the edge of the Cascade Range. I also consider how different the experience at the Miller Farm is from hearing Hunter Noack play on Oregon's State Capital Mall in Salem on a quiet summer evening. On that evening, I walked around and listened to the music through the headphones as I contemplated the green landscape of the mall, the rows of cherry trees and the bronze golden-leaf statue of Oregon's pioneer on top of the Capital building. Contemplating both experiences, I reflect on the communities of people across Oregon who have attended Hunter Noack's IN A LANDSCAPE concert since 2016 in such diverse places as Crater Lake, Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Columbia Gorge, Smith Rock State Park and the farm home of Oregon's legendary writer Ken Kesey. I realize my experience of the landscapes of the Miller Farm and the Capital Mall will now be firmly identified with the sounds of a piano (Figure 10 ).

Bend, Sunriver and the Cascades: From Timber to Creative City

Hunter Noack's life might be described metaphorically as taking place in a landscape of central Oregon combined with the landscape of classical music. Born in 1989, he was raised in Sunriver.

Salem, the state capital of Oregon, sits astride the Willamette River in the north-central part of the Willamette Valley with the Coast Range to the west and the Cascades to the east. The original inhabitants were the Kalapuya people who had lived in the mild climate of Willamette Valley for thousands of years as hunters and gathers who considered “humans, animals and the land as interconnected.” The yearly life of the Kalapuya moved with the seasons. In the spring, they moved across the valley floor harvesting camas and hunting migratory birds. With the heat of summer, they moved to the foothills where men hunted and women picked and preserved wild cherries, elderberries, blueberries and hazelnuts. The coolness of the fall brought on a period of burning the prairie and harvesting of acorns. The cooler temperatures of winter caused them to return to their large cedar bark and plank lodges. As Boag notes, “The Kalapuya's continuous cycle of seasonal movements among various eco-systems of the valley is one indicator of stability in the human environmental relationship.” The landscape was changed following the establishment of a Methodist mission by Jason Lee near the Kalapuyan village of Tchimikiti in 1841. Settlers followed dividing the land into plots and plowed the fields following styles of land use that they had evolved east of the Mississippi. The Kalapuya people were moved in 1855 to the Grande Ronde reservation that is still located between Salem and the coastal community of Lincoln City.

Elizabeth Lord (1887–1976) and Edith Schryver's (1901–1984) joint venture of a landscape architecture business entered into the history of Salem in 1929. Their visual aesthetic was the European influences from their training at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts. In their 40 years of practice, their design style influenced over 200 gardens throughout the Pacific Northwest. They lived and ran their business out of a house on Mission Street in an area referred to as Gaiety Hill which was then and is still today on the edge of Salem's business district.

The introduction to this volume quotes the 2011 James Irvine Foundation published report titled Getting in on the Act. It is included again as the report's observations are fundamental to the changes that have taken place in the arts throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

Essentially, the Irvine report was documenting the consequence of an intense political engagement in which many visual and performing artists around the globe became committed to creating art that represented the identity and expressed the concerns of a community. In terms of theater, this activist performance form is an extension of the engaged theater of German director and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1893–1956) and the performance methods of Brazilian Augusto Boal (1931–2009), whose performances broke the fourth wall of the proscenium and encouraged the stage as a space of community dialogue. As Cohen-Cruz points out, “theater is not a self-contained entity but rather gains meaning in context, integrated into people's lives.”

This chapter traces Daniel Stone and Tinamarie Ivey's evolution of an approach to theater in Oregon's Willamette Valley that builds on the performance theories of Brecht and Boal that they refer to as “sanctuary theater” or in terms of its company name, Sanctuary Stage. Merriam Webster Dictionary notes that sanctuary is a political concept derived from the Latin sanctuarium with a history primarily associated with worship.

Klamath Falls, Oregon-based environmental writer Emma Marris suggests there is a tendency for Oregonians to mythologize Oregon as having retained its nineteenth-century designation as the Land of Eden. She argues, “We must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.” As she notes, the romantic view does not take into account our impact on the planet. Ecologist Erle Ellis further describes our impact,

A corresponding view is held by visual artist Monte Shelton’s Key Element (Figure 23). Influenced by growing up visiting Oregon's diverse landscapes, during summer family adventures, Shelton comments on Oregon's current state through the iconic skeleton key, a symbol of opening. In this case, the opening is the influence of humans in the Anthropocene. Painted during the forest fires that swept Oregon in September of 2020, Shelton explains the painting's symbolism,

Introduction

Carol Hughes, eventually perhaps habituated enough to trust me with a major revelation, one day said her husband David’s mantra was: ‘Not the BBC’. Why, given some of his most important films were made for them and that he had in part been trained by them, and given the general esteem in which the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU) and David Attenborough are held, might he have seen them as a negative principle? To understand the distinctive strengths of Southern African wildlife documentaries, it is useful to extract some of the NHU’s key operating principles as they were at once the source of its distinctive achievements but also point to some of their weaknesses and to the niches in the wildlife ecosphere the Southern Africans tried to fill.

The NHU

The histories of the BBC’s Natural History Unit examined earlier (Bright, Davies, Gouyon, Louson) illustrate the strengths of this institution but also suggest its corollary weaknesses. As I argued earlier, the weakness of the accounts of the NHU is both theoretical and historical in that they try to extract the NHU from the larger competitive broadcasting and production contexts. To try to write the history of the NHU without looking at what other broadcasters were doing or who was winning the ratings wars or industry accolades is to miss the way in which the field (to invoke Bourdieu) was developing and changing.

Let us put aside the greater home audience for most US productions and note that for much of the past half century, the NHU was not even the dominant wildlife broadcaster in the UK. Survival, with a strong component of Southern African material and with a South African born producer Mike Hay, was drawing much larger audiences (Gouyon 2019, 116). Partridge, as Davies pointed out, won the big competition prizes for most of the 1980s. And it didn’t stop there. Ellen Windemuth recalls in 2000 walking to collect the Golden Panda for the Foster brothers’ The Great Dance past rows of shocked BBC figures. If that didn’t happen in 2020 when Craig Foster won for My Octopus Teacher it was only because the event that year was virtual because of the COVID pandemic.

Angus Bowmer (1904–1979), founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in his biography As I Remember Adam, describes his years growing up as a member of a musical family engaged in the country newspaper business in which his grandfather started 16 newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest. His grandfather's process as Bowmer describes it was to move into an area with an old press and immediately through the newspaper start advocating for a new road or “some other project which would bring the community together in support of the common good.” Eventually, the newspaper's advocacy became a factor in new businesses starting up as people begin to develop an identity as a community. “The citizenry would take on a feeling of pride in the identity of their community. New folk would move in, houses would be built and there would emerge a new town.” The establishment of a new town was the signal to Bowmer's grandfather to pack up and move on to the next place.

Bowmer learned from his grandfather an approach in which cultural institutions, such as a newspaper, could be the creative force in a community. It was an approach he would use in 1935 to establish the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the small town of Ashland in southern Oregon. The difference between Bowmer and his grandfather is that Bowmer stayed in Ashland and set a public engagement in motion that would create a theater enterprise that in 2021 would cover four acres of Ashland in three theaters with an annual audience of 400,000, employ 675 and have an annual budget of 30 million dollars. His efforts resulted in Ashland, a small community of approximately 21,000, to be the site of one of the largest regional theaters in the United States and the home of the most noted performing arts institution in Oregon. Bowmer's initiative is an example of what business researcher Henry Etzkowitz refers to as civic entrepreneurship in which there is alignment between humanistic, social and commercial entrepreneurship.

Introduction

This chapter explores why and how African wildlife documentary moved significantly from East to Southern Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s, at a time when southern Africa faced considerable political turmoil: the struggle for independence in South-West Africa/Namibia; the June 1976 upheavals in Soweto; the battle for independence in Mozambique and Angola.

Chapter 4 will examine the importance of the rise of private lodges and a guiding culture in more detail and Chapter 5 outlines, through a critical comparison of Southern African with British productions, and particularly those of the BBC’s NHU, what the distinctive strengths and achievements of Southern African wildlife productions were and are. These chapters thus summarize much of the material that will be covered in more detail in later chapters that take a more historical and chronological approach.

Drawing on the theoretical insights of Bourdieu, Latour and Peters, this chapter examines three major sets of factors, agents and infrastructures: the background of the filmmakers; the legal, economic and political factors enabling the development of a local industry; and the crucial agents and infrastructures that enabled Southern Africans to go beyond relying on outsiders who made films in Africa. These cultural, political, economic and technological factors made it possible for Southern Africa to move from being simply a site for colonial or imperial production to being a place where Southern Africans were, arguably, producing the most interesting work in the genre. Given the difficulties subordinated formerly colonial cultures have in achieving this kind of cultural status, the achievement and the conditions for it matter.

The Filmmakers

Who were the filmmakers producing the major documentaries and what brought them to Southern Africa during this period if they came from other countries? I asked Jen Bartlett why she and her husband Des, both Australian-born, but the first major filmmaking couple in East Africa who had worked with Armand Denis and inspired Alan and Joan Root, had ended up in the Namib and spent the last years of their career in Southern Africa. Her answer succinctly sets out the push and pull factors involved in their eventual settling in Namibia:

Two-and-a-half hours south of Astoria there is a headland formed by the upthrust of underwater volcanic basalt flows with views of the ocean and the Salmon River estuary called Cascade Head. The grassy headland is home to an endangered species of butterfly, the Oregon Silverspot, that only exists in four other locations in the world. The headland prairies are covered with native plant species—paintbrush, goldenrod, blue violet, streambank lupine and two rare wildflowers—the Hairy Checker Mallow and the Cascade Head Catchfly. Cascade Head is also home to elk, deer, coyote, snowshoe hare, bald eagle, great horned owl, red-tail hawk and the peregrine falcon (Figure 20).

Sitting looking out over the landscape, I contemplate that for thousands of years this was the home of the Nechesne a branch of the Tillamook tribe who built permanent log plank villages along the estuary and temporary summer shelters at fishing and berry picking sites. They were outstanding craftsmen who created sea worthy dugout canoes and designed detailed baskets that could be used for a variety of purposes including cooking. The promontory of Cascade Head was also a vigil site for Nechesne who on spirit quests climbed to the top to fast and dream.

Dreaming continues to be an integral part of Cascade Head through the back-to-nature movement that was an fundamental part of Oregon in the 1970s. Artists Frank and Jane Boyden participated in this movement by starting an Oregon Coast summer camp for children. Their initial goal was to teach children how to deeply observe the many faceted environment of the Oregon Coast. Ultimately, they established a community on one acre donated by rancher Mike Lowell where artists and scientists living and creating in a natural environment could be in conversation with each other. The couple's vision to establish what would become the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology overlapped with Mike Lowell's goal to protect the Cascade headland and integrate it with the Cascade Head Experimental Forest that had been established in 1935.

Oregon State and Lane County Fairs

The Oregon Country Fair is often described as a new cultural event of the late twentieth century. Yet as historian Lila Perl notes, “In their oldest and simplest form, fairs were a means of bringing people together to trade, by bartering or by buying and selling. Commerce and communication sprang from the primitive fairs of prehistory.” Fairs have been a way of life in the United States since King George II advocated in 1745 that the town of Trenton, New Jersey, hold one to promote its agricultural products. In fact, beginning in 1860, the big event in the life of those living in Oregon was the State Fair sponsored by the Oregon State Agricultural Society and held in Salem, the capital city. The art-rich Oregon Country Fair is a reflection not only of this centuries-old fair tradition but integrates a specific aesthetic twist and focus on sustainability that has been integral to the cultural history of Eugene.

In the late nineteenth century, families traveled by wagon and train to the Oregon State Fair for the opportunity to spend a week camping outside the State Fair's grounds and visiting with distant friends and relatives. “Fair-goers carried with them everything they would need for the entire week of camping. Flour, sugar, rice, coffee, with dried fruit for pies and home-made jams and jellies, home-based bread, fried and roasted chickens, baked ham, cakes and always the big coffee pot and the syrup keg.” Participation at early State Fairs was based on gender. Men visited farm and stock exhibits, machine sheds and farm equipment and later in the day the race track.