The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale

This essay examines a corpus of award-winning nature films associated with French actor-director-producer Jacques Perrin: Microcosmos: le peuple de l’herbe/Microcosmos (Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou, 1996), Le Peuple migrateur/Winged Migration (Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud & Michel Debats, 2001), Océans/Oceans (Perrin & Cluzaud, 2009)

The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale

L'échelle environnementale et les documentaires écologiques contemporains de Jacques Perrin
Margaret C. Flinn 1 The 1990s-2010s nature films associated with Jacques Perrin (as voice actor, producer, writer or co-director) have been critical and box office successes that arguably have shaped turn of the millennium mainstream nature documentary (both in France and abroad) as much as the work of Jean Painlevé or Jacques Cousteau in their respective eras.Perrin is not an auteur as defined in film theory: in this corpus he serves alternately or multiply in various roles that are not (or not only) director/co-director. His ability to dedicate himself primarily to work in nature documentary from the 1980s on was clearly connected to his stardom, which was well-established from the 1960s.Thus, he is unlike other towering figures of international nature documentary (film and television combined), such as David Attenborough, who did study science prior to becoming in essence an extraordinarily high-profile science communicator.To a degree Attenborough and Perrin are comparable, though: the hyper-recognizable public figure who has quite literally been the national voice (through recurrent narrator roles in doc films or television series) of a kind of mainstream environmentalism.Like Perrin, Attenborough has engaged in multiple different roles in relation to the television series and films he has been a part of.Whether behind the camera, producing, or narrating, his presence serves as a guarantor of quality for nature documentary in Great Britain.Thus, within nature documentary, there is a special kind of auteur figure, in that their participation in a project can be tracked in terms of aesthetics, recognition, reception, etc.All projects with which they are associated thus can constitute a coherent corpus.I suggest that Perrin's "authorship" then, gives the four-film corpus of this essay a logical coherence and also a greater representativity (because of the expansiveness of the filmmaking teams) than focusing on a single director would have.To date, Perrin's The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 films have attracted scholarly attention primarily as individual units of study (particularly in the area of animal studies).In this essay, I use this underlying auteur framing of Jacques Perrin films to give some organizational logic to a small corpus I will use to explore the question of spatiotemporal scale in contemporary nature films. 1 Perrin's films, such as Microcosmos: le peuple de l'herbe/Microcosmos (Claude Nuridsany &   Marie Pérennou, 1996), Le Peuple migrateur/Winged Migration (Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud &  Michel Debats, 2001), Océans/Oceans (Perrin & Cluzaud, 2009), and Les Saisons/Seasons (Perrin, Cluzaud & Alexandre Poulichot, 2015), have garnered many nominations and wins at Cannes, the Césars, and Oscars, as well as numerous specialized documentary and environmental film festivals.Perrin is associated with significantly more projects (especially as producer), but these four films are logical focal points as they exemplify various aspects of the problem of scale across a two-decade span. 2 In their editorial introduction to a special issue of Studies in French Cinema 3 on documentary, David Heinneman and Sharon Lin Tay characterize these Perrin films as "high-profile, innovative, critically acclaimed and successful," pointing out that Seasons, then forthcoming, had a budget of €29.8 million (158).The blockbuster, high-profile nature of these films can be seen on an international scale, with Seasons taking $11.5 million at the worldwide box office, Oceans $83 million, Winged Migration $34 million, and the ground-breaking Microcosmos, $1.5 million (Boxofficemojo.com,consulted June 14, 2022) -Oceans clearly benefitted from its distribution by Disney. 4of these films involved significant technical innovation in order to capture so much extraordinary footage of their non-human actors (the term preferred by the filmmaking teams) -efforts showcased in press publicity and DVD or internet-based paratextual materials (such as "Making of"s).Microcosmos caused marvel for its closeup images of insects where camera movements needed to be calibrated to a fraction of normal scale; Winged Migration attracted attention for its innovative use of ultralight aircraft to fly amongst flocks of migrating birds (before drone cinematography became commonplace); Oceans pushed boundaries of underwater photography; while for Seasons, unusual mounts were constructed on off-road vehicles to capture fast-moving images of non-human actors running and hunting.While direct evaluation or analysis of this technical innovation would thus be one valid approach to such films, I will here pursue a different angle.
Across the films in question, we see a displacement of human scale.From its very title, Microcosmos suggests both extreme smallness ("micro," small) and vast completeness ("cosmos," universe, order), and of course the film's main subject is insect life, which is not only small, but generally close to the ground, sometimes living in the soil.The film takes as its subject the insect life of a single meadow, much of which is filmed in what we call extreme close up -but we must recall that this very term for framing is determined by the size of a human body, for in fact the insects are, by their own terms, more often framed in long shots to medium close ups.Winged Migration considers the transcontinental seasonal migration of birds, a scale of distance which vastly exceeds what humans can easily or regularly traverse on their own physical power, and remains significant even with the aid of transportation machines.Oceans considers the life in and around 70% of the earth's surface, within 97% of the planet's water, while Seasons takes up and expands the annual cyclicality evoked in Winged Migration, considering time from before human history through the present.Thus, Perrin's films cross a wide range of scales, recurrently situating the human spectator in a scaled relationship to the image, in order to encourage an ethical engagement with the environment.The play with scale (and perspective) afforded by technical innovation, is thus part of a range of scalar strategies that are concerned with positioning the human vis-à-vis the nonhuman (the specifically animal and the ecological/environmental more broadly).Thus, I will argue that these films engage spatiotemporal scale as a means of situating the human spectator vis-à-vis the environment, particularly in the context of contemporary environmental change.

Parallel Worlds
As I have already pointed out, from its very title, Microcosmos explicitly contends with the problem of scale, but its subtitle, "le peuple de l'herbe" [the people of the grass], points towards the parallel between insect and human life. 5In paratextual materials and press interviews, Nuridsany and Pérannou resolutely refer to the insects as "actors," language which is maintained by crew members on all the subsequent films, as a means of rendering explicit that their process was as much that of fiction filmmaking as observational documentary.For example, the filmmakers meticulously created sets using real plants, in order to give insects a space for natural behaviors that would nonetheless allow camera access, but once the insect actors were introduced into the set, the filmmakers were forced to wait and observe what the insects would do. 6The animals then are described as being better or worse actors based on the degree to which they would carry out natural behaviors on set.Microcosmos' pattern of titling, using "peuple" (in this case, in the subtitle) remains evident in subsequent films: Winged Migration's original French title is Le peuple migrateur, while Océans' companion television series was titled Le peuple de l'eau and that of Les Saisons, Le peuple des forêts.Microcosmos and the subsequent films foreground the spectacular nature of viewing these creatures' daily life -since such perspective is not within most humans' typical experience.Yet, a crucial move established in this first film is to set up the microcosm of the meadow's insect life as a world that exists in parallel to that of humans in the establishing sequence.
The film opens with a shot of nearly ninety seconds, from above the clouds on a day with heavy cloud cover.At the top level of towering cumulonimbus clouds, the camera looks down towards thicker, lower levels.A lap dissolve brings the viewer to that lower level, with a continued descent until a jump below the clouds; the camera then skims over the treetops of a forest, racing towards an open meadow, at which point another dissolve brings the camera deep into the grasses, leading ultimately to a series of extreme close ups of a series of the insect denizens of the meadow, who will be the film's subject.Thus, Microcosmos problematizes vastness in scale from the outset, carrying the viewer from above the clouds to deep within the lowest of grasses, extending above and beyond the range perceived in most daily human life.
The remaining two minutes of this opening sequence is a montage noteworthy for the variety of insects it depicts, before returning to another establishing shot of hillside meadowlands with a voiceover that establishes the parallelism between insects and humans that directors Nuridsany and Pérannou nourish throughout the film. 7As Perrin's voiceover explains: [Hidden under that meadow is a vast world, as large as a planet.Wild grasses are transformed into an impenetrable jungle.Pebbles become mountains, and the most humble puddle takes on the dimensions of an ocean.Here, time passes differently.An hour for a day, a day for a season, a season for a lifetime.]8 The comparison between the meadow's ecosystem and that of planetary ecosystems bears some consideration.As Tiago de Luca puts it in Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth, the words earth and planet both partly resist abstract and anthropocentric connotations by evoking materialities and processes above and beyond the human.Whereas Earth shares its name with the ground and soil, thus producing an adherence to the ideas of land nourishment, rootedness and organic life, to speak of the world as a planet is also to picture it as a physical entity, but as a rounded, solid object floating in outer space alongside other celestial bodies.(de Luca 26) position themselves in vast, non-human scales, I would suggest that the technical innovations needed to smooth out camera movements and render them appropriate to the insects' scale can be understood as a gesture towards rendering the entirety of the film visibly verisimilar.The "making of" DVD bonus for Microcosmos spends a great deal of time explaining the challenge of translating human-scale camera movements to insect-scale so that the insect actors' movements could be filmed in a visually plausible way.In Bigger than Life, Mary Ann Doane points out that "this desire to exceed or The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 surpass the scale of the human has been allied historically with film theory insofar as the camera lens is understood as inhuman, 'objective,' independent of authorial perspective" (Doane 23).But in the making of, Nuridsany explains: "Il a été nécessaire de développer des outils qui permettent de guider la caméra avec une extrême fluidité, et il s'agit de mettre le spectateur vraiment à la hauteur des insectes à l'échelle des insectes, comme si lui-même était parmi eux" [It was necessary to develop tools that would allow guiding the camera with extreme fluidity, with the goal of really putting the spectator at the level of the insects, on their scale, as if the spectator was among them] (0:01:24, my emphasis).
Rather than trying to exempt their camera from authorial perspective, the filmmakers here ally the camera with a nonhuman animal scale of movement precisely as the crux of their environmentalist engagement.

Aerial bodies
Winged Migration (like Oceans and Microcosmos) occupies a perspective that is almost impossible to imagine in terms of the human body -in this case it is less a matter of the scale of the body itself, but rather of its possible position.In Oceans and Winged Migration, the problem is partially one of scale: the immensity of the oceans and the diversity of its creatures is a central challenge to the spectator.In Winged Migration, the central issue is the distance of the migration, and, like the underwater creatures of Oceans, the fact that the animal subjects of the film have all or substantial portions of their lives unfold in a different realm from humans, to wit, under water and suspended in air.Winged Migration was made possible by the use of ultralight aircraft to fly amongst flocks of birds who were imprinted on humans.While this does not cause the viewer to reckon with a different size of creature (as in Microcosmos, or even the large ocean mammals in Oceans), it does put the viewer in an unusual position vis-à-vis the earth.A huge portion of Winged Migration's screen time is given to aerial photography where the birds are 'normal' sized, but the earth below is distant and unfamiliar.This has two effects.On the one hand, the flying birds, shown at varied closeness to the camera, are 'normal' to human scale, and thus while their extraordinary activity is highlighted, their size is not hard to comprehend.In contrast, the earth in the background of any of the in-flight images is defamiliarized.Of course aerial photography is not new, but having the birds as life-sized anchors or focal points throughout such images is far less common.
Like Microcosmos, Winged Migration deploys a framing device that offers an anchor point for human scale and perspective: in this case, a small, open wooden structure seen on a river at the film's opening and closing.It appears to be a type of washhouse.This structure serves as a visual anchor during the film's opening sequence: a first shot which is set in winter with a series of close ups of a small European robin who has taken shelter in the structure; a second wintery image that dissolves to springtime, with a small church spire and glimpse of village buildings in the background.These images are classic establishing shots, from an understandable, 'easy' perspective.The robin in springtime is shown feeding babies in its nest; greylag geese arrive; a blue bird is fishing, then feeding its young; and at three minutes, a young boy, about 10 years of age (played by Perrin's son), is seen racing through the forest.When the film returns to the distant image of the washhouse, the boy is just visible approaching the structure, and The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 then, in a medium close-up, peering through the lattice of the structure.The geese take off, and the boy frees one, whose leg had been caught in a net.
Throughout the Winged Migration, there are more and less prominent, intermittent traces of human presence (a boat, Parisian [and other] buildings, humans, factories in the background of flying flocks), even a very difficult-to-watch encounter with hunters.But the boy at the beginning will return at the film's close: at 1:29, we see the same goose flying, with the bit of netting still dangling from his foot.The birds are now flying from screen right to left, and the boy runs (in similar framing to the beginning) in the same direction.Again, the same long shot shows the boy approaching the shelter, now in a new springtime, upon the geese's return.The camera zooms out away from the robin, who moves towards the camera (and in cutaway, we see a new nest of chicks), before eventually returning to another v-shaped flock, far away in the sky.The combination of the young boy and the washhouse structure with the double arrival/ departure of the flock of geese, and the robin's new family, together serve as an indication of the cyclical nature of seasonal migrations.These are also, however, images that are at a comprehensible level: for most (French) audiences with any daily experience of green space, these are common perspectives.Such images thus serve as anchors for the more extraordinary ones that make up the bulk of the film.

Blue planet
Like Microcosmos, Oceans begins with a view far above its subject, although not above the clouds, and like Winged Migration, uses a young boy (again, Perrin's son Lancelot) as a diegetic point of reference -this time more extensively and with Perrin himself also visible in front of the camera.After shots straight down at waves, the camera follows a group of kids running over dunes towards a beach, and then lingers on the back of the head of a single boy.Jacques Perrin's voiceover begins at that point: Un jour, un enfant qui découvrait la mer me demandait, 'l'océan c'est quoi, l'océan ?' Et je ne savais comment répondre.C'est quoi la mer ?C'est quoi l'océan ?Comment raconter ?[One day, a child discovering the sea for the first time asked me, 'The ocean, what is it, the ocean?'And I didn't know how to answer.What is the sea?What is the ocean?How to tell that story?]As Perrin's voiceover speaks, the image cuts to a medium close-up of the boy contemplating the waves.
Lancelot and Jacques return later in the film, appearing in a museum of natural history where ultimately Lancelot is face to face with a taxidermied seal.There have just been three closeup shots of different extinct creatures, coming on the heels of a staged sequence of whaling.Lancelot's limpid, dark brown eyes mirror those of the marine mammal.Jacques joins his son in the frame, with his voiceover recounting, "Ça aussi, il faut que je le raconte…" [I need to tell this story, too…] and the two walk through the museum, wordlessly contemplating the dead, preserved animals, mounted in life-like poses, as if they were swimming through the gallery's air."Combien d'espèces avons-nous fait disparaître ?Combien sont en voie de disparition ?Combien sont menacées ?" [How many species have we caused to disappear?How many are on their way to extinction?How many are threatened?]Throughout this promenade, the camera has continued to move around the pair, including far above, mimicking the fluidity of the underwater camera movements, and eventually the sequence concludes with a rushing movement up The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 towards the windows of the gallery as a sound bridge transitions the viewer back from the cathedral of science and monument to the dead that is the natural history museum, to the underwater cathedral of rock formations with beams of lights penetrating down in canyons from the surface far above.Where Perrin père and fils were the audience stand-ins in the museum, here the camera slowly approaches two divers examining the wildlife, indicating the possibility of a human entry point towards a different contemplation of oceanic life -despite the sequence's overarching indictment of human activity in bringing about extinctions of other species.
In this sequence, there is a clear gesture towards human extinction, as Perrin considers the rapidity of extermination of ocean species, showing the boy's quiet contemplation as the father looks affectionately down at his son.Clearly, Lancelot represents a possible future with greater appreciation of the natural world, as these nature documentaries all have the ambition to inspire.Yet an underlying current of parental anxiety haunts the sequence, for what world is being left for our children?The psychological immensity of this problem is suggested with the two humans seen crossing the floor of the gallery, surrounded by a parade of mounted sea creatures, while the frame is nearly filled by a portion of the body of a whale in the foreground. 8eans does not only situate humans in relationship to other animal bodies, but in relationship to the planet as a whole.In a reversal of the plunging shot at the opening of Microcosmos that descends from above the clouds down into the meadow, after the sequence about ships during stormy seas, Oceans transitions from sea level to a sequence showing the earth from far above.This sequence that shows multiple satellite views of the planet comes right after images of a fishing vessel and then an even larger military vessel being tossed in waves as a storm starts to blow up roiling seas.Watching the military vessel climbing a wave, one cannot help but observe how insignificant people are, as this massive machine meant to encase and protect them is tossed about indifferently by the waves.Thanks to CGI manipulation, a massive zoom out allows the camera point of view to climb up through the storm and increasingly clear cloud cover (with window and storm noises ultimately fading to silence as the camera enters space.Ultimately, the camera pauses to show a satellite in orbit.(At 1:19, Perrin's voiceover says: "La ronde des satellites observe notre planète" [The parade of satellites observing our planet].)Next (1:20), a series of satellite images show the progress of pollution emerging from rivers and pouring from various coastlines, penetrating into the oceans.After four such coastal shots, comes a montage of the ocean surface seen from below, covered with plastic bottles and other waste, to finally glimpse, as if from the sea denizen's perspective, a massive factory where the factory, water, and coastline are a menacingly dark color suggesting evil and toxicity. 9The film here has modulated from humans' smallness relative to marine creatures, to humans' relative powerlessness in the grips of ocean storms, to humans' invisibility from space.Nonetheless, that zone of the all-powerful, godlike view of the earth is shown to be populated by the satellites ultimately destined to be space junk-just as the oceans are filled with plastic detritus.From each point of view, then, human damage is evident.
Predictably, Lancelot and Jacques return at the film's closing, this time in front of a massive aquarium tank.They contemplate the live animals much as they previously had contemplated the dead ones in the gallery, as Perrin's voiceover asks :

"Doit-on se préparer à vivre dans un monde artificiel ? Où des représentants de chaque espèce seraient conservés dans des parcs animaliers, dans des aquariums géants ? Pâles reflets d'une diversité révolue ?"
The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 [Must we prepare to live in an artificial world?One where representatives of each species would be conserved in animal parks and giant aquariums?Pale reflection of vanished diversity?] 10 As father and son walk off, the screen fades to black, and a huge planet fills two thirds of the screen, coming into view backlit as if by a rising sun rounding the globe.This appears at first to be a satellite image, until the viewer notices father and son have entered on a catwalk on frame right.The film cuts to behind the pair, and instead of being in front of a perfect blue marble, the two are framed in such a way that the earth is so large as not to be completely visible.

Commenting on this sequence, Adam Konik writes :
Here, what at first appears to be an encompassing image of the earth suspended in space -which may invite the idea of mastering the earth -turns out to be merely a point of view shot of what a boy and his father see from a steel walkway: a large plastic model of the earth.Immediately the illusion of mastery is replaced by a sense of humans' smallness relative to the planet, and hence their actual vulnerability.(40) I agree with Konik that where Oceans attempts to move its visitor is towards a sense of human fragility (and culpability).But the voiceover's attempt to encourage audiences to change before it's too late because "Il n'y a pas de planète de rechange" [there is no backup planet], its final exhortation that "tout est encore possible" [Anything is still possible], rejoin the moves that Tiago de Luca notes are enacted by the films such as the IMAX Blue Planet (Toni Myers, 1990) and Beautiful Planet (Toni Myers, 2016).De Luca explains that these films, having constructed a "technological sublime" in the spectacular visual views of earth from above, end on a hopeful note.De Luca points out that both films […] reinforce a prevailing Anthropocene narrative according to which the whole of humanity is not only attributed ecological culpability but is also assumed to continue to have mastery and control but now in the service of saving, rather than destroying the planet, as Kelly Oliver puts it" (De Luca 80). 11timately, I would suggest that Perrin's "tout est encore possible" does not undermine the cautionary note, as one reviewer calls the final scrap of narration a "thoughtful warning about the state of the globe" (Firestein 1483).

Biogeologic time
In his essay "The Uses and Abuses of Environmental Memory," Lawrence Buell taxonomizes environmental memory in relationship to three or four different spatiotemporal scales, or "environmental timescapes": (1) "biogeological" time: i.e. human life imagined as participating in an ongoing process of planetary unfolding ever since time began; (2) individual lifelines imagined as shaped through symbiotic relation to place; (3) narratives of communities and (4) of nations imagined as formatively shaped by social or collective processes of remembering crucial interdependencies between people and physical environment.(97) For her part, Ursula Heise (with whom de Luca dialogues in his theoretical reframing of cinema away from "global" and towards "planetary"), remarks that the novels she studies in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet have an "interplay between local, regional, and global processes, as well as the alternation between the irruption of an apocalyptic The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 disaster and the normalcy of everyday routines" (13).The novels Heise studies, as well as the types of narratives I have considered in bandes dessinées as falling into Buell's second and third categories, are all what can be characterized as individual human or cultural stories -in other words, their scale is human. 12What the Perrin nature documentaries attempt to reckon with is the biogeological.Moments of individual lifecycles of non-human actors (the birth of a fawn, ducklings jumping/falling from their tree-hole nest, violent death from predators, etc.) may be showcased in individual sequences, but no single actor's (human or non-human) entire lifecycle is a unifying thread.Instead, these individual lifecycles are always examined as part of ecosystemlevel processes.Even when those occur on a human-comprehensible temporal scale (the annual migration of birds), the spatial scale exceeds that of the human, as I discussed above.While Perrin's other films take on scale primarily from a spatial perspective, Seasons is concerned with time -as one immediately intuits from its title.But contrary to what one might guess, the temporal scale in question is not simply that of a single year.Instead, the film uses the four annual seasons that demarcate temperate forest zones as a marker for the characteristics of the time period from the end of the Last Glacial Period through the "golden age of forests," up until the advent of widespread cultivation of farmland in Europe, through to the present day.Of all of Perrin's films, this one (like Oceans, co-directed with Jacques Cluzaud), has the strongest human presence.Instead of offering identifiable human characters who serve as anchors or entry points for the audience, though, Seasons' raison d'être is to convey the human impact on the environment, while centering that story on non-human life.Thus, the film begins at the end of the Last Glacial Period, with images of bison and reindeer on frozen landscapes.Perrin's voiceover explains "L'hiver durait depuis quatre-vingt mille ans, un manteau de glace recouvre le continent."[Winter lasted for eighty thousand years, a coat of ice covers the continent.]Obviously, it is impossible to film the pre-cinematic past, so in order to maintain their observational positioning, the filmmakers substitute space for time: filming still-frozen regions to stand in for the more southerly portions of Europe that were covered with ice during the Pleistocene. 13The film does not maintain strict proportionality of screen time to real time: the film is approximately one and a half hours long, and the final third is deeply implicated in Anthropocene/Capitalocene transformations of the environment.However, the film's set up and first hour does keep homo sapiens' presence at the extreme margins: at three minutes, for example, as a snowy owl perches upon a rock cairn lost in a desolate landscape, the voiceover remarks, "Sur l'immensité, peu de traces des hommes, juste quelques pierres empilées" [In this immense space, few traces of men [sic], just a few piles of stones.]After this acknowledgement that humans do walk the earth, the film holds the speaking bipeds on the margins, showing, for instance, at about 10 minutes a flute player in the forest, out of focus on the ground while a warbling bird takes up the center of the screen within the forest canopy.Or at 16 minutes, a child is glimpsed through trees, observing the horses that are the focal point of the sequence.During these brief glimpses, the human characters are out of focus, obscured by foliage, or viewed only from the back or in partial framing that does not include their faces.
During the final thirty minutes, humans remain obscure in terms of characterization, but their presence and impact on the environment is more explicit.The domestication The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 of dogs (while wolves retreat deep into the forest) and the appearance of hedge-row countryside ecosystems are depicted fairly neutrally, the voiceover making no comment upon the wolf who initially shows some curious interaction with a human child (taking a snack of a bone tossed to it), or the subsequent dog who peacefully traverses a village and enters a long house structure.The "lisière" ecosystems are commented on as providing opportunities for species diversity (1:20).But from 1:09 on, the film is dominated by sobering sequences on sport hunting, deforestation for the building of the Royal Navy, culminating in the trench warfare of WWI and its toxic gases re-purposed as pesticides in the twentieth century: "l'homme est devenu une force géologique" [man became a geological force].This film once again concludes on a note of hope, with closeups of a girl and fawn looking at each other in the forest, positing that "au printemps de ce nouveau siècle, une nouvelle alliance est encore possible" [in the springtime of this new century, a new alliance is yet possible.]While the narrator of Seasons remains relatively "discreet" (as reviewers congratulated previous films for their light touch in voice-over), these closing exhortations indict human-kind, while emphasizing the need and possibility of change in the relationship between human and environment. 14nclusion 31 Seasons appears as a kind of summum of Perrin's career, including migratory bird footage remarkably similar to that of Winged Migration (graylag geese, herons, pelicans), and large horned beetles filmed very much like the actors of Microcosmos.Perrin's death in April of 2022, while I was in the process of preparing this essay, sadly ensures that Seasons will remain the capstone of his oeuvre -one which encourages, through a variety of strategies, a shift in perspective, allowing human 'anchor points' positioned against and in relation to scales that far surpass the human.Joshua DiCaglio ends his substantial study on scale theory with the exhortation that "We do not simply need to see more or better, but in a qualitatively different fashion.We need to learn to spend time contemplating these scalar relationships, but doing so requires that we each take on the difficult task of looking at and facing the fundamentally false sense of egoic identification that lies at the core of our interpretation of the world" (265).In other words, as DiCaglio writes just above, "experiencing the self itself as ecological" (265).It bears remembering the point where I started: Perrin's nature documentaries were immensely successful, mainstream affairs.They are also, notably, "family friendly," and their points of hope explicitly foreground children as the addressee of wisdom (father to son, in Oceans), and as the embodiment of hope for a future wherein a different relationship between human and non-human animal, human and environment might still be possible.Across this body of work, the human is positioned as an anchor point, and allowing 'egoic identification' (particularly for children who might see themselves mirrored in Laurent, or the girl at the end of Seasons) that shifts their importance relatively to a sense of scale and planet.Nuridsany and Pérennou present the fiction/non-fiction issue in terms of their praxis.This praxis and language appear to be consistent with the teams of subsequent Perrin films.

2.
Oceans and Seasons also have the benefit of existing in companion television minidocu-series versions, Le Peuple des océans/Kingdom of the Oceans (four episodes, 2011) and Le Peuple des forêts [no English-language release] (three episodes, 2016).These companion television versions could allow for some direct comparison of different aesthetic strategies, most obviously the sparsity of voiceover.Océans opens with remarkable footage of Galápagos marine iguanas, a marine reptile that appears particularly strange due to its rarity.In the film, the creature is never identified, whereas in Episode 1 of Kingdom of the Oceans, "From the Land to the Sea," the didactic voiceover (that almost never ceases throughout the series), furnishes not only the name, and basic facts about the marine reptile, but also explains its limited geographic range and particular evolutionary history.

6.
In Seasons, the crew's process was similar except that it involved scouting forest locations that could accommodate various camera chase rigs, and using primarily mammalian actors who were imprinted on human handlers but also raised together, such as a predator-prey pair of a lynx and deer, such that they could be allowed to interact freely but without danger to the prey animal.

7.
One of the very few scholars to engage in extended study of the Perrin documentaries, Adrian Konik, dedicates an entire article to the way in which this parallelism in Microcosmos is philosophically substantiated.

8.
The following sequence continues these size comparisons, showing one or more divers with immense whales and sharks.13.This very obvious sleight of hand on the part of the filmmakers is grounded in the common scientific practice of substituting place for time when conducting experiments where it would be impossible to wait for real time to unfold in order to take further measurements.In preparing this article, I benefited from discussions about Perrin's films with my Ohio State University colleagues in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, Dr. Jonathan Calede and Dr. Des Palik, and would like to express my appreciation for their insights and impressions of the accuracy and validity of these films as mainstream science communication.

INDEXKeywords:
Perrin (Jacques), Microcosmos, Oceans, Seasons, Winged Migration, auteur, documentary, environmentalism Mots-clés: Perrin (Jacques), Microcosmos, Océans, Saisons (Les), Peuple Migrateur (Le), auteur, documentaire, écologie The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 Caché sous cette prairie s'étend un monde démesuré, grand comme une planète.Les herbes folles se transforment en jungle impénétrable.Les cailloux deviennent des montagnes, et le The journal is currently published under the title French Screen Studies.4.Pierre Gras positions Perrin's work similarly to Heinemann and Tay: "Parmi les plus grands succès, citons les documentaires animaliers Le Peuple migrateur (2001) de Jacques Perrin et La Marche de l'empereur, qui attira près de 1 900 000 spectateurs français en 2005 et fut aussi un exceptionnel succès d'exportation."(305) 5.In "A Cut or a Dissolve?Insects and identification in Microcosmos," Georgina Evans analyzes this parallel as a matter of cross-species identification that resists anthropomorphic tendencies by rendering the insect point of view.Anat Pick chooses a different theoretical tack, in "Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt," engaging rather with the notion of interior animal worlds, comparing labor in Microcosmos and Robert Bresson's A ManEscaped (1956).For both essays, see Animal Life and the Moving Image, McMahon and Lawrence, eds.

9 .
On the challenges of representing toxicity cinematographically, see Karl Schoonover, "Documentaries without Documents?Ecocinema and the Toxic," NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 2:2 (2013), 483-507.10.It is worth noting that this is one of several scenes omitted from the U.S. release of the film.The reviewer for Science Magazine suggests "The suspicious may see the deletion of this touching scene as an egregious act of corporate self-interest (Disney being a big player in the marine theme park biz)."(1483).11.De Luca here is citing Oliver, Earth & World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions, 24.For a consideration of spectacular landscapes in British television nature documentaries,The Contemporary Nature Films of Jacques Perrin and Environmental Scale Interfaces, 50 | 2023 see Helen Wheatley, "Beautiful images in spectacular clarity: spectacular television, landscape programming and the question of (tele)visual pleasure."12. See Flinn, "Popular Terroir."