Wildlife documentaries have long been popular cultural products and important tools for environmental communication, yet their aesthetic dimensions have received comparatively little academic attention in the field of film studies. This dissertation addresses that gap by asking how wildlife modes bring forth environments and entanglements between humans, nonhuman animals, and cinematic technologies. The focus is particularly on the aesthetics of contemporary wildlife documentaries. The study is situated within the historical context of a paradigmatic shift in the wildlife documentary genre, especially from the early 2000s onward—a period marked by a growing prominence of environmental issues and climate change in public discourse and media representations.
Positioned within ecocinema studies and posthumanist theory, the dissertation critically interrogates the anthropocentric tendencies of wildlife documentaries while emphasizing their potential to foster more-than-human encounters. By conceptualizing wildlife documentaries as cinematic assemblages, the study highlights how these films and series do more than simply represent nature—they actively participate in world-making processes and visualize environments that extend beyond everyday human perception. The study introduces the concept of wildlife modes, an analytical approach that explores how wildlife documentaries construct perceptual and affective engagements with nonhuman life in an audiovisual manner. This concept enables a more nuanced understanding of how wildlife documentaries mediate multispecies relations.
This article-based dissertation consists of a thematic summary section and four peer-reviewed articles, each contributing to an understanding of wildlife documentaries as assemblages of human and nonhuman agencies. The research material comprises eight European wildlife documentaries, many of which are British productions—particularly by the BBC. The selected documentaries were produced between 1996 and 2019. Although the material includes widely distributed and popular works, the focus is on documentaries that depict environments beyond everyday human perception—spaces and processes made visible only through technological mediation.
Each article offers a distinct case study that illuminates the cinematic techniques and aesthetic strategies employed in contemporary wildlife documentary filmmaking. The research engages with diverse themes such as underwater aesthetics 5 and knowledge production, aerial perspectives and nonhuman agencies, microcinematographic representations that explore scale and interspecies encounters, as well as ecological temporalities and the visualization of climate change. Together, these case studies examine different wildlife modes that bring forth specific assemblages negotiating between humans, nonhuman wild animals, cinematic technologies, and specific environments, forming ecologies of wildlife modes. This conceptual assemblage reconfigures how wildlife documentaries visualize environments as entangled, multiperspective, and ethically charged spaces.
This research contributes to film and media studies and the environmental humanities by offering a new conceptual framework for analyzing the role of aesthetics in wildlife documentaries. The dissertation contends that attending to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of wildlife documentaries is crucial for understanding their epistemic and ethical implications in a time of ecological uncertainty.