The Lemmings Were Pushed

In 1958 Disney released White Wilderness, one of its True-Life Adventures, a series of nature documentaries made for cinemas. It won the Academy Award for documentary feature, and one sequence in it outlived everything else: lemmings swarming across the tundra to a cliff edge and throwing themselves into the sea, while a narrator explained the compulsion that drove them.

Lemmings do not do this. Their populations go through dramatic booms and crashes, and in a boom year animals disperse in large numbers, and some drown crossing rivers and lakes. There is no instinct for mass suicide. The film did more than anything to fix the opposite in the public mind, and lemming is still a word for a mindless follower.

The sequence was also manufactured. A Canadian television investigation in 1982, Cruel Camera, showed how. It was filmed not in the Arctic but in Alberta, with lemmings brought in for the purpose. A snow-covered turntable, filmed tightly, turned a few animals into an endless migration. And the final plunge was produced by driving the animals over a bank into the water below.

That makes White Wilderness the clearest case in this book of a documentary that is simply false, and it is worth being exact about what made it so. Not the turntable: wildlife films use controlled settings all the time. Not that the animals were bought: that is ordinary production. Not even that the event was staged. What makes it a fabrication is that it staged something untrue of the animal, and told the audience it was nature.

Two questions separate the cases. Is what the film shows true of the world? And was the audience allowed to know how it was obtained? Each can fail without the other, and two later cases show how.

In 2011 the BBC's Frozen Planet showed a polar bear giving birth and nursing her cubs in a snow den. The den had been built in a zoo in the Netherlands. A wild birth cannot be filmed that closely without putting the cubs at risk, and the method was explained on the programme's website, in material about how it was made. It was not explained in the programme. When newspapers found out, David Attenborough defended the decision: the behaviour was real, and the alternative was no footage at all or a danger to the animals.

Frozen Planet passes the first question. Polar bears are born in dens like that one, and the footage shows what happens there. It was criticised on the second.

Then a newer case. Roadrunner, Morgan Neville's 2021 documentary about the chef and writer Anthony Bourdain, made after his death in 2018, contains a few lines in Bourdain's voice that he never spoke aloud. They were generated by software trained on recordings of him, and the words were his own, taken from things he had written. The film did not say so. Neville mentioned it in an interview after release, and the reaction was furious.

Roadrunner passes the first question too, at least as far as the words go: he wrote them. The row was entirely about the second. An audience that hears a dead man's voice assumes a recording, and the film let it assume one.

Put the three side by side and they sort cleanly. White Wilderness fails both questions. Frozen Planet and Roadrunner pass the first and stumble on the second, and the second is the cheap one to fix: a line of narration, a caption, a credit.

A point from the Hearing book belongs here as well. Much of the sound in wildlife films is added afterwards, performed on a Foley stage, because a microphone cannot be placed beside a hunting animal. By the first question that is fine, since the sounds are chosen to be true of the animal. By the second it is the same issue as the zoo den, and it is rarely raised.

So, the conclusion of a book that began with an igloo cut in half. Staging was never the line between documentary and fiction, and every film in these four lessons was arranged somewhere. Flaherty reconstructed, Riefenstahl's subjects performed for her, Morris hired actors, and the BBC built a den. The line is elsewhere: whether the arrangement serves something true, and whether you were allowed to know.