Docs from The Open

In Spring 2026, students in ANT 455: Visible Evidence: Wildlife Films and Multispecies Documentary traveled to the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya to create films exploring the relationships between humans, animals, and conservation research. Working alongside scientists, community members, and Kenyan students, they produced documentary projects that challenge traditional wildlife filmmaking and highlight multispecies perspectives that emphasize the myriad ways that the rest of nature expresses itself.

Led by Professor Jeffrey Himpele, ANT 455 seeks to reveal and reinvigorate ways of socializing and communicating beyond humanity and to understand the species with whom we live in community on this planet. To do this, we maximized the multiple sensory capacities of filmmaking that would enable us to tune into the forms of relationality and expression among nonhumans. Starting with our seminar in Princeton, here is what we did:

• Engaged in screenings and critical analyses of wildlife films, noting the anthropocentric dominance on language as a primary form of knowing and storytelling; language, we noted, is a bossy way of seeing that can detract from understanding the physical forms of expression among nonhumans even in the most spectacular wildlife films. We also studied how commodification and the political economy of the commercial documentary industry contributes to global warming and loss of biodiversity. 

• Learned the basic techniques of filmmaking that might be applicable to any documentary film, but with the aim of bending them into anthropological, multi-species film styles. 

• Studied multispecies films and ethnographies that would inspire our own experiments with films styles that reveal how humans and other animals interact and communicate. In these approaches, we focused on pointing, tactility, nudging, uses of physical space, mimicry, and gesture, for instance, in ways that went around symbolic language and narrativity; or we would draw on language as only one form of expression in a much wider range of possibilities. 

• In Mpala for ten days, students were joined by a half a dozen Kenyan students and collaborated on five projects about relations between animals and humans - most of them scientists as well as Mpala Centre staff who are concerned with the conservation of nonhuman life. As you can imagine, the films we created have a look and feel that you typically don’t see in conventional Nature documentaries. The films dial up and down, meld and mix, various forms of communication and sociality with and among ourselves, scientists and wider nonhuman worlds.  

• Finally, a few larger lessons learned: First, we came to view filmmaking itself as a multispecies machine capable of tuning into and getting closer to the rest of Nature. We set aside the idea that filmic representation had to be detached, but that it nevertheless entailed degrees of distortion or manipulation of a preexisting "Natural" domain. Instead, then, we developed a heightened awareness of film's intrinsic nonlinguistic and physical dimensions of pointing, nudging and sheparding viewers through a temporal and spatial path. Multispecies filmmaking subverts the distanced, objective or even romanticizing stances of filmmsaking - where Nature would just "be itself." These are misleading if not reckless approaches in the context of global warming and biodiversity crises in which humans are already accountable, in varying degrees, for the conditions they are representing. And of course, filmmaking at any scale has ecological implications, or a "footprint." Finally, we learned that many of the scientists, conservationists, and staff at Mpala themselves were already working with and practicing a robust multispecies mindset and practices. It is this thread that the ANT 455 class will trace at Mpala in January 2027.