Nature documentaries have been a staple of the cinematic world since the silent era, although many of the most famous examples stretch the meaning of “documentary” about as far as it can go. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), for instance, was scripted, cast, and staged, but none of those things seemed remarkable to anyone at the time it was released. More recently, we have the Disney nature docs like White Wilderness (1958), whose deliberately misleading editing inculcated the belief in generations of viewers that it’s in the nature of lemmings to commit mass suicide. Even more recently we have the many BBC films and series from Sir David Attenborough that juxtapose stunning nature photography with heavy-handed narration that apparently some people like (I generally watch with the sound off).
Some directors take the opposite approach, dispensing entirely with narration and dialogue. Often this approach is paired with a direct cinema style, as in Nicolas Philibert’s 2010 film Nénette, whose central character is an orangutan living in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris (you do hear various human visitors react to her, but no voice of God narration). In a similar vein is Thomas Balmès’ Babies (also 2010), which offers a fly on the wall view of the lives on infants and mothers in four countries.
Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux’s Heart of an Oak (sometimes billed as “Heart of Oak”; the French title is simply Le Chêne or “The Oak”) represents an interesting hybrid approach to nature documentary. The central character, so to speak, is a massive oak in the Sologne region in central France, but most of the film’s interest lies in its observation and dramatization of the lives of the many creatures living in and around this mighty tree. On the one hand, it is legitimately without words except for some song lyrics heard on the soundtrack, so there’s no voice of God narration telling the viewer what to think and feel. On the other hand, this film is organized around a series of dramatic wildlife encounters, created through Hollywood-style continuity editing and accompanied by a dramatic soundtrack cueing the audience to the appropriate emotional response, that would not be out of place in the most conventional Disney, or Attenborough, documentary.
You could say that all movies are created in the editing suite, but with a conventional narrative film the task is to create the appearance of real life from a series of scripted, rehearsed takes that are usually shot out of order. Heart of an Oak seems to have been created in a similar manner—while animals are not big on taking direction or rehearsing multiple takes, if you have enough patience you can catch them on camera doing whatever it is you need them to do, and the resulting footage can be edited together to create a convincing narrative.
Does that make Heart of an Oak “real”? I’d say it makes it better than real, because you’re getting not just some random encounters of woodland creatures that happened to be captured on film, but the Platonic ideal of those encounters, perfectly photographed and edited for your viewing pleasure. Plus the obvious fact that of course this is a real film and thus, like all films, is a created object. For what it’s worth, five writers are credited in the imdb: original idea by Charbonnier, scenario by Seydoux and Michel Fessler, and collaboration by Dominique Mansion and Karine Winczura.
The best way to enjoy Heart of an Oak is probably to put such concerns out of your mind and let it wash over you, in which case you can enjoy a view of one corner of the natural world that you will probably never experience first-hand. And everything about this film is well done, so feel free to sit back and enjoy Mathieu Giombini’s stunning cinematography, Cyrille Aufort’s endearingly quirky soundtrack, and above all the skillful editing of Sylvie Lager. There’s also an implicit message being delivered: the creatures you see in this film are part of a web of life in which even the smallest of them plays an important role. The individual “players,” who are identified (with proper Latin as well as colloquial French and English names) in the credits sequence, include the starring pendulculate oak (born in 1810, to be precise) plus supporting characters including an acorn weevil, an Eurasian jay, a wood mouse, and a northern goshawk. | Sarah Boslaugh
Heart of an Oak is distributed on VOD by Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment.
