Film Paper #1

The makers of "Confronting the Wilderness" present us with a nature-centric history of the early colonial period of contact between Europeans and North America's indigenous peoples in the area of what is now New England and eastern Canada. Like our readings from Chapter 3, the film focuses on the concept of wilderness as it might have appeared (or been constructed) by the Europeans. In describing the French canoe-borne river traders who lived very close to the people and natural environment of that time and region, it introduces us to a major colonial life-style which our text did not provide. Yet if the film is attempting to portray nature as the early settlers would have experienced it, I believe it is somewhat deficient. Let me explain.

When we discussed the text, we focussed on two perspectives confronting early colonists as they viewed the natural landscape. One was a vision of a fruitful virgin (land) impatiently waiting to yield its bounty to those who would bring their labor, their god, and their seed; the other, a nightmare tableau of terrifying beasts and savage men, impenetrable and strange forests, winds bearing storms and disease, soil that would not yield crops. These contrasting perspectives were especially well represented by William Bradford and Thomas Morton when they wrote contemporaneously in the early years of the Plymouth colony.

We have considered the change in the European Americans' concept of nature and wilderness over time, through the romanticism of the 19th century and into our environmentalism of the 20th. However, Bradford and Morton demonstrate that multiple, strongly disparate views of nature have been held at the very same time by European Americans. To hold such multiple perspectives of nature is to be expected, I believe, for those who live closest to it.

The film was quite lush in its intimate portrayal of living things that would have been encountered by the peoples of that time, particularly by the French canoe travelers who lived lives much like those of the Indians with whom they traded. To make the film appealing to us, the filmmakers represented a side of nature in keeping with our 20th century environmentally- (and perhaps Disney)- oriented wilderness construct: Technicolor plants and animals rushing through the sunshine in harmony. A very nicely done, but also comfortable, portrayal of nature.

The harshest acts of nature I can recall represented in the film involve deer being bitten by flies, and flies being trapped in pitcher plants. For William Bradford, and most probably for the film's French river traders as well, nature would have removed its mask of gentility on many occasions. The terrifying side of nature is quite difficult, I think, for most of us today to comprehend. A grizzly bear is something from a child's television show. We escape storms by evacuating or building stronger habitations. Our biggest communal fears revolve around the predicted behavior of our computers in the new year. Even earthquakes fail to impress us soon after they pass, and we expect our commercial infrastructure and architectural prowess to at least largely blunt even this demonstration of natures wrath.

Because the terrifying side of wilderness, which the early colonists would often have experienced, is difficult for most of us to appreciate, I wish the film could have given us more perspective on this side of the Europeans' relationship to nature. If I recall, even one of the most dangerous aspects of the French river traders life, descending river rapids, was portrayed as some sort of game or challenge. I'm not amused by documentary films that specialize in animal gore or human tragedy for the sake of titillation, but I felt in this film a lack of a perspective that would have helped us better understand the reason for the colonists' dual views on wilderness.