Ecological Relations: FalconCam in Conversation with The Back of Beyond

This chapter augments conceptions of the national cinema as a space of cultural relations by proposing that cinema can also be understood through the lens of ecological relations. It explores how the wildlife webcam, or naturecam, functions in a cinema studies frame. By bracketing two very different examples the chapter asserts the diverse ways in which the category of documentary manifests recorded reality and brings the discipline’s (documentary studies specifically and film studies more broadly) analytical and historical frames to nascent digital moving image forms. It offers a double- edged intervention with an approach to Australian cinema that privileges the optic of the nonhuman, exploring how it might in turn revise the status of the human, while also advancing an expanded notion of documentary. The chapter shows how both FalconCam and The Back of Beyond bring to the fore a lack of certainty and human powerlessness in the encounter with the natural world.