Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed (2020)
Nature documentaries, however ecologically-minded, are inclined to anthropomorphism. The music and voiceover in the 1950s Disney ‘True-Life Adventures’ series were often derided for this. David Attenborough is understandably revered for his enduring environmentalism yet his television programmes, in this respect, don’t seem to me that different from the old Disneys. Sacrilegious to say but I prefer the work of cameraman and conservationist Gordon Buchanan to Attenborough’s. As their names suggest (The Bear Family and Me, etc), Buchanan’s TV films strike an honest balance between wildlife observation and personal involvement. The recently Oscar-winning Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher similarly earns points for a title that lays its anthropomorphic cards on the table.
The first person in this story is Craig Foster, a South African naturalist and documentary film-maker. Every day for a year, Foster went diving in the kelp forests off False Bay, near Cape Town, where he found and started to film an octopus. Not only does Foster become increasingly fascinated with the creature, a young female. He also gains her trust – she lets him observe her habits at close quarters and even engages in play. It’s impossible to avoid humanising language in a sentence like that last one – which more makes you sympathetic to the anthropomorphism you’ve just been hearing on the soundtrack. Besides, there’s no denying the octopus justifies the treatment to a remarkable degree, especially in her resourceful self-defence against a pyjama shark. One of its kind has already dismembered the octopus, who retreats to her den, allowing the arm gradually to regenerate. She thwarts the next attack by attaching herself to the shark’s back, eventually sliding off to safety. This episode makes a real heroine of the octopus, as smart as she is plucky.
A female octopus’s biological design makes her a paradigm of maternal self-sacrifice, as well as of the natural order whereby the individual ends but the species lives on. Once the octopus has been impregnated, she starts to die. In nourishing her eggs, she gives up her own strength. Her last act is to give birth; thoroughly depleted, she then expires. When he sees ‘his’ octopus mating with a male, Foster knows it’s the beginning of the end. A shark has the last word, making off with her remains. Foster’s feelings of loss – even in longish retrospect (his year with the octopus was a decade ago) – crystallised the low spirits that nature documentaries, in spite of their manifold beauties, tend to leave me in (‘Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks’). My Octopus Teacher, it has to be said, is certainly not short of beauties. A film of this kind is bound to be lauded for cinematography that’s amazing and breathtaking; here’s one that really merits those adjectives. The world under the sea is hardly a new screen location but the images of Roger Horrocks and Foster, both of whom shot submarine sequences, have an exhilarating lucidity.
Whereas you can’t get enough of the cephalopod teacher or the flora and fauna of which she’s part, I could have done with rather less of the human pupil. Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed share the directing credit but Craig Foster produced and seems to have been the prime mover, in more ways than one, in the making of the film. As well as doing the voiceover narrative, he also speaks regularly to camera, and he does go on a bit – in the regional accent that’s my least favourite. (I realise this amounts to racial prejudice of a kind but I also know my dislike of the sound of white South African voices derives from first hearing them emerge from guardians of apartheid.) This isn’t Foster’s fault, of course, but the same can’t be said for some of his clichéd remarks. He explains, for example, how, before the events described, he’d been ‘through two years of hell’. This turns out to mean little more than that he was overworked, jaded and seems to have felt the need to revitalise his relationship with his teenage son Tom.
The octopus experience gave Foster a new lease of life on all fronts. The closing legends explain that he still goes deep-sea swimming but now in the company of others – not only Tom but also colleagues in the Sea Change project, which Craig Foster co-founded in 2012, to help protect life in the kelp forests. What exactly did Foster learn from the octopus? The chief lesson, he says in the film’s closing lines, was ‘to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor: that’s a huge difference’. Fair enough, though why should the two things be mutually exclusive? Foster also says the octopus educated him to ‘care for all life, even the smallest fish’. I’m not sure if that all includes the pyjama sharks.
2 May 2021
