The Habitat Diorama in/a Film - Text 1
The diorama tradition (particularly in its zoological, geographical, ethnographic and anthropological forms) was an important means for popularizing the sciences in museums around the turn of the twentieth century. Carl Akeley, the naturalist and inventor of the camera of the same name, was the key figure in the history of the habitat diorama, a strange, spectacular and pedagogical mise en scène containing the true and the false, things taken from nature and things fabricated in a studio, the embalmed and the synthetic, posed together frontally behind glass in a museum lobby. The word “diorama” is also present in another invention, by another “monomaniacal bricoleur” – to employ an adjective dear to André Bazin on the topic of technological inventions –, Louis Daguerre. In Daguerre’s conceptions, the path leading from the diorama to the daguerreotype can be seen as similar to that, in Akeley’s work, leading from the habitat diorama to the moving images captured by the Akeley camera. These projects, with their mechanical recording of images developed by their inventors, shared a field of exchange. The staging of nature in a museum and the films shot with the Akeley camera advance a common interpretation of the world, just as the canvases in Daguerre’s illusionist system shared something with the later world photochemical recording of light in the daguerreotype: transporting the experience of nature and re-presenting it. It was the same impossible mission.
The habitat diorama in Akeley’s project was a method for showing through glass in a museum and for arousing emotions in the hope of making people care about nature, already in danger in the early twentieth century. These dioramas showed frozen and imaginary moments in a wild, timeless space. They were a montage which constructed a different space, a milieu teeming with moving beings now shown in a gripping trompe l’oeil mise en scène, given its depth of field. There the nature familiar to the naturalist since his travels was encapsulated and now made available to urban spectators. The terms used here to introduce the habitat diorama, however, deliberately put up a smokescreen by merging with those which could be used to speak of cinematic shots brought back from the travels of an explorer. When Akeley began to conceive and make habitat dioramas in 1889 in Milwaukee at the Natural History Museum, and then from 1896 to 1909 in Chicago at the Field Museum and afterwards, in 1909, at New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), cinema did not yet exist and so was not capable of following in the field. In a sense, the spectacular naturalist exhibition in the form of “mini-worlds”[1] has cinema as an imagined reference, and the Akeley camera would make it possible to give material form to this vision.
