समाचार

Sex-obsessed newts, a vampire vine, slime moulds – nature films of the interwar wars focused not on big beasts in exotic places but on the world around us. Robert Macfarlane hails a golden age of natural history documentary.

In the summer of 1903, the hottest ticket in London was for the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, where a minute-long silent film called Cheese Mites was showing to packed houses. The film was the work of an amateur naturalist called Francis Martin Duncan, who had hit on the idea of pointing a motion-picture camera down a microscope. Cheese Mites, the result of his experiments in micro-cinematography, was a miniature B-movie masterpiece. An Edwardian gentleman sits at a table, browsing his newspaper through a reading glass while lunching on bread and cheese. He idly turns his glass upon his cheese and – horror! – discovers it to be seething with dozens of "great uncanny crabs...