China Revealed
The Age
Thursday June 5, 2008
The BBC's Wild China has captured an elusive world, writes Michael Idato.
THE power and the wonder of the images captured for the BBC's natural history documentary series Wild China are difficult to express in words, says producer Phil Chapman. "There is a sense of novelty to the images from Wild China, the sense of stumbling into a world which is like a parallel universe, that is hard to capture in print," he says.Wild China is the latest chapter in a series of "continents"-themed programs from the BBC's Natural History Unit. Past programs have included Spirits of the Jaguar, Land of the Tiger, Andes to Amazon, and more recently, Wild Africa, Wild Caribbean and Wild Australasia.The series was co-produced with China Central Television (CCTV) - the Chinese national broadcaster's first such collaboration - and explores some of the most remote and spectacular parts of China, including the Tibetan Plateau, Mongol steppes and Uygur Desert.Because the BBC had made several Wild programs before, there was a template of sorts that Chapman and his team could begin with. But Chapman had some issues with how preceding programs had dealt with their subjects, most notably a failure to explore the human aspect of their geographical subjects."The brief has been, let's look at the natural wonders of this place, and in Wild Africa, for example, most of us think of Africa in terms of poverty, AIDS, conflict and bad government, and Wild Africa said forget all of that, let's have a look at the beauties of the wildlife, but I kind of feel it didn't touch base with people's expectations of a series about Africa," Chapman says."It didn't show any people, it didn't show any rural African life, and to my mind, they were missing half the picture. The amazing-ness of most natural environments, in most parts of the world, is partly contributed to by the activities of people, the way the land is being used and managed."As a subject, China has historically proved to be elusive, even to the most persistent of producers, largely because the country's administrative infrastructure was unyielding. It was, says Chapman, less a case of the BBC wanting to do Wild China because of the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games, and more a case that because of the Games, the Chinese government was willing to take "a risk"."We've talked about doing Wild China for about 15 years, but it never really got anywhere because China was such a difficult place to get into, to get any co-operation, and what has changed is that in the run-up to the Olympics the Chinese are keen for the world to see something of China," Chapman says."They decided it was time to take a risk, and let people in to take a look, and doing a series like the 'wild continents' series felt to the Chinese, I imagine, like a fairly safe option. We would logically focus on the beauties of China, rather than the problems."Working with CCTV was challenging, particularly because the two companies had very different ways of going about their work. CCTV, somewhat unexpectedly, foresaw the problem and recruited a team of newly graduated students who spoke English and had not, as Chapman's contact said, "picked up any bad habits", and invited Chapman to train them in the BBC's processes. "That was quite a big challenge, because when you have the usual time constraints of needing to get things done, you don't usually have time to train everyone up," he says.The six-part series explores the floodplain of the Yangtze River, the Hengduan Mountains and Nujiang River of the south-western Yunnan province, Tibet's Chang Tang wildlife reserve and Taklamakan Desert, the northern interior of China "beyond the Great Wall" and more than 14,500km of coastline.Chapman says the locals reacted to the visiting BBC crew as if "you're some sort of exotic creature. It's a world which has been isolated from the rest of humanity for a long time."The most profound impact, Chapman says, were the stunning landscapes and the strong sense of community. "You get a feeling everywhere you go that it is still a place where communities are joined up, and that people help each other," he says."You see a lot of things that make you think, I don't want to live here, but you get a sense that for most people they enjoy living there, there is tremendous confidence in China, like this sense that China is the centre of the world, that being Chinese is a privilege."There were significant challenges, particularly the vast and disparate geography, from the Chang Tang reserve, where the crew filmed Chiru antelopes in temperatures of -30C plus wind chill, to the Taklamakan desert in the middle of summer, where it was 50C."China has not got a bad infrastructure, you can fly to most parts of China and they have a good road system. It's not like the US but it's way ahead of any other developing country I've been in, but because we were trying to cover all of China, and get a sense of every part of it, there was a huge amount of travelling. It wasn't logistically hard to organise, but it took a lot of our filming time."The series was filmed in high-definition, which Chapman believes has breathed new life into the landscape image. "You can certainly run a shot of a landscape for way longer than you would with conventional capture systems because of that detail," he says. "You can look at those pictures and find them interesting, and you can find movement within pictures which is not immediately apparent with lower-definition images."It has also pushed producers and directors away from the "big close-up", he says. "In this series, we've moved away from the obsession with what's this animal doing, and the balance is to give a much greater sense of place and a better sense of context."Wild China screens Sundays at 7.30pm on ABC1.
© 2008 The Age