Armand Denis: The Belgian who pioneered wildlife photography

From breeding flies in a matchbox in Antwerp to filming Africa’s wildlife for the BBC, Armand Denis was an extraordinary Belgian who was behind the world’s early wildlife documentaries.

A personal introduction

When I was in my early teens I was addicted to TV nature programmes. At that time, the late 1960s and early 70s, the BBC’s Natural History Unit was churning out superb nature documentaries. I was hooked to the exploits of Jeffrey Boswall in Africa and South America; Tony Soper tracking otters in Devon; and of course everyone’s favourite, David Attenborough. Backing them up were Eric Hosking and his brilliant bird photographs, and Jacques Cousteau with his underwater filming. But what I didn’t realise at the time was that all these men were riding on the pioneering work of Belgian Armand Denis.

It was only when Discovering Belgium reader and freelance writer Jack Gaioni sent me an article on Armand Denis that I realised how important this Belgian man was to the world of wildlife documentaries. Jack gave me permission to rewrite his article for Discovering Belgium, and here it is:

A puritan father, an encouraging mother, and a strange childhood

Born in Brussels on 2 December 1896 and raised in Antwerp, Armand Denis described his upbringing as stable and happy, though not without its tensions. His father, a judge who moved the family from Brussels to Antwerp shortly after Armand’s birth, was – in his son’s own words – something of a puritan and a disciplinarian with a strong sense of individuality. His mother, by contrast, recognised early on that her son’s fascination with the natural world wasn’t a phase, and encouraged it rather than trying to redirect it.

That encouragement paid off in unusual ways. While other Antwerp children were kicking footballs or flying kites, or other activities that whatever ordinary Belgian children did in the early 1900s, young Armand was doing totally different things. At three years old he started breeding flies and insects in matchboxes. By five, he had amassed an impressive collection of lizards. By seven, he was travelling alone by railway across Belgium, notebook in hand, cataloguing wildlife and teaching himself the basics of photography.

From Oxford chemistry student to prisoner of war

At seventeen, Armand Denis enrolled at Oxford to study chemistry and engineering, as, remarkably, a “refugee student.” Why this label? Well, on the very day the German army invaded Belgium, seventeen-year-old Armand joined the Belgian Army. He was captured almost immediately and sent to a German internment camp.

Here is where his physical stature became, quite literally, his ticket to freedom. At two metres tall, no prison uniform in the camp fit him. So he simply walked out the front gate in his own civilian clothes. He made his way to England, briefly joined the Belgian resistance in London, and used his refugee status to talk his way into Oxford.

The invention that financed a life of adventure

After the First World War, Armand worked as an engineer across France, Belgium and the United States. It was during this period that he developed something called Automatic Volume Control (AVC). AVC is a feedback circuit that compensated for the wildly inconsistent signal strength of early radio broadcasts. It smoothed out the fluctuating volume that had plagued listeners since the medium began.

While Harold Alden Wheeler is more widely credited in textbooks for inventing AVC around 1925-1926, Armand Denis independently developed or co-invented his own feedback circuit system during the same era. The invention was highly successful, and the patent royalties he received granted him complete financial independence. This allowed him to step away from his rigorous laboratory work and pivot entirely to his true passion: traveling the world and pioneering early wildlife documentary filmmaking.

The documentary that became an international sensation

Armand Denis’s first stop, armed with second-hand cameras and used equipment, was Bali, then part of the Dutch East Indies. He’d set out to make a documentary about the island’s animal life. What he came back with was something else entirely.

The resulting film, Goona Goona, used an entirely native cast to capture Balinese religious temples, ceremonies, dance and the island’s social customs, including, candidly, its sex life. American censors of the 1920s labelled it “semi-pornographic,” which, rather predictably, only made it more popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Goona Goona became an international hit and is widely credited with kickstarting Bali’s very first wave of Western tourism. Here’s an excerpt:

Hollywood comes calling for Armand Denis

The success of Goona Goona caught Hollywood’s attention. Armand Denis was paired with Frank Buck, a genuine box-office star known for his swashbuckling reputation as an animal trapper, to direct Wild Cargo (1934). Filmed across Singapore, Ceylon and India, it followed Buck capturing leopards, rhinos, giant pythons, orangutans and water buffalo for Western audiences. The film did moderately well and, once again, funded Armand’s next chapter.

But the experience left him cold. Working within a scripted, staged plotline alongside a Hollywood personality struck Armand as the opposite of what he believed documentary filmmaking should be. He was convinced that animals filmed in the wild – unscripted, unpredictable, and real – made for both more accurate and more genuinely thrilling viewing. So he turned to Africa.

“Wheels Across Africa”

By this time, Armand Denis had married Leila Roosevelt (yes, distantly related to the US President). In 1934-35, sponsored by the Belgian government, the couple travelled to the (then) Belgian Congo with the cinematographer Leroy G. Phelps, to record sound film material suitable for use in African movies. The route crossed from Belgium into Spanish Morocco, pushed through the Sahara, traversed the Belgian Congo, and eventually reached Kenya and the Indian Ocean.

The resulting film, Wheels Across Africa, covered more than 40,000 miles of rough African terrain. Remarkably, according to the facts on record, it was accomplished without a single mechanical breakdown. Not surprisingly, this did Dodge’s reputation for rugged engineering no harm at all. It’s considered a genuine milestone in the crossover between adventure filmmaking and automotive marketing. Here’s the first part of the film if you want to take a step back in time:

More importantly, the documentary introduced Western audiences to African geography and anthropology through unscripted, real-time wildlife encounters and synchronised recordings of Central African tribal music and conversation. These techniques were, at the time, genuinely new to cinema.

“Below the Sahara” changes wildlife television

In 1948, Armand Denis met British dress designer Michaela Holdsworth, they began an affair, Armand divorced Leila and married Michaela.

In order to finance their independent work, the couple travelled to Africa in 1950 to work on the feature film, King Solomon’s Mines, in which Michaela acted as Deborah Kerr’s double. In 1953 they made a new film together, Below the Sahara, and appeared on BBC radio to promote it. The BBC saw the couple’s potential for television work, and in 1954 they produced a successful TV programme, Filming Wild Animals.

The BBC years

Over the following decades, Armand Denis’s work became something of a gold standard for pioneering documentary filmmaking. It struck a particular chord with British audiences. He became a fixture on BBC television through the 1950s and 60s, effectively revolutionising the wildlife documentary genre, and hosted the long-running series Armand and Michaela on Safari.

It’s worth placing him in context. The twentieth century produced no shortage of people devoted to the study and protection of animals. These included Jane Goodall’s six decades of field research on chimpanzee social life, Dian Fossey’s work with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Margaret Mead’s cross-cultural anthropology, and later, television advocates such as Steve Irwin. Armand Denis arguably came first, and in many ways set the template the others would follow: go to the animal, on its own terms, and let the camera tell the truth.

The Antwerp boy who showed us the world

Armand and Michaela Denis eventually settled in Nairobi, Kenya. Armand published an autobiography, On Safari: the story of my life in 1963. He died from Parkinson’s disease in 1971; Michaela died in 2003.

Armand Denis was certainly versatile. He was an inventor, an innovative filmmaker, a self-taught animal behaviourist, a wildlife preservation advocate, a cultural anthropologist and a television personality. He was also a bestselling author, with his book Taboo exploring sexual customs across primitive and modern societies alike.

It’s a genuinely remarkable range of achievement for anyone; and it all began with a small boy in Antwerp, quietly breeding flies in a matchbox. Little did he know that he would reshape how we came to see the natural world.

Have you read this fascinating article on Discovering Belgium by Jack Gaioni?

Denzil Walton

I created Discovering Belgium in 2011 to share the country’s hidden stories, fascinating places, and remarkable people. Through articles, photography, and audio walks, I share discoveries that reveal Belgium beyond the obvious. Hope you enjoy this site.