la chasse du lion a l’arc (d jean rouch)

Nowadays we are festooned with TV programs documenting obscure corners of the planet. The images are always seductive, attractive, whispering of a pre-lapserian time when nature and mankind co-existed in a seemingly more harmonious time. Rouch’s film, made over the course of seven years, opens with these kinds of images, as his jeep is filmed headed into the deep interior of the African continent, crossing the river Niger and entering a zone which, the narrator tells us, has neither roads nor villages, and is referred to as the Nowhere Place. This is the inhospitable southern edge of the Sahara, a land of scrub and thorn. The only inhabitants are pastoral nomads who bring their herds to the water holes. This territory belongs to the animals more than the humans, giraffes and hyenas and of course, the lions. The lions, the narration observes, generally live in peaceful co-existence with the humans, only killing cattle that are sick. But sometimes, a lion will turn savage, and kill just for the hell of it. And that’s when the lion hunters are called up.

Up to this point, Rouch’s film has been an amiable watch, in keeping with modern documentary methods. But when the hunters enter the frame, this changes. After showing us how the hunters prepare their tools, including the lethal looking traps, the film then follows two hunts, one unsuccessful, the other successful. This latter hunt occupies the last third of the film. Now we are witness to the other side of the harmonious picture. The hunters traps snap shut on the paw of a civet, a hyena, a young lion and finally a grown lion. The hunters execute the final kill with their poisoned arrows, but the animals are already on a death spiral once they have been caught in the traps. The rest is putting them out of their misery. Rouch’s film doesn’t spare the viewer any of the savagery of the kill. The dead lion is brought back to the village as a trophy, where it is reduced to skin and bones, its meat carried off to be cooked. The images are disturbing, horrific, savage. This, the film shows us, is the other side of that seemingly Edenic world. Blood and viscera. The mirage of the bucolic life is eviscerated. And this is also honest; revealing how dishonest are all those lovely images that populate our screens and our consciousness, as some kind of ‘other’ to our cosy, ‘civilised’ existences.