safari (d ulrich seidl)

Seidl’s deadpan, disturbing documentary is a fearsome piece of stripped-down filmmaking. As the title suggests, the film follows various  Austrian characters on safari at a game reserve in Namibia. The reserve is run by a German couple whose visitors include a family of four, father, mother, son and daughter. It’s obvious that these people are extremely wealthy. Safaris aren’t something many can afford, as one of the hunters observes, stating they bring far more money into the country than ordinary tourists.  

The film is set up to intersperse moments of action, as the hunters track down game in the bush, with snippets from staged interviews, where they talk about their attitudes to hunting, killing and death. Those characters seem harmless enough on first viewing; their attitudes appear to be formed by a need to prove their alpha status, for example when the son questions his sister as to why she’d draw the line at killing a lion or a giraffe. They come across as banal figures, playing out some kind of power fantasy as they tramp through the bush, searching out targets. Another older couple are even broadly comic, with the wife spending her time sun-bathing whilst her husband drinks beer in a hide, waiting for game that never arrives.

But in the last third of the film the killing takes on a different dimension. The mother has already shot an impala and posed by it, but now the son shoots a zebra. The beast’s beauty appears to be unconquerable even in death, but then the filmmaker shows the zebra being skinned by the African workers, who also increasingly figure in the film’s narrative. Then the father shoots a giraffe. It feels like an act of terrible, senseless vandalism. When they get to the beast, it is still dying. The camera observes its death throes in a chilling sequence, made all the more so by the family’s pride in their actions. It’s not a boastful pride; it’s a kind of self-serving bourgeois pride in a job well done. Seidl then films the giraffe being loaded onto a truck, driven away and skinned, with the family looking on. The images of the entrails are worse than anything you’d encounter in a horror movie.  The film has captured the obscene reality of killing: a beast that was alive and wondrous a few hours ago is reduced to a carcass. 

The exact message of the movie is never stated, but the viewer comes away with a deep feeling of unease; that this kind of sport should still exist; at the senseless violence of man; and an implicit critique of a class of people who choose to indulge themselves using killing as a kind of bonding experience. The film is framed with two shots, pre and post credits, of horn players performing in a European forest, suggesting that this is a movie which is more concerned with questioning European values than anything else. The reserve is owned by slightly racist Germans, (with suits of armour in their colonial home) who have created a kind of savage idyll. Safari is a very simple piece of filmmaking, but the director succeeds in creating a deeply unsettling narrative from his material.