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. 

chronique d’un eté (d. edgar morin, jean rouch)

At the start of the film, the filmmakers declare their objective is to document the city of Paris over the course of summer, 1960. This is clearly an unviable objective and the filmmakers make clear that they are conscious of the limits of their project. Things open with a straightforward device, as two young women stop people in the street and ask them, bluntly, if they are happy, with predictably humorous results. It’s vox pop, ahead of its time, which allows the film to engage with a variety of people from differing backgrounds, but it’s a limited strategy. Then the methodology shifts as we move into a series of interviews with seemingly random characters: a worker in a Renault factory, an Ivory Coast immigrant, Marceline, one of the young women doing the interviews. Gradually the film starts to piece these seemingly random elements together. They meet, they interact, they discuss the events of the day, including the post-imperialist wars in Algiers and the Congo. They even go on holiday, to Saint Tropez, a paradoxically essential element of the Parisian summer. Along the way there are surprises and moments of raw emotion. Some of the characters open up, others are more guarded. The joys and futilities of living in the French capital are laid bare. The film closes with a sequence where the participants are shown the film in preview, a device which allows for more surprises and a further layer of commentary on the viability of the project in itself.

What do we get out of all this as viewers? Well, on the one hand, we do indeed get an idea of what Paris was like over the course of the summer of 1960. We get to see what it looked like, and what the concerns and hopes and fears of its citizens were. We also get an investigation into the limits of a certain observational fly-on-the-wall filmmaking style, what it reveals and what it hides. Where the traps might lie. But more than all of this, we also get a sometimes marvellous study of humanity, the simplicity of humanity, its everyday charm and its everyday despair, a life clothed in the secrets that every soul carries around with them.