When you get used to the icy, unpleasant atmosphere that often features in Ulrich Seidl’s films, it becomes difficult to feel anything other than a kind of weary horror. But watching this documentary about Austrian tourists at a Namibian hunting lodge I felt real indignation and disgust. It is hard to believe the smugness and lack of imagination of these people playing Great White Hunter as they fell impala and zebras with very loud, very powerful rifles in conditions so controlled that they effectively hide the fact that it is no challenge whatsoever.
But as someone who eats meat I also had to admit that what Seidl is showing us here is only an extreme version of something which is not so far from many people’s lives, far from this obviously exotic arena. Mind you: the hunters’ conceited theatrical rituals, get-up and vocab are especially galling.
We see an ordinary Austrian family being taught how to stalk, how to handle the weapon, how to approach the quarry once hit carefully, because it might not be dead. They are interviewed and express their enthusiastic love of hunting. We see some lodge owners interviewed, one expresses his robust political views and complains he cannot voice them without being accused of racism.
Then we see some horrible kills for sentimental reasons or irrational reasons or who knows why but some reason brings down a giraffe with particular gruesomeness. Then bizarrely poses the animal’s dead body for trophy photo shoot like you do: actually has leaves pushed into its mouth for added drama! The hunters congratulates each other pompously with phrase: “Hunter’s hail!” To which solemn reply is: “Hunter’s thanks!”
Then begins dirty work animals must be skinned, dismembered in preparation for head getting mounted on wall etc butchery stuff. This part done by black assistants who work at lodge well away from tourists etc, (social order). It may well be true that the hunter-tourists have never seen this.
This is a staged documentary with people posing for staged shots like portrait photos, standing still just long enough to look uncomfortable. (It’s a cliché and I wish the director could do without it). There are some of Seidl’s familiar images very fat middle-aged people in swimming costumes are shown sunbathing an activity which I suspect licenses the showing of, well, very fat ugly naked people. The contrived images here are not so different from douc-realism of his fictional work, using nonprofessionals.
I’m not sure that Seidl is simply campaigning against hunt-tourism any more than he was simply against sex tourism in his “Paradise” movies. His procedure seems to me to be about creating a grotesque world; or isolating the grotesque elements of the world he sees; then shining a cold, clear light on them. It’s horrible but fair film-making.
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