The Lion Hunters

In a  chorus in Antigone, Sophocles celebrates human cunning and craft, man's ability to tame horses and send sailboats careening over the deep seas.  Jean Rouch's astonishing The Lion Hunters, an ethnographic film released in1965, embodies a similar theme:  the complexity of human transactions with the wild.   Rouch was a great, instinctive filmmaker who was later hailed as one of the great inspirations of the French Nouvelle Vague.  His films don't erase cultural differences, but bluntly expose to us the sheer strangeness of other ways of being human.  People and their societies are, to use a German word, fragwuerdig -- that is, worthy (and necessarily) to be questioned.  A good anthropological film and, indeed, a good documentary in general shows you something you have never seen before and, perhaps, never imagined and, then, I think, raises more questions than it answers.  The Lion Hunters meets and exceeds these criterion -- indeed, during much of the film, the viewer is shaking his or her head and asking:  Why are they doing these things?

Framed as a sort of griot, that is, an African legend told to the community, Rouch's film follows the fortunes of four or five professional lion-hunters, members of the Songhay tribe that lives in villages between Mali and Niger.  The lion-hunters are somehow engaged -- the nature of the transaction is unclear -- by nomads who wander in a vast, thorn-bush studded chaparral.  The nomads have negotiated a truce with the lions that live in that place -- when a lion approaches their cattle, they drive it off with sticks and stones and, as Rouch tells us, a lion repelled in that way "will never attack a man."  The nomads seem to admire the lions that they believe to be the genius loci of their savannah home -- the lions cull the sick cows from their herds and their children can't sleep until they hear the oddly reassuring roar of the lion in the bush.  But, periodically, a lion will go rogue and start attacking healthy cattle or threatening humans.  When this occurs, the nomads don't simply shoot the animal or trap or poison it.  Instead, they retain the services of the Songhay villager lion hunter's guild.  These men bring a sort of complex (and gratuitous) technology to the hunt -- they make special bows and arrows, brew a deadly poison (made from water drawn by a woman noteworthy for her jealously), carefully imbue their arrow points (which we have seen them making) with this woman-poison, and, then, consult soothsayers about the hunt.  Although people with guns are obviously available, the lion has to be confronted, harangued, and, then, shot with these poisoned arrow.  Rouch's film tracks the technologies, many of the linguistic (incantations and speeches that must be made to lions and other prey), involved in the hunt and, then, shows the hunt itself.  The actual hunt stretches over several years and culminates in the killing of a lioness.   The biggest, most dangerous, and cunning lion, called "the American", eludes the hunters and remains on the prowl. 

The portrayal of real death in film is always disturbing and the last half of the picture is sometimes not easy to watch -- a variety of animals are crippled by carefully concealed steel traps and, then, slaughtered.  This is gory and the viewer sympathizes with the maimed animals vainly trying to escape their fate.  A villager who intrudes on the hunt gets mauled by a lioness -- oddly enough, this is less disturbing than the imagery of dying animals.  The beasts are killed with elaborate rituals and the hunters beg for their forgiveness and the chief hazard seems supernatural -- the angry ghosts of the dead beasts can apparently wreak havoc on the hunters.  When a young lion is trapped and killed, the apprentice hunter is told to kill the animal with the understanding that the man who kills a lion is "very likely to have his son die."  The film is full of curious portents and prophecies.  In the final scenes, after the big lioness has been killed, the hunters re-enact the successful adventure for the villagers -- one man crawls stealthily, shrouded in a cloak, imitating the lion; another man shoots an arrow into the dust near him causing the man pretending to be the lion to go into seizures.  An old woman chants a song about the lion-hunt and the children look on wide-eyed as the narrator tells us that this is, perhaps, the last traditional lion hunt that will take place in this area -- the rituals and incantations are being forgotten and there are, of course, easier ways to get rid of the big cats.  There is an elegiac, even nostalgic, tone to the film.  (In some ways, it reminds me of Sweetwater, the recent documentary about cowboys driving herds of sheep over the rugged Bear Tooth mountains on the northwest border of  Wyoming with Montana.  At the end of the film, a title tells us that we have witnessed the last such drive -- in the future, the sheep will not be herded over the high mountain pass by men on horseback).  Most noteworthy is the notion that the lion hunter's trade must be undertaken outside of the outside of the village for it requires traffic in "wicked things."  Notwithstanding this reservation, the "wicked" hunters revel in the knowledge that they are celebrated in song, legendary heroes of their people and guardians of its culture.