Film and the Hunting Experience

Stalking the Hunters

Written by Wieczorek, Gerald

Wieczorek, Gerald. 1998. Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University. Pre-publication draft. Copyright: Gerald M Wieczorek

 

Preface: Autobiographical Note of a Hunter

Reflexivity can be a quality in the film viewing experience where one takes on the thoughts and consciousness of the subjects (10). Many of us have experienced this phenomenon of reflexivity known psychologically as “flow”, sometimes in a computer game or a good book we loose track of time, because we are so involved in the subject. This “flow is a form of reflexivity. I call this transformation.

The myths and icons are so hard, raw in The Hunters that it took me awhile for the cognitive functions and processes to develop my understanding of what I saw. This film requires a while to reflect while the powerful nature of the images cools.

The look on the hunter’s face and lack of effort of the hunter to feebly throw a spear into the giraffe’s chest spoke volumes. From several thousand miles away and 40 years apart the look on his face, touched me and I bonded with this fellow hunter and understood his paradigm (subsistence hunters) intuitively, hunter to hunter, killer to killer. In the face of the “other” I found myself. I saw me, technologically 200 years ago. At this point in the film, the context teleported me to Africa as a !Kung African hunter. Not as a black man but as a hunter, tracking, learning to think as the animal we hunt, reading spoor, following blood trails, stalking, killing, bleeding, gutting, skinning and butchering. The “subsistence” and “sport” hunting paradigms, both lined up and fell into place for me. The odor of hot blood, covered to your elbows in sticky warm wet blood is a context hunters understand. Both concepts want a kill, one for survival, the other is part ritual. One approves of any method to kill the animal and feed his family, the other has rules and codes about killing. One approves of the use of any and all weapons as it is less technologically developed. The other is highly developed and very accurate at long distances. (I qualified as an ‘Expert Marksman’ in the US Army, I can hit a fifty cent piece at 100 yards.) Both have an empathic feeling for the animal. I had never seen this, empathy in “savages” killing game before. Not like how I feel when I kill, but in this film that feeling, that look grabbed me and grounded my “sport” hunting context in this “subsistence” context. I now KNOW and understand the ontology of our “sports hunting” paradigm, maybe back to the Paleolithic, but can trace it at least back to the !Kung in the 1950’s.

I experience crossed feelings of sorrow for the pain and suffering and death of this fine innocent animal. And feel joy and exultation over my abilities as a hunter to feed my family, if the chips are ever down. A feeling of carrying half the power of God; to kill. A sadness over using this power, causing pain and suffering in innocent animals. It was this feeling I saw in this hunter’s look, that teleported filmicly, I became him. I understood the “subsistence hunters” method, just as I understand the “sport hunters ” method, they are both the same. Except one is a matter of survival, of life or death, but technologically at least 200 years removed. This is one of the most powerful methods and uses of reflexivity I have seen.

The first time I felt this empathy was after I killed my first bird (non-game). I was excited by the power of my weapon and the abilities of my skill. This was soon overwhelmed by the feelings of waste, unnecessary death that could not be undone. I was ten years old at the time.

Never seeing this empathy in “subsistence hunters” is not unusual, I have almost never seen it in my “sport hunters” tribe either. It would be considered unmanly. It is evidenced sometimes by the silence of a new hunter (after his initial excitement) during his cleaning the game. Or the older more experienced hunters do not get a kill, they sometimes do not need or want a kill. Many hunters who intend to kill a deer are unsuccessful, from lack of ability or bad luck. Many hunters go through this ritual never intending to kill a deer. It is used as a socially acceptable way to commune with nature. A way to get away from work and live in the wild for a while re-charging our ‘Green batteries’.

And this turns to motivation, for “subsistence hunting” usually it is for food. However deer hunting in the USA it is not for food, the cost of the license, weapons, ammunition, transportation and outfit cost, far exceed the cost for the equivalent amount of beef.

My motivation can be traced back to two events. Stories my Grandfather told me about how during the Great Depression he kept my father and Grandmother fed (they lost their home), by hunting as there was no work. During the 1950’s in school we used to practice “Duck and Cover,” hid under our little school desks, in case of Nuclear Russian attack, Atom Bombs. This was presented as the end of civilization. Even as an adult after I realized the unlikelihood of surviving a nuclear war, this thought has persisted, I do not need the food, I need to keep the hunter inside me alive.

Both of these experiences imbued in me a need to have the skills and abilities to hunt to feed my family, if it ever came to that. That started my annual hunter’s ritual, hunting buck in Michigan. An annual testing ritual, have I lost touch with nature, do I have enough primitive in me still to track, kill and butcher, to with stand and endure days in the snow and sub-zero Temperatures? The wood fires, smell of smoke permeating my clothes and skin. Confirmation of my ability to chuck civilization and live off the land. Do I have what it takes to become a hunter-gatherer, if civilization collapses? I do feel some guilt over killing such an animal, but it feels imperative and basic to my survival to do so.

As kids we used to play shoot’em up, cowboy and Indians, and TV is loaded with shoot’em ups. It takes some discipline, skill and hardness of heart to actually kill an innocent animal, even for food. Depending on cold war conditions some years I have felt a need to prove, I still have these abilities. That is how I understand the “subsistence hunter.” Some hunting buddies (tribe), and I get together and go hunting for bucks. 30-06 and I against Michigan’s beautiful masters of the woods, magnificent, brown eyed, well muscled, innocent deer. I personally feel and experience the deer’s death, as all hunters do, during cleaning I am up to my elbows in his warm blood. I feel proud of my skills and abilities just as the !Kung do, I am touched by its death and feel guilty over any unnecessary pain and suffering, just as the !Kung do in this film, for the first time I see we are hunting brothers, 200 or maybe even 100,000 years removed. In this movie I understood and FELT, a brotherhood with archaic man. In one glimpse I was teleported into a !Kung hunter.

Introduction

The premise of Tomaselli and Homiak’s (1999) paper is: John Marshal, shot some of the best film footage in his career in the 1950’s. This evaluation is contrary to Marshall’s own statement, “not a single foot of film” … he shot in the 1950’s … “was worth using” (9). Marshall’s repudiation of The Hunters as an artistic creation of his own imagination, deserves re-consideration. This film connected me, a hunter, to this !Kung hunter, using flint age weapons in a way that transformed me. Even if the native hunters did not kill the giraffe, this film has a sense of being there. For hunters it is transportingly haunting in nature. It is not my responsibility or desire to re-write the hypothesis to include this information. It is my desire to point out the powerful learning experience it coveys. I want to explore why this problem develops within anthropology and to question part of the anthropological paternal and imperialistic ontology’s. And I want to point out John Marshal’s intuitive genius in filmic recording the breadth and depth of the band he chose to focus. To recognize the context of his work, at the time this film was shot (1952- 195 he was close to twenty years of age.