La Chasse au Lion a l’Arc

1967 documentary from Jean Rouch
This is a more straightforward documentary of the ‘hunt’ for a lion. We have the usual Rouch form narrator who to a degree holds the proceedings together, connects up the disconnected and quickly cut, but logically complete, footage. Here we have much outdoor shooting, with much of the precise action for obvious reasons not visible; there is a strange moment where it is confessed (to be believed?) the camera function stopped working.
The question that has to come from this is; what exactly is the foreign element here? One could say it is a matter of time; the disgust that greets the killing of the fine beast, the protest of its prone body lies there, and Rouch surely feels this way to, note the shots, almost lingering, of the disgustingly stripped body. The lion speaks to us more than the people.
Yet a key theme of Rouch’s is that we, in a sense, see ourselves in what is most alien. But what is this ‘seeing itself’? Sheer identification is plain racism; arguing for ourselves as universal. In ‘Les Maitres Fous’, for example, there is a lot more than simple colonialism; there is an alien aspect, of life and forms of life, that seem difficult to touch. And if we do try and see ourselves, what do we really see? Our own unknowability? Our own need to project, but inability for this to succeed? These questions are perhaps the key ones of Rouch, for the non-African viewer; the questions of closeness and separation, with all the hubris the very posing implies.