The Beauty of Hunting Revisited

After the short film The Beauty of Hunting, The Beauty of Hunting Revisited returns to the original scene of the lone female hunter immersed in the forest landscape and weatherworld to situate her within the unfolding of events and activities in which she was embedded that day.

Whereas the short film aimed at an understanding of hunting experiences through an evocation of atmosphere, this film deepens this understanding by showing how the sociocultural practice of hunting organizes and structures these experiences.

Instead of providing decontextualized ‚factual‘ information on hunting in general (through a narrator or interviews), the film stays close to the actual unfolding of the hunting day. It is hence not by listening to ‚explanations‘ that viewers learn about hunting but by attentively following what is going on – as the hunters follow the unfolding of action. The film might thus be conceived as an education of attention. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold has put it,

To show something to somebody is to cause it to be seen or otherwise experienced … by that other person. It is, as it were, to lift a veil off some aspect or component of the environment so that it can be apprehended directly. In that way, truths that are inherent in the world are, bit by bit, revealed or disclosed …