(Don’t) Look at the Camera - Text 1
When today’s viewer is confronted with images captured by the Akeley camera at its apogee in documentary cinema, it is difficult to pay no heed to the many issues around the representational practices employed at the time. The ambient colonialism with which disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology were imbued invited the viewer to see the places and subjects filmed (residents, non-human animals, etc.) as exotic and to objectify them. And yet between the lines, in archives and expedition narratives, it turns out that the people from these exoticized elsewheres were often part of the crews which made it possible to record these moving images. The fact that this film production work was carried out with local populations raises the question of the other users of the camera and, more generally, of those whose contribution to capturing these spectacular or didactic images was made not readily visible. The discourses and vocabularies employed by the Western protagonists of these expeditions made them invisible.
In 1916, for example, a journalist with the magazine Travel wrote up the story of a twenty-day safari led by Carl Akeley in 1910 seeking to film a traditional lion hunt in British West Africa.[1] This was the journey which ended with the concrete decision to manufacture the Akeley camera. To carry out this safari, Akeley had necessarily surrounded himself with a hundred men belonging to the Nandi people, working as porters and actor-hunters. The article, as it narrates the expedition, mentions laconically the many deaths and injuries suffered by these men. The minimal information on these events and, when they are addressed, the depiction of the reluctance of the Nandi men to accept medical care from Akeley and his American colleague, situate the lives and deaths of these other people in the background, as anecdote. Thinking about the vital prognoses of several Nandi is tempered by concerns around Akeley’s difficulties shooting the film. This semantic contrast corroborates the imaginary conception of a harsh, savage life in which the deaths of these human and non-human beings is an ordinary and everyday occurrence, to such an extent that the generous assistance of the Westerners is absurdly not appreciated. Such are the contextual backstories in which the Akeley camera was used as an instrument for creating a way of looking at animals and at “primitive” peoples as figures of difference.
Ten years later, a lion hunt was in fact captured on film thanks to the use of an Akeley camera. It is seen in the popular film by Osa and Martin Johnson,[2] Simba: King of the Beasts (1928). In the Kenyan veldt, local hunters are not only shown in the midst of a lion hunt; one of them is also glimpsed behind the Akeley camera, taking part in filming the moving images. Such a glimpse of a local resident actively taking part in recording the film as one of the camera operators is striking.
