Underplayed Gems

The Hunters (1957)

The Hunters poster
Directed by
Robert Gardner, John Marshall
Genre
documentary film
Country
United States
Runtime
1h 12m
Rated
NR
Rating
6.5 of 10 from 7 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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How it feels

Four !Kung men in the Kalahari Desert track and hunt a giraffe. The film also shows daily life among their group including family interactions, food gathering, and storytelling.

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What happens

The Hunters is a 1957 ethnographic film that documents the efforts of four !Kung men (also known as Ju/'hoansi or Bushmen) to hunt a giraffe in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia. The footage was shot by John Marshall during a Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody sponsored expedition in 1952–53. In addition to the giraffe hunt, the film shows other aspects of !Kung life at that time, including family relationships, socializing and storytelling, and the hard work of gathering plant foods and hunting for small game. The film was produced at the Film Study Center of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University by John Marshall in collaboration with Robert Gardner. It won the 1957 Robert J. Flaherty Award for best documentary film from the City College Institute of Film Technique, New York, and was named to the US National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress in 2003 for its "cultural, aesthetic, or historical significance". The Hunters was preserved in 2000 with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. In his book At The Edge of History, William Irwin Thompson uses the structure of The Hunters to model the universal form of conflict in values in human institutions. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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