The Last Buffalo Hunt

Once a year in southern Utah, the hunt is on for last herds of wild buffalo. They numbered tens of millions until 19th-century expansionism and the will to harm native Americans drove them to the brink of extinction. For five years, the filmmaker followed some of the hunters, not to document the event, but rather question today’s Frontier. Like California Company Town (Cinéma du Réel 2009), The Last Buffalo Hunt gleans traces of History from the landscape. What has become of the open range that was fought for in westerns? On the already vintage 1998 videos, Terry, the guide who sells his services to occasional hunters, embodies both the pioneering spirit and its ultimate commodification. The campers’ joke about Obama hanging from a branch (referring to the lynching of Blacks) is a sure and obscene sign that this world will die from its anachronism. But like the buffalo repeatedly shot at by a couple that fail to finish it off, this world is in endless decline. Yet the filmmaker elegantly avoids facile satire of the rednecks to chisel an elegy. Rhythmed by a ghostly voice-over, the archive becomes living matter while in front of the camera the present world, with its Indian-head snack-bar signs and its buffalo-head key rings, lives under the diffuse threat of its already archived future.

Charlotte Garson