Something Other Than Its Own Mass (Currently in Postproduction)

Contact with animals turns human beings into others, effecting a metamorphosis. Animality is, in this sense, a kind of seduction, a magnetic force or gaze that brings humanity to the threshold of its subjectivity

Akira Mizuta Lippit: Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife

To make the body appear as a subject of movement and a subject of perception—if that is not verbal, it means: the body as touching-touched, seeing-seen, the place of a kind of reflection and, thereby, the capacity to relate itself to something other than its own mass, to close its circuit on the visible, on a sensible exterior

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

Logline

Six uncommon hunters living in small town America use hunting to manage trauma. In pursuit of their prey, it’s the only time they feel in control. In a post-industrial age that regards hunting for food as obsolete and killing animals for pleasure as repugnant, what does their obsession tell us about being human? Something Other Than Its Own Mass explores a core paradox—we are apex predators who are deeply uncomfortable with the reality of killing.

Synopsis

This feature documentary film is an intimate portrait of six low-income women/men who rely on hunting to cope with various trauma—from addiction to gender dysmorphia, family dysfunction, and sexual abuse. Director Alex Kershaw has spent over a decade getting to know and filming these subjects. The film captures the sublime beauty of landscape, tempered by the brutality that nature affords. It documents the intimacy between hunter and prey through opposing points of view—where the hunter’s mystical experience of the wild is set against our unknowability of the animals who try to evade them. Paradoxically, hunting is both a way of escaping the world while also ‘feeling’ it more viscerally.

Hunting, they claim, gives meaning to their lives and they won’t give it up for anybody. In pacts oscillating between trust and domination, hunting cultivates empathetic and animist engagements via process of seduction, where the hunters’ libidinal energies are displaced onto the animal. Here, as they think themselves into the lifeworld’s of other species, the boundaries between human and non-human animal are softened—where we witness an animality, that is neither entirely “animal” nor completely “human.” As outsiders, the hunters don’t bother with standard justifications. Instead, they disguise their real motivations to hide their shame—justifications that range from repairing the broken bonds of a nuclear family to making hunting accessible for the LGBTIQA+ community. By untangling hunting from killing, their pretexts attempt to make the hunter’s paradox palatable—advocating it’s possible to love and respect the same animals you kill.

The film also documents a reality we don’t give much weight to in contemporary culture—that human beings are animals, and increasingly disconnected from nature. We struggle to acknowledge our animal-selves and the violence within us; we consider traits like empathy, compassion and grief as existing solely within the domain of ‘our’ more evolved humanity, even as we have become apex predators devouring the world’s resources with the advantage of superior technology and weaponry. Ultimately, Something Other Than Its Own Mass holds a mirror up to a core paradox of human existence: our primal hunger for pleasure, convenience and territory thrives regardless of the harm caused to other beings and life in the natural world.

Topic Summary

Typically, hunting documentaries tend to collapse the film’s point of view with their “position” on hunting framed politically or as social impact. This film however, takes a different route—instead, it preserves tensions that can never be fully resolved for the ways in which nonhuman animals are brought closer into the life-worlds of humans. In other words, this is a film made with hunters, so that people who don’t hunt, can better understand it. By choosing not to make controversy out of what already is one, this film is ‘controversial’ for the way it addresses the territory of empathetic processes in hunting. This changes how violence is experienced by our audience, who are accustomed to dismissing it as inhumane bloodthirsty spectacle. Instead, their discomfort results from witnessing an intimate or authentic connection that someone is having with an animal—a closeness they lack in their own lives. Through fine grain accounts of individual hunter’s lives, the film establishes significance by engaging with conflicts between the urban and pastoral, male and female, animism and materialism, and the politics of industrialized versus domestic food production. The hunters we meet are not necessarily resolved in their positions nor are they as black and white as the issues they get caught up in are presented. As such, it cannot be reduced to an anti-hunting film or a pro-hunting film—where subjects are presented as indexes (routinely done stereotypically) of one side of the debate over guns, or conservation, or animal rights. There are already a number of great films that do this—Trophy (2017) and The Ivory Game (2016) being such two recent examples. Rather, this film is about the complexity of human/animal relations presented though an insider’s view of hunting culture.

Production Team

Funding

Australia Council for the Arts
International Studio & Curatorial Program, NYC
American Australian Association
Denniston Hill Residency Program