The Last Buffalo Hunt
Director Lee Anne Schmitt
Countries United States
Duration 76 min
Synopsis
The Last Buffalo Hunt is not a documentary about hunting buffalo. It is a film about cowboys, history and landscape, a film that documents the experience of one of the last open landscapes in America even while depicting its demise. The film complicates images of the Utah landscape with images of taxidermy, helicopters, shotguns, casinos built in the shape of twelve story barns and plastic teepees, gas stations and snack shops advertised with figures of INn chiefs from tribes long since displaced and robotic hunters selling sporting goods. The Last Buffalo Hunt makes space for the construct of American individuality to reverberate alongside the marketing of the hunt, faith and belief, and the image of the American West, questioning the authenticity of our myths and the foundations of our frontier ideology.
The Last Buffalo Hunt is not a documentary about hunting buffalo. It is a film about cowboys, history and landscape, a film that documents the experience of one of the last open landscapes in America even while depicting its demise. The film complicates images of the Utah landscape with images of taxidermy, helicopters, shotguns, casinos built in the shape of twelve story barns and plastic teepees, gas stations and snack shops advertised with figures of INn chiefs from tribes long since displaced and robotic hunters selling sporting goods. The Last Buffalo Hunt makes space for the construct of American individuality to reverberate alongside the marketing of the hunt, faith and belief, and the image of the American West, questioning the authenticity of our myths and the foundations of our frontier ideology.