CineClub presents a special season of films in conjunction with our summer exhibition Touch Nature exploring humanity's relationship with nature. While our first screening focused on polution and the effects of our modern existance on the natural world, our final two screenings examine the historical and ongoing dominance of man over nature. These final two screenings Tarzan the Ape Man and Safari are conceived of as a double bill and are best viewed together.

In the wild expanses, where bushbucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with excitement and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature. By presenting hunting as leisure, infamous Austrian director Ulrich Seidl confronts viewers with the banality of violence and raises unsettling questions about human attitudes toward nature, death, and domination.

Film critic Peter Bradshaw writes "The sheer smugness and chilling lack of imagination of these people playing the Great White Hunter is mind boggling as they slay Impala and zebras with deafeningly loud and powerful hunting rifles - in controlled conditions which effectively disguise the fish-in-a-barrel nature of the experience they’re buying."

Read Peter Bradshaw's review here in the Guardian

We have programmed Tarzan to be seen alongside Ulrich Seidl's documentary Safari. Although 84 years have passed since the release of Tarzan, the attitude of the “tourist hunter” as portrayed in Safari demonstrates how little has hardly changed for some of the wealthiest in our society.

Austria, 2016, 90min, German, English, Africaans with subtitles, directed by Ulrich Seidl

All our CineClub films are 18+ unless otherwise advertised.