Løvejagten is a Danish classic and was the beginning of an era where Hollywood was located in the Danish Valby!!! With that I mean that between 1909-16 Ole olsens Nordisk film was one of the worlds leading movie compagnies and like the Hollywood compagnies todays dominated the market. What was so special about løvejagten and why it launched the Danish movie industry is because a real lion is shot and killed and that shocked the audience then. It is not a good movie/short, but it is important in a historical view because it launched the first golden age of Danish cinema.
3 Reviews
Impressive fake wildlife film.
F Gwynplaine MacIntyre5 March 2007
I saw this impressive early silent film in October 2006 at the Cinema Muto festival in Sacile, Italy. Those who are unfamiliar with Scandinavian languages may find the title 'Løvejagten' confusing. 'Løve' has nothing to do with 'love': it's the Danish word for 'lion'. The film's title translates as 'Lion Hunters'.
IMDb's credits for this film are incorrect. Axel Sørensen should not be in the cast list; he is this film's photographer. Someone who *should* be in the cast list is William Thomsen, who plays the black African tracker for the white lion-hunters. I was intrigued that the African character is depicted with very little racial stereotyping or condescension.
'Løvejagten' has the general feel of a wildlife documentary, and is done so well that the fakery is hard to spot. The action of the film is as follows: two white hunters and their native tracker progress through the jungle. They observe various fauna: ostriches, a hippopotamus, a zebra. (The fakery was obvious for me here, as zebras in the wild always remain with the herd, unless one diseased zebra is outcast: it's only ever in zoos and wildlife preserves that one sees an isolated zebra.) The hunters make camp for the night, but are awakened by a lion killing a young goat. (Which would be unlikely to exist in the wild.) The lion then kills the hunters' horse, but then the hunters shoot the lion. One hunter poses beside the dead lion, smoking a cigarette. They shoot another lion, then skin both of them and display their pelts for the camera. The hunters enjoy another smoko, and offer a cigarette to the black man too. (Just what the African people need: lung cancer!)
This film consists entirely of staged enactments, made more realistic by the fact that the shooting and skinning of the lions is genuine. The 'jungle' sequences were actually filmed in a forest north of Copenhagen. The wildlife sequences (bar the lions) were filmed in the Copenhagen Zoo. This explains a couple of askew camera angles, as photographer Sørensen had to avoid showing any of the fences or barriers separating the various species.
The lion sequences were filmed on Elleore, a small island off the Danish coast. This was done partly so as to avoid bringing the lions into proximity of innocent by-standers, but the film-makers' prime motive appears to have been a desire to escape the scrutiny of animal-rights activists (yes, they were out and about even then!) who had heard about this film in advance and were determined to stop its production. Even the Danish minister of justice attempted to stop it.
I'm extremely impressed with 'Løvejagten' as an early example of movie-makers' ability to fake real events credibly. I was tempted to give my review of this film some sarky title such as 'I Bwana Go Home' or 'Life with the Lions' ... but in fact this is an excellent enactment which earns my rating of 9 out of 10. Veldt done!
IMDb's credits for this film are incorrect. Axel Sørensen should not be in the cast list; he is this film's photographer. Someone who *should* be in the cast list is William Thomsen, who plays the black African tracker for the white lion-hunters. I was intrigued that the African character is depicted with very little racial stereotyping or condescension.
'Løvejagten' has the general feel of a wildlife documentary, and is done so well that the fakery is hard to spot. The action of the film is as follows: two white hunters and their native tracker progress through the jungle. They observe various fauna: ostriches, a hippopotamus, a zebra. (The fakery was obvious for me here, as zebras in the wild always remain with the herd, unless one diseased zebra is outcast: it's only ever in zoos and wildlife preserves that one sees an isolated zebra.) The hunters make camp for the night, but are awakened by a lion killing a young goat. (Which would be unlikely to exist in the wild.) The lion then kills the hunters' horse, but then the hunters shoot the lion. One hunter poses beside the dead lion, smoking a cigarette. They shoot another lion, then skin both of them and display their pelts for the camera. The hunters enjoy another smoko, and offer a cigarette to the black man too. (Just what the African people need: lung cancer!)
This film consists entirely of staged enactments, made more realistic by the fact that the shooting and skinning of the lions is genuine. The 'jungle' sequences were actually filmed in a forest north of Copenhagen. The wildlife sequences (bar the lions) were filmed in the Copenhagen Zoo. This explains a couple of askew camera angles, as photographer Sørensen had to avoid showing any of the fences or barriers separating the various species.
The lion sequences were filmed on Elleore, a small island off the Danish coast. This was done partly so as to avoid bringing the lions into proximity of innocent by-standers, but the film-makers' prime motive appears to have been a desire to escape the scrutiny of animal-rights activists (yes, they were out and about even then!) who had heard about this film in advance and were determined to stop its production. Even the Danish minister of justice attempted to stop it.
I'm extremely impressed with 'Løvejagten' as an early example of movie-makers' ability to fake real events credibly. I was tempted to give my review of this film some sarky title such as 'I Bwana Go Home' or 'Life with the Lions' ... but in fact this is an excellent enactment which earns my rating of 9 out of 10. Veldt done!
Well......a classic of sorts
kekseksa19 September 2015
This film seems to be all over the place on IMDb, as 1908 and as 1907 (and I rather suspect the "US" film "Lion Hunt" listed as 1906 is really the same again) but in a way this confusion is a fair reflection of the popularity the film enjoyed at the time.
And the fakery in the film could not be more obvious for the very good reason that it was meant to be. The film is a kind of parody (native bearers didn't crawl on all fours even in 1907 and the cigarette-smoking scene with the bearer, quite inconceivable in a real hunting film, is a hoot). You only have to glance at any genuine hunting films from the period (and there are plenty of them) to appreciate the difference.
But, it has to be said, all the elements we see here are actually there in the real hunting films - the fat-headed, self-satisfied pith-helmeted hunters, the bearer who does all the real work,the glee over the slaughtering and skinning (an aspect on which all the contemporay hunting films concentrate). A very good example is La Chasse en Abyssinie, a gruesome Belgian film made of a genuine lion-hunt just the year after this by eccentric aristocrat Hyacinthe Octavie Frédérique Louise Irénée Rolande Pirmez.
What shocked people "back then" - and it would shock modern audiences a whole lot more - was not that the lions were shot (lions were pretty much by definition shot in any hunting film that involved them) but because, or so the story went, the founder and boss of Nordisk and producer of the film, Ole Olsen, had bought these two wretched beasts from a circus with the express purpose of shooting them, not just with a camera but with guns as well. In other words this was supposedly a kind of "snuff" film.
Ole Olsen was really a bit of a rascal by any standards and this whole film was something of a carefully-conceived publicity stunt for the newly-founded Nordisk Company. And it worked a dream. The word got around about the film; the Danish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals complained to the authorities who banned the making of the film. Olsen ignored them and went ahead. The film was banned when it came out but Olsen just slipped it across the border and premiered it in Sweden. And, as a direct result of all this shenanigans, the film was a huge international success and did indeed set Nordisk on its dizzy path to glory.
A question remains. Is it really a "snuff" film? Quite frankly I doubt it. Some critics and film-historians seem to accept that it is, just as the reviewers here do, but I find that people in 2015 are quite often more gullible and naive than folk were a hundred years ago. The fact is, 1) the rumours about the making of the film spread before the film was actually made, indicating of course that they were quite deliberately leaked by Olsen 2) the charges of cruelty to animals were very quickly dropped and the film came out quite normally, even in Denmark, in 1908. The fact that one supposedly sees the lions killed and that one subsequently sees lion-skins on display (as in any real hunting film)of course proves nothing. It would be preposterous to suppose that a bunch of busy film-makers took time about between scenes to slaughter lions....
A nice codicil can be discovered if you follow the link in the "Connections" section. A group of Swedish students at Lund University made five films for their Carnival celebrations in 1908 including one called Lejonjakten which is a spoof of this film (a spoof of a spoof really) in which actors dressed up as animals get shot by hunters who then get arrested by the police. What is interesting to note about this little parody is that is not at all intended as an attack on Olsen and his film but on the stupidity of the authorities (there had been trouble in Sweden between the police and students).
A not dissimilar but rather more realistic Pathé film exists, A Tragic Panther Hunt. This too, although genuinely filmed in Africa, is clearly a fiction. The hunter is attacked by the panther (presumably in fact a trained panther) after which one sees the carcass of a dead panther (presumably not the same one). The film is a tiny 9.5m snippet produced for home-viewing on a Pathé-Baby but in all probability was made by Pathé's panther expert Alfred Machin and may possibly be an extract from his 1913 full-length documentary Voyage et grandes chasses en Afrique.
In some ways with this film Olsen invented the "exploitation" film which became something of a Nordisk trademark. The same year the same team, the writer Nielsen, the director/star Larsen and the cinematographer Graatkjaer/Sørensen made the first "white slavery" film, Den hvide Slavinde, a lurid piece of sensationalism about women being kidnapped and forced its prostitution which set off another international film fad, caused all sorts of rumpus over censorship and even contributed to a change in the law in the US (the Mann Act)
On "cruelty to animals" as a form of visual pornography at this time, see my review of A Spanish Bullfight 1900.
And the fakery in the film could not be more obvious for the very good reason that it was meant to be. The film is a kind of parody (native bearers didn't crawl on all fours even in 1907 and the cigarette-smoking scene with the bearer, quite inconceivable in a real hunting film, is a hoot). You only have to glance at any genuine hunting films from the period (and there are plenty of them) to appreciate the difference.
But, it has to be said, all the elements we see here are actually there in the real hunting films - the fat-headed, self-satisfied pith-helmeted hunters, the bearer who does all the real work,the glee over the slaughtering and skinning (an aspect on which all the contemporay hunting films concentrate). A very good example is La Chasse en Abyssinie, a gruesome Belgian film made of a genuine lion-hunt just the year after this by eccentric aristocrat Hyacinthe Octavie Frédérique Louise Irénée Rolande Pirmez.
What shocked people "back then" - and it would shock modern audiences a whole lot more - was not that the lions were shot (lions were pretty much by definition shot in any hunting film that involved them) but because, or so the story went, the founder and boss of Nordisk and producer of the film, Ole Olsen, had bought these two wretched beasts from a circus with the express purpose of shooting them, not just with a camera but with guns as well. In other words this was supposedly a kind of "snuff" film.
Ole Olsen was really a bit of a rascal by any standards and this whole film was something of a carefully-conceived publicity stunt for the newly-founded Nordisk Company. And it worked a dream. The word got around about the film; the Danish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals complained to the authorities who banned the making of the film. Olsen ignored them and went ahead. The film was banned when it came out but Olsen just slipped it across the border and premiered it in Sweden. And, as a direct result of all this shenanigans, the film was a huge international success and did indeed set Nordisk on its dizzy path to glory.
A question remains. Is it really a "snuff" film? Quite frankly I doubt it. Some critics and film-historians seem to accept that it is, just as the reviewers here do, but I find that people in 2015 are quite often more gullible and naive than folk were a hundred years ago. The fact is, 1) the rumours about the making of the film spread before the film was actually made, indicating of course that they were quite deliberately leaked by Olsen 2) the charges of cruelty to animals were very quickly dropped and the film came out quite normally, even in Denmark, in 1908. The fact that one supposedly sees the lions killed and that one subsequently sees lion-skins on display (as in any real hunting film)of course proves nothing. It would be preposterous to suppose that a bunch of busy film-makers took time about between scenes to slaughter lions....
A nice codicil can be discovered if you follow the link in the "Connections" section. A group of Swedish students at Lund University made five films for their Carnival celebrations in 1908 including one called Lejonjakten which is a spoof of this film (a spoof of a spoof really) in which actors dressed up as animals get shot by hunters who then get arrested by the police. What is interesting to note about this little parody is that is not at all intended as an attack on Olsen and his film but on the stupidity of the authorities (there had been trouble in Sweden between the police and students).
A not dissimilar but rather more realistic Pathé film exists, A Tragic Panther Hunt. This too, although genuinely filmed in Africa, is clearly a fiction. The hunter is attacked by the panther (presumably in fact a trained panther) after which one sees the carcass of a dead panther (presumably not the same one). The film is a tiny 9.5m snippet produced for home-viewing on a Pathé-Baby but in all probability was made by Pathé's panther expert Alfred Machin and may possibly be an extract from his 1913 full-length documentary Voyage et grandes chasses en Afrique.
In some ways with this film Olsen invented the "exploitation" film which became something of a Nordisk trademark. The same year the same team, the writer Nielsen, the director/star Larsen and the cinematographer Graatkjaer/Sørensen made the first "white slavery" film, Den hvide Slavinde, a lurid piece of sensationalism about women being kidnapped and forced its prostitution which set off another international film fad, caused all sorts of rumpus over censorship and even contributed to a change in the law in the US (the Mann Act)
On "cruelty to animals" as a form of visual pornography at this time, see my review of A Spanish Bullfight 1900.
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