Filming Buck Season at Bear Meadows Sunset
Filming the Hunt at Bear Meadow Sunset
An article written by a student of Kenneth Thigpen and published in the Pennsylvania Game News, April 1984, pp. 26-28:
By Nancy Marie Brown
THE HUNTER crashes out of the laurel, a rifle on a sling over his shoulder. He pauses; his right thumb hooks the sling and eases the weight off his collarbone. He cups his hand to his mouth. “Ho-oh!” he hollers. His hand moves up to tip his cap brim back. He looks down the valley. To his left and slightly in front, he can see the back of Dave’s orange vest. Farther on, he can just make out Norman’s orange hat. He’s standing under the white oak at the crossing. “Ho-oh!” Fred yells. Dave answers, “Ho-oh!”
Fred unhooks his thumb, pulls aside a maple-sapling branch and steps through, holding it. He glances over his shoulder, lets the branch swing back. George Hornbein and Tom Keiter scuttle around him on either side, run ahead 10 feet, and turn. Hornbein focuses the camera on the slate light of Keiter’s tape recorder: Keiter thumbs the switch and the recorder makes a simultaneous flash and bleat. The camera swings toward Fred, and he lifts his hand to his mouth again. “Ho-oh!” He lowers his hat brim and starts through the next patch of laurel. Hornbein and Keiter let him catch up, then stay parallel, watching him, maneuvering the 15-pound camera and the four-foot-long boom-microphone through the branches, trying not to trip.
Dave waves, and points toward the crossing. Fred and the camera crew alter course to meet him. “Right down through here’s the way he went. And one over here. Right in through here.”
“If we had more men,” Fred starts. “Right up here’s a big ledge. We put one up there and then had one man come in across the top of the mountain, and just stay in front of the drive goin’ up. From what I see, they was headin’ this way.” He squats, tugging the rifle farther onto his back, and touches his finger to an imprint in the mud. Hornbein crouches near him, makes the camera zoom in on his finger. “But most of ‘em look like they was last night’s tracks. So that means they’re probably still in here.” He stands up. “Ho-oh! I didn’t see where any moved yet. I didn’t see no fresh tracks.”
Back on the road, Keiter, Hornbein and the three hunters join up with the folklorist, Ken Thigpen, and the rest of the group. The men stretch their legs in the back of the pickup; Keiter drives while Hornbein keeps the camera focused. The camp members discuss the morning’s hunt. By the end of the trip, they have what Thigpen terms “a version.”
Hornbein, Keiter, and Thigpen are making a documentary film about a hunting camp. They hope to have it aired on public television this fall. (WPSX at Penn State has already asked permission to show it.) Thigpen is a professor of folklore at Penn State; Keiter teaches filmmaking there. Keiter and Hornbein are partners in Filmspace—a State College production studio that makes films and slide shows for corporations, universities, and other institutions. (Keiter does the sound, Hornbein does the picture.) Filmspace lets Keiter and Hornbein own the equipment to make documentaries. Documentaries do not turn a profit.
In 1982, Hornbein and Thigpen formed the nonprofit Documentary Resource Center (DRC) “to make these kinds of films,” Keiter says. “Ken’s involvement,” he explains, “gives the films a structure and an academic niche. He clarifies the purpose of the films without changing our way of making them.” The DRC’s first film was about a salamander-eating contest at a fraternity; in the works are films about Pennsylvania German “powwowers,’’ and a group of Mohawk Indians in upstate New York. “Buck Season at Bear Meadow Sunset” was funded by the National Rifle Association and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and shot during 1982.
“Being a folklorist, Ken can attach meaning to things that I don’t see,” Keiter says. “We’re not looking at it in the same way.”
Bear Meadow Sunset is a log cabin, second oldest camp in the valley. Downstairs is a kitchen, a long plank table with benches, a central wood stove, antlers on the walls. Upstairs are metal bunks. A noisy generator runs the lights. Evenings, the men gather to the table and play cards. They talk.
“. . . and he said, ‘There ought to be a buck in there, Dale.’ And so I walked in there, and this buck, he stood up on his front legs like this”—Dale stretches his arms out straight—“and he looks at me. Been hit in the kidneys. So I shot him right there through the neck”—he reaches over and touches his neighbor’s neck below the jawbone—“with a 270. He didn’t move. They all laughed, they said, ‘Dale missed him!’ But he just stood there and bled out on both sides and then he just fell.”
Keiter notices Norman, in the corner, with Thigpen and a small group of men around him. He extends the boom-microphone a few feet and nods to Hornbein. Hornbein swings the camera away from Dale and focuses on Norman. “. . . and then Dick would go ahead of me. We walked into a buck and five doe. And Dick says—this was Sunday—he says, ‘Men, we’re not gonna see no buck come Monday.’ And we didn’t. I hunted thirty-four years before I got my first buck. And I got it. . . . It’s nice in there, though. It's nice in there. I don’t know. I killed all the buck I want to kill, I don’t want to kill any more buck. I will, though, to keep the camp from being skunked. But.”
“So keeping the camp going is more important than getting a buck?” Thigpen asks.
“Right, right.” Norman answers. “I think so. It gives the younger generation, you know, something to look forward to. No, we’ve had some good times.”
The filming at Bear Meadow Sunset came out of a discussion Thigpen had with the mason laying up his new woodstove chimney. “I told him that I was interested in local culture, local history, how people preserve their past through folklore. I used the word ‘folklore’ first,” Thigpen says. “’If you really want to see some good folklore,’ the mason told me, ‘come out to this hunting camp.’ They do things in a certain way, he said—for lack of a better word, ‘traditionally.’
“The deer drive, for instance, It’s a ritual. They go out in a group, they have roles: drivers, standers, flankers who pull around to keep the deer from escaping through the sides. Someone who’s wild and rowdy during the evening card game is given the responsibility of the hunt and becomes totally serious the next day. He has to be safe and efficient. You can see this in the film, the dramatic personality shifts. They’re not the same people all the time.
“They see it like a military operation—I’m using these terms, I don’t think they would. They consider this the right way to hunt, the most efficient way. But nobody in the camp has killed a buck for the last two seasons. It matters if they get deer, but it matters more that they go through the actions. Repeated actions with meaning, folklorists call ‘ritual.’ If you want to be romantic about it, and I guess I’m supposed to be, it’s a reenactment of a heroic age.”
Dick stands on the porch of the camp, in his shirtsleeves, looking out into the fog. It’s morning. The temperature is 42. Now and then he glances at the camera on Hornbein’s shoulder. Keiter asks him a question. “Well, I started hunting right after I came out of the war, in 1946. Hunted every year since that time. Never missed a year. . . . I probably don’t have too many years to go.” He gives a little laugh, looks at the camera, then back out toward the woods. Hornbein moves around to the other corner of the porch to get a better angle on him. “We don’t have the young men who are really interested in the drive anymore, and that’s probably because there’s less game here now. It just isn’t interesting. We used to see fifty to sixty deer in a week, and that’s not counting seeing the same ones twice.
A shot. Dick looks hard toward the sound. “That might be blood,” he says, “but who knows. . . .
“These people up here at the camp, they hunt real hard, but there’s no acorns or nothing. You don’t have any acorns, you don’t have the deer. It’s Mother Nature that fixed us. You might find a few little does wandering around looking for a buck. . . .” He laughs. “You just ain’t got the bucks no more.”
“It’s a different type of documentary than the television news kind,” Keiter explains. “For one thing, you’re working under the worst possible lighting and sound conditions. You build drama. You wait for the moments to happen and make sure you get them on film. Everything is subtle. There’s no narrator; the people tell the story themselves. The rhythm and pace of their lives dictate the rhythm and pace of the film. That’s partly how film communicates. It’s a portrait.”
(Dale sits in the easy chair, in his orange hat and red vest, looking at his hands. Norman is on the couch next to him, asleep, the quilt pulled up to his chin, his tattooed forearms flung out around his head. Morning light falls on him from the window.)
“The whole process of this type of filmmaking,” Keiter continues, “is to establish a trust relationship. If you blow that, you can’t make an honest film. We won’t make an exploitative film. It has to be accurate.
“We can’t pretend not to use some of the same techniques you’d use to manipulate in a film—such as taking scenes out of context, or dubbing in sound, or cutting out the questions we ask to get them to talk about themselves—but I think our intentions are good. At Bear Meadow Sunset, we’re making a film to show people what a hunting camp is like. The film might be used by both pro-hunting and anti-hunting groups equally well—if they want to use it.
(Norman and Dale stand at the kitchen window. Norman points outside. “See, there he is. It’s the little gray one. And now that red squirrel’s gonna come and push him out.”
“Looks like the gray one’s scared of him,” Dale says.)
“It’s folklore I’m interested in, but if you’re looking for folktales,” Thigpen says, “you won’t find them. That’s exactly the point of the film. What we’ve got on film is not a catalog of folktales, but a portrait of people who are performing stories and non-stories. Stories and silences. Grocery store clerks tell the same kinds of jokes, but these hunters fit what scholars call the ‘folk type.’ They’re a rural, close-knit, males-only group. We’re showing the natural context in which folktales are told.
“Mostly what they do at camp is sit around and talk. They don’t wait for someone to tell a story, and if you ask them to tell one, they’re stumped. They have to lead into it. Murph—his real name is Norman—will set up a story for five or ten minutes, leading the conversation onto the proper subject, for a story that is only two sentences long. He’s not aware he’s doing it, or won’t tell you if he is.
“Dale, the oldest member of the camp, tells different kinds of tales. History. What ‘really’ happened. He doesn’t like to fool around in the same way as the other men. He doesn’t tell jokes. They’ll defer to him—he used to be the hunt captain, but now he’s too old—about things like where the beaver dam used to be, where the dinkey tracks for the old logging rail came through.
“What they talk about is what’s going on at the time: hunting, caring for the equipment, tending the fire. They blend together what happened today with tales they tell year after year. They go out on a hunt and by the time they get back in the evening, they have a version of it. The narrative is so fluid that when it jumps from personal experience into legend, sometimes you can’t tell the two apart.
“It’s what I call the epic process: blending the mythic past with the just-experienced present. You have it in Beowulf, in the part where they talk about hunting the monster Grendel and add in stories about famous heroes like Sigmund the dragon-slayer. Beowulf was written at least a thousand years ago.”
In the film studio, three reels of tape—two soundtracks and the picture—unwind from the left side of the editing machine. They are funneled past the projector and picked up by three reels on the right. The film plays on a TV screen, red numbers below ticking off the seconds. “Buck Season at Bear Meadow Sunset” is almost finished: It is thirty minutes long; each minute took twenty-five hours to produce.
The screen goes blank. “What do you think of the ending?” Hornbein asks. His voice is soft and slow.
“When Dale is looking out through the trees—that’s when it should end,” says his friend, a hunter. “Everything after that is kind of gimmicky.”
“That is where it ends, sort of. The rest we’ll print the credits over, and you won’t really notice what’s going on in the background.”
“That band of trees, though, and his white beard—that’s beautiful.”
“But you’re right. I kind of prefer films that don’t have two endings, and it does this way.” Hornbein rewinds to the last drive. Dale is standing by a tree—white beard, red vest, orange hat, rifle held loosely in his hands. The camera pulls in close, looks overs his shoulder. The trees are thin, black phantoms fading into the gray of the sky and the gray of twigs and brush. Nothing moves. A shot rings out.
“What about that shot?” the hunter asks.
Hornbein stops the film. “What about it?”
“It was faked, wasn’t it?”
“Not exactly. It was recorded at another time and added in here. Hornbein winds the film back; the shot cracks again.
“It sounds too close, and the guy doesn’t react to it.”
“We could make it sound farther away.” He rewinds, turns down the volume, lets the scene play through.
“That’s better—if you need it at all.”
“Well, I think we do.” The film plays on: (“We was in here huntin’ all week, and Murph was telling jokes. Boy, he’d tell jokes all the time. We couldn’t even remember ‘em so we’d just give ‘em numbers. . . .”)
“The shot’s a promise, a hope for the future.” Hornbein turns the sound off, and the picture runs through: close-ups of the old photos on the walls; and finally a young camp member putting his suitcase in the car. “Maybe they did get a buck this year. The shot leaves the question up in the air. . . . But it’s easy to intellectualize and say how it works as a symbol. I guess I have to ask, does it work dramatically?”
“I think it should end with Dale looking out through the woods and no shot,” the hunter says. “That’s the way it happens most of the time.”
