Mortal Cameras and Vulnerable Vision in Found-Footage Horror

André Bazin once quipped: " When a savage headhunter is shown in the foreground watching for the arrival of the whites, this necessarily implies that this person is not a savage because he has not cut the cameraman's head off " (qted. in Daney 37). Here he points to the precise spot or the decisive moment at which the screen of fiction that divides the filmmaker from the material reality of what is being filmed can be dissolved. Like sex, death for Bazin denoted the limit of representation; it is obscene, unrepresentable, and marks the ultimate rupture in our perceptual realities, but he was nonetheless intensely attracted to getting as close to it as possible through filmic representation. Peppered throughout his writings is the notion that distinctly powerful images can result from the camera coinciding with and occupying the same space as the profilmic world it depicts, thereby rendering it vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a shared reality. As Serge Daney puts it, for Bazin, [t]he trip switch is therefore the death of the filmmaker. In its more anodyne guise, this is also the fetishism of 'filming as the decisive moment,' of filming as risk and of risk as what justifies the making of the film, which confers upon it a certain surplus value " (37). The surplus value that comes with this kind of risk is in part what endeared the cinema verité films of Jean Rouch to Bazin. One of the early adopters of more lightweight portable 16mm film cameras, Rouch typically insisted on operating the camera himself during the shoots for his ethnographic films. In his film The Lion Hunters (1965), he comes perilously close to death (or at least severe injury) during a lion hunt with some Gow hunters in Western Africa. At one point during the hunt, the Gow with which he is traveling is attacked by a lion and