August 2009 Archives

Caw.

You knew it had to happen one day.  Sorry.

Been thinking about the readings for the cinema course.  We need to be grounded in the historical aspect of Indians in the movie, so I've put Kilpatrick's Celluloid Indians on the list and also a couple novels.

Well, I could, but one of the things that we are going to discuss is what shapes an American Indian film aesthetic might take.  One thing we need to consider in thinking about such an aesthetic is the ways in which Native literary narratives may inform the way a film is made.  A novel--or collection--like Sherman Alexie's Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven is an excellent example of the sort of non-linear interconnectivity that informs a lot of contemporary Native writing.  As it serves as the basis of the Alexie scripted movie Smoke Signals, it gives us an excellent chance to do a little comparison of how the book looks, feels, and works when read with the movie.

I did.  But we may cut Tom King's Medicine River (both the book and the movie) from our reading list.  Students in the class should hold off on buying it until they see how the final syllabus looks--unless they want to read a really good story.  In which case, they should go and buy it.  It's a good read--at least the half of it I've read is good;-)

Guilty, but not sheepishly so.

I guess I'll let it slide.  Anything else on the reading list?  Things you may have read? 

I've got a bunch of articles to put on eReserve.  Some of it is pretty thick, but we need to think about the ideology of putting things on film--whether in photographs or movies--and how that ideology relates to indigenous peoples in general, and Indians in particular.  There's kind of this received notion that photographs "capture" reality, but really it composes it in particular ways for particular purposes.

Exactly.  These articles will help us examine those kind of ethnographic and romantic contexts I talked about there, and will also help make the connection of anthropology to U.S. nationalism and how it views, and deals with, Indian peoples.

That should be "taming" the wilderness and "settling" the frontier.  Problematic terms so common and familiar that we forget their origin in white America's myth of itself and its righteous and (self-) ordained need to "liberate" land from Native nations.  But otherwise, you're right.  Though I want to extend it not just from "taming" Cowboy movies, but also to assimilationist narratives.  I mean once U.S. nationalist narratives stop fighting Indians and starts feeling sympathy instead, the narrative shifts to assimilation.  Accepting Indians into a mainstream America that Indians don't necessarily want to be part of.  Such white bread liberalism destroys difference and is as racially charged as all the old cowboy redskin talk.  But we need to learn to recognize it as part of what passes for "multiculturalism" in the world today.

You keep saying things like white bread and white.  Do you care to explain yourself? 

I will later.

Becaws...

Teachers gripe about grading and try to figure out ways to minimize the amount they do.

Students gripe about how much work they have to do.

The real gripe of it is that in student-centered teaching, work is key, but I'm going to attempt to minimize it on both ends with essay questions and this blog.

How's that going to work? 

Every week some segment of the class--say a third--will need to submit two essay questions to me based on that week's readings.  I will post the questions to the blog and the other two-thirds of the group will have to pick one of the roughly 12-14 questions available and answer it in some depth (say 300 words or so) before coming to class.  Their answers will be required to connect readings to films we've viewed in class.  The third writing questions and the two-thirds answering them will rotate from week-to-week.

These student-submitted questions will lay the groundwork for the take-home midterm essay questions.

No, there's more, of course! Though I'm weighing exactly what else we'll need to do.  I think two more projects minimum are necessary.  One will most likely be a final take home essay.  The midterm take home will largely concern the ways in which Indians are constructed on film by colonialist culture, while the final will concern the ways in which Native filmmakers generate differing ways of presenting Native people and Native-centered stories.  The first will focus on the shapes of a colonialist aesthetic and the second will focus on a Native aesthetic.

Two different things,variations of one another in some ways in that both concern students identifying and watching a film that we haven't watched in class and doing some critical analytical work on it.  The two options I'm looking at concern writing a critical review of the movie or doing a group presentation on a film.

More to the point, does anyone--like me--really want to read another academic review?  The answer: Hell, no!  This review would be required to be witty, insightful, engaged with course ideas, and a delight to read.  Think more on The New Yorker side of things rather than the Cinematic Journal of Postmodern Jargon Exercises side of things.  My idea would be to organize these reviews into some kind of online journal that we would put together and put out on the interweb.

That's what I think too and it also informs the second option.  This option revolves around a group presentation.  Students in groups of four would watch a film and work up a presentation on it--you know, film clips, handouts, and questions that would give the class a sense of what is going on in the film and get us--in the audience--talking about how it's similar to what we've already seen and how it differs.

Actually the group presentation would have that option.  That is, the group could either do a presentation on an existing film or they could generate their own film--short of actually making it.  A group that took this option would essentially make a pitch to the class, work up a treatment, story, storyboards, and perhaps some test footage.  The rest of us would be producers and ask a lot of questions about how this film would look and what it would do and why it would do those things.

I listen to the way crows stir things up.

My big idea is that an ethnographic, romantic nationalism so wholly captures Indians as people caught in the past and weighed down by custom and "primitive" tradition that "we" (meaning white people) need to save them from themselves.  White supremacist nationalism constructs images from information that affirms this need--it becomes a self-perpetuating, and negative, feedback loop--that misrepresents who Native people are.  When photography comes along, its ability to capture an image "truthfully" becomes an intrinsic part of "seeing" Indian peoples, but photography does not merely render reality transparently, it composes a perspective on it.  It is not objective, it is manipulative.  When ethnography meets art it composes Indians as romantically "other" from "us."

Check out this picture, "In a Piegan Lodge", taken by Edward Curtis in the early 1900s:

It ostensibly shows two Piegan men, dressed in their finery and displaying some of the items they use in their lives.  Take a closer look and see if you notice anything strange.  Look right there, at the man on the right.  Look just to the left of his right elbow.  See that round-ish distortion there.

Well, look at the picture before it was manipulated.  Check that spot to the left of the man's right elbow.

Yep.  Curtis removed it in the print he published, manipulating the reality these men lived in, taking away the evidence that Western cultural objects have entered their lives.

Removing the timepiece quite literally renders these Indians "timeless." It makes them something "other" than the consumers of such images.  Makes them appear to be unchanged and, more critically, unchanging: it makes them "authentic" Indians, rather than Indians sullied by Western influence.  It allows consumers to view Indians as living a life totally free of Western influence--perhaps totally ignorant of it, living pure.  By removing the clock, the photographer is explicitly stating Indians, like these Piegan men, have no need to know that it is about ten to five.  And perhaps they don't, but the fact of this image is that they included the timepiece as part of their gear and the photographer thought that conflicted with prevailing ideas of Indians.

And that's romantic?

In two ways.  That timeless way and in the erasure of colonialism.  The image erases the West from these men's experience and, more important, it erases it from the view of those non-Indians who view or buy the picture--those who benefitted from colonialism.  It allows them to romanticize Native people without having to recognize, acknowledge, and take ownership of the fact that these men, and other people like them, have experienced, suffered, and survived the colonialist expansion of the United States and the genocidal policies that went with that expansion.

Exactly.

The principles that inform the transformation of ethnographic imagery into romantic imagery are transferred from still photography to the movies.

I think that's what's most interesting.  One of the biggest blockbuster films of the 1920s was Nanook of the North, a quasi-documentary of Inuit life, and it looks like a "true" record of life in the far north, and some of it certainly was, but much of it was staged.  Later, in the late 1920s, another seeming documentary The Silent Enemy worked much the same way.

But isn't the attempt to represent life as it was a good thing?  

Perhaps, it is a good complex area to inquire into, and I hope class members will hone their thoughts on that when we look at those movies.

What I'm interested in is the downstream effects of these ethnographic/romantic images.  In Westerns that deal with Indian characters, conflicts, and themes you have this strange thing that happens in many of them: you get the ethnographic moment.

So you're watching a movie and the plot is unfolding and there's shootouts and ambushes and all the appurtenances of the horse opera melodrama and then, almost out of nowhere, will come this break in the action while we viewers get to see a "real" Native ceremony, puberty ritual, marriage, or some other "traditional" practice.  It's educational, see.  Even while it's a break in the action, it is necessary because we need to see that Indians are "real."  And so we get the ethnographic moment.

I think so, but it's not real ethnography--its ethnography inflected with romantic and nationalistic imperatives.  Indians in the movies are the original postmodern subjects.  They are images taken from other images.  Shadows.  In class we will explore these ideas and see how they shape much of the imagery and ideas that non-Indians have of Native peoples, and we will also see how they persist over time--despite seeming cultural and social advances.