A Reflection on Native Cinema and Manifesto for My own Works (Second in a Five-part series)

By Ernest M. Whiteman III

"The Turn"  

If there ever was a “theory” or set of ideas that film school instilled in me, it is two fold—film is not art, film is not important.   So how have I come to believe this?  Years of working in the industry making me jaded, embittered?  Nope.  Simply a revelation at the words my Directing III instructor Tom Fraterrigo said to us in the first week of class—movies are America’s number one business export to the world.  More that anything we export to other countries we export and proliferate movies the most.  Which means it is a business, not an artistic endeavor but a cold, hard business.  The billion dollar success of a pirate movie last summer bears him out. 

If film school taught me anything it was that Art (capital “A”) is a narcissistic medium.  Everything the Artist (capital “A”) sees, thinks and feels about the world, God, King and Country is put into the final product; be it a painting, mural, sculpture, song, poem, photograph, or a writing.  The film elite always try to promote the “auteur” theory of movie making; that films have a significant, often signature “voice” as they play out and often attributed to the director. 

For me, that just does not wash, because in movie making, there is also involved a screenwriter (Who is an artist), an editor (Who is an artist), a cinematographer (Who is an artist), an actor, a sound tech, lighting techs, grips, painters, designers, and carpenters.  All of them are artists in their chosen fields, are artists with a voice and a demand to be heard, and should have a say in the look, feel, sound of the final product.  But they do not. 

Many will say that the director’s voice—the auteur—is the final voice.  And so, for all of their work, that single voice negates all other voices, all other views?  This is art?   The negation of voices.  We seem to have become accustomed to negating voices.  Native American for so long have always had their voices negated. 

Art is singular, it is narcissistic, it is a lone voice, view, and product.  Film, quite simply, is not that.   That we consciously chose to negate those many other voices in favor of the Coppola’s and Ozu’s seems ridiculous.  To me this does not define what art is.  Besides, Art is too subjective a word to define.  Meaning it has too many definitions for too many people to satisfy every person’s expectations.  For me, film does not satisfy my expectations as art. 

Some people have argued that because the movie-going audience makes a movie about the director’s voice, that, that make it singular, that makes it art; such as going to see a move because Jim Jamusch or Wes Anderson directed it. Once again, ruling out all other voices that contributed to the film  Again choosing to negate those other voices who’ve contributed to the making of a film.  This is illustrated nightly as scores of people walk out of the theater as the credits roll, uncaring about who helped make it a movie.  Besides, no one ever goes to a movie because they want to see Gore Verbinski’s narcissistic view of the world.  The one billion dollar success of a pirate film bears this out. 

Although, with the rise of independent movie-making and the release of cheaper digital video production and editing equipment which allows the director more flexibility in becoming also the writer, cinematographer and sound designer, I could foresee filmmaking becoming more singular in the future.  Until then, how can we garner attention when we risk alienating the audience in the pursuit of high art? 

-o- 

The image of the beads and feathers continue to endure during the new enlightened period of the 1970s and still a Native Voice continued to be missing.   The 80s showed few choices in regards to Native American films.  More often than not, non-Natives were portraying Native roles, irregardless of Chief Dan George’s portrayals.  The first time I realized that Native American actors were being ruled out was with the success of Oliver Stone’s Platoon,  about his own experiences during the Vietnam War.  

I love the film; it is searing and powerful and moving.  It deserved the accolades it won.  It presented for the first time an accurate portrayal of the experiences of Vietnam Veterans during the war.  My favorite character was Sergeant Elias, richly portrayed by Willem Dafoe.  His character’s death scene has been seared into my favorite movie memories. Platoon  also ushered me into a new level of the movie-going experience.  For the first time in my young adult life my emotions were evoked.  I hated Sergeant Barnes as played by Tom Berenger.  This movie is just that good.  

Later, I picked up an issue of Rolling Stone  Magazine with an interview with Oliver Stone and he talked about casting Platoon.  In the interview he revealed that he actually cast a Native American actor for the role of Sergeant Elias, my favorite character. This took me aback.  Why was a Native actor not good enough for the role?  I mean, he could have recast the role with another Native actor but chose Dafoe instead after seeing his work in To Live and Die in L.A. 

I was at once confused by his choice and somewhat enlightened because the character of Elias was based on one of Stone’s own sergeants, who was a Native American.  So then began my own Vietnam movie script with a Northern Arapaho as the central character but have since abandoned the project.  I gave it up for several reasons.  The most important was that I am not a Vietnam Veteran and all I wanted to do was put out a cool war movie.  The driving image in my mind was of a Native American man covered in red paint and in a flight suit. 

So, then my eyes were opened a bit to Native casting in films.  While several 80s films such as Powwow Highway  and War Party  presented Natives in a contemporary setting, the main characters were played by non-Natives.  Meanwhile, Gary Farmer, Graham Greene, Dennis Means and Tantoo Cardinal were relegated to supporting roles, often as the Native Mystic. 

The 1980s continued the trend of non-Natives as Natives until the end of the decade.  Then, in 1990 a single movie would revive the western genre and open the door to a more accurate Native representation in films.  Still this film brought with it larger issues, the control of Native American imagery, the stealing of a Native identity, and the commodification of Native American cultures. 

-o- 

I know what you are thinking; monetary success does not necessarily make something art.   I agree, and the one billion dollar success of a pirate movie bears me out.  My wife Bonnie teases me when I discuss this with her, and I mention that art is not for an “Auteur” to declare but for posterity and future generations to decide by gauging the impact the work had on people and society.  She always asks me “So something being art is just a matter of timing?” 

More often than not, it is.  Bill Moyers once spoke about the impact of the first Star Wars  had at the end of the 70s with a more cynical world having gone through the Vietnam War and Watergate.  Films represented this new cynicism by the creation of the anti-hero.  Movies became less about morality and more about the blurring of right and wrong.  Moyers stated that Star Wars came out at a time when the world was ready for a new type of mythology with heroes and good and evil clearly spelled out.  The success of the Star Wars  saga and the impact it had is clear even today. 

In the next generation, what movie will they talk about that came out in generations before that impacted their lives?   Also, could the great movies be made today?  Or are they a product of their times? 

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In 1990, Dances with Wolves painted the most sympathetic and most accurate representation of Native Americans in the 1870's up to that point.   Its success went on to revive the sagging western genre and with the added success of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven,  the entire genre went through what I call, in comic book terms, the “Miller/Moore Syndrome.”   More western heroes became morally ambiguous, darker, and bleaker.  Yet, it was Dances with Wolves  that sparked a revival of the sympathetic portrayal of Native American cultures.  It also rode the crest of what was termed the New Age movement, where holistic healing arts came to the fore and focus fell on Native American rituals.  Then, out of that interest came an ugly economic commodification of Native rituals, healing ceremonies, and motifs. 

Which begs the question, what is commodification of culture?   Shifting gears, the more recent, best example is the urban gang culture of the late 20^th century, which still thrives today.  When urban youth descended into gang culture they made an unmistakable impression on the vanguard of society.  Here were black youth empowered, through gangs, the clothes the wear, the colors, the graffiti, the rap music, the cars; they suddenly had a voice—a very loud voice. 

It was a voice that pointed the national spotlight on how poverty, crime, and drugs exist in the poorest neighborhoods of America.  It showed a human face on these problems and how society is quick to turn their back on them.  It was the gangs, that culture, that empowerment, right or wrong, which caught the attention of American Society. 

So, American Society reacted in the best way it knew to de-power that voice.  They commercialized it and put it on the sales rack for the suburban kids to emulate.  Everyday we are hit with ads featuring some form of the urban gang culture; the clothes, the cars, the chrome, the white rapper television shows, the “bling-bling” that has been wrapped up and package for sale to our kids, who now have more spending power than previous generations.  And they are buying it up.  Gone is that face of urban poverty and inner city society in turmoil and in its place?   A must-have, multi-function cell phone covered in “bling.”  That black, urban voice has been de-powered. 

While gangs and gang violence still exist, they no longer are a part of the fabric of American culture.   They are no longer representative of American poverty in urban areas. Instead, they are the insidious evil that is infecting America’s youth.  People do not see that gangs are not the cause of poverty, but a result.  Other than seeing gangs on COPS, only the materialistic trappings remains; the clothing, the jewelry, the music, the cars. 

During the New Age movement, the same could be said about Native American cultures.  Suddenly people paid a lot of money to attend “sweat ceremonies” hosted by Venerable white men and dream catchers adorned SUV rearview mirrors.  Bead and feather necklaces are for sale everywhere.  This distilled our culture down to its material representations.  Once again, the voice was de-powered. 

And so continues the de-powering of the Native voice by continuing to represent them in movies as the Old Times Indians in the beads and feathers and buckskins.  The Old Times Indian will continually be made present in such works as Into the West  only to show that they need to be made absent to show the inevitability of their demise and for American Society’s progress. 

So it becomes about the control of Native American images and motifs.  It must be up to Native movie-makers, artists, and performers to take control of these images.  Like the Blaxploitation films thirty years ago that not only created a new genre, but created a plethora of African American directors, actors, and performers that not only are commercially viable but are able to exercise their view in movies, and that image is a modern and contemporary one. 

Armando José Prats has written an excellent film critique, Invisible Natives: Myth & Identity in the American Western.   In this book he dissects the movie western and how it pertains to Native representation in western movies.   Reading it I saw a connection to both the power of controlling such images and the taking of that power gradually through the “stealing” of a Native American identity, prevalent in many westerns, most glaringly in Dances with Wolves. 

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It was not until one Mister Dave Spencer walked into the computer lab I was working in did my perspective on Native imagery in film take a sudden turn.   Up until then I was more interested in making commercial films, movies that would be successful in a market that would allow me to keep working.  None of the movies I dreamed of making ever involved my Native identity.  They were exercise in making cool images and scenarios happen on the big screen. 

I had an idea in mind for almost every movie franchise I watched.  I found I had a lot in common with Dave and that he worked for the American Indian Center where the First Nations Film and Video Festival was held.  We both are fans of U2 and movies.  We talked about Native Americans in film and I began to form an idea of plugging a Native American actor into a standard, genre Hollywood plot.           

But it was not until I met Dave and gotten to know him as a good friend with a keen insight into Native American arts, did I become more aware of Native American self-representation.  Then ideas of Native American imagery and motifs began to spring up in my works and scripts at school.   I often tried to play counter to what people expected from me as a Native American film maker.  It was then that the Invincible Indian Hit Man was resurrected and come to mean more than a typical, action movie archetype.  He would come to represent my soul in my movie making ideology. 

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Coming this weekend…

Part Three: "On Stealing a Native Identity"
The genre of whites "becoming" Indian in films

Part One: No One Ever Sees Indians: The Pledge