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"Indians in the motion picture industry -- United States"
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Reservation Reelism
In this deeply engaging account Michelle H. Raheja offers the first book-length study of the Indigenous actors, directors, and spectators who helped shape Hollywood's representation of Indigenous peoples. Since the era of silent films, Hollywood movies and visual culture generally have provided the primary representational field on which Indigenous images have been displayed to non-Native audiences. These films have been highly influential in shaping perceptions of Indigenous peoples as, for example, a dying race or as inherently unable or unwilling to adapt to change. However, films with Indigenous plots and subplots also signify at least some degree of Native presence in a culture that largely defines Native peoples as absent or separate.
Native actors, directors, and spectators have had a part in creating these cinematic representations and have thus complicated the dominant, and usually negative, messages about Native peoples that films portray. InReservation ReelismRaheja examines the history of these Native actors, directors, and spectators, reveals their contributions, and attempts to create positive representations in film that reflect the complex and vibrant experiences of Native peoples and communities.
eBook
Imagic Moments
In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native. Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera. Despite their low budgets and often nonprofessional acting, Indigenous films succeed in being all the more engaging in their own right and are indicative of the complexity, vibrancy, and survival of myriad contemporary Native cultures.
eBook
Wiping the War Paint off the Lens
Native Americans have thrown themselves into filmmaking since the mid-1970s, producing hundreds of films and videos, and their body of work has had great impact on Native cultures and filmmaking itself. Wiping the War Paint off the Lens traces the history of Native experiences as subjects, actors, and creators, and develops a critical framework for approaching Native work. Singer positions Native media as part of a larger struggle for \"cultural sovereignty\"-the right to maintain and protect cultures and traditions.
eBook
Cinema, Transnationalism, and Colonial India
Through the lens of cinema, this book explores the ways in which the United States, Britain and India impacted each other politically, culturally and ideologically. It argues that American films of the 1920s posited alternative notions of whiteness and the West to that of Britain, which stood for democracy and social mobility even at a time of virulent racism.
The book examines the impact that the American cinema has on Indian filmmakers of the period, who were integrating its conventions with indigenous artistic traditions to articulate an Indian modernity. It considers the way American films in the 1920s presented an orientalist fantasy of Asia, which occluded the harsh realities of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation in the period as well as the exciting engagement of anti-imperial activists who sought to use the United States as the base of a transnational network. The book goes on to analyse the American 'empire films' of the 1930s, which adapted British narratives of empire to represent the United States as a new global paradigm.
Presenting close readings of films, literature and art from the era, the book engages cinema studies with theories of post-colonialism and transnationalism, and provides a novel approach to the study of Indian cinema.
eBook
Land of Smoke and Mirrors
Unlike the more forthrightly mythic origins of other urban centers-think Rome via Romulus and Remus or Mexico City via the god Huitzilopochtli-Los Angeles emerged from a smoke-and-mirrors process that is simultaneously literal and figurative, real and imagined, material and metaphorical, physical and textual. Through penetrating analysis and personal engagement, Vincent Brook uncovers the many portraits of this ever-enticing, ever-ambivalent, and increasingly multicultural megalopolis. Divided into sections that probe Los Angeles's checkered history and reflect on Hollywood's own self-reflections, the book shows how the city, despite considerable remaining challenges, is finally blowing away some of the smoke of its not always proud past and rhetorically adjusting its rear-view mirrors.
Part I is a review of the city's history through the early 1900s, focusing on the seminal 1884 novelRamonaand its immediate effect, but also exploring its ongoing impact through interviews with present-day Tongva Indians, attendance at the 88th annualRamonapageant, and analysis of its feature film adaptations.
Brook deals with Hollywood as geographical site, film production center, and frame of mind in Part II. He charts the events leading up to Hollywood's emergence as the world's movie capital and explores subsequent developments of the film industry from its golden age through the so-called New Hollywood, citing such self-reflexive films asSunset Blvd.,
Singin' in the Rain, andThe Truman Show.
Part III considers LA noir, a subset of film noir that emerged alongside the classical noir cycle in the 1940s and 1950s and continues today. The city's status as a privileged noir site is analyzed in relation to its history and through discussions of such key LA noir novels and films asDouble Indemnity,Chinatown, andCrash.
In Part IV, Brook examines multicultural Los Angeles. Using media texts as signposts, he maps the history and contemporary situation of the city's major ethno-racial and other minority groups, looking at such films asMi Familia(Latinos),Boyz N the Hood(African Americans),Charlotte Sometimes(Asians),Falling Down(Whites), andThe Kids Are All Right(LGBT).
eBook
Urban Spaces of American Indians in the Exiles
Released in 1961, The Exiles is a low-budget docudrama that chronicles the lives of three American Indians over a period of twelve hours in a downtown Los Angeles neighborhood in the late 1950s. Contemporary neorealist filmmaking appears to have influenced the film, whereas itsg narrative is ethnographic in form. An examination of the film and its dialogue reveals the ways in which American Indians who recently migrated from their reservation to the city have socially constructed the urban spaces within the framework of the physical setting provided to them. The nature of the engagements of the male and female protagonists with the sites and with other American Indians in this small urban sphere provides substantive clues to the nature and level of their respective transitions into the realm of the white-dominated society of Los Angeles and beyond.
Journal Article
The Burden of Historical Representation: The Case of/for Indigenous Film
In this article, the authors explore the nature of film that is both \"about\" and now more often made \"for/by\" indigenous peoples and its potential as a medium for introducing and engaging students in the study of indigenous history and perspectives in secondary classrooms. As a framework for analysis, the authors examine to what extent these films meet the burden of historical representation, a construct they developed from the film studies' concept of a \"burden of representation.\" They also examine the potential use of film representing indigenous history with secondary students to raise questions about the common historical narratives taught in schools, to present events or perspectives that typically are marginalized or ignored in the school curriculum, and to examine how film represents the views and histories of different groups. The analysis is grounded in the context in which film is produced, distributed, and viewed. Selecting four films as case studies, the authors apply the burden of historical representation framework to an exploration of what may be considered indigenous films or films about/for indigenous people, and consider the questions raised to further develop the framework. The authors use this analysis to illustrate how the concept of the burden of historical representation can be a useful tool both for teachers and teacher educators to select media for their classes and to prepare their respective students to become critically aware consumers and users of film.
Journal Article
\Remember, you're the good guy:\ 'Hidalgo', American Identity, and Histories of the Western
Kollin focuses on the film, Hidalgo, a twenty-first century Western released in 2004 that stages European American encounters with Native Americans and Arab peoples from various locales across the Middle East. Film scholar Philip French once noted that while the historical background in the Western is often used for larger mythical stories of adventure and intrigue, \"the tales [are] as much about the hopes and anxieties of the time in which they were made as the period they were set. Hidalgo appeared in theaters one year after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and in the midst of the Bush Administration's post-9/11 war on terrorism.
Journal Article
Say Brother. Hustlers, Drugs and Prison
The program focuses on illegal drugs, and the continued effect they have on the African American community via an exploration of the recent drug-culture film Superfly and discussions with local drug rehabilitation employees. Program includes clips from the recent film, an interview with actor Ron O'Neal conducted by John Slade, a discussion among community members who oppose the film (John Chatterton of the Bay State Banner and David Booker and Fred Smallwood of First Incorporated, a drug rehabilitation program in Roxbury that is among the oldest in the country), 'man on the street' interviews regarding drug use, and a discussion with South End Community Drug Council employees Joseph Nkunta, Rochelle Lee, and Steve Moss about the specific ways they handle drug abuse in the community.
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