Screen Indians in the EFL-Classroom: Transnational Perspectives by Karsten Fitz

asjournal.org DOI 10.18422/51-06 Screen Indians in the EFL-Classroom: Transnational Perspectives by Karsten Fitz This article addresses the question of what different audiences ‘see’ when watching movies depicting Native Americans, arguing that ways of ‘seeing’ are deeply embedded in specific cultural contexts. In particular, it is concerned with what a German movie-going audience—our EFL-students, in particular— see when watching blockbuster Hollywood movies like Dances with Wolves or popular Native American productions like Smoke Signals? Against the background of the West German Winnetou films and the East German DEFA westerns, respectively, German audiences on both sides of the iron curtain have been appropriating ‘Indians’ on their own terms, ‘using’ them for their own purposes and within their own cultural frames of reference. Introduction By the time Hollywood started to produce its first cinematic pictures of ‘Indians’ at the beginning of the twentieth century, the captivity narratives, travel reports, paintings, frontier romances (most prominently Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales), dime novels, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show had already long and firmly shaped the image of Native Americans in the popular American cultural imagination. When Hollywood ‘took over’ this role of image-making, it not only perpetuated existing stereotypes and accelerated their distribution, but also continued to promote the image of the ‘Hollywood Indian’ worldwide. Starting with the letters of Christopher Columbus, Europe had had its own fabrications of Indian images long before the appearance of screen pictures, most influentially that of Rousseau’s ‘noble savage.’ In Germany, for instance, the Karl May novels have firmly rooted the romanticized and noble Apaches, particularly their heroic chief Winnetou, the epitome of virtue, in popular German culture. In the twentieth century, European film audiences have not only abundantly consumed Hollywood stereotypes, they have also created their own versions of ‘the West’ and ‘the Indian.’ Ironically, just when the popularity of the western was considerably declining in Hollywood, this genre climaxed in Europe: many of the Karl May novels were adapted to the screen in West Germany, the genre of the ‘Italo western’ emerged, and the Eastern German Film Academy (DEFA) produced their own Indianerfilme. While a worldwide blockbuster Hollywood movie like Dances With Wolves (1990), which triggered the re- emergence of Indians on the Hollywood screen, seems at first glance generally respectful of Native Americans, it still completely relegates them to the past and tells the story of “the Vanishing Indian”; and it tells it from an exclusively Euro-American perspective—from the perspective of a white man “going native.” No doubt, similar observations can be made about the westerns (a term used here in the wider sense) succeeding Dances With Wolves, such as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), or Last of the Dogmen (1995). And although less widely distributed and less successful films, like Powwow Highway (1989), Clearcut (1991), and Thunderheart (1992), clearly opened up multidimensional perspectives, creating both more complex and contemporary Native American characters and settings, it would be a long time before Native Americans wrote, directed, and produced their own stories for large movie audiences. Only since the surprise success of Smoke Signals (1998), directed by Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapahoe) and written and co-produced by Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), have Native Americans begun to produce their own feature films. With Eyre’s Skins and Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing (both 2002), two fairly successful all-Native American productions have succeeded Smoke Signals. This paper tackles the question of what different audiences ‘see’ when watching movies depicting Indians. In particular, what does a German movie-going audience—what do our students—see when watching Dances with Wolves or Last of the Mohicans as compared to an American audience? Does a German audience generally ‘see’ these films differently? (At first sight, they seem to be watching the same movies, of course.) One tends to argue that different people watching the same film also ‘see’ the same movie. Upon more careful investigation, however, this is not necessarily the case. This is particularly relevant to the representation of ‘Indians’—and I am using the term Indians here, since in Hollywood productions we usually do not get to see any Native Americans.1 Indeed, Hollywood movies are about imagined Indians, projections, appropriations made in alliance with the perceived ideas of a white mass audience. Thus, although Native Americans play a crucial and visible part in both American history and in American reality and everyday life, they are hardly ever ‘seen’ for who and what they are—actually living creatures (and, thus, cultures) who are as much part of dynamic cultural processes as are all other living cultures today. As will be shown, German audiences on both sides of the iron curtain have similarly appropriated Indians, ‘using’ them for their own purposes and within their own cultural frames of reference. That depictions of Native Americans are actually not about Native Americans is by no means a new insight and goes back at least as far as to Robert Berkhofer’s seminal study The White Man’s Indian (though Berkhofer does mention the genre of film only in passing). What has been neglected in the studies of the fabrication of Indians, particularly in the movies, is how—and for which purpose—different national cultures use representations of Indians in different ways as projective surface. For instance, while most Americans would probably be able to decipher many of the subtexts to Dances with Wolves immediately—American westward expansion, a policy of extinction of Native American tribes in the nineteenth century, and feelings of national guilt connected to that history—it is at least questionable whether the majority of Germans would actually ‘see’ the film within the same frame of reference. Being culturally conditioned in a different way and with Native Americans playing no historical, cultural, and social roles, most German mass audiences probably miss important layers of these films. In other words if we “see in Indians what we want to see, what we need to see,” as British film scholar Edward Buscombe puts it (16), then the “we” must clearly be different in different national cultures and reference systems. What, then, is the cultural perspective from which German audiences ‘see’ Indians? Popular German Perceptions on the Screen (I)—The Winnetou Films: (West-) German “Indianthusiasm” and Vanishing Indian As mentioned above, the concept of the noble Indian has been powerful among Europeans at least since Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s reflections on the ‘noble savage’ in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men (1755). On the one hand, Indians roaming the open prairie symbolized freedom at a time when feudalism practically made every individual in Europe dependent. On the other hand, European audiences “could thrill themselves with stories of Indian savagery while remaining safe in their beds” (Buscombe 185). Against this background, the Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper became extremely successful in Europe— and they have remained so throughout the twentieth century. Many European authors dealt with the American West and the ‘noble savage.’ In Germany this fascination culminated in the emergence of the Karl May novels in the mid-1890s. And culmination seems to be the right word, since, as Christian Feest’s research shows, more than a thousand fictional stories on Indians were published in Germany between 1875 and 1900 (cf. 37). In Germany, Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker, and Balduin Möllhausen were the most popular writers prior to Karl May. Interestingly, all of these writers had some direct experience with the American West and with western tribal cultures. However, it was Karl May who would so powerfully and enduringly shape the image of the Indian for his German readers and later film audiences.2 It would be a good preparation for the showing and discussion of the films to confront students with the long history of German fascination with Native Americans in selected images and to thus open up the field.3 Paradoxically, just when the American western was going into a long-term period of decline, the first of the eleven Winnetou films was produced in 1962 (the last one in 1968). The film version of the most successful Karl May novel, Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure of Silver Lake) was the most expensive film ever made in West Germany. It was also the most successful of the season 1962–63, surpassing films like, for instance, the James Bond movie of that year, Dr. No. Whereas the Italian westerns of Sergio Leone attempted to deconstruct the western-genre and its underlying ideologies, the Karl May films returned to an earlier, more innocent world of virtue vs. villainy (cf. Schneider 149). The roles were reversed now in that the Indians, most prominently the impeccable Winnetou, always played by the French actor Pierre Brice, were turned here into symbols of innocence and virtue, while the whites were mostly depicted as corrupt and savage. The voice-overs at the beginning of each of these films time and again articulate the mission of Winnetou, assisted by his blood-brother Old Shatterhand (or, in a few cases, Old Surehand and Old Firehand): to establish peace between Indians and whites against white outlaws who are after the infamous Apache gold, land, or oil, and who currently threaten this peace. This idea of peacekeeping is as generalizing as can be: “friend and protector of all the helpless, but uncompromising enemy of all injustices” (voice-over in Winnetou I). Plots are highly formulaic but complicated, reminiscent of Cooper’s novels, with characters permanently captured, then rescued, then recaptured. As a rule, Indians are never funny, always stoic; they never laugh.

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