AN AMERICAN ACCENTED CINEMA
INDIGENOUS-CENTERED ROAD MOVIES
An Honors Thesis by Elizabeth Falkenberg
An American Accented Cinema: Indigenous-Centered Road Movies By Elizabeth Falkenberg
Brown University MCM Track I Honors Thesis Spring 2019 Primary Advisor: Joan Copjec Second Reader: Levi Thompson
ABSTRACT
Motivated by a desire to assess both the positive and negative cultural legacies of classical Hollywood cinema, this thesis focuses on a genre descendant of the classic western: the road movie. More specifically, inspired and contextualized by Hamid Naficy’s theory of ‘accented cinema,’ it will explore a subgenre of the road movie that features indigenous characters and narratives. Three indigenous-centered road movies – Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water – help me define a specific type of accented cinema which has emerged in United States. Positioned as cultural and social texts, these films can be considered “accented” by the ways in which they employ accepted modes of production and address the themes of nostalgia, border consciousness, and journeys.
i TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...... i Introduction: A New Accented Cinema ...... 1 1. A Hollywood History of Mythmaking ...... 10 Assessing the Popularity of Classical American Cinema The Westward Dream Developing Genre Cinema 2. Genre History Part 1: From the Western ...... 18 Constructing an Iconography of the American West Political Legacies of the Western Mainstream Alternatives 3. Genre History Part 2: To the Road Movie ...... 31 The Road Between Genres Road Signs and Signifiers Road Movies as Narrative Vehicles 4. Situating The Indigenous-Centered Road Movie ...... 41 Locating Displacement and Reterritorialization Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals Sterlin Harjo’s Barking Water Powwow Highway Looking Backwards, Driving Forwards 5. Mapping an Imagined Homeland ...... 51 Homeland as Symbolic Landscape Native Reservation as Heterotopia Metaphorizing the Third World 6. Narratives of Journeying ...... 58 Propelled by Masculinity Linear and Circular Narrative Structures 7. Accented Modes of Production ...... 64 Returning from the Oppositional Alternative Routes Collective Indigenous Filmmaking Culture Conclusion ...... 72 Acknowledgments ...... 76 Bibliography ...... 77 Filmography ...... 80
ii INTRODUCTION A NEW ACCENTED CINEMA
Thomas Builds-the-Fire: “So, I told you a story. Now it’s your turn.” Suzy Song: “What, do you want the truth or do you want lies?” Thomas Builds-the-Fire: “I want both.”1
Narrative films, as assemblages of sound and image, are dually conveyances of story and objects of production. Narrative cinema’s duality of function produces a double relation to reality; cinema has the capacity to refer to, reproduce, and represent reality, as well as the ability to affect reality. In the above quote from Smoke Signals, the character of Thomas asks to hear both the truth and lies, for stories employ both – as does reality.
Simply put, since a narrative film is an artifact in the physical world, its elements of fact and fiction, therefore, have material, real consequences for society.
The fictional, indigenous-centered films of Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water, through their diegetic stories and the politics of their production, embrace cinema’s capacity to produce reality through imaginative intervention. By positioning indigenous characters in the driver’s seat, the films visualize narratives of self-determination for Native American characters. Further, the process of creating each film gave rise to indigenous involvement in the creative and economic processes of filmmaking in America.
1 Smoke Signals. Dir. Chris Eyre (Miramax, 1998).
1 The three films are all indigenous-centered road movies, set in America.
Collectively, they provoke the ties between genre and the process of creating and dismantling myth and stereotype. This thesis will explore how these films leave stereotype behind through a nuanced return to the specific genre conventions of the
American road movie and western. This project operates with an assumption that there is something novel and different going on in the presentations of these films. The vast majority of indigenous characters throughout Hollywood history have been confined to nineteenth century-set, violent narratives – particularly told through the western genre.
Through their exhibition of twenty-first century, modern lives of indigenous people, these indigenous-centered road movies, however, offer a new position for their characters.
To begin an exploration of the cinematic conjunction of the indigenous-centered road movie and the classical western, this introduction will start by addressing two categorical terms of interest: indigeneity in contemporary America and Hamid Naficy’s term “accented cinema.”2 First, the former. Indigeneity, in this context, refers to the status of having native or ancestral connections to specific land territory, particularly before colonial intrusion. “Indigenous” is the term most often used in global or transnational contexts to refer to communities with original ties to specific regions. In contemporary
America, the category of indigenous is used as an umbrella term for descendants and members of the ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse tribal nations. There are
573 federally-recognized native nations across the continental United States and in
Alaska and Hawaii.3
2 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 10. 3 Tribal Nations and the United States: An Introduction. National Congress of American Indians. http://www.ncai.org/about-tribes. March 2019.
2 The latter term, “accented cinema” is borrowed from theorist and cultural studies scholar, Hamid Naficy. In his book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic
Filmmaking, Naficy loosely defines “accented cinema” as an aesthetic response to the experience of displacement through exile, migration or diaspora. At the heart of Naficy’s theory of accented films is the idea that they reflect a “double consciousness” that is derived from experiences of displacement.4 This phrase has also been used by American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and Pan-Africanist writer W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. In this text, Du Bois describes the “peculiar sensation” experienced by African Americans as a “double-consciousness” that feels like a “sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.”5 He continues to write that “one ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” The “double-self” of
American and other that Du Bois describes is also applicable to the indigenous experience of Native Americans. This duality is central to layered analysis of indigenous representation in this project. Through connection to Du Bois’ writing, one can see that this speaks to a larger phenomenon of the American experience.
To accompany my topical and thematic categories, I would like to also provide clarity for my mindful choices of terminology. Throughout this work, I use the terms
“indigenous,” “indigenous-centered,” and “Native American.” The terms “indigenous” and “indigenous-centered” are used most frequently within this work and is done in an effort to remain in line with the terminology of indigenous cinema culture globally.
“Indigenous-centered” is borrowed directly from Annette Portillo’s College English
4 Naficy, 22. 5 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. (Global Grey Books eBooks), 4.
3 Association journal article titled “Indigenous-Centered Pedagogies: Strategies for
Teaching Native American Literature and Culture.”6 Her essay focuses on developing an appropriate and responsible approach to teaching Native American literature and culture to non-native students. Her methods reflect the decolonial methodologies defined by historian Devon Mihesuah, which heavily emphasizes the power and consequences of naming and nomenclature.
When referring to the community histories of native populations in the United
States, I use the term “Native American.” It is important to note that personal and community choices for nomenclature vary nationally and that this is not always a preferred term. It is common, actually, for individuals and communities to still use and encourage the use of other terms of general identification like Indian, American Indian, native, First Nation, and, of course, terms tied to specific tribal names. My use of terminology throughout this project, while not perfect, is undertaken with the intention of balancing regard for specific historicizing context with the established language traditions of indigenous and minority cinema studies.
This project will explore an extension of Naficy’s theory to suggest the possibility for a specific accented cinema connected on indigenous filmmaking in the United States.
In order to find space in Naficy’s theory for this specific category of indigenous
American cinema, a renegotiated definition of displacement is required. This project’s working definition of displacement is of one that transcends the traditional physical markers of national boundary, insofar as displacement occupies the industrial and cultural levels of the imaginary. One historical element of importance is the exclusion of
6 Annette Portillo, “Indigenous-Centered Pedagogies: Strategies for Teaching Native American Literature and Culture,” (College English Association, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2013).
4 indigenous filmmakers and characters from early Hollywood filmmaking culture.
Further, an example of “double consciousness” added in this work comes from the simultaneous interest of the independent filmmakers dismantling the Hollywood practice of stereotyping indigenous characters, while also borrowing Hollywood-associated genre conventions.
To situate the indigenous-centered road movie, we’ll first want to define the road movie. In their introduction to The Road Movie Book, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark introduce their topic through a discussion of the road as a “persistent theme of American culture” with its significance going “back to the nation’s frontier ethos.”7 The
“technological intersection of motion pictures and the automobile in the twentieth century” transfigured the frontier as the open road and the western narrative as the road movie.8 Before the road became a visual symbol of an exploration, the western genre, with its setting of the unmapped American West, was the main cinematic avenue through which the frontier was narratively and visually explored on screen. Embedded within the history of American filmmaking is the longevity of the western genre’s success. The genre served as a profitable staple for early Hollywood studios, and as a collection of work it helped shape the impression of American ideals abroad.
The success of this genre, however, was not without consequence. The dominant imaginary and conventions of the western, which were domestically and internationally branded as an American ideal, crafted a specific image of identity groups based on strict binaries. Even today, the oppositional pairing of the central cowboy protagonist and peripheral Indian figure is a colloquial legacy of the western genre. The relevance of the
7 Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. The Road Movie Book (London: Routledge, 1997), 1. 8 Ibid., 1.
5 separation between the center and the periphery is not limited to the visual history of representation of Native Americans in dominant American cinema; this pattern can also be found in the industrial conditions of the American film industry. Native American and indigenous filmmakers, like their diegetic counterparts, exist on the periphery of
American cinema.
The indigenous-centered road movies of Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and
Barking Water serve as case studies for this possible widening of accented cinema because of their engagement with themes similar to those found in traditional accented films. Jonathan Wack’s 1989 Powwow Highway is about two Cheyenne Indian friends –
Philbert and Buddy – who set out on a road trip to bail out Buddy’s sister from jail in
Santa Fe.9 The mismatched duo rides off in Philbert’s dilapidated car, heading towards
New Mexico. Their journey transforms from one of retrieval to one of self-discovery.
Chris Eyre’s 1998 Smoke Signals also follows two clashing friends who embark on a journey on behalf of a family member.10 When Victor’s dad Arnold dies in Phoenix,
Victor and Thomas take a bus journey from the Coeur d'Alene reservation in Idaho in order to retrieve his ashes. Along the way, they argue about cultural identity and forgiving one’s father. The last film of this trio is Sterlin Harjo’s Barking Water.11 Like the other two films, Barking Water focuses on the journey of a pair of people, but in this case, the pair is an ex-couple. In the film, Frankie, who is terminally ill, enlists the help of his former lover, Irene, to drive him home to Barking Water so he can see his daughter and grandchild before passing away.
9 Powwow Highway. Dir. Jonathan Wacks (Warner Brothers, 1989). 10 Smoke Signals. 11 Barking Water. Dir. Sterlin Harjo (Cinema Purgatorio and Lorber Films, 2009).
6 These films directly engage with the foundational narrative practices of the road movie genre. They follow the vehiculated journey of a pair who travel great geographic distances while engaging in a more intimate psychological journey. Road movies, generally, pull to the forefront the themes of journeying, homeland, boundary, identity, and nostalgia. The road movie can be framed as an extension of the historically- established genre of the western because of its focus on movement and discovery. In the most basic of narrative terms, the road movie is similar to the western genre because of the exploration of a physical or metaphorical frontier and self-discovery along a plane of geographic travel. Within both genres, one finds an expression of the codes of discovery
(or self-discovery) that is visually and narratively aided by physical movement through space and the gesture of frontiersmanship.
It is also through the themes and politics of their production that the films become tied to the philosophy of accented cinema. Naficy uses the linguistic concept of the
‘accented’ as a metaphor to highlight a kind of emerging cinema that he identifies as different from dominant cinema. Cinema that is produced primarily for entertainment, according to Naficy, is devoid of overt ideology or accent, while accented cinema is inherently political. Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water, as I will prove later, candidly engage with the ideological and political and, in these gestures, position themselves as alternatives to the dominant and homogenous cinema of
Hollywood. But, they do not cut all ties with Hollywood genre practices and this is where their categorization becomes complicated.
Caught between the American and the accented, the aesthetic sensibilities of these films inhabit an alternative, hybridized space. Through their engagement with counter-
7 representations of Native Americans and employment of non-mainstream production strategies, they trouble any simple categorization as well as the politics of representation.
Specifically, these films blend contemporary portrayals of Native Americans with the conventions of a genre with a history of cinematic stereotyping indigenous characters.
In addition to the polarity of the films’ resistant renegotiation of genre, the narratives of these films also exhibit paradoxical elements. The stories reflect the simultaneities of the experience of inhabiting the between, which is crucial to telling a contemporary indigenous story. This is an experience of occupying the past and present, tradition and modernity, and inherited memory and movement forward. The American road movie genre is a channel through which to visualize these experiences in terms of space and identity. The contemporary indigenous characters of these films drive between spaces – the native reservation and the rest of the United States – and therefore, occupy the dual identities as native and American. The road movie genre, therefore, is a successful form in which to tell a contemporary Indigenous story because it, too, centers on in-betweenness.
This project begins with a genre study of the classical western genre and then considers the road movie genre. From that established foundation, it moves to situate the three films within American filmmaking culture and Naficy’s theory of accented cinema.
The final three chapters of this project center on close-readings of the films with elements borrowed from Naficy’s accented cinema theory. First, this projects analyzes the films’ portrayals and imaginings of the homeland in regard to ideas of symbolic landscape, heterotopia, world order, and the dichotomy of antiquated and modern American culture.
Next, the characteristics of narratives of journeying are viewed within the context of
8 masculinity, linear and circular narrative structures, and journeys and renegotiations of identity. Finally, the project ends with a short chapter on the embodiment of accented modes of production within these three films. This last chapter provides information on how the practices of making these films can be positioned in American filmmaking culture and indigenous filmmaking culture.
This project is based on the coalescence of three approaches: cultural theory, film genre history, and the politics of representation. The application of these approaches is developed in dialogue with the distinct occurrence of coincidences and conscious upheavals connected to the production of the films. Before inviting you to embark on the next parts of this work, however, I would like to offer a word on my position as author.
As a non-indigenous person, my writing on indigenous representation and modes of film production inherently comes from an outside perspective. I am careful throughout this work to not tread into the territory of problematic ethnographic study.
Further, by focusing on three specific films (only two of which are directed by
Native Americans), my analysis may also risk incompleteness. This project is not meant to create a situation of forced advocacy by suggesting that these films can speak on behalf of the contemporary experiences of all Native American individuals and Native
American communities. Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water were chosen because of the analytic opportunity that arises through their own, individual engagements and renegotiations with the legacy of genre. The films, through employing road movie and western genre techniques, bridge a gap between established film studies scholarship and twenty-first century Hollywood movements.
9 1
A HOLLYWOOD HISTORY OF MYTHMAKING
Smoke Signals, Powwow Highway, and Barking Water all center on the lives of indigenous characters embarking on journeys. The reservations from which the characters of these films depart from or return to are designated land areas managed by federally- recognized Native American communities. These territories, in a sense, are circumscribed by land that is federally managed by the United States government. Through this geographic bounding, reservations form semi-enclaves that are contained by the United
States but exhibit their own distinct culture.
As objects of production, these films, like their characters, reside in the overlap of the geographically-internal and the culturally-external. These films were produced within the geographic bounds of the American nation and American film industry but positioned themselves as separate from the dominant system of classical Hollywood production. It is with this paradoxical relationship of circumscription and alienation that these films are concerned with the way classical American cinema originally perpetuated and continues to determine cinematic genres.
10 ASSESSING THE POPULARITY OF CLASSICAL AMERICAN CINEMA
The contemporary tensions between dominant and independent filmmaking continually come back to the frustration that has always existed with the power that resides in the Hollywood industry hub. Film theory and cultural studies have returned to the question of how classical Hollywood cinema was able to spread globally and with such influence. This question has a renewed significance today as national and international movements call for more politically-conscious representation of underrepresented communities and identities across all mediums.
In an international context, the success of Hollywood films over other cinemas presents a threat to representation and identification. Domestically, this anxiety is also present. A comprehensive investigation of answers to Hollywood’s domination of the world stage could be a project in itself. Most commonly, some suggest that the best way to resolve this disparity is through diversifying key creative players working on projects.
This proposition doesn’t, however, explain how Hollywood’s less-than-diverse beginnings still bred international success with diverse audiences.
In line with this project’s focus on contemporary negotiations with past legacies, this question of the paradoxical success of classical Hollywood cinema will also be addressed. One straightforward explanation lies in the realm of political economy.
Following World War I, classical Hollywood studios bought global distribution networks that allowed their films to circulate internationally.12
In a different vein, Miriam Hansen offers an alternative take. In her article from the journal Modernism/Modernity, titled “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical
12 Miriam Hansen. “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism and Modernity (Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 6, Issue 2, April 1999), 68.
11 Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Hansen calls for a reassessment of the “juncture of cinema and modernism” and renames classical cinema “vernacular modernism.”13
Hansen defines vernacular modernism as a form of engagement with and response to conditions of modernity while being particularly focused on contextualizing these experiences through their connection to the public. For her, classical Hollywood cinema traveled well to international markets because it offered a vernacular that had a
“transnational and translatable resonance” through its “[articulation], [multiplication], and [globalization] of a particular historical experience.”14 While Hansen recognizes the
“hegemonic mechanisms” at play in classical Hollywood cinema, what is of the most interest to her is how its dialectical relation to modernism made it capable of transcending national boundaries of reception.15
Finally, film theorist David Bordwell offers a third explanation. Interestingly,
Bordwell and Hansen were in extensive disagreement on the reasons for Hollywood’s global success. He critiques her theory for not offering “any evidence that a massive diversity of interpretations was actually taking place.”16 Bordwell, instead, frames the
“operations of visual conventions of cinema” as the significant point.17 According to him,
Hollywood cinema was easily taken up internationally because it approached spectatorial identification through appeals to cues of perception. These cues include drawing upon the capacity to understand visual portrays of movement through three-dimensional environments and the passage of time. Through continuity editing and coverage filming,
13 Hansen, 59. 14 Ibid., 68. 15 Ibid. 16 David Bordwell, “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press,1996), 77. 17 Ibid., 57.
12 classical Hollywood cinema established a tradition of storytelling that targeted audience’s perceptual understanding.
While the three arguments have no special relevance to indigenous-centered
American films, the international appeal of American genre cinema remains significant.
When Hollywood classical cinema is re-contextualized as the welcomed, international success it has been for nearly a century, any example of rebellion against it becomes complicated. For Hansen, modern society’s urge to homogenize is not exclusive to cinema, but it means, for cinema, that the homogenized films are at the “expense of racial others.”18 Hansen’s line of argument is troubling for this project because, for the indigenous-centered road movies to be successful in completely dismantling certain myths and stereotypes, they need to defy not one genre’s history but all of Hollywood cinema’s history.
Bordwell’s line of argument, however, offers hope. He endows power to the style of editing and filming conventions of Hollywood cinema and it is through these avenues that standardized Hollywood cinema trains spectators to anticipate certain styles of filmic continuity and storytelling. By adopting practices with established precedence, the indigenous-centered road movies appeal to normal viewership while simultaneously challenging the political ramifications of genre determinism. In other words, these films are innovatory through their salvaging of certain elements of popular Hollywood cinema practices and exercising them to tell a story that challenges the stereotypes sustained by films which employed the same narrative and genre conventions. This chapter attends to this overlap by historically contextualizing the genre specifics of the western.
18 Hansen, 68.
13 THE WESTWARD DREAM
The various associations and internalized hierarchies called up by the word, the
“west,” draws our attention to the relation between linguistics and cinema theory. Most notably, film theory has a long history of using semiotics as a means for understanding cinematic production. The specific linguistic term of interest for this project is “accent,” which grows out of Hamid Naficy’s theory of “accented cinema” and how he signifies difference linguistically.
In line with the link between film studies and linguistics, this section considers the symbolic weight of the label “the western.” This genre, through its name alone, connects to a pattern of dominance surrounding the conventions and morality of American history and contemporary American culture. Among these, we note the following: global western culture and its ties to colonialism; American Westward Expansion and its tied to genocide; the American West as a sight of historically imposed populism and individualism; and, finally, the American West Coast as the hub of the American film industry and a dominating force in international media production.
While engaging with western imagery, the canon of Hollywood westerns imagined the real so as to fit the formulaic plots of the genre. The American West has come to stand for many things throughout history, and its function as a symbol is sometimes contradictory. Most notably, the American West is often viewed as a frontier space: unclaimed and unconquered, but also seductively asking to be claimed and conquered by the film’s hero protagonist. The American West is both a real, physical place and an amorphous idea.
14 The American Dream and the westward dream hinge on the belief in mobility and supremacy. The American Dream specifically refers to the opportunity for upward, economic movement in society and the dream of moving west and finding success is seen as a means of achieving the larger dream of possibility. The land of the west becomes an object for lust and fantasy for the normal American citizen. This is the sentiment often tapped into and reinforced by the western film genre, in which individualistic men are able to achieve freedom and self-reliance.
DEVELOPING GENRE CINEMA
Most Hollywood productions between the late 1920s and early 1960s adhered closely to select genre conventions. Along with the western, these popular genres included slapstick comedy, the musical, animated cartoons, and the biopic. Each genre came with its own practices and codes. At its height, the western genre’s strength was in its economic reliability. From this economic success came its dominance in domestic and abroad markets of distribution, which, in turn, allowed it to function as a primary creator of the iconography of the American West. Its popularity led to its long history of production and later impact on subsequent genres, such as the the road movie.
The collective imaginary surrounding the mythologization of the American West was both a result of lived national history and development of Hollywood filmmaking practices. The American western film genre developed alongside the American
Hollywood-centered studio system; together they became an efficient money-making machine. The western, with its popular and established narrative norms, soon became a go-to genre for Hollywood studios.
15 Westerns are traditionally remembered as stories centered on a nomadic cowboy or gunfighter, but variations of the conventions exist, such as exhibited by the Coen
Brother’s 2018 comedy western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. One of the most recognizable narrative tropes of the classic American western genre is that of government cavalry fighting Native Americans. Native American characters in classic westerns also often sidekicks, noble caregivers, or mistresses.
Like the history of American modernity itself, this genre’s transformations reflect the growing role of transportation technology in the evolution of personal narratives and experiences. Classical Hollywood westerns branded the desire to expand and spread out as distinctly American traits. In one sense, the American sprawl through and towards the west encapsulates this vision. These inclinations and patterns of actions came together in the early history of the United States and due to geographic coincidence, political victories, and economic power, the sentiment of conquering the frontier (and pride in doing so) stuck as part of the dominant imaginary of classical American consciousness.
Later, this form of American consciousness spread beyond national boundaries and ventured into outer space. From the 1950s and 60s national conversations about space travel led to the introduction of ‘space westerns,’ thus the classical western imaginary of expansion was extended. This futuristic and technologically-minded instantiation of the inherited ideal further modernized the basic concept. Between the classical western and the sci-fi space epic is where we can place the road movie – through it, characters travel further than the western once took them but through means a bit less modern than the sci-fi flicks.
16 From these overlapping elements, this projects identifies indigeneity on screen in
American filmmaking as a co-occurrence of multiple meanings. Indigenous representation is closely tied to the ideology of the American western and, in many of these films, indigenous communities are framed as a hurdle to the unbridled expansion and settlement of the frontier. This purposeful tension feeds into a dangerous ideological history of prejudicial policies detrimental to indigenous communities. When the road movie, spread in influence, the same questions of representation and moral judgment were raised.
Since genre categories hinge on understanding and labeling shared elements, it is natural to inquire about how genre determinism might affect individual films. The next two chapters outline the progression from western to road movie. Examples of genres are themselves individual films that may be doing independent work but are also participating in the wider interchange of genre collectives.
17 2
GENRE HISTORY PART 1: FROM THE WESTERN
The history of the western film genre is inseparable from the history of American movies. While examples of this genre can be found globally, such as in Italian “spaghetti westerns” directed by Sergio Leone or Japanese westerns, such as Seijun Suzuki’s Man with a Shotgun, the classical western genre originally developed concurrently with the classical Hollywood era. In his New York Times magazine article on the history of the
American western, Thomas Schatz writes that “by the 1960s, the western had peaked both as a viable Hollywood commodity and as a national myth to ease America's rural- urban transformation.”19 In addition to being culturally popular, westerns also economically prospered as business endeavors because their formulaic plots were easy to develop and the films were relatively low in cost to produce.20
In his essay, “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence,” André Bazin writes, “the Western is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of
19 Thomas Schatz, “Cowboy Business.” (The New York Times Magazine, 2007). 20 Ibid.
18 cinema itself” due to the ever-present fascination of the road and travel by both.21
Furthermore, Bazin goes on to discuss the appeal of the western within cinematic thought because of its sharing of a very basic element. For Bazin, “it is easy to say that because the cinema is movement the western is cinema par excellence.”22 The connection between the western genre and cinema, as such, has intrigued theorists and filmmakers for generations.
As a money-making American studio staple and preferred method in which to tell tales of early American history, the western film genre simultaneously reflects one part of
American history (early settlement of the West), while helping to shore up another (the period of classical Hollywood cinema). The historical duality of the western genre inextricably links it to the development of American filmmaking culture and positions it among its long-lasting cinematic legacies.
As one of the most popular genres of classical Hollywood, the western genre has a legacy of industrial and cultural significance. Its narrative conventions include a typification and stereotyping of its secondary characters, such as the indigenous person.
In regard to characters, the western’s historically preferred protagonist is a white, male explorer, loner, vigilante, or cowboy whose mission often includes embodying masculine
American ideals of the western frontiersman. This patterned characterization leaves mainly secondary or peripheral roles for indigenous characters, as well as women and people of color.
21 André Bazin, “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence,” What is Cinema?: Volume II (University of California Press, 2005), 140. 22 Bazin, 141.
19 This chapter focuses on the function of the American western film genre in constructing a dominant iconography of the American West and how this system of symbols has been addressed by Hollywood alternatives and is still being grappled with today. I wish to foreground the significance of indigenous-centered road movies of this project through an encounter between the long history of the American imaginary and its relation to the politics of representation. The dualistic history of indigenous treatment by the American government and portrayal of indigenous people by Hollywood is a key point of context for understanding the dialectical engagement set in motion by Smoke
Signals, Powwow Highway, and Barking Water.
CONSTRUCTING AN ICONOGRAPHY OF THE WEST
The Western part of the United States of America has long been considered the
“most distinctly American part of America.”23 Attempting to categorize any ‘distinct’ element of any culture, especially in a nation of immigrants, is not without the risk of essentialism. What is of interest here, however, is not offering a revisionist history and perspective on what qualifies as ‘distinctly American,’ but instead an examination of how forms and mediums that claim themselves to be ‘distinctly American’ communicate this claim.
The western film genre is both a set of narrative conventions and a descriptor of time and place that ties itself to American history and national development. Its characteristics have generated a history of associations that render the genre of the western a proper influence on the American imaginary. The American cinematic canon
23 James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. II (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941[1893]), 315.
20 holds up the western film genre as classical for two reasons: it is deeply tied to classical
Hollywood modes of production and is linked to a pivotal period of American national development. This double association has produced a unique instance of aesthetic attachment and genre codification. The western genre is thus regarded as ‘distinctly
American’ and American filmmaking culture, in turn, internalized this constructed legacy of national characteristics.
A staple of the Hollywood studio system for many decades, the western genre, is remembered for being central to the development of American iconography (domestically and abroad). Generally speaking, the American western is a genre of storytelling which is set in the American Old West of the late nineteenth century. Its roots can be traced to the trend of capturing the spirit of the growing American West in stories. This spirit exemplifies a drive for expansion, ownership and defense of private property, vigilante justice, and nomadic male experiences.
Set on the western frontier, western narratives are tales of progress, modernization, and nation-building. In his essay “Dances with Wolves: Romantic
Reconstruction, Historical Reality, or Both?,” Michael T. Marsden explores the role played by the western genre in American collective consciousness. He theorizes that the western genre is “both a fleeing from [America’s] collective past and a celebration of it, and it includes all that was gained and, more importantly, all that was lost.”24
Joanna Hearne, in her book Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the
Western, traces the cinematic portrayals of Native Americans back even earlier to silent
24 Michael T. Marsden,“Dances with Wolves: Romantic Reconstruction, Historical Reality, or Both?” in Contemporary Westerns: Film and Television Since 1990, ed. Andrew Patrick Nelson (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 3.
21 films. She notes that frontier dramas – which were the predecessor to the classical western – often engage with themes of struggle over land and territory. The “theatrical space” of these films was one white Hollywood filmmakers could claim as their own by tilting the empathetic emphasis of the narrative towards the leading white men.25 For
Hearne, one of the most significant points of departure is that early westerns and what she calls “Indian dramas” were “centrally concerned with legitimizing white settlers’ title to land ownership by inverting history to figure Natives as the invaders of white settlements.”26
The American motif of the western frontier echoes through American literature, cinema, and popular culture. Conceptualized as America’s “Manifest Destiny,” the settling of the west was thought of as “America’s right to expand.” With this expansion came violent conflict and racial strife. The history of violence is not a single narrative of the conqueror versus the conquered; it’s a history of the intersections of race, gender, technology, and constructed culture. The notion that equality of opportunity is accessible to any American, allowing any person to pursue their own idea of happiness and success
– commonly labeled the American Dream – is deeply tied to social and economic mobility, a metaphorical form of movement.
Physical movement across space and time is an essential element of the western.
The western is a visual encounter with and documentation of the triumph over the hardship in the wild west, as well as a dramatized tale of conquest. Settlers moved west with the hope of finding opportunity and prosperity as farmers, miners, fur traders, or
25 Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (NY: State University of New York Press, 2013), 17. 26 Hearne, 43.
22 other professionals. The belief that opportunity comes with movement is a perspective necessary for understanding how the myths perpetuated by the western engraved the
American Dream into America’s collective consciousness.
The movement west of American settlements and the taking of traditional lands from Native American tribes are significant developments in American history and yet are not portrayed fully in their moral complexities in film and institutionalized history.
While westerns are aware of territory, space, and movement westward, it is through the lens of the white male characters that audiences see this framed reality. Classically focused on stories of a white nomadic cowboy or gunfighter who takes justice into his own hands, westerns are remembered as macho demonstrations of American masculinity.
The women, Native Americans, black slaves, Mexicans (both indigenous and of Spanish descent), and others were still a part of the story. While the white male leads dominate western stories, the peripheral characters are just as important to us now from a cultural analysis perspective. While white American viewers might easily empathize with the white male lead, the Native American storylines offer less for Native Americans to be proud of, given the fact that these stories are often tragic. In Marsden’s words, for the
Native Americans in most westerns, the “future is… bleak.”27
POLITICAL LEGACIES OF THE WESTERN
The western frontier, since early settlement in North America, was regarded as a space beyond or on the edge of civilization. American Western Expansion was an idea popularized during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency with the Louisiana Purchase.28 The
27 Michael T. Marsden, “Dances with Wolves: Romantic Reconstruction, Historical Reality, or Both?,” 5. 28 Westward Expansion.” History Channel, A&E Television Networks, 15 December 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/westward-expansion/westward-expansion.
23 idea was that in order for the country to prosper, it had to continually expand by taking up more land for independent farmers to live and work on. While the propagation of the ideas of Western Expansion was occurring, so was the Trail of Tears.29 Under Jefferson, the federal government forcibly removed Native American communities and moved them west to designated reservations of land. The original myth, unfortunately, is still active today and endorses that the violence of the Trail of Tears was an inevitable and unavoidable moment in American history.
American Exceptionalism is a category within American ideology that suggests that the “U.S. is not just a bigger and more powerful country — but an exception” to the rules and plagues that hold back other countries.30 This ideological construction focuses on the superiority of the U.S. to other world powers. This concept is important in regards to the presentation of indigeneity in westerns and the question of revisionist history because “exceptionalism” usually excludes (or intentionally forgets) the tragic history of indigenous communities in the United States.
In addition to its appeal to populist tendencies of the genre’s appeal to Western
Expansion and American Exceptionalism, the western also left a mark on the racial politics of the nation. The constructed dichotomy between the cowboy and the Indian exists contemporarily as a nostalgic fascination. Its history retains deep tied to racism and genocide. In his book Native America: A History, historian Michael Leroy Oberg writes that the “native peoples lived lives of enormous diversity, and their varied experiences
29 Ibid. 30 Ian Tyrrell, “What, exactly, is ‘American Exceptionalism’?” The Week, Aeon. 12 October 2016, https://theweek.com/articles/654508/what-exactly-american exceptionalism.
24 make clear the difficulties of generalizing about Native Americans and their history.”31
Generalizing is, however, something Hollywood does well and has done for a long time.
The western’s success allowed for its proposed stereotyping of indigenous characters to stick. Further, the legacy of the genre is clearly visible in the three films that this project takes up and must be analyzed in the context of the “mother tongue” and native culture. Over the history of Hollywood, American cinema has perpetuated the standard image of indigeneity as a mythologized relic of the past and not as a lived experience by Native Americans today. It is not merely coincidental that the indigenous persons’ storyline (in all media) remains attached to a place and space in the past. This persistence developed out of the racist consciousness of the Native American as representative of the savagery of the American past.
In contrast to the brave, confident, and often moral white lead men, popular representations of indigenous characters in Hollywood westerns gravitate to two contrasting poles: the violent animal-man and the sympathetic primitive. Within cinema, the cowboy vs. Indian story is more of a pattern than a myth. It was perpetuated by the visual medium of film, and later television. It pits individual cowboy against stock Native
American characters. The constructed dichotomy fueled the notion that Native Americans were a hurdle to be overcome or overpowered as well as the conviction that the white man would eventually win out over this adversary.
In his Introduction to Saints and Savages: The Changing Image of American
Indians in Westerns, Bob Herzberg notes the transition from the more well-rounded portrayals of Native Americans in the era of silent films to the confusing rise of the
31 Michael Leroy Oberg, Native America: A History. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2018), 4.
25 stereotype of the “murderous savage.”32 In later decades, portrayals of the native as
‘lovable Teddy bears’ do, however, pop up with Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrows and
Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves. As “either saint or subhuman on the movie screen,” the indigenous figure departs from 3-dimensional accuracy.33 Further, in many early westerns, the indigenous characters weren’t played by indigenous actors but by white actors in red face. These casting choices add another layer of erasure and
“othering” of the indigenous person in Hollywood cinema.
The construction of the identity of an individual or group is not the result of only one form of media – by its nature it is intertextual. Literature, political discourse, history textbooks, and national mythology also are responsible for the presentation and skewing of the view of the indigenous community, from the outside in. Cinema is distinctive in that it offers moving images instead of words and with this expansion of representational capacity comes the increased potential to show reality. Unfortunately, like the literature that proceeded it, cinema too cast the indigenous character in a relatively non-speaking role. Hence, these characters were silent and violent. To the spectator of these images, these are incredibly threatening traits.
MAINSTREAM ALTERNATIVES
Several mainstream films have functioned as alternatives through their digression from the classical western’s constructions of indigenous characters and histories. These films transition away from the classical western to adopt a more politically-conscious
32 Bob Herzberg, Savages and Saints: The Changing Image of American Indians in Westerns (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008), 1. 33 Ibid.
26 form. In a similar fashion, the road movie challenged the western genre by taking up symbols of modernity that were lacking or nonexistent in mainstream westerns.
The following mainstream films each diverge from the traditional constructions and conventions of the classical Hollywood western. They are useful in the foregrounding of the three indigenous-centered road movies we will address because they introduce subversions that will be taken to the next level by indigenous-centered, reflexive narratives. The films on this list span westerns and non-westerns; they are connected by how they individually engage differently – but not necessarily positively – with indigenous character portrayal.
Little Big Man (Dir. Arthur Penn, 1970)
Arthur Penn’s 1970 film, based on Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel of the same name, is chiefly concerned with the contrasting lives of white settlers and native populations during the nineteenth century. Little Big Man offers an early example of the potential for more sympathetic portrayals of indigenous people in American cinema.
Dustin Hoffman stars as the lead character, Jack Crabb, who, as a child, was rescued and raised by a Cheyenne tribe. The film uses satire and anti-establishment sentiments to examine the prejudice and injustice at the heart of American history. The indigenous people are presented sympathetically and the U.S. Cavalry as intensely villainous, which was unusual for the genre.
Dances with Wolves (Dir. Kevin Costner, 1990)
Kevin Costner is the star, director, and producer of this 1990 epic western adapted from Michael Blake’s 1989 book of the same name. It tells the story of a Union Army lieutenant, Dunbar (Costner), who travels to the western frontier to a military post. Along
27 the way, he develops a relationship with a group of Lakota indigenous people. Attracted to their lifestyle, Dunbar decides to stay and live with them. This film, like Little Big
Man, shows a different kind of relationship between American soldiers and indigenous communities.
The Last of the Mohicans (Dir. Michael Mann, 1992)
Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Hawkeye in this 1992 historical drama based on the
1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 and an earlier film adaptation of the novel from 1936. Set in 1757 during the French and Indian War, the film unfolds in the Adirondack Mountains in New York, when the territory was still a British colony.
Day-Lewis’s Hawkeye is a half-white, half-indigenous man who is one of the last members of the dying Native American tribe the Mohicans. Hawkeye’s brother, Uncas, and father, Chingachgook, live alongside British colonists, but get caught in the crossfire of the French and Indian War. The film was critiqued for playing loosely with history and therefore not being as authentic as it claimed to be. Its box office success and winning of the Academy Award for Best Sound, however, placed this indigenous-centered, albeit white-washed, narrative in front of mainstream audiences.
Pocahontas (Dir. Eric Goldberg and Mike Gabriel, 1995)
This 1995 Disney animated, musical romantic drama is loosely based on the real life of Pocahontas who was a member of the tributary tribal nations in the
Tsenacommacah, in present-day Virginia. While not exactly historically accurate and cited for its racist overtones, Pocahontas is significant for its presentation of a leading indigenous woman character to global audiences of young children.
Twilight (Dir. Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) and New Moon (Dir. Chris Weitz, 2009)
28 While the vampire romance dramas of the Twilight saga films mythologize a
Native American community in a factually problematic way, it should not go without recognition that the series intentionally sought to present Native American teenagers as normal American teens. The first two films from the series, in particular, show the Native
American teenage characters as normal members of a society struggling with normal teenage questions of friendship, romance, and community. The series also shows indigenous characters in a contemporary setting; while it engages with history, it also presents their community as a still functioning one current to the twenty-first century.
Hostiles (Dir. Scott Cooper, 2017)
Scott Coopers 2017 western is set in 1892 and follows Army Capt. Joseph
Blocker (played by English-American actor Christian Bale) who reluctantly agrees to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief and his family back to their traditional tribal land.
Their group embarks on a perilous journey from New Mexico to Montana. Blocker and
Chief Yellow Hawk confront their mutually violent history and the changing relations between the American government’s armed forces and the indigenous communities.
Hostiles allows the Cheyenne characters in the film to speak authentically. While still shrouded in the violence and romanticized history of the western, Hostiles’ use of language and authentic casting makes it a more responsible western.
From these mainstream alternatives to the western’s legacy of indigenous portrayal, we move on to the genre development of the road movie out of the western.
Within the next chapter, we’ll explore the direct relation between the western and the road movie and how the spirit of “rebellion against conservative social norms,” which is
29 so often associated with the road movie genre, encapsulates genre rebellion as well.34 The evolution between these two genres is not simply a passive transition of modern reflection but is also a somewhat chaotic and involved process of active renegotiation, which can be seen surrounding the films as items of production and within their diegetic worlds.
34 David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (University of Texas Press, 2002), 1.
30 3
GENRE HISTORY PART 2: TO THE ROAD MOVIE
“Despite being an independent, postmodernist genre, the road movie should be understood in relation to classical genres. Upon closer inspection, the road movie reveals itself to be not only a “new” independent genre of the New American cinema but also an amalgam of certain classical Hollywood elements…The Western, for example, is a classical genre of substantial formative significance for the road movie. With its emphasis on the precarious, ambiguous border between nature and culture, and its prevalent use of the journey as narrative structure, the Western functions in a sense as the road movie’s grandparent.”35
- David Laderman
The ethos of the American road, with its seductive invitation for leaving and returning, has been aggrandized to the level of legend. The “moving pictures” of cinema, quite poetically, were deployed to tell moving stories of the road in the road movie genre.
Out of the essence of the motifs of exploration, self-discovery, and one-man-against-the- world at the heart of the western grew the road movie genre. While the western goes back to the “go west” spirit of the nineteenth century of American history, the road movie is not directionally bound but is still enamored by a level of spiritual movement. Like the classic American epic western, the road movie takes up thematic conventions of the
35 Laderman, 23.
31 western setting, character inclination for self-determination and self-discovery, and the narrative structuring of movement through space.
From a contemporary perspective, this urge is delegated to the individual and his personal vehicle of transportation: the automobile. The physical journeys of the driver and passengers in road movies are often taken up as metaphors for their emotional and personal developments. The transition from horses to cars and unchartered territory to the open road is crucial to the conception of American modernity. The introduction of personal modes of transportation take the ideals of the American western epic and modernizes it for a new period of cinema. Even as the technology pictured in these films changes, the basic myths and concerns for the American West remain mostly the same.
The western genre’s transformation into the road movie can be examined in a film history context and viewed as a metaphor for the progression of indigenous narratives.
Indigeneity in American films will be examined in relation to the intersection of the western and the road movie insofar as they both visualize American progress. While the road movie is often associated with American culture and filmmaking practices, it is not exclusive to it. Additionally, America is not the only nor original site of development of the road movie.
THE ROAD BETWEEN GENRES
It is easy to give into the lure of categorization in speaking of genre. While this project hinges on the cultural use and reflexive re-use of genre, the road movie as genre is a complex case. In his 1991 A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam, film theorist Timothy Corrigan writes about the “near impossibility of genre.”36 Corrigan
36 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Cinema After Vietnam. (New Bunswick: Rutgers, 1991), 138.
32 asserts that “the image of genre seems to taunt contemporary reception with its utopian possibilities only to turn those audiences back before its historical impossibilities.”37
Corrigan points to the systems of genre as “hysterical” and chaotic in nature. For
Corrigian, however, out of this complexity of genre’s “historical impossibilities” arises the road movie as distinct from other genre practices because of its “nearly exhaustive classical generic referentiality” and its qualities of being “self-conscious” and “post- generic.”38
Perhaps, as Corrigan suggests, the road movie’s overindulgence in genre also positions it as post-generic. Rather than distinguishing it from other genres, the road movie’s self-referentiality actually perpetually connects it back to them. For the purpose of this project, genre is taken up as a useful tool of connection. Genre, as a term, is used here as a way to condense the similarities that bind Smoke Signals, Powwow Highway, and Barking Water. This is done while keeping in mind Corrigan’s thoughtful gesture towards the elements of the post-genre.
In his book Road Movies, David Orgeron takes a different position from that of Corrigan. For the former, it is important to be critical of what Corrigan refers to as
“strict generic approaches” to the road movie, but also to recognize that its connection to genre history.39 For Orgeron, the road movie’s “connection to genre” is “undeniable” because it is inherited from the “ideological [links] to the past” exhibited by the precursor genres of the western and film noir.40
37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 David Orgeron, Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami, 47. 40 Ibid.
33 Further, Orgeron continues to engage with David Laderman’s take on the supposed “progressiveness” of the road movie. Laderman’s rather casual position is that the road movie is “both more ‘authentically progressive’ than and subject to the same old pitfalls as classical genre.”41 Orgeron is suspicious of the true level of independence that the road movie, as a genre collective, tends to claim for itself. The road movie could be said to be “assembled from the dispersed particles of Classical-era Hollywood genres.”42
If one were to believe that this dispersed assemblage held for the road movie, its genre conventions would be less about formed expectations than about a continuity of renegotiation and rebellion.
ROAD SIGNS AND SIGNIFIERS
“In the Hollywood road movie, a direct descendant of the western, the open road substitutes for the American frontier. Like the West, the road in such films and texts (Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, On the Road) promises opportunity, freedom, and renewal, though it rarely delivers on these promises.43
- Colleen Glenn
The road movie’s emphasis on the narrative role of movement proved useful for cinema because of how it extended the appeal of the western and pushed it into a new era of filmmaking. While the road, as a setting, motif, or simply a consideration, has been important to the cinema since its early development, road movies as an independent genre took off in the 1960s. This expansion is mainly the result of the collapse of the American studio system and advancements in camera technology. While the road may have always
41 Ibid., 49. 42 Ibid, 3. 43 Colleen Glenn, “The Road Western: The Mad MaxSeries and its Latest Installment, Fury Road,” Antenna, http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2015/06/19/the-road-western-the-mad-max-series-and-its-latest- installment-fury-road/, 19 June 2015.
34 been accessible to a narrative, it became more accessible technologically with the advent lightweight and highly portable cameras that could be taken on the road.44
While the journey narrative is the most readily detectable commonality of the road movie, and cinema in general, the specifics offered by the road journey are crucial to the generation of the collective aesthetic of the genre. Visually, the open road is the most common repeated motif of road movies. A pair or couple often sit in the front seat of the car – which serves as the home base for the road movie story. The dual character dynamic of the pair leads us to the compound nature of the journey. While the journey narrative is first conveyed as the travel from point A to point B, there is also an interpersonal relationship between the pair of travelers and the internal, more intimate, journey of development within and between the individual characters. It is mainly through conflict that these interpersonal and internal journeys of development arise. The conflicts most often visualized in road movies range from disagreements between the two travelers or clashes with others when the travelers leave the road to stop and rest.
With this general set of commonalities in mind, the road movie genre can be presented as an organized, yet still informal, genre form. Road movies set in the present are still often inseparable from the past and its legacy. The difference introduced by indigenous-directed road movies is that they avoid the tendency to confine indigenous people to violent time in American history. By casting their narrative net into the present, these films overtly and politically announce that Native Americans still have, and always have had, stories to tell.
44 Orgeron 112.
35 The imagery of Native Americans is found in a variety of places across the country and in many cultural forms. The western genre, as a category with historical memory, contains a high concentration of indigenous imagery – but its set of memories is an imbalanced collection. While political resistance movements often note that the tools used to one group’s disadvantage cannot easily be deployed to free the disadvantaged group from oppression, there is something to be said for the co-opting narrative for renegotiations of self-representation.
Through this move forward in American genre history, we see reflected the ways in which art evolves to grapple with the past, visualized through the self-guided journey of road travel. Many westerns also contain themes of self-discovery, but intense violence often overshadows these themes. Westerns set in the late 1800s often focused on the violence of the times as a catalyst for their heroes’ rises and falls. Violence in modern westerns or western-set road films centered upon indigenous characters are not without violence but violence’s greatest impact upon their stories comes through the communal memory of systematic violence.
Today, the violence akin to the nineteenth century’s ethos of brutality is not the biggest threat to contemporary Native Americans – economic security, family stability, opportunities for education, gender equality, and preserving heritage, however, are towards the top of the list of concerns. The discrepancy in the reality of violence in daily life is one reason for why the contemporary road movie is a more effective means for conveying modern Native American stories than the western. Indigenous directors Chris
Eyre and Sterlin Harjo, thus, used the road movie genre as the vehicle for their films.
36 ROAD MOVIES AS NARRATIVE VEHICLES
“A man went looking for America… and couldn’t find it anywhere.”
- Easy Rider promotional poster45
In Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water, indigenous characters come face to face with memories of past persecution by the government against indigenous people. This violence continues to have tangible and intangible effects on communities and individuals and mostly acts as a deterrent of inter-race bonds across the reservation borders. The road, in this way, serves as route for indigenous travel outside of the reservation.
Road movies, while building their plots on the movement from one place to another across time and space, also extensively delve into internal psychic movements, realizations, and self-discoveries within the characters. One reason for the combination of this inside/outside sense of movement is that the liminal space of the moving vehicle can limit traditional expressions of outside action. Where characters would have once encountered conflict with the outside world, in road movies they often face, in equal parts, conflict within themselves. By isolating the characters within their vehicle, the characters’ internalized progression and movement are further highlighted.
Dennis Hopper’s 1969 road movie, Easy Rider, expanded the tradition of the
American road movie. According to Orgeron, “Easy Rider helped solidify the rules of this cinematic tradition.”46 More than that, it directly addressed the polarization crystalized by the American political consciousness of the American West – the opposition between populism and individualism. In many ways, the western genre
45 Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969. 46 Orgeron, 102.
37 idealized the American West for the same reason real people feared it: it required people to face harsh elements and lawlessness. The American West required an ‘every man for himself’ mindset, but with the caveat that moral men must still act on behalf of their country and in honor of its excellence.
Easy Rider slams head-first into this impossible position, but not before moving it to a different time and a not-so-different place. In the film, actor Peter Fonda (Wyatt) and actor/director Dennis Hopper (Billy) play two Harley-riding counterculturists who travel across the country in search of spiritual truth. They complete a drug deal in Southern
California and then set out for New Orleans, in hopes of making it there for the Mardi
Gras celebration. Over the course of their journey, they have experiences that make them question the nature of the American way of life.
Orgeron analyzes Easy Rider in combination with philosopher Roland Barthes’ theories of the “doubly seductive” nature of the visual language of cinema and the enjoyment of the process of “drifting.”47 For Orgeron, the road movie is an ideal example for Barthesian scrutiny because it engages with the “landscape of myth.”48 In his analysis,
Orgeron isolates the thematic duality of the main characters, Wyatt and Billy, who desire to escape the artifice of Los Angeles because of its exhausting urbanity and its status as an “artificial dream machine” in the “land of movies.”49
Even though they escape the urban setting, with each of their stops they encounter new points of tension. The film ends with both men getting shot while driving down a road in rural Louisiana. The characters’ ends come as a surprise and the senselessness of
47 Orgeron, 103-4. 48 Ibid., 109. 49 Ibid.
38 their unfortunate their demise casts a dark cloud of apprehension over the unfulfilled promises of unlimited possibility.
I allude to Easy Rider here for two reasons. First, it is generally recognized as a foundational work of the new road movie and therefore its upsetting of conventions is helpful for establishing an indigenous-centered subgenre of the road movie. The second reason for its inclusion comes out of its own ruminations on the “dying myth of the expansionist West” and the tragic role played by indigenous communities in this myth.50
During a campfire scene, the two men, joined by a stranger whom they picked up, rest on top of an Indian burial ground. The stranger tells them to be a “trifle polite” as “the people this place belongs to are buried right under [them].”51
The road movie, like the western, is frequently associated with the American open road but ought to be more associated with the history of American land ownership. In many road narratives, the open road is exposed as a utopian fantasy that ultimately falls short. In Easy Rider, the false promises of the open road are not delivered to the two men and they believe this is the case because, through their own actions, they “blew it.” In other road movies, particularly ones with less pessimistic endings, the positive deliverance is redistributed from the road itself to the characters. It is their internal journey that creates difference rather than their physical movement.
The road movie opens the doors to emotional and intellectual journeys of characters through its narrative positioning. The road’s liminality establishes it as an alternative space set apart from society. From this position, the road movies find new perspectives to examine, directly or indirectly, the tensions of American culture:
50 Orgeron, 109. 51 Easy Rider.
39 individualism and populism. Caught between their desires and the demands of society, the characters find the road to be a site of negotiation between the two conflicting courses.
40 4
SITUATING THE INDIGENOUS-CENTERED ROAD MOVIE
“We need to give out a portrayal of ourselves. Every non-Indian writer writes about 1860 to 1890 pretty much, and there is no non-Indian writer that can write movies about contemporary Indians. Only Indians can. Indians are usually romanticized. Non-Indians are totally irresponsible with the appropriation of Indians, because any time you have an Indian in a movie, it's political. They're not used as people, they're used as points.”52
- Chris Eyre
“A Time magazine headline (29 June 1998) suggested that each minority would soon aim for a road film of its own: “what Spike Lee’s film [Get on the Bus] did for African Americans, Smoke Signals aims to do for Native Americans.”53
- Jeffery Ressner
With this project, I intend to investigate the possible developments of knowledge that arise from applying accented cinema theory to indigenous-centered and indigenous- made films in the United States. This chapter, more specifically, outlines how the three films Smoke Signals, Barking Water, and Powwow Highway may be accented in their own regard. This chapter begins with a negotiated definition of displacement as a
52 Chris Eyre and Lee, Juillerat “Chris Eyre (1968-).” The Oregon Encyclopedia. https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/eyre_chris_1968_/#.XH1cos9KhHR, 2018. 53 Jeffery Ressner, as cited by Katie Mills in The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television (United Kingdom: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 189.
41 descriptor for the experience of reterritorialization before moving through a detailed summary and analysis of each of the films individually.
Through the lens of an accented cinema, these three films, as indigenous-centered road movies, enter into the established, but independent, patterns of Third World cinema.
Naficy references internal American filmmaking in his book in the context of an allusion to the influences of “post-studio ‘ethnics’” in the history of Hollywood. He points to the
“children of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants,” who “contributed to the emergence of the New Hollywood post-industrial cinema,” by integrating itself into the mainstream, rather than keeping itself separate.54 It is this difference between the assimilated immigrant and the relocated indigenous person that an internal American accented cinema can be located.
LOCATING DISPLACEMENT AND RETERRITORIALIZATION
Deterritorialization, in anthropology, essentially refers to the process and experience of a weakening linkage between a location and the culture associated with or existing within it. In their joint philosophical works, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari examine the function of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In A Thousand Plateaus, they outline two classifications of deterritorialization: relative and absolute.55 Relative deterritorialization, according to their work, is always accompanied by reterritorialization, which is the process of restructuring of a place or territory that has experienced deterritorialization and applying a new system of power.
54 Naficy, 8. 55 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
42 A popular example of reterritorialization is that of the Spanish conquistadors who conquered the Aztecs and subsequently deterritorialized the space by eliminating Aztec belief and ritual systems, before reterritorializing the space by forcing assimilation with their own Spanish beliefs and rituals. For Native Americans, the preservation of reservation space meant that the reterritorialization process, while influenced by the
American culture at large, was not determined completely by it. The indigenous communities reterritorialized their spaces through a process of renegotiation of their circumstance of double consciousness.
This topic could easily become a complex conversation about the processes and legacies of colonial powers. For the context of this project, we will stay in philosophical realm here and discuss these matters in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari, but even more metaphorically. Smoke Signals, Barking Water, and Powwow Highway contribute to the process of the deterritorialization and reterritorialization in their own ways. More specifically, since the three films do not explore tribal experiences of forced relocation they, instead, inscribe a different kind of meaning. By focusing on movements away, towards, or within traditionally-held native reservations, they imagine a deterritorialization that is much more internal.
In these cases, the films present a perspective on physical space as territory for deterritorialization and reterritorialization. As cultural artifacts, these films also do something novel: they offer a cinematic space for deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Most obviously, their political acts of challenging and offering authentic alternatives to Hollywood-created stereotypes of indigenous characters destabilize reterritorialized systems of representation.
43 According to Naficy, accented filmmakers tend to share the commonalities of
“liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society and the film industry” that is derived from experiences of displacement.56 While many of the films taken up by
Naficy’s book are made by displaced individuals living in the global West, there is an opportunity to reimagine internal displacement and exile. Due to the variations among experiences of exile, diaspora, and displacement, inside and across communities, I will focus on the elements of Naficy’s theory applicable to internal post-colonialism, which he particularly describes in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Within mainstream American cultural production, Native Americans are included but are more often disproportionately underrepresented and/or misrepresented. Within this misrepresentation comes a pattern of trapping the image of the Native American in the past. The aesthetic of indigenous North American forms of cinema have much in common with the postcolonial, exilic, and diasporic examples of filmmaking that interest
Naficy.
The Native American experience, over centuries, includes forced relocation, assimilation, genocide, and overt societal prejudice, which is similar to the communities of interest in Naficy’s book. There are examples of both geographic and metaphorical forms of displacement, from the Cherokee tribe’s forced relocation during the Trail of
Tears to the underrepresentation of indigenous characters in the media. Since many tribes still have populations living on traditional land and form vibrant indigenous communities that transcend traditional tribal borders, displacement in this context needs to be expanded beyond the geographic. Their continuation on past land keeps them within the
56 Naficy, 10.
44 confines of the larger state power, which is similar to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict explored by Palestinian-made accented films.
A key difference between Native American films and the main film examples in
Naficy’s An Accented Cinema is a sense of hyper-reterritorialization. The land (as a place, symbol, metaphor, and character) comes to represent a continuation of communal memory that transcends individuals and generations. The land, in a way, is not something owned but something that owns. In Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking
Water the land has its people more than the people have their land.
Indigenous-centered road movies examine the same tensions encountered in road movies generally, but the questions are further compounded by the complex histories and collective memory that define indigenous presence in America. Examples of indigenous- centered road movies accomplish two main tasks: (1) they entertain spectators with successful and established narrative structures, and (2) they offer alternative modes of indigenous representation cast into the contemporary setting. While Powwow Highway is not indigenous-directed and not without elements of complication, I have included it along with Smoke Signals and Barking Water because of its impact on the two later films and its unconcealed attempt to remain allegiant to a level of authenticity for Indigenous stories.
Additionally, it is important to note the psychological implications for spectators of indigenous heritage, of seeing reminders of violence against indigenous people on screen. Director Chris Eyre’s desire for indigenous people to create and experience more self-representation is derived from a desire for representational justice and an establishment of healthier presentations of indigenous stories. The road movie genre
45 inhabits the realm between the past and the present and this intersection is exceptionally topical for present-day Indigenous filmmaking.
CHRIS EYRE’S SMOKE SIGNALS (1998)
Chris Eyre, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of
Oklahoma, was born in Portland, Oregon in 1968. Though raised by his non-native adoptive parents, Eyre was involved in his indigenous community and rose to prominence as an indigenous filmmaker. Eyre openly doesn’t seek to make films exclusively about indigenous themes and stories, but his career of work tends to engage with identity. For him, "the story is about living vicariously with people and honoring them and their spirits."
His 1998 film, Smoke Signals, pushed him into the limelight of prominence as a
Native American director. The film stars Adam Beach, Evan Adams, Irene Bedard, Gary
Farmer, and Tantoo Cardinal. Based on the short story "This is What it Means to Say
Phoenix, Arizona" from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Spokane-
Coeur d'Alene-American novelist Sherman Alexie, the film centers on the journey made by two childhood friends, now young adults, following the death of one of their fathers.
When Victor and his mother hear that his father Arnold has died in Phoenix, Arizona, he is sent to retrieve his father’s ashes. Unable to afford the cost of the journey on his own, he has no choice but to agree to travel with his friend, Thomas, on the cross-country trip from the Coeur d’Alene reservation in Idaho to Phoenix.
Along the way, the two young men learn to better understand one another and help one another grow up. While Smoke Signals easily fits into the road movie genre, it also alludes to the western and coming-of-age genres. The layering of memory (both real
46 and mythic) contextualizes the young men’s lives and pursuits within the indigenous imagination. Furthermore, the encounters they have with non-indigenous people remind the spectator again about the young men’s difficulties outside of the reservation. For instance, after a pit stop on the bus journey, Victor and Thomas return to the bus to find that two middle-aged white men are sitting in their seats. The boys tell the men that these seats are theirs but the white men refuse to leave. Victor and Thomas grab their bags from above the seats and relocate to another place on the bus.
While we never see the now older Victor with his father, this film is very much about the current state of their father-son relationship. The exploration of this absence sends Victor on a path of self-discovery. The film is significant because it also demonstrates the anxiety of the reservation border. Marking the difference is a nod to the historical prejudice against Indigenous People in the United States.
STERLIN HARJO’S BARKING WATER (2009)
In this film, two past lovers reunite on a road journey to return the male of the couple home to Barking Water before his impending death. During their travels, the couple comes to terms with their separation and their lasting love. This film is about forgiveness, return, and symbols of devotion. The man’s dying wish to return to his home solidifies his love for that place and his relationship to the land. In a flashback to a time when the couple was still together, they are sitting on their neighbor’s land and talk about their desire to own land again.
The film starts with Frankie and Irene fleeing a hospital by car. Frankie is in the final stages of his cancer battle and has requested to return to Barking Water, where his estranged daughter and grandchild live. Early in their journey, Irene promises Frankie
47 that she’ll get him home because she owes it to him. Over their emotional journey, more is revealed about their past romantic relationship and the reasons behind its eventual end.
They say goodbye to several friends and family members over their journey towards
Barking Water. Frankie, however, dies just miles outside of Barking Water, falling just short of completing his journey alive. This film is less about the physical movement of the couple and their car and more about their emotional journey of forgiveness.
POWWOW HIGHWAY (1989)
In this comedy-drama, based on the novel by the same name by David Seals, an indigenous man, Buddy Red Bow, finds himself in need of a ride from Lame Deer,
Montana to Santa Fe, New Mexico in order to bail his estranged sister out of jail. Without other options, Buddy asks Philbert, who has just recently traded some marijuana for a rusted and beat up car he calls a “war pony,” to make the journey with him. Together they drive to Santa Fe; once they’re there, Philbert, inspired by an old western he sees on
TV, breaks Bonnie out of jail.
While this film is included with Smoke Signals and Barking Water because of the genre features it shares with them, it is importantly different in that it is not directed nor produced by an indigenous filmmaker. Powwow Highway, however, is included alongside the other two films in how it directly inspires their mediation on genre legacy.
As the earliest of the three, Powwow Highway catapults the indigenous narrative into the crossfire of the western and the road movie genres.
The directors of Smoke Signals and Barking Water were aware and arguably responsive to Powwow Highway in their own films. While Powwow Highway places two indigenous male characters in the starring positions as protagonists, it does so through the
48 power of the mythic. For example, in one scene, Philbert leaves a Hershey’s chocolate bar on the top of a sacred mountaintop. This scene juxtaposes the contemporary with the spiritual, but, while doing so, risks trapping the Native American within American pop culture without complexity and in spite of numerous social critiques.
In all three films, the characters strive for self-determination over their lives (and in the case of Barking Water, their deaths). The category of accented cinema is nearly anonymous with striving for self-representation. This endeavor can be extended to the identity politics of minority cinema but can also be as simple as the revolutionary act of employing accented modes of production.
LOOKING BACKWARDS, DRIVING FORWARDS
“‘Driving backward garners political resonance as commentary on the socioeconomic status of Native Americans, going backward’ as the ‘society’ that conquered them ‘progresses.’”57 - David Laderman
On their way to the bus stop, Victor and Thomas from Smoke Signals catch a ride with two of their female friends, who offer to take them to the edge of the reservation.
The girl’s car, however, only drives in reverse. Comically, she drives the car leaning back and looking out the back window the whole way.
It is through this visual metaphor that the state of indigenous road movies can be understood. The genre’s close relationship to the western adds to the latter a self- awareness of looking back on history and the contemporary implications of past crimes committed against indigenous communities. It is doubtful, however, that a genre built on an inheritance of another that is responsible for much of the stereotyping of the indigenous people can succeed completely. Perhaps the road movie genre, and the legacy
57 Laderman, 229.
49 it carries, is a broken vehicle for the indigenous filmmaker because of its inescapable ties to the American western? The self-referentiality and intertextuality does, however, empower the indigenous filmmaker to compensate by driving their narrative vehicle backward, while moving forwards.
The hyper-reterritorialization of these films, coupled with the narrative and aesthetic motif of their journeys, characterizes the aesthetics of their accented style. Their focus on indigenous-centered narratives, and particularly under the direction of indigenous filmmakers (as is the case for Smoke Signals and Barking Water), crystalizes their politically accented dimension. The next three chapters engage with specifics of the accented style of the films, which include mapping an imagined homeland, employing narratives of journeying, and embodying accented modes of production.
50 5
MAPPING AN IMAGINED HOMELAND
Velma: “You guys got your passports?... You’re leaving the rez and going into a whole different country, cousin.” Thomas: “But it’s the United States.” Velma: “Damn right it is. That’s as foreign as it gets. Hope you two got your vaccinations.”58
“The dialectics of displacement and emplacement are expressed in the space-time configurations of accented films in certain specific ways. Place is a segment of space that people imbue with special meaning and value. It may refer to a country a region, a town, a village, a particular street, a specific house, or a special nook in a house. It refers not only to a physical entity, however, but also to our relations to it and to our social relations within it. Most of us take for granted our place in the world…”59
- Hamid Naficy
The very name of the road movie genre emphasizes the liminal space of the road as the defining feature of the story. The genre, however, maintains a balance between attention to transitional spaces and the sites of departure, arrival, or return. At the core of these three Indigenous-centered road movies is a rupture, between the experience of the journey and the imagination and personification of the homeland. Their communication
58 Smoke Signals. 59 Naficy, 26.
51 of both is aligned through the inherent contrast between the interior and exterior of the homeland.
This chapter opened with a quotation from the film Smoke Signals. As Thomas and Victor prepare to leave the reservation and catch a bus to Arizona, their peers jokingly remind them of the differences between the native reservation and the rest of the
United States of America. A native reservation, when viewed as a heterotopia, is repositioned as as place of inherent contrast. It is both American and distanced from
America. The following sections will explore this multitude of meaning derived from the homeland through the exploration of symbolic landscape, heterotopia, and relative world order.
HOMELAND AS SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPE
Early examples of the American road movie emphasized the visuals of landscape through which the characters traveled – horizontality was thus emphasized. In the three road movies, landscape is split between the homeland and the non-homeland, and this difference is communicated narratively. The landscape outside the homeland moves with the character while the landscape of the homeland is static and carries the weight of collective meaning.
Naficy writes that accented cinema engages with a “rhetoric of the land, home, and identity” and this rhetoric reflects how certain “places have become important symbolic sites” for certain communities.”60 According to Naficy, this phenomenon vehicles a pattern of “idyllic memory” of the homeland by those who have left it. Naficy, aware that not all members of communities whose narratives are taken up by accented
60 Naficy, 167.
52 cinema have been forced to leave their home, also discusses instances of individuals and parts of communities that remain, which he terms the “remnant.”61 His main example of the remnant comes in the context of Palestinian people who “remained in Israel or in the
Occupied Territories under Israeli control.”62 Conceptually, there is an explicit link between the Native American and Palestinian experiences of settler colonialism, although, these experiences are varyingly marked by contemporary occupation. Naficy includes Palestinian filmmakers in his list and conception of accented cinema, therefore, there is is precedence for Native American inclusion in a subsequent abstraction of new accented cinema.
While, in most cases, the homeland is often framed as an imagined, nostalgic ideal, it can be interpreted more fluidly. The films on which this project focuses engage with the homeland as an expression of nostalgic communal memory or longing, but they also return it to the materiality of a real place and nature. The primary similarity between these American accented films and Naficy’s original conception of accented cinema by
Third World filmmakers is the symbolic weight they give to the homeland, although the meaning of the landscape varies with each film.
In Powwow Highway, the mountains the characters pass while on the road signify the challenges they have faced. In one scene early in the film, Philbert climbs a sacred mountain. In doing so, he attains the power of a perspective he had not previously had.
The sheer physical endeavor of the climb and the acceptance of the visual reward gives
Philbert a lift; he is elevated to a new level of understanding. In Smoke Signals, the river is give the most symbolic importance. The river into which Victor disperses his father’s
61 Ibid., 166. 62 Ibid.
53 ashes functions as a symbol of change and presents the opportunity for forgiveness. In the final scene of the film, Victor asks “How do we forgive our Fathers?” and his first answer is that “maybe in a dream” they can forgive them. His monologue ends by asking, “If we forgive our Fathers what is left?” The film closes on this scene of the river, moving vibrantly and energetically; it proposes that nature and homeland is what is left, and with it, honor and heritage.
NATIVE RESERVATION AS HETEROTOPIA
“This dislocatory feeling structures are powerfully expressed in the accented films’ chronotopical configurations of the homeland as utopian and open and of exile as dystopian and claustrophobic…”63
- Hamid Naficy
Naficy focuses on this idea of homeland in accented films as utopian in the way the filmmakers and characters long to return to a homeland, but cannot. In Powwow
Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water, however, the characters live on the homeland of the reservation and are able to move within and outside of it. The homeland in the three film, therefore, is less akin to imagined utopia and more comparable to a heterotopia.
In his text, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” French philosopher
Michel Foucault discusses the differences between utopias and heterotopias.64 “Utopia” translates literally to “no place,” so, in short, they are not real. A utopia is thought to represent society in an ideal state of pure perfection. Conversely, a society conceived as the opposite of ideal is called a dystopia. In both cases, a utopia and a dystopia,
63 Naficy, 27. 64Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Diacritics, Vol. 16, no. 1 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
54 fundamentally, are unreal places. Heterotopias, on the other hand, are real and effective spaces. In some cases, a heterotopia may be considered a realized utopia but it does not always have to be held to this complete standard of perfection. The most important element of a heterotopia worth emphasizing is its simultaneous nature of being a place outside all places and yet also a real place in itself.
At the center of the narratives of Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking
Water are family and home, which are rendered more complicated by the particular history of indigenous communities in the United States. Heterotopia is useful concept here as a way to theorize the construction of the reservation as a space. It is America’s past and its most forgotten history. In these films, the elements of utopia are tied to history and to a missed historical opportunity. The space of the reservation itself is more of a heterotopia because it is a place of difference within a larger place. The difference between the space of the reservation and the rest of the nation is almost assumed in these three films. This assumption doesn’t come through a desire to minimize political complexity but from a desire to reflect a lived, subliminal dynamic.
Viewing the native reservation as a heterotopia opens up a valuable window of opportunity to conceptualize the space in terms of time and memory. The heterotopic reservation is timeless in that, in some ways, it can be framed as stuck in the past, and in other ways, it can be formulated as outside of chronological time altogether. In this way, the native reservation becomes symbolic of a consciousness of the unchanging. Taken cynically, this evokes the colloquial phrase ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same,’ which is an idea suggested by the three films political handlings of homeland.
55 METAPHORIZING THE THIRD WORLD
“It’s always the same deal, ain’t it? You get what you want and we get the shaft… 75% of our people are living below the poverty line and you’re telling us that stripping off what’s left of our natural resources is going to change that. Maybe you better tell us something different. This ain’t the American Dream we’re living. This here’s the Third World.”65 - Powwow Highway
The third notable characteristic of the cinematic homeland in these films is its oppositional relation to the outside. The above quotation from Powwow Highway embodies the use of comparative terminology to describe suspended difference. In a reservation meeting, Buddy interrupts a mining company representative during his presentation of a plan for his company to buy access to the reservation’s natural resources. Buddy believes that the man is feigning respect for the community and has actually come with the intention to take something from them. He describes the pattern of inequality between the native reservation and the larger outside realm of the American surrounding and how this relationship is similar to a colonial dynamic.
The goal of Buddy’s argument is to describe the paradoxical positioning of the native reservation; it is within the First World but subject to Third World conditions
(relatively speaking). The difference between living standards in the native reservation and the rest of the country is stark. To describe this difference, Buddy compares the native reservation to a place far away, and juxtaposes it with the immediate neighboring territory.
Buddy’s equating the native reservation to the Third World is of additional interest to this project because accented cinema originates from a study of Third World
65 Powwow Highway.
56 Cinema. According to Naficy, Third World Cinema is an aesthetic and political practice that aims to produce works of cinema alternative to Hollywood and European films.
Qualification as Third World Cinema is mainly determined by a filmmaker’s country of origin. Buddy suggests that it is possible to compare the native reservation to the Third
World based on living conditions, geography, and colonial history and, therefore, blends the distinction between the Third World and other community pockets found in the First
World.
Analysis of the varying ways in which the homeland is framed and portrayed in these films serves as useful background for the next chapters on the aesthetic dimension of travel in indigenous-centered road movies and the political ramifications of accented modes of production. This section is a responsive analysis of the framing of the native reservation, or native characters’ home places, as inherently distinguishable from the dominant and heterogeneous parts of America. The reservation is coded as a perpetually othered space. Within this gesture of being othered, the differences between the various places in America is also effaced. It is through the characters’ movement outside – away from or towards – their ‘homeland’ that they experience that their relation to their homeland is reframed.
57 6
NARRATIVES OF JOURNEYING
“Like roads themselves in the USA, the metaphor of the road is always under construction.”66
- Gordon Slethaug and Stacilee Ford
Frankie: “I feel good as long as I keep moving, keep going. They was just going to let me fade away in the old hospital bed. But I know I have to keep moving.”67
This project positions indigenous-centered films alongside Naficy’s concept of
“accented cinema.” They naturally cooperate with one another because of their shared relations to time and space. More specifically, they both relate to anterior time and forced movement across space. “Indigeneity” carries a specific weight of temporality, with its reference to a time and condition in a specific past, as well as a spatial concern with an ancestral connection to specific land. Similarly, “accented cinema,” for Naficy, hinges on the filmmaker’s experience of displacement. This dislocation engages primarily with the spatial through geographic movement or separation. The temporal comes in through recurring markings of before and after events that cause displacement.
66 Gordon Slethaug and Stacilee Ford. Hit the Road, Jack: Essays On the Culture of the American Road. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012), 12. 67 Barking Water.
58 Spatial movement and time are fundamental to well-established conceptions of the filmic image, such as exhibited by Gilles Deleuze’s categories of the “movement- image” and “time-image.” This project attempts to place three indigenous-centered road movies in relation to wider film history and theory. The films and the concepts they engage with appeal to this kind of analytic attention not only because of the political stakes of self-representation by minority filmmakers but also because of the inherent constellation of thematic connection offered by them.
When establishing his history of the road movie, Orgeron writes that he “[wishes] to foreground the road movie’s… place within a much larger pattern of critical imagistic reflection upon the politics of motion.”68 The scope of this project is more specific but also aims to situate the road movie in regards to motion and travel. Like the western genre that came before, the road movie engages with the conceptualization of exploration. This exploration is comprised of two layers. The first, most surface layer, is an exploration visually coded as the physical voyage over land. This layer “[forges] a travel narrative out of a particular conjunction of plot and setting that sets the liberation of the road against the oppression of hegemonic norms.”69
PROPELLED BY MASCULINITY
Like its predecessor, the western, the road movie is “propelled by masculinity and a particular conception of American national identity that revolves around individualism and aggression.”70 While a masculine focus for these genres can be related back to the particularities of American national identity, it can also be connected to a primary
68 Orgeron, 50. 69 Cohan and Hark, 1. 70 Shari Roberts in The Road Movie Book, ed, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, (London: Routledge, 1997), 45.
59 gendered association that transcends national constructions. Historically, across the globe, traveling has been conceived as a male activity. Likewise, before modern, industrial inventions, one of the main motivations for any sort of travel was related to violent warfare, which, again, was coded as male in nature. Gender difference marked the conditions of women being left at home and excluded from travel. It was often defended as an example of gendered protection and a way of hierarchizing the active, mobile male over the passive, sedentary female. In regards to how the different designations of travel roles were applied, male and female spaces also map onto the public and the private divide – with the men being able to travel between both while being associated with the public.
In the theme of male warfare activity, Timothy Corrigan considers the road movie, first and foremost, as a particularly “postwar phenomenon.”71 Cohan and Hark reference Corrigan as suggesting that one of the main elements of the road movie is its promotion of a “male escapist fantasy linking masculinity to technology.”72 Visually, road movies rely on the employment of masculine symbols – many of which are the technology of transportation itself. The truck in Smoke Signals, for example, is employed at Victor’s moment of coming-of-age transition and acceptance of the nature of his relationship with his father. In this pickup truck, Victor makes the journey home to his reservation. He is no longer reliant on the communal transportation of the bus and, instead, obtains a status of masculine movement and self-determination; he goes home, but just as easily could go anywhere.
71 Timothy Corrigan, 138. 72 Ibid., 138.
60 More than the visible symbols like the truck, the context of the films’ journeys tend to be masculine because the characters and their problems are distinctly coded as male. In the three films of interest to this project, only one of the six main characters is a woman (Irene in Barking Water). Both Powwow Highway and Smoke Signals follow two young males as the central travelers. In his chapter, “Masculinities in Buddy and Road
Films,” from Hit the Road, Jack, Gordon E. Slethaug writes of a form of “emergent postmodern [masculinity]” in Smoke Signals.73 For Slethaug, this is most readily identifiable in the dynamic created by the “loss of, and attempt to regain, the transgressive father.” The central tensions in this film are “Victor’s antagonism toward his father, need for reconciliation, and integration into his Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe and the American nation.” Victor’s final monologue asks, “Do we ever forgive our fathers?”
This question “sums up Victor’s masculinist enterprise,” which entails his road trip to and from Pheonix and his coming to terms with his relationship with his father and forgiving him.
The story of the departed father is prevalent across cultures and genres. Barking
Water, the latest of the three films, centers on the attempted return of Frankie to his daughter and granddaughter. The goal for this reunion is to reconcile Frankie’s absence and make amends with key family members before Frankie’s death. While Powwow
Highway doesn’t engage with the absent father dynamic, Buddy’s stepping in to save his sister is presented with frustration. This anxiety may stem from his own discomfort at having to inhabit the fatherly protective role for someone who is family but not his offspring.
73 Slethaug and Ford, 173.
61 LINEAR AND CIRCULAR NARRATIVE STRUCTURES
“to depart / to travel / to arrive to stay: the journey is saturated. To end, to fill, to join, to unify – one might say that this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection.”74
- Roland Barthes
The opening scene of Powwow Highway is a communal flashback to a nineteenth century Native American warrior on a horse. From that imaginary opening, the title card fades in and then fades out over a tracking shot of the native reservation. This tracking shot is made to look as if it were filmed from a car window as it passes by the impoverished homes of the reservation. The other two films, Smoke Signals and Barking
Water, also rely heavily on the employment of flashback.
These films are circular in a stylistic sense; they use techniques for visualizing the past to suggest the weight of this collective memory and nostalgia. Furthermore, journey narratives hinge on the conceptualization and fulfillment of return. In Smoke Signals, the narrative is circular in that the hero “must finish the loop by returning home – not on the bus but in Arnold Joseph’s pickup truck.”75 The completion of the return journey concludes at the place where it began. In Barking Water, Frankie is trying, desperately, to return to his family members and his home, but ultimately fails by dying so close to his arrival back; Irene then finishes the journey for him.
The road movie genre has a history of emphasizing a character’s personal, internal arc as part of the main narrative. Along these lines, physical travel is used as a metaphor for this individual transformation and/or a catalyst for confronting one’s identity. Part of the reason for this simultaneous external narrative of movement and the
74 Roland Barthes, S/Z. Richard Miller, trans. (London: Blackwell, 2002), 105. 75 Slethaug and Ford, 176.
62 interior narrative of identity development, affirmation, or reclamation can be found, again, in the western. The classic western centers on the single male protagonist who comes and goes on his own, but often, the male protagonist enlisted the help of a side- kick. When the road movie grew out of the western genre, it shared the values of the buddy film. The liminal space of the car becomes the site of the journey and therefore the genre requires more than one character for a narrative to occur on screen.
In all three of these films, we learn the characters’ missions fairly early on and they directly relate to a reunion of the family. Family is central to the three films. This focus frames the linearity of lineage and the circulatory of bloodline. The familial dynamics are fundamental to the variation of time constructions in the films. Their immediate relationships to their nuclear family members dominates the present narrative, but these relations are mediated through history and memory. The circumstances call back to the inherited link to ancestral conflict.
Linear and circular narrative structures, therefore, determine the composition of the journey stories as well as their relation to the effects of time on crafting identity. Not all roads are straight and this is reflected in the way the journey narratives are contoured varyingly in linear and circular structures.
63 7
ACCENTED MODES OF PRODUCTION
Aunt Harriet: “I get sick of being asked for good old Indian wisdom. I ain't got none. So get the hell out of here!”76
“The biggest problem I see is when non-Native people come into Native communities with this idea that they are the first ones to ever look at this community with a camera—as if they have ‘uncovered’ or ‘discovered’ something…Since the beginning of cinema, people have been pointing cameras at our people and our culture, and from the beginning they have been fucking it up. So, there is a natural, healthy degree of skepticism towards film crews from the outside…When you walk into a community from the outside and put your camera in the first person's face that comes along without really knowing that community, then you are doing a disservice to the community, the audience and to storytelling in general.77
- Sterlin Harjo
The past chapters have been about the development and intention of indigenous- centered road movies’ aesthetic qualities and narrative subjects. In this final chapter, I shift my focus to the elements of production that produce an accented style. In his book,
76 Powwow Highway. 77 Sterlin Harjo and Lauren Wissot. “Sterlin Harjo on the Dos and Don'ts of Filming in Indian Country.” International Documentary Association, 2017.
64 Naficy develops the concept of accented cinema to refer an aesthetic sensibility and a politics of accented film production; the filmmaker is as important as the film, for Naficy.
Naficy classifies accented cinema as independent of dominant forms of filmmaking. In most cases, Hollywood is situated as the antithesis to the independent, minor, or peripheral. While this view has been challenged and disrupted over the years by film theorists and historians, the basic opposition still stands. While there may be variations in the forms of opposition, the dynamic has a logic of its own.
This chapter considers the ways in which the indigenous-centered road movies occupy a unique space of oppositionality through the ways in which they distinguish themselves from other American films and international accented cinema. We end on an engagement with the collective, indigenous-centered, filmmaking cultures, in the United
States and abroad. This collectivity is crucial to the assessment of the future of this
American accented cinema because it speaks to the alternative industrial structures paving the way for new indigenous-centered and indigenous-made cinema.
RETURNING FROM THE OPPOSITIONAL
Indigenous-centered narratives set in America complicate easy national and cultural distinctions. The often paradoxical abstractions of America also breed complexity. The overlapping and sometimes contradictory perceptions of America vary from America as a place of white colonialism, a nation of immigrants, and a nation of natives and non-native intruders. When the definition of American is muddied by closer inspection, the definition of American filmmaking is, in effect, also unclear. When the inconsistent sites of availability for indigenous status in contemporary constructions of
65 American national identity and representation are translated into conceptions of
American filmmaking, the same contradictions arise.
While accented cinema is based partly on the mirroring of displacement by oppositional production practices, an indigenous-meets-non-indigenous variation on the minor-meets-dominant dynamic complicates this original manifestation. One way of approaching this question is to suggest that indigenous filmmaking, not just in America but in a global context, goes beyond the oppositional altogether. There is an urge for reclamation, not simply self-representation, at work in this strand of accented production.
Naficy outlines the elements of accented modes of production as, first and foremost, deeply linked to language, voice, and address. For this reason, the linguistic term of “accented” is the adjective of choice for Naficy’s theory. Accented modes of production are artisanal and interstitial in nature and often relate back to the collective.
The key feature of Hamid’s theory is the way in which accented filmmakers’ “[identities] as oppositional figures” are due to their experience of displacement from the Third World by working in the First World and the way this informs the politics of their work.78
Furthermore, this understanding of opposition connects to the outlook of Hollywood’s mode of production as indicative of its “standard, neutral, value-free accent.”79
Just as the specific type of accented filmmaking exhibited by these indigenous- centered narratives obscures a strict definition of displacement as geographic, this type of filmmaking also blurs the spectrum of opposition. The hybridity is a result of the engagement with oppositional narrative and a simultaneous process of embracing genre conventions and clichés tied to Hollywood classical cinema. In this sense, these
78 Naficy, 11. 79 Ibid., 23.
66 indigenous-centered narratives blend the ethos of accented films’ aesthetic resistance with artistic assimilation of Hollywood production.
ALTERNATIVE ROUTES
“But what’s dispiriting to note is that there wasn’t a big boom of Native- American filmmakers who got their chance to tell their stories after “Smoke Signals” helped to pave the way. “The follow-up was very shallow in Hollywood,” laments Eyre, who adds that “audiences deserve the Native American ‘Black Panther.’”80
- Nick Clement
The narratives of the three films we are investigating are engaged with travel and journeying. Their movements, while directionally engaged, take on an alternative significance over the course of their journey. Differences are overcome and peace is attained, at least partially, through narrative resolution of conflict. While the films engage with the conventional structures of road movies, they do so by defying the history of the standard road movie.
This project’s main goal has been to include the films Smoke Signals, Powwow
Highway, and Barking Water under an umbrella of connectivity of style, aesthetic, and historical reflexivity. Through their unique act of connecting the western and road movie genres, through form and reference to legacy, these films imagine the future of indigenous-centered cinema by renegotiating their relation to American filmmaking culture. Accented cinema offers a means to think through the relationship between these films and dominant American cinema. The films demonstrate that alternative modes of
80 Nick Clement, “‘Smoke Signals’ Film’s Effects 20 Years Late Topic of Discussion,” Variety, 26 September, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/film/news/smoke-signals-25-years-later-1202959185/.
67 production do not necessarily need to cut all ties with established cinema industries, especially when there is an unavoidable relation between them.
The road movie genre hinges on the visual and narrative role of movement across time and space. This movement is often exceptionally liminal and operates as a state of interior reflection on the outside world. These three films offer a similarly enigmatic opportunity for reflection. By engaging the spectator in the interior world of indigenous characters, these films offer a commentary on the wide-spread practice of stereotyping emphasized by classical Hollywood cinema. Their blended nature results from the convergence of indigenous-centered stories and mainstream narrative structures. These films inhabit positions of hybridity through narrative structures, genre conventions, and politically-minded character representations which is also reflected in the arrangements of their production culture.
COLLECTIVE INDIGENOUS FILMMAKING CULTURE
Appreciation for indigenous independent filmmaking is alive in America, but from a funding and distribution standpoint, it is not as well maintained as other indigenous filmmaking cultures in other parts of the world. Most notably, First Nations documentary filmmaking in Canada receives substantial public funding unavailable to independent filmmakers in the United States. One of the most influential American platforms for the celebration of indigenous film takes place at the Sundance Film Festival each year with the support of the Sundance Institute.
Sundance’s Indigenous Program is committed to supporting Indigenous artists and filmmakers and has been committed to this goal since the founding of the Sundance
Institute. The original vision of Robert Redford, President and founder of the Institute,
68 was to support the voices and work of indigenous artists from around the world, in addition to lending support to independent cinema generally. In 2018, Merata Mita
Fellow, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, spoke of the legacy of Merata Mita, who during her time as a screenwriter and director was the first-and only-Maori indigenous woman to write and direct a dramatic feature film in New Zealand. At this event, Tailfeathers, as a First
Nations indigenous woman from Canada, spoke about Mita’s advocacy for “indigenous screen sovereignty:”
“I’ve thought about her work and what Indigenous screen sovereignty means, and I realized that thinking wasn’t getting me that far. So I decided to turn inward and really feel sovereignty. And my first instinct was home. Sovereignty is home. Home is more than the land. Home is the people we love. Home is the collision of the past, the present, and the future. Home is all of the ancestors who brought us to where we are today. Home is the future generations that will uphold our ways—and our connection to home. Home is our stories—our songs, our ceremonies. As an Indigenous feminist, home is my grandmothers, my mother, my sisters, my aunts, my nieces. Home is my body, my mind, and my spirit. And sovereignty is home. Sovereignty is the right home. And sovereignty is relational. So for me sovereignty is a daily practice. What that means is that it’s reclamation of the Indigenous feminine. It’s a celebration of Indigenous sexuality. It’s an embrace of Indigenous gender non-binary identities and queer identities. And right now more than ever it is a dismantling of misogyny. I think we’re at a really important time in world cinema in general, but also within our own communities and our own nations. It’s time to speak out about misogyny. It’s time to speak out about the ways that it infects our relationships. I think it’s critical that we acknowledge that it’s a part of our nations and that we need to work together to dismantle it—especially if we want to be a healthy, thriving community and continue to uphold and support stories that really speak to who we are as Indigenous peoples.”81
I highlight these remarks because of the focus on the intersection of gender and ethic identity. Tailfeathers asserts the connection between her identity as an “indigenous feminist” and her concern for how misogyny “infects” relationships and the community.
She challenges indigenous-centered cinema to not just be focused on dismantling racial
81 Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Sundance Institute, 8 October, 2018, https://www.sundance.org/blogs/program- spotlight/merata-mita-elle-maija-tailfeathers-sovereignty-is-home.
69 misrepresentation but to also to responsibly consider gender dynamics. Tailfeathers damands that her community’s cinema and filmmaking culture observes the crossroads of multiple identities. Road movies, like their ‘grandparent genre’ of the western, are typically considered and framed as men’s films and Tailfeathers is aware of this. Her speech’s emphasis on the importance of intersectionality in minority cinema, therefore, is also a challenge to all cinemas’ legacies.
Further, Tailfeather’s identification of home as symbolic of screen sovereignty is a useful line of argument in regards to the specific road movies of this project. The road movies, through their attention to movement, seem to suggest that it is through leaving that they make discoveries and solve their conflicts. It is through the coupling of this with a reinforced relationship to the home or homeland, however, that completes the characters’ spiritual journeys. Inspired by Tailfeather’s comments on home and the road movie’s conceptions of returning to the homeland, coming full circle necessitates a duality of going backwards and going forwards. The future of this cinema also depends on taking action in this way.
AN ACCENTED FUTURE
Naficy’s book, published in 2001, analyzes accented cinema at a time before internet streaming services began to dominant the ways in which viewers accessed movies. In a time of increasingly digital interconnectedness, it has never been easier to find and watch low-budget and self-distributed cinema. For independent filmmakers globally, this means two things: their work can be seen without formal movie theater distribution, and this virtue is mitigated by the fact that a saturation of content available makes it difficult for individual films to stand out.
70 Within American cinema-viewing culture, movie theaters are either the home for big blockbusters (which can afford theater distribution) or small art-house cinemas
(which regards theater screenings as the ideal space for communal viewership of cinema).
The films that might inhabit the middle of this spectrum are relegated to digital streaming platforms. There still exists a tension in American cinema culture that pushes films to either side of this spectrum. This may be for an ease of categorization or as a reactionary urge against American cinema pressures. Much of the celebrated success of evolving elements of minority-centered American cinema, regardless, can be connected back to a collective desire to infiltrate the mainstream and diversify it.
The tentative category of American accented cinema recognizes the predicament of this and other categories: they are inherently and perpetually temporary. In the case of these accented road movies, it is perhaps fitting that their narrative exploration of liminality would also be reflected by their collective liminality as cultural artifacts.
71 CONCLUSION
“Accented filmmakers are the products of this dual postcolonial displacement and postmodern or late modern scattering...They have earned the right to speak and have dared to capture the means of representation. However marginalized they are within the center, their ability to access the means of reproduction may prove to be as empowering to the marginalia of the postindustrial era as the capturing of the means of production would have been to the subalterns of the industrial era.”82
- Hamid Naficy
The act of leaving can be sweet, as can the act of coming home. The road movies
Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water narratively concern the thematic doubling of leaving and returning, as well as require this same twofold movement in their analysis. In this project, I have attempted to investigate a dual return to and a departure from the film genre of the road movie and its predecessor the western. These indigenous- centered road movies, through their deep concern with correcting misrepresentation, drive away from the western, while keeping a constant eye on it its legacies in the rearview mirror.
Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Barking Water stage an intervention within classically-constructed plot dynamics and character portrayals of the historical
American western and road movie. These films, individually and uniquely, address the
82 Naficy, 11.
72 lasting legacies of Hollywood in a more representationally-conscious world. By studying them as examples of genre and placing them within the context of the established theory of accented cinema, I have attempted to frame these films as a collective possibility for the re-visioning of a politics of (self)identification.
Naficy defines his accented cinema as one that remains perpetually outside and operates against the grain of the mainstream. For decades, many independent filmmakers have been grappling with the reality of this exteriority, as well as the questions of diverse representation and inclusive mainstream reception. Native American and indigenous filmmakers have been producing work outside of the geographic and industrial grip (and privilege) of the Hollywood-centric sector of the American film industry, but without the same reception or pre-production support.
In American cinema, particularly, there is a progression to celebrate how new representation can inhabit the old structures that once excluded them. Within the last few years, Hollywood films such as Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther have been celebrated because they, by necessity, required casts comprised of minority actors. While not always to the same scale of these two films, large budgets and the industrial resources that come from mainstream production and distribution have been taken up by other filmmakers of color and female filmmakers working in Hollywood. The films they then produce are praised as symbols for the possibilities of increased diversification in
Hollywood.
Contemporary Hollywood has not simply been reckoning with the push from audiences to see more cast members or color but has also been experiencing movements that address systematic power dynamics of leadership. The recent #metoo and the 2015
73 #OscarsSoWhite movements are just two of the campaigns operating within and against contemporary Hollywood. Their missions are to question and change the patterns of irresponsible representation and systems of power. The movements have articulates these cinema industry concerns through the use of the post-cinematic media of social media.
Both movements advocate for new, systematic changes in hiring and casting. The
#metoo movement, among its larger focus on calling out and ending sexual assault and harassment, also advocates for the benefits of increased female leadership in the professional sphere of the film industry. Similarly, the #OscarsSoWhite movement highlights the importance of having people of marginalized identities in positons of leadership. The movement, while originally conceived online in backlash to the lack of people of color represented in Oscar nomination categories, additionally speaks to the ways in which leader identity has a patterned association to marginalization.
These social media movements and the efforts by activists and industry people have, quantitatively, changed Hollywood. More money is allocated to films starring or directed by people of color and women. As profound as these changes appear to be, however, there remains a nagging question: can the Hollywood system ever change enough? Smoke Signals, Powwow Highway, and Barking Water, through their successful appropriation and transformation of Hollywood-derived genre practices, offer a sense of hope. Their very existence suggests that Hollywood’s technological and creative legacies are salvageable in the necessary transition to a more diverse and welcoming culture of
American film.
The purpose of this project has been to outline a genre and categorical shift proposed by Smoke Signals, Powwow Highway, and Barking Water. Independent
74 directors like Chris Eyre and Sterlin Harjo found a way to work outside the bounds of the
Hollywood system and to still use the storytelling conventions that the system developed.
While their films received less financial and industrial support than mainstream,
Hollywood-produced road movies, they were able to realize a larger scope of freedom from their independence of production.
The proposal that these films represent the future of indigenous-centered cinema is largely speculative. The ways in which they represent a possibility, however, is clear.
This possibility may not necessarily be taken up fully by its own complete, niche movement, but it can have a legacy in other ways. The layered engagement with history, genre, and new imaginaries of these films builds an argument for the potential value of revisionist cinema work. By inhabiting both conventional and accented positions, the films hybridize their relation to cinema politics. These films engage with internal differences of community engagement, approaches to popular culture, and constructions of indigenous politics.
Indigenous directors have made strides to find opportunities to make cinema in the context of their culture. Damaging stereotypes have persisted for decades, yet self- representation by indigenous filmmakers, such as by Eyre and Harjo, has fostered a new sense of agency in the independent film industry which encourages indigenous-centered film production. As American accented films, indigenous-centered road movies demonstrate that they have the potential to occupy an independent space by intertextually referencing and appropriating the filmic practices of the mainstream. These films represent not only a future of indigenous representation in America but also a future of independent minority-focused cinema, holistically.
75 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my readers, Professor Joan Copjec and Professor Levi Thompson, for assisting me through this process. I would also like to thank my parents, Rob and Cathy Falkenberg, and my sisters, Lindsay and Lauren Falkenberg, for supporting my education at Brown University. Thank you to the Brown University Modern Culture and Media Department for providing me with four amazing years and for preparing me to think for myself as I embark on life after graduation. Other individuals I would like to thank: Liza Hebert, Professor Richard Rambuss, Noah Chamberlain, Isabel Thornton, Josh Wartel, Jennah Gosciak, Meredith Morran, Kripa Venkatesh, and Addy Schuetz.
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79 FILMOGRAPHY
Barking Water. Dir. Sterlin Harjo. Cinema Purgatorio and Lorber Films, 2009.
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The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Dir. Chris Weitz. Summit Entertainment, 2009.
Twilight. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Summit Entertainment, 2008.
80