Book Description
In more than twenty powerful films, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has waged a brilliant battle against the ignorance and stereotypes that Native Americans have long endured in cinema and television. In this book, the first devoted to any Native filmmaker, Obomsawin receives her due as the central figure in the development of indigenous media in North America.
Incorporating history, politics, and film theory into a compelling narrative, Randolph Lewis explores the life and work of a multifaceted woman whose career was flourishing long before Native films such as Smoke Signals reached the screen. He traces Obomsawin’s path from an impoverished Abenaki reserve in the 1930s to bohemian Montreal in the 1960s, where she first found fame as a traditional storyteller and singer. Lewis follows her career as a celebrated documentary filmmaker, citing her courage in covering, at great personal risk, the 1991 Oka Crisis between Mohawk warriors and Canadian soldiers. We see how, since the late 1960s, Obomsawin has transformed documentary film, reshaping it for the first time into a crucial forum for sharing indigenous perspectives. Through a careful examination of her work, Lewis proposes a new vision for indigenous media around the globe: a “cinema of sovereignty” based on what Obomsawin has accomplished.
Book Description
The image in Hollywood movies of savage Indians attacking white settlers represents only one side of a very complicated picture. In fact sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans stood alongside those of hostile Indians in the silent films of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, and flourished during the early 1930s with Hollywood's cycle of pro-Indian adventures. Decades later, the stereotype became even more complicated, as films depicted the savagery of whites (The Searchers) in contrast to the more "peaceful" Indian (Broken Arrow). By 1990 the release of Dances with Wolves appeared to have recycled the romantic and savage portrayals embedded in early cinema. In this new study, author Angela Aleiss traces the history of Native Americans on the silver screen, and breaks new ground by drawing on primary sources such as studio correspondence, script treatments, trade newspapers, industry censorship files, and filmmakers' interviews to reveal how and why Hollywood created its Indian characters. Behind-the-scenes anecdotes of filmmakers and Native Americans, as well as rare archival photographs, supplement the discussion, which often shows a stark contrast between depiction and reality. The book traces chronologically the development of the Native American's screen image while also examining many forgotten or "lost" Western films. Each chapter will feature black and white stills from the films discussed.
Book Description
Killing the Indian Maiden examines the fascinating and often disturbing portrayal of Native American women in film. M. Elise Marubbio examines the sacrificial role in which a young Native woman allies herself with a white male hero and dies as a result of that choice. In studying thirty-four Hollywood films from the silent period to the present, she draws upon theories of colonization, gender, race, and film studies to ground her analysis in broader historical and sociopolitical context and to help answer the question, "What does it mean to be an American?"
The book reveals a cultural iconography embedded in the American psyche. As such, the Native American woman is a racialized and sexualized other. A conquerable body, she represents both the seductions and the dangers of the American frontier and the Manifest Destiny of the American nation to master it.
Book Description
Originally published in 1972, this pioneering book has become a classic in visual anthropology. Worth and Adair set out to answer the question, What would happen if someone from a culture that makes and uses motion pictures taught people who have never made or used motion pictures to do so for the first time? They taught filmmaking and editing to a group of six Navajos in Pinetree, Arizona. This book explains what happened, what they and the Navajos said and thought about what happened, and how they analyzed the films in a cultural context. The films, still available for rent, are described in detail and illustrated with still photographs.
Richard Chalfen, a research assistant on the original project in 1966, has updated the book with a thorough discussion of the importance of the Navajo project and a critical assessment of the reactions to it.
Customer Reviews:
A classic and quietly radical innovation.......2000-03-25
"Through Navajo Eyes" examines the importance of cutural perspective in ethnographic filmmaking. Sol Worth and John Adair's study of the Navajo made a simple innovation. Previously, filmmakers had usually pointed the camera at others in order to create an audiovisual representation of their world. In essence, Worth and Adair instead handed over the camera to see what would result. The results were fascinating, and elude definitive interpretation to this very day. This "experiment" has been repeated many times, and in many places, which is perhaps the greatest testament to the power and originality of a simple, yet ultimately radical, shift of control over the perspective and re-presentation of reality in film.
Book Description
Every aspect of the career of General George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn is covered here. The people around Custer and his native American counterparts are detailed, as are related military campaigns, battles, historical events, equipment and terminology. There are also entries on Plains Indian culture and customs, artists and artwork, movies and other subjects associated with the battle. Following the entries is a listing of suggested sources for further research.
Customer Reviews:
This is the best book about Custer I have ever read........1999-10-13
When it comes to Custer one can not read a more up to date book
This is the best Custer book I have ever read.......1999-10-13
When it comes to Custer one can not find a more informative book
THE RESEARCH WAS EXCELLENT, IT IS A GREAT BOOK.......1999-09-17
MR. HATCH HAS DONE EXTENSIVE RESEARCH INTO THE CUSTER SUBJECT. THE PHOTOS WERE GREAT TOO. THIS WAS THE BEST BOOK AVAILABLE FOR MY THESIS.
Book Description
Native Americans have thrown themselves into filmmaking since the mid-1970s, producing hundreds of films and videos, and their body of work has had great impact on Native cultures and filmmaking itself. With their cameras, they capture the lives of Native people, celebrating community, ancestral lifeways, and identity. Not only artistic statements, the films are archives that document rich and complex Native communities and counter mainstream media portrayals.
Wiping the War Paint off the Lens traces the history of Native experiences as subjects, actors, and creators, and develops a critical framework for approaching Native work. Singer positions Native media as part of a larger struggle for "cultural sovereignty"-the right to maintain and protect cultures and traditions. Taking it out of a European-American context, she reframes the discourse of filmmaking, exploring oral histories and ancient lifeways inform Native filmmaking and how it seeks to heal the devastation of the past. Singer's approach is both cultural and personal, provides both historical views and close textual readings, and may well set the terms of the critical debate on Native filmmaking.
Beverly R. Singer is a filmmaker and director of the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies at the University of New Mexico.
Book Description
Native American characters have been the most malleable of metaphors for filmmakers. The likeable Doc of Stagecoach (1939) had audiences on the edge of their seats with dire warnings about “that old butcher, Geronimo.” Old Lodgeskins of Little Big Man (1970) had viewers crying out against the demise of the noble, wise chief and his kind and simple people. In 1995 Disney created a beautiful, peace-loving ecologist and called her Pocahontas. Only occasionally have Native Americans been portrayed as complex, modern characters in films like Smoke Signals.
Celluloid Indians is an accessible, insightful overview of Native American representation in film over the past century. Beginning with the birth of the movie industry, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick carefully traces changes in the cinematic depictions of Native peoples and identifies cultural and historical reasons for those changes. In the late twentieth century, Native Americans have been increasingly involved with writing and directing movies about themselves, and Kilpatrick places appropriate emphasis on the impact that Native American screenwriters and filmmakers have had on the industry. Celluloid Indians concludes with a valuable, in-depth look at influential and innovative Native Americans in today’s film industry.
Customer Reviews:
A disappointing book on a necessary topic.......2007-03-15
I teach a cultural studies course that examines representations of native peoples in American film, so was searching for a text that would provide a critical apparatus for analyzing films by and about indigenous people. Partly based on the glowing reviews here (and partly due to the dearth of full-length studies on this topic), I opted for Celluloid Indians. This book is a letdown, and the disappointment is amplified by the necessity for serious critical work on native peoples and American film. Basically Kilpatrick summarizes films from Griffith to Alexie, with a few withering editorial comments about stereotypes sprinkled here and there. The critical orientation is puzzling, moreover, a reliance on thinkers like Bakhtin, who was a theorist of the modern novel, not cinema. I might concede that applying Bakhtin to film could be successfully achieved, but not here. I'm waiting on a better book than this, and hope that a scholar of American Indian cultures and film will write one.
Contributes Nothing New to the Field.......2004-04-12
Celluloid Indians offers on overview of the history of Indians in the movies but rehases much of what has been done before. The author cuts and pastes long previously published excerpts from other articles and calls them her own. She adds merely a few comments to issues that have already been thoroughly discussed elsewhere. She knows little of Hollywood history, which makes her book nothing more than a superficial study of Native American images in the motion picture business. But perhaps the most annoying aspect of this book is that it's so one sided and determined to fault everything on Hollywood that it gets tiresome after a while. Isn't it time for this field to move beyond that stereotype?
An important scholarly contribution.......2001-09-17
Celluloid Indians is book that makes an important contribution to the discourse of representations of Native Americans in the dominant culture. In Celluloid Indians, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick considers the combination of the misrepresentations and the displacement of native peoples, the use of popular stereotypes to rewrite history, as well as the gendering of this activity. Furthermore, Kilpatrick's Celluloid Indians examines stereotypes in twentieth-century films as she posits that popular images of Indians speak more importantly to the Euro-American agenda and history of conquest.
Lets me be more specific. Celluloid Indians, examines the importance of native voices (or the lack thereof), of "the represented subject" Kilpatrick posits that the Indian, "must be able to talk back" (p. xvi). Kilpatrick argues that twentieth-century Hollywood films create and re-enforce stereotypes that were first made popular in the 19th century by dime novels and Wild West shows. She engages in a number of films, including "shorts" produced early in the century by D. W. Griffith and Thomas Edison, conventional and counterculture Westerns released from the 1930s through to the 1970s, and even some (or what might seem to be) pro-native films of the 1980s and 1990s, like Dances with Wolves, Powwow Highway, and Pocahontas. The book mentions that these works pretend to show, contrary to the claims of some Hollywood filmmakers, popular images of native peoples have changed little during the last century.
However, while it is indeed the case that these images of Native Americans seem predictable, they have been used for different ends and sometimes diametrically opposed purposes depending on the time and context. Over time, as values and government agendas change, the film industry becomes co-conspirator to fostering its agenda at the expense of the misrepresentation of the Indian. The book ends with a discussion of several popular films and documentaries by contemporary native media and filmmakers. One thing I have to give Kilpatrick credit for is the flirting with women's issues despite having to pull back because it does not really seem to fall under the rubric of her argument - but in reality - it does. She brilliantly places in context the discussions of little known movies by juxtaposing the key historical events affecting the landscape of Native America, like the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the termination and relocation policies of the 1950s, and the activities of the American Indian Movement during the 1960s and 1970s.
What we have here is a compelling book that requires a read and a re-read. It breaks down the stereotypes of the savage and noble Indian as well as the romantic notion of the mystical Indian as close to the land. The discourse is wide and this is only a subtopic. For a more expansive examination, kindly consider reading Robert F. Berkhofer's "The White Man's Indian" for which Kilpatrick prepares you. Prepare to look at things differently from here on in.
Miguel Llora
An Inside Look.......2000-01-04
This book is an absolute must for anyone...student, teacher or other interested people who might have wondered how and why Native Americans react like they do to the stereotypical images that we see everyday in the media. The author...rooted in the Chicago Indian community... echoes the heart felt sentiments of her people. As an Indian person, I found myself at times cheering...saying 'YOU DAMENED RIGHT MOMMA...YOU TELL EM' and at others I could only stop to wipe away a tear because I realized this woman had actulized what I could never say. In no uncertain terms Ms. Kilpatrick did our community proud. I recommend this book to any teacher who is interested in presenting students with a clear view of how we have been cast and more important why! A good read folks..ya gotta check it out.
Informative and compelling read.......1999-12-12
Dr. Kilpatrick's new book, Celluloid Indians, is a breathtaking account of Native Americans as portrayed in film. Her solid scholarly work is made accessible to readers of varying backgrounds. The subtle humor, sprinkled thoughout the book, enhances its appeal and makes this one very good read. I highly recommend Celluloid Indians to anyone who is even remotely interested in gaining an increased understanding of the misrepresentation of Native Americans in film. Thank you Dr. Kilpatrick!
Average customer rating:
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Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western
Armando Jose Prats
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
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The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre's First Half Century (Genres in American Cinema)
ASIN: 0801487544 |
Book Description
The indispensable sage, fierce enemy, silent sidekick: the role of Native Americans in film has been largely confined to identities defined by the “white” perspective. Many studies have analyzed these simplistic stereotypes of Native American cultures in film, but few have looked beyond the Hollywood Western for further examples. Distinguished film scholar Edward Buscombe offers here an incisive study that examines cinematic depictions of Native Americans from a global perspective.
Buscombe opens with a historical survey of American Westerns and their controversial portrayals of Native Americans: the wild redmen of nineteenth-century Wild West shows, the more sympathetic depictions of Native Americans in early Westerns, and the shift in the American film industry in the 1920s to hostile characterizations of Indians. Questioning the implicit assumptions of prevailing critiques, Buscombe looks abroad to reveal a distinctly different portrait of Native Americans. He focuses on the lesser known Westerns made in Germany—such as East Germany’s Indianerfilme, in which Native Americans were Third World freedom fighters battling against Yankee imperialists—as well as the films based on the novels of nineteenth-century German writer Karl May. These alternative portrayals of Native Americans offer a vastly different view of their cultural position in American society.
Buscombe offers nothing less than a wholly original and readable account of the cultural images of Native Americans through history andaround the globe, revealing new and complex issues in our understanding of how oppressed peoples have been represented in mass culture.
Book Description
Academics have generally dismissed Hollywood's cowboy and Indian movies—one of its defining successful genres—as specious, one-dimensional, and crassly commercial. In Shooting Cowboys and Indians, Andrew Brodie Smith challenges this simplistic characterization of the genre, illustrating the complex and sometimes contentious process by which business interests commercialized images of the West.
Tracing the western from its hazy silent-picture origins in the 1890s to the advent of talking pictures in the 1920s, Smith examines the ways in which silent westerns contributed to the overall development of the film industry.
Focusing on such early important production companies as Selig Polyscope, New York Motion Picture, and Essanay, Smith revises current thinking about the birth of Hollywood and the establishment of Los Angeles as the nexus of filmmaking in the United States. Smith also reveals the role silent westerns played in the creation of the white male screen hero that dominated American popular culture in the twentieth century.
Illustrated with dozens of historic photos and movie stills, this engaging and substantive story will appeal to scholars interested in Western history, film history, and film studies as well as general readers hoping to learn more about this little-known chapter in popular filmmaking.
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