Navajo Talking Picture: Cinema on Native Ground

3. Reaction

72 chapter three Reaction In her fine book Imaging Indians in the Southwest, cultural historian Leah Dilworth writes about sharing the work of Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva with her college students in New York City. Much to their professor’s chagrin, the responses ranged from yawns to puzzlement to tepid curiosity. Rather than blaming her students for their lack of interest or understanding, Dilworth writes sympathetically about their reaction, realizing that a film like Itam Hakim, Hopiit (1985) comes from a world separated from New York by more than sheer distance. By design, Masayesva’s film presents images of the Southwest that do not conform to stereotypes of a magical “land of enchantment” nor to stereotypes of Indians generally. “Our assumptions about what we thought we knew about ‘Indians’ were not reaffirmed,” Dilworth recalls about her classroom experience with Masayesva’s poetic vision of a Hopi elder and his musings about traditional life. I suspect that like Itam Hakim, Hopiit, Navajo Talking Picture can be added to the list of indigenous films that “disrupt” primitivist discourse in a way that can perplex and put off outsiders expecting something more familiar and comforting.1 At least one anthropologist has argued that Native filmmakers should avoid this disruption in order to get their message across. In an influential article published in 1997, Harald Prins argued that indigenous media should pander, albeit carefully, to the stereotypical expectations of non-Native audiences, emphasizing the “harmonious,” “natural,” and “innocent” aspects of Native life in order to promote “a people’s general public appeal.”2 While there might be some strategic value to this cautious approach, the most interesting Native filmmakers, like Masayesva, Zacharias Kunuk, or Shelly Niro, have challenged mainstream assumptions in the way reaction | 73 that Bowman seems to do in Navajo Talking Picture. To understand the merits of a more confrontational approach to intercultural communication , and to shed some light on the relationship between Native filmmakers and their audiences, in this chapter I will look at the powerful responses to Bowman’s film. I do so with some caution, painfully aware that we can never know what viewers have made of any single film. Indeed, I have little in common with communication scholars who look for survey data to tell a neat story about the reception of a particular text, because I prefer to use a more humanistic methodology with its roots in literary criticism. To better explain my own approach to the subject of reception, let me provide some background that I hope will be helpful. What makes audience research so difficult is the sheer multiplicity of interpretations that even a single individual could formulate, let alone two separate people with wildly divergent backgrounds. As the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein once said with considerable understatement, “a Czarist soldier may not respond to images the same way that a peasant might.”3 This insight is nearly a century old, yet we still know relatively little about the infinitely varied reactions of soldier, peasant, or anyone else staring at a screen in the dark. In 1988 Ann Kaplan complained that we “need to know more about how the actual, concrete individuals ‘read’ films in concrete historical contexts.”4 Twenty years later, in an excellent article on the reception of Ken Burns’s Jazz, film scholar Hector Amaya offered the same lament when he noted that “only a small fraction of the work done on documentary has investigated actual interpretations by viewers.”5 Indeed, accounting for audience behavior remains one of the great puzzles of cinema studies, one that has challenged scholars in film studies, sociology, communication, cultural studies, and other fields at least since the 1940s.6 Working in the wake of the Second World War, scholars initially took a deterministic view of the problem, believing that audiences were like gentle sheep that were led by a “culture industry” wielding the power of a well-chosen image—it was a propaganda model that left little room for agency in the audience. During the same postwar decades, other scholars examined media “effects” on audiences, in an effort to show that passive spectators were ingesting harmful information. In either case, viewers were regarded as docile creatures with little mind of their own. All of this began to change in the 1970s. With the influence of a new cultural studies movement in the UK, the gentle sheep in the audience began to look more like...