Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory

Native Resistance to Hollywood's Persistence of Vision: Teaching Films about Contemporary American Indians

Native Resistance to Hollywood’s Persistence of Vision Teaching Films about Contemporary American Indians Carole Gerster Persistence of Vision: the capacity of the eye to maintain an image on the retina for a brief instant after it has disappeared from the screen, thus filling in the gaps between successive images and giving continuity from one to another. [T]he brain is [also] involved to some degree. —Ira Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary In representing American Indians, as the still-prescient 1979 documentary film series Images of Indians illustrates, Hollywood films consistently offer nineteenth-century manifest destiny stories, white male perspectives, and monolithic images of vanishing Indians. To non-Indians, these films convey the impression that American Indians are relics of the past; to Indians , they send a message of cultural and historical misrepresentation and invisibility. “Persistence of Vision” describes how the eye momentarily retains an image until a new image replaces it on the screen. It is also an apt characterization of how viewers collectively retain repeated Hollywood images of vanquished American Indians until new images replace them on movie theater and television screens. Images of Indians marks a significant moment in film history by confronting this persistence of vision with its critical review of Hollywood films and its new images of contemporary Indians. Serving as a precursor, this film series helped initiate an alternative independent media movement, wherein both Indians and Indians in collaboration with non-Indians now create films that follow its lead in displacing Hollywood’s manifest destiny stories with stories about contemporary American Indians told from Native perspectives. This chapter focuses on representation issues highlighted in Images of Indians and a sampling of other independent media efforts that continue its alternative vision. Teaching all or selected segments of Phil Lucas and Robert Hagopian’s Images of Indians (1979), followed by Chris Eyre’s 142 Carole Gerster Smoke Signals (1998) and A Thousand Roads (2005), and Jay Rosenstein’s In Whose Honor? (1996) serves to illuminate a building visual-media resistance to Hollywood-created invisibility, to visualize the diversity of contemporary Indigenous identities, and to address current and recurrent Indigenous issues important to American Indians and America at large. As these films and videos expand the range of previous representations and representational strategies, they offer students in cultural studies, film studies, and media studies new understandings and inspiration for new forms of Indigenous expression. Images of Indians Phil Lucas and Robert Hagopian’s five-part film series (each twenty-eight minutes; two hours and thirty minutes altogether) Images of Indians1 is significant as both the first and the most influential documentary film response to the long history of American Indian misrepresentation in Hollywood films.2 Although now dated (it was released in 1979), this film series effectively records and responds to Hollywood’s continuing persistence of vision. In Hollywood’s colonial settler films and westerns, repeated stories about heroic Euro-American protagonists require standardized roles of helpful and hostile Natives and manifest destiny plots, wherein both types are doomed to extinction, inevitably relinquishing their lands, cultures, and lives to the always ultimately successful settlers. Working from the history of Hollywood films in Images of Indians, students can explore more recent films to see for themselves what has and what has not changed.3 And knowing the kinds of responses and the new images provided in Images of Indians and the other independent films examined here, students can discover and imagine additional representations that update, add to, and continue to revitalize this American Indian independent media movement. Images of Indians offers a brief history and criticism of both types of vanishing Hollywood Indians. This background is important for students to understand how mainstream mass media creates, maintains, and reinforces images that ensure an entrenched and continuing public perception. A significant topic for students to explore and discuss is how representations of ever-vanishing Indians render contemporary American Indians invisible. As the film series’ narrator, Muscogee-Creek film and television actor Will Sampson, reveals in part 3, eighteenth- Native Resistance to Hollywood’s Persistence of Vision 143 and nineteenth-century plays—such as Pocahontas, Hiawatha, and Metamora, the Last of the Wampanoags—popularized the stereotype of the innocent, primitive, and disappearing Noble Savage before its incarnation in films. Sampson notes that images of benign Indians, pictured as “quaint . . . romantic children of nature,” appeared onscreen as early as D. W. Griffith’s 1911 film The Squaw’s Love...