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113 SEVEN Feeling Extra Magical The Art of Disappearing in Smoke Signals Happy Independence Day, Victor. Are you feeling independent? I’m feeling independent. I’m feeling extra magical today like I could make anything disappear. Houdini with braids. . . . I’m so good I could make myself disappear. Poof. I’m gone. —Smoke Signals Smoke Signals is unique among the Indigenous films examined in this study in that it is one of the very few to have been widely released and to actually become a moneymaker, grossing between six and seven million dollars. By Hollywood standards the gross is miniscule, of course, but the film did indeed pay for itself and did reach audiences in mall movie houses throughout the United States in ways that few other Indigenous films have done. Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals marks a pivotal moment in the history of American Indian film as the first American Indian film to achieve this relatively wide acclaim, and reviewers and scholars readily commend the film in this context. Ward Churchill identifies the release of the film as “a vitally important event,” pointing out that it is directed by an American Indian, and “the screenplay was also written by an Indian, adapted from a book of his short stories, and virtually the entire cast is composed of Indians. To top things off, the director, Chris Eyre, an Arapaho, teamed up with the scriptwriter , Spokane author Sherman Alexie, to co-produce the venture. Smoke Signals was thus, from top to bottom, an American Indian production, and that made it historically unprecedented” (Churchill, “Smoke Signals” n. pag.). In Wiping the War Paint off the Lens, Beverley Singer points out that several all-Indian productions actually did precede Chris Eyre’s and that “these films, all by Native Americans, set the stage for Eyre’s film and [they] represent the struggle by Native Americans to overcome the visual genocide and to reimagine and revisualize what it means to be an Indian” (62). At the same time, however, she does maintain that the “production of Smoke Signals demonstrated that American Indians can make a good commercial product while telling a good story with Indians as the central characters” (61). Filmmaker Barry Barclay lists Smoke Signals as one of the very few Indigenous “dramatic feature films” in the world (7), and Ernest Stromberg argues that Feeling Extra Magical 114 despite some limitations, “Smoke Signals represents a significant evolution in the cinematic representation of American Indians,” especially in that the film undoes “the ideological assumptions that seem to burden the tradition of cinematic representations of Indians” (39). Jhon Gilroy concludes his 2001 essay on the film by noting that it “signals the paradigm shift that Alexie sees as necessary for opening a new era of filmic self-representation” (“Another” 38). According to Gordon Slethaug, writing in 2003, Smoke Signals can be recognized as the first American Indian film to enjoy “the popular support that would lead to increased production possibilities for Native American films [and] might significantly alter public opinion on Indians in American society or their role in the Arts” (131). Corinn Columpar calls it a “landmark film,” in part because of its “integration of a conventional story and unconventional protagonists” (126). As is evident from these comments and commensurate with its being identi- fied as a pivotal film, Smoke Signals has received much scholarly attention. In addition to discussions of the film as groundbreaking, investigations have explored many of the film’s thematic issues. Kilpatrick argues that “the specters of alcoholism, injustice, and loneliness form the skeleton upon which this film hangs, and the fact that it is also very funny doesn’t keep it from showing a Native present that is devoid of much hope for the future. In significant ways, it falls into the clichéd stereotypes of mainstream Hollywood films” (230). Gilroy, in contrast, describes the important subversive characteristics of the film, and he details “how the film departs from the classical Hollywood buddy/road movie tropes in its efforts to subvert these stereotypes” (“Another” 31). John Mihelich agrees, writing about ways in which the film breaks stereotypes through its reaching out to the masses and its “humanizing efforts.” Furthermore, according to Mihelich, the film “appeals to a mainstream audience because it addresses familiar human conditions” (132). Echoing Mihelich, Corinn Columpar argues that the film is interested in “familial experiences that are common to a variety of cultural communities” (127). These several scholars point out that...

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