Hidden Cinema of the Southwest and Mexico (review)

Background

If asked to consider the American Southwest and Mexico in terms of film production, some may cite the heyday of Arizona's Old Tucson Studios or New Mexico's current, hugely successful film production tax incentive program. However, the area has long been home to diverse and largely unknown amateur, nontheatrical, and non-Hollywood productions. The region's stunning, largely untouched landscape, along with its mild weather and preponderance of sunny days, drew nature lovers, anthropologists, and educational filmmakers early on and, as Hidden Cinema of the Southwest and Mexico's program proved, often produced superlative work in the medium.

Hidden Cinema of the Southwest and Mexico was conceived as a film-based symposium concentrating on work produced in those regions. The event was sponsored by Northern Arizona University's (NAU) School of Communication in Flagstaff and the University of Arizona's Department of English in Tucson and was hosted by the Center for Creative Photography (CCP). Both institutions promote nontheatrical film preservation and study within their respective universities. Organized by Janna Jones and Mark Neumann of NAU and Jennifer Jenkins of the University of Arizona, the two-day symposium's inaugural session included an apposite program of contemporary, independent documentary screenings and scholarly presentations that highlighted a rich array of archival film materials and topics. The symposium's presentations were grouped by media and content into three categories: "Hidden Cinema," "Hidden Vistas," and "Hidden Talents."

Hidden Talents

The landscape, its people, and its cultures still inspire contemporary filmmakers in their cinematic inquiries, and Hidden Cinema's opening night of films, screened at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center, gave a taste of the myriad topics and techniques filmmakers have undertaken in the region. The evening also set the tone for the themes that would continue to inform the symposium's discussions. Introductions for the symposium's films were provided by special guest Liz Coffey, conservator at the Harvard Film Archive. As a nonnative of the Southwest, Coffey lent a striking perspective to films steeped in the issues and milieu of the region. A Line in the Sand: Arivaca (2009), directed by Bryce Goodman, James Johenning, and Joel Smith, explores the complex perceptions of community and place that occur in an American border town. Located just eleven miles from the Mexican border, Arivaca, Arizona, is a site of both contention and contentment. A Line in the Sand presents the town as a microcosm of the individualist ideals of the American West and illuminates the impact of controversial, largely ineffective border policies on those same ideals. Reflecting the sensitivity and even-handedness that characterized the rest of the film, the filmmakers deal delicately— via a textual afterword—with a violent home invasion and double murder that occurred in Arivaca after filming wrapped. The filmmakers and one of the film's subjects were on hand to offer a sensitive and very human dialogue on a highly sensationalized, polarized, and polarizing topic.

Roderick Coover and Lance Newman's Canyonlands: Edward Abbey and the Great American Desert (2010) used Edward Abbey's writing and environmental activism as a springboard for examining the incursion of civilization on the natural landscape and the destruction that accompanied the American tourism boom of the 1950s. Arizona's Glen Canyon Dam as it is now is featured prominently in the film, as are other sites that informed Edward Abbey's work and activism and that played a role in his life as a champion of the unmolested southwestern landscape. The filmmakers' gorgeous images, accompanied by readings of Abbey's sharp, uncompromising prose, offer a keen portrait of how much was lost with the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and the ultimate pointlessness of the entire endeavor. Through the film, Abbey's once strong, idiosyncratic rhetoric is vindicated as a voice of reason on the matter, and Coover and Newman are proven to be worthy heirs to the writer's legacy of activism through art.

Hidden Cinema

Reflecting the rich multiculturalism of...