Navajo Talking Picture: Cinema on Native Ground

4. Intent

chapter four Intent Looking at the screen, most viewers want to know: Why did she do this? What were Arlene Bowman’s intentions in making Navajo Talking Picture? Finding an answer, however, is more difficult than we might expect, because the relationship between intention and meaning is one of the most perplexing issues in the study of documentary film. Scholars have said relatively little about the question of “authorial intent” in documentary cinema, and what has been said in our broader culture tends to presume an uncomplicated relationship between intent and meaning—usually that a documentary film is a precise rendering of what the filmmaker meant and hardly anything more.1 In the interest of taxonomy, some scholars have talked about intent in order to distinguish nonfiction films from their fictional counterparts (i.e., that nonfiction intent is an essential prerequisite to categorizing something as documentary), but not often how such categorization would affect meaning per se. We might assume that the pitfalls of looking at “authorial intent” to settle questions of interpretation have long been apparent. As far back as Plato’s Apology, we see Socrates interrogating the poets of ancient Greece about the meaning of their words. “I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings,” Socrates said, “and asked what was the meaning of them, thinking that they would teach me something.” The poets failed the philosopher’s test. “I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves,” he is reported to have observed, before comparing the poets to diviners and soothsayers “who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.”2 Nonfiction authors can find themselves in a similar predicament. In 1632 the Presbyterian 88 reformer William Prynne wrote a pamphlet that appeared to criticize the theatrical tastes of the English royal family, which promptly brought him up on charges. When the frightened author claimed that he meant no such offense as the one being taken, the court was not impressed: “Itt is said, hee had noe ill intention. . . . That must not be allowed in excuse, for he should not have written any thinge that would bear [an offensive] construction, for hee doth not accompanye his booke, to make his intencion known to all that reades it.”3 What had been meant was irrelevant; the court was interested only in what had been understood. Similar debates about intent have haunted English departments for many decades. Long before he became one of the most strident culture warriors of the 1980s with his Eurocentric prescription for “cultural literacy,” E. D. Hirsch had written one of the classic works of literary criticism to address the question of intent.4 In Validity in Interpretation (1967), Hirsch complained about the “heavy and largely victorious assault on the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant.”5 The problem, he suggested, began in the 1930s when New Critics had promoted “semantic autonomy” as an antidote to simplistic biographical criticism. If he had written a few years later, Hirsch might also have lamented a second wave of “semantic autonomists” coming from France in the late 1960s, when Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes published classic statements on what was called “the death of the author.” These poststructuralists argued that the intentions of the author were far less important than the plausible meanings that could be found in the text itself. “Even if the author has a ‘specific purpose’ in mind when putting pen to paper,” as literary scholar William R. Schroeder argued in this vein, “the text’s meaning may far exceed the limits of these purposes.”6 I would like to suggest that we look at Navajo Talking Picture in the same light as what Schroeder described. In doing so, we can give greater recognition to the ambiguity, irony, and complexity that lurk within documentaries that may be more than what they appear at first glance, more than what we presume their makers intent | 89 intended (or claim to have intended), and certainly more than the simple fulfillment of an auteur’s personal vision. As I hope to show in the pages ahead, we cannot always find what we need to “anchor” a particular meaning in seeking the intentions behind a documentary film. Even when we uncover such intentions to our satisfaction, we have not necessarily solved...