Profane Illuminations: History and Collaboration in James Luna and Isaac Artenstein's The History of the Luiseño People

This essay studies narrative collaboration in film, focusing on The History of the Luiseño People, produced collaboratively by performance artist James Luna and filmmaker Isaac Artenstein. The film uses the ephemeral quality of performance art to allegorize the loss of a material history that would register its story. Rather than invoking division, plurality, and ambiguity, Luna and Artenstein limit their film's historical space to the media and the domestic, and its temporality to a version of what Walter Benjamin called "nowtime." Although History's apparent collaboration with negative stereotypes of Native Americans has angered many critics, McHugh reads the film as an instance of Benjaminian "profane illumination." Her essay details Luna and Artenstein's profane apprehension of the historical, as she considers their strategies within the contexts in which the film was funded, produced, distributed, and exhibited.