#(but what should i expect given hollywood's treatment of native americans)

[mothmanchronicler]

was thinking abt sweet pea's government name, blinked, and now i'm researching ny state reservations and the demographics of early colonizers and oh how far away from nyc that i think riverdale would be and i can pull up a map and compare the reservations that exist near the radius that i've deemed a likely distance from the city and then i can read about those tribes and note the surnames of the tribal leaders and make note of which ones start with M and i can look up the origins of those surnames and then ill look up popular baby names from 1999-2001 that start with N but that feels incomplete so i'll look into-

[dweemeister]

Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

The American Western has been a genre in cinema almost from the artform’s beginning. Over decades and influenced by the traditions of Western firsthand storytelling and literature, Western films evolved with the vocabulary and history of film. Maybe the most important figure in the Western’s development is director John Ford. Ford directed not only the greatest films of that genre, but for the entire medium of cinema – including titles like Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Searchers (1956). All three of those films were shot in Monument Valley, located on the Arizona-Utah border within the Navajo Nation, and famous for its imposing mesas. Many Navajo starred as extras in those films, including the subject of this write-up, Cheyenne Autumn.

With this final Western to direct and his health failing, Ford was in an unusually repentant mood. Upon reflection, he became to realize how poorly he treated the Native American characters in his Westerns. They were often one-dimensional villains massacred by white pioneers or United States Cavalrymen; noble savages; or just faceless, bloodthirsty legends that are never seen. Ford always sympathized with the Navajo extras he employed in his Westerns (they often played non-Navajo tribes, and the filmmakers spent no effort for linguistic accuracy), albeit from a paternalistic lens. Cheyenne Autumn is shadowed by that white paternalism – an overlong experience never adopting the perspectives of its Native American characters.

In Oklahoma Territory/Indian Territory, a group of Northern Cheyenne leaders are planning to return their people back to their homeland in Wyoming. Led by Little Wolf (Ricardo Montalbán) and Dull Knife (Gilbert Roland) after the death of Tall Tree (Victor Jory), the tribe’s efforts are opposed from a military and Department of Interior policy lens. Captain Thomas Archer (Richard Widmark) sympathizes, but refuses to listen to the advice of his bloodlusting, openly prejudiced subordinates (especially Patrick Wayne’s character). American newspapers get wind of these Western developments, and begin to misrepresent the Northern Cheyenne actions as a danger to American civilians. Numerous subplots abound, including Archer’s Mormon love interest, Deborah Wright (Carroll Baker, whose character teaches the Cheyenne children English) deciding to embed herself with the Cheyenne’s northward journey. Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz (Edward G. Robinson) also wants to avoid violence, and will venture westward to defuse the situation.

Other characters including a Cheyenne named “Spanish Woman” (Dolores del Río, probably referring to the character’s mixed heritage), the fiery Red Shirt (Sal Mineo), and the short-tempered Captain Oscar Wessels (Karl Malden). An ill-advised pre-intermission comedic sequence with Wyatt Earp (James Stewart) and Doc Holliday (Arthur Kennedy) comes off only as bloat.

The chief problem of Cheyenne Autumn is one that constantly undermines its central premise. In this film, Ford and screenwriters Mari Sandoz (a novelist-biographer who specialized on the American West, including the Plains Indians) and James R. Webb (1962′s Cape Fear, 1963′s How the West Was Won) rarely adopt the point of view of the Native American characters. When the screenplay does concentrate on them, it is distilled by the experiences and political positions of the white characters. Carroll Baker’s character becomes the white character through whom the Cheyenne become relatable, their intentions and reasons sanitized. Mentions of American atrocities towards Native Americans – if not specifically the Cheyenne – are superficial, requiring guesswork for those unfamiliar in American West history, with Ford never bothering to contextualize how those actions have contributed to the Cheyenne’s presence in Oklahoma. As characters, they are never anything more than frustrated figures that speak out against the American government. Aside from moments where the Cheyenne are taking down their teepees and packing their belongings, what are they like as parents? Friends? Peers? The film is not interested in that, depriving a lot of potential emotional power for the characters that should be central to this work.

One important inclusion in Cheyenne Autumn is the American media’s depiction of the roving Cheyenne as a band of anarchic scalp-collectors. An outlier newspaper editor wants to distinguish himself from the mob, so he frames his paper’s stories as supporting a horde of noble savages. The mass hysteria among Eastern and Western publications could stand in for twentieth-century Hollywood, as the initial storytellers of a narrative tradition colored by racial fear. As much as this film’s allegiances are more beholden to the Native American characters compared to John Ford’s previous works, Cheyenne Autumn is not so much forcing the viewer to experience American imperialism through the eyes of its Native American as it is an expensive, languidly-staged presentation of Ford’s personal beliefs.

Ford further weakens his film by whitewashing the principal Cheyenne characters. Dull Knife, Tall Tree, and Red Shirt are all played by white actors; Little Wolf is played by Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán, but this is just as problematic – Mexican actors or “less pale” white actors were often employed to portray Native Americans in American Western movies. While conversing in “Cheyenne”, the few Navajo actors playing the Cheyenne are saying dirty Navajo jokes to each other. This erasure of historically correct Native American perspectives fails to generate much empathy, even if Cheyenne Autumn has some structural similarities to documentaries or docudramas.

Cheyenne Autumn’s comedic sequence in Dodge City featuring some of the most famous names of Western lore is an inexplicable miscalculation. As much as I might like some Jimmy Stewart any day, there is no reason for Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday (Stewart and Kennedy are too old to play Earp and Holliday, respectively) to appear. This pre-intermission comic relief does nothing but wreak havoc on the film’s already-languid pacing. It does not help that the broad comedy elicits few laughs.

Shot in Super Panavision 70mm Technicolor, Cheyenne Autumn has a wide frame for cinematographer William S. Clothier (1948′s Fort Apache, 1959′s The Horse Soldiers) to work with. The final cut is beautifully photographed, if a bit repetitive and annoying to anybody with an understanding of Great Plains geography (those Monument Valley vistas are not that ubiquitous across the central United States; for example, there are no mountains in Kansas). The signature vistas, shot solely medium and long shots that a widescreen format enables, are gorgeous as always. Moab, Utah and Gunnison, Colorado also stood in for locales along the Northern Cheyenne Exodus – even if the exodus never traversed those states. Ford, his eyesight failing, had lost much of his sense of composition by this point. Those repetitive wide shots and awkward stagings of dialogue scenes with a mass of characters all attest to this. But even a weaker John Ford effort ranks as a stunning visual experience.

Composer Alex North’s (1960′s Spartacus, 1963′s Cleopatra) modernism in his score clashed with Ford’s expectations. North’s score is powerful, brimming with anticipation of the tense situations that are to come. Yet it is without any identifiable leitmotifs until later in the film, as North adopted a modal structure based in Native American music that runs against the idea and expectations of recurring, melodic musical ideas. This set-up works in the context of the film, but independent of the accompanying scenes – and this subsequent statement is speculation but based on my experience with modal classical music; Cheyenne Autumn’s score is unavailable for free online – the score probably suffers. Music like the lyricism of Dimitri Tiomkin’s Western scores (see 1948′s Red River and 1956′s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral) would not fit in Cheyenne Autumn, given the challenging subject matter. Ford himself disliked North’s music, cutting much of it from the final version of the movie. This would not be the last time North was on the wrong side of an artistic disagreement, with much worse treatment by the likes of Stanley Kubrick in his future.

For Warner Bros., 1964 proved to be an eventful year. Its two most high-profile properties – at least, the two movies they spent the most money to acquire the rights for – were Cheyenne Autumn and My Fair Lady. Producer Bernard Smith (1960′s Elmer Gantry, How the West Was Won) convinced Jack Warner, after Warner’s greenlighting of My Fair Lady, that the studio needed a second surefire hit: a John Ford Western. But Ford’s decision in material was among the least commercial of his career, and Cheyenne Autumn’s constitution is not conducive to a single sitting for most. With My Fair Lady slated to be released three weeks  after Cheyenne Autumn, Warner Bros. then decided to concentrate its advertising firepower on the Lerner and Loewe musical adaptation – sealing the financial fate of John Ford’s last Western.

More truthful, faithful Westerns portraying Native Americans would be released in later decades – perhaps not always the most high-profile Hollywood features, but worthy in their fidelity to depicting Native American perspectives. Yet the idea for a kind of cinematic reparation from a major Hollywood production can be said to begin here, in Cheyenne Autumn, under the direction of the one person who might have been most responsible in popularizing negative cinematic stereotypes of Native Americans. John Ford may be the most accomplished director the United States has given to cinema, but a great portion of that success is thanks to capitalizing on destructive ideas serving as the keystone of American narratives.

My rating: 6/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

[chrysanthe0-blog]

WRITE LEFT - contextualizing the LA in slavery

In May 2017, I published a zine called ‘write left: selections and reflections from the author’s late night #WikipediaWanderings.’ It contains 3 essays inspired by my amateur research into the history of southern California. Here is the first piece.

Recently, my partner was given the opportunity to spend some time in the South. Neither of us were familiar with the area, and we didn’t know what he should expect. We’d heard a tale of two regions. The first view was defined by one of its namesakes - Southern hospitality, where people on the street give you a friendly hello, strangers welcomed you into their home with open arms and a pitcher of sweet tea, a genteel demeanor in strong contrast to the fast-paced city nature of “the North”.

We were quicker to think of the South in the other light, one brought about from its history as the American epicenter of enslavement, debasement and cruelty that is the chattel slave system of Africans/ African-Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Where people still proudly flew Confederate flags as if oblivious to the pain and turmoil of black life that that symbol represented. We could tell that the foundations of racism and hatred ran deep, and my partner (white but woke) wondered about walking amongst them.

Of course, we were judging from afar, as we lived in California, the biggest blue state in the nation. Racism was, is and continues to oppressively dictate the lives of people of color in our great state; for a small sampling see pernicious ICE raids & LAPD targeting of black and brown bodies. But the South! Didn’t the systematic barbarity of the transatlantic slave trade take evil to a whole ‘nother level?  

As if I could point the finger away from the land I live.

I recall vividly when my 5th grade teacher told our class that America (which I’d only ever been taught to see as the best most freedomest nation ever) was responsible and must account for 2 great evils in its history: how we treated Africans/ African-Americans and the indigenous people of this land**. I don’t mean to minimize the destruction of life methodically achieved through the Southern slavery system, but why am I so quick to bring up one evil, and not that which has been wrought upon the first peoples of this nation?

As an Angelena, I too live in a land that has enslaved members of another race and assumed their inferiority. That this has been perpetrated by the 3 powers that claimed their rule over this land - Spain, Mexico, and finally the U.S. - does not lessen our culpability in owning up to this past.

It was under Spanish rule that in 1799 Padre Antonio de la Concepcion Horra reported, “The treatment shown to the Indians is the most cruel I have ever read in history. For the slightest things, they receive heavy flogging, are shackeled and put in the stocks, and treated with so much cruelty that they are kept whole days without water.” In elementary school in California, children learn about the Spanish missions, making their own replica and going on a field trip to visit the historical site. What is often missing from the lesson is how they were built with Indian labor, with the express purpose of converting Native Americans to Catholicism, after which the native people of the land were forced to live within the settlements and work for the Spanish. Runaways and rebels were punished harshly, but throughout this period, Native Americans resisted their colonizers through uprisings and other attempts to achieve their freedom from bondage.

It was under Mexican rule that the missions and other large land estates were awarded to wealthy ranchos, who counted on the native population as their labor force. Native Americans had no choice but to enter this pact; if they did not, their villages would be raided and their labor would be taken by force anyway. Going further, in 1846, Mexico’s Assembly passed resolutions calling for funding to locate and demolish Indian villages.

It was under American rule where in 1850 state legislators legalized white custody of Indian minors and prisoner leasing. Ten years later, they legalized the “indenture” of “any Indian,” which triggered an increase in violent kidnappings of Indian people. As one lawyer at the time put it “Los Angeles had its slave mart [and] thousands of honest, useful people were absolutely destroyed in this way.”

And during this whole time, the Native American population fell at an incredible rate, further decimated by the onslaught of European diseases. This point is important, because sadly, one of the main reasons our public education fails to acknowledge our genocide of Native Americans is because America has so totally accomplished its goal of annihilation of indigenous people.

Or as comedian Solomon Georgio puts it: “The Native Americans as a people have suffered the worse genocide in human history. Some may say, hey Solomon what about the Holocaust? And I wouldn’t take that away from anyone, the Holocaust was a terrible, terrible tragedy.  However…I have seen 10 or more Jewish people in the same room. I haven’t seen 10 Native Americans…in my life. They used to live right here.”

In Mexico, self-identified indigenous people make up 21.5% of the population. In Canada, it’s 4.2%. In USA, the indigenous population is only 1.4% of the general population. The USA has been the most systematically cutthroat in ending the lives of its native peoples, and as a result, it is possible in today’s world to not be visibly reminded of their presence.

But it is our duty to empathize, feel into their struggle, and most importantly act in solidarity with these communities. Here is an incomplete list of concrete steps we can take today, most local to the Los Angeles area:

- We can support indigenous-led movements such as the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline and divestment efforts from banks that support the destruction of Native American land. In June 2017, LA City Council, pressured by the indigenous-led Divest L.A. movement, voted unanimously to divest over $40 million in investments from Wells Fargo.

- We can pressure LA City Council to follow the example of other cities and turn Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples Day, as well as formally recognize the genocide of the Native American people. In August 2017, LA did just that, replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

- We can join the new petition to decolonize our children’s education when it comes to learning about the Spanish missions, recentering the narrative to focus on “the impact and daily life of the native population within these missions.” The 2nd CA Indian Curriculum Summit happened at Sacramento State on October 2017, with the purpose to “provide 3rd and 4th grade teachers with California Indian vetted replacement units that address Common Core Standards.”

- We can use our money to support Native American stories, media and art, such as film festivals like LA Skins Fest. The next LA Skins Fest happens annually in November at TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Find out more at www.laskinsfest.com.

As expected, my partner survived the South. What he saw was appalling - “Drunk Lives Matter” on a T-shirt, a man trying to start a fight as my partner booed a parade’s Confederate flag. But peeking into that world through him, made me think about mine. We can’t even get it right in CA, a state that prides itself on its “progressive values”. For the indigenous people of this land, and for us, the descendants of settlers, who are committed to living by our values and fighting for the liberation of all peoples, it’s time to act. Let’s start locally, in the place that we’re in, with the hope that everyone else is thinking the same.

**Shoutout to Mr. Sig for keeping it real! Although - only 2 evils? The Chinese laborers of the nineteenth century, Japanese families forced into internment camps during WW2, Latino youth of the ‘Zoot Suit Riots’ and many other marginalized groups beg to differ…

References “Demographics of Canada.” Wikipedia “Demographics of Mexico.” Wikipedia “Demographics of the United States.” Wikipedia “A History of American Indians in California.” Five Views: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey for California. National Park Service. November 17, 2004 “History of Enslavement of Indigenous Peoples in California.” Wikipedia “History of Los Angeles.” Wikipedia  Madley, Benjamin. “It’s time to acknowledge the genocide of California’s Indians.” Los Angeles Times. May 22, 2016 “Repeal, Replace and Reframe the 4th Grade Mission Project.” California Indian Curriculum. Sacramento State. “Solomon Georgio Stand-Up 02/10/15 - Conan on TBS”

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Digital Decline of David Hockney

David Hockney, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” (1972), acrylic paint on canvas, 2140 x 3048 mm (Lewis Collection © David Hockney, photo credit: Art Gallery of New South Wales / Jenni Carter)

LONDON — Since the passing of Lucian Freud, David Hockney has come to be regarded as the UK’s greatest living painter, his name a byword for extraordinary draftsmanship and an altogether less “passionate” style of painting. The queues snaking around the block for his retrospective at the Tate demonstrate the compelling popularity of his bright colors, the aesthetic pleasantness of his vibrant landscapes spanning his near-60-year career, and his capturing of glamorous sex and sun in the 1960s. Hockney is comparatively dispassionate, however, because his method of working is instructively informed by inquisitive intellectual and technical explorations. Tate Britain curators Chris Stephens, Andrew Wilson, and Helen Little make this clear by their choice to arrange this chronological survey around Hockney’s technical interests, theming each segment in the context of, say, abstraction, naturalism, and optical theories regarding cameras. The chronological method of display overall, however, reinforces what has been cited by many a critic and will be obvious to any visitor: Although the technical interest is in play throughout his career, the visual quality of his work undeniably suffers and declines following his 1960s peak.

Rooms One through Five cover early works of the 1960s, demonstrating Hockney’s prodigious inventiveness in his youth combined with his absolutely breathtaking draftsmanship skills. The period is compartmentalized into technical explorations thus: “Play within a Play” shows his investigations into the conventions of perspective (his reimagining of Hogarth’s famous perspectival oddity in “Kerby (After Hogarth) Useful Knowledge” of 1975 is a cocky artist’s in-joke); “Demonstrations of Versatility” covers his work at the Royal College of Art, in which Hockney selects or discards different styles, treating painting as an intellectual exercise. (He noted, “I deliberately set out to prove I could do four entirely different sorts of picture like Picasso.”) “Paintings with People In” addresses his years after the royal College of Art, visiting Los Angeles for the first time in 1964, pointing out his interest in the painting plane as a stage combined with interplay between modes of abstraction vs. representation: 1963’s “The Hypnotist” quite literally turns the picture plane into a theatre stage, across which two players traverse.

David Hockney, “Domestic Scene, Los Angeles” (1963), oil paint on canvas, 1530 x 1530 mm (Private collection © David Hockney)

David Hockney, “Model with Unfinished Self Portrait” (1977), oil paint on canvas, 1524 x 1524 mm (Private collection c/o Eykyn Maclean © David Hockney)

If all this sounds terribly detached and unemotional, that’s because Hockney’s technical skill is quite clearly completely effortless and natural — almost unbelievably so. His confidence of line and economy of modeling means that painting, for him, presents no struggle whatsoever, hence the room for complete focus on its means to explore intellectual ideas. Such formidable talent is evident in some iconic portraits, lending that distinctive 1960s coolness: “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” (1970–71); “American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman)” (1968). The famous LA paintings, including “A Bigger Splash” (1967) and “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” (1972), strip all modeling down to its bare minimum, using precision of line, color choice, and composition that make it all look so still, easy, and unforced. These are presented again in terms of artistic theory — we are invited to observe their use of pictorial framing, and, yes, you probably never noticed that the sensational “A Bigger Splash” has an enormous expanse of unpainted canvas left as a framing device — but their visual punch nonetheless goes straight to the gut.

David Hockney, “A Lawn Being Sprinkled” (1967), acrylic paint on canvas, 1530 x 1530 mm (Lear Family Collection © David Hockney; photo credit: Richard Schmidt)

David Hockney, “Ossie Wearing a Fairisle Sweater” (1970), colored pencil and crayon on paper, 430 x 355 mm (private collection, London © David Hockney)

David Hockney, “Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool” (1966), acrylic paint on canvas, 1520 x 1520 mm (National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery; presented by Sir John Moores 1968 © David Hockney) Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt

It’s all too easy. Thus, one can’t help but feel that the output following this initial starburst tends toward the sloppy. When you’ve encapsulated the 1960s in a singularly iconic body of work, though, why should you bother? This was my repeated thought throughout the subsequent works. Hockney’s landscapes are increasingly abstract from the naturalistic, using freer, more expressive strokes that sometimes don’t actually cover the bare canvas. His colors similarly depart from naturalism in their loudness: all purples, yellows, and greens straight from the tube, applied to all landscapes, whether supposedly LA or East Yorkshire: They could theoretically depict anywhere. Indeed, his recent works of large scale and outdoor depictions of trees tend toward the outright naïve; gone is the precision of hand, that economy replaced with — I hate to say it — what looks an awful lot like laziness. When the final rooms bring the advent of Hockney’s digital paintings, conducted on an iPad, one wonders how much of it is for the technical interest in the “next step” in making art, and how much for the convenience of no longer bothering with the messiness of paint. Perhaps I’m being harsh to an increasingly frail artist who has already more than proven himself, but from a coldly art-historical perspective, given that the iPad lends itself particularly to the naïve tendencies in Hockney’s drawing skills, the case for it here as a method of advancing the means of making art is not exactly convincing.

David Hockney, “Red Pots in the Garden” (2000), oil paint on canvas, 1524 x 1930 mm (private collection, courtesy Guggenheim Asher Associates © David Hockney) Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt

David Hockney, “Garden” (2015), acrylic paint on canvas, 1219 x 1828 mm (collection of the artist © David Hockney; photo Credit: Richard Schmidt)

The show’s curation at times feels forgiving toward this decline, in evidence from the first when it chooses to bend the rules of its own chronological method; the exhibition’s mantra is to show how the “roots of each new direction lay in the work that came before,” and it uses Room One to juxtapose works from the 1960s, 1970s, and one from 2014 to reinforce this cyclical idea, justifying the progression into computer generated images. Thus the brilliant “Rubber Ring Floating in a Swimming Pool” (1971) — gorgeously economic in its geometrical treatment of a plan view of a pool, just two blocks of color with a red circle — sits with 2014’s “4 Blue Stools,” a “photographic drawing” splicing together drawing and digital photos of sitters, with the Tate arguing for its technical concerns with pictorial plane and perspective. The brilliance of Hockney’s early paintings, regardless, still acts as a yardstick that his forays into fiddling with digital manipulation never come close to surpassing.

Similarly, describing Hockney’s experiments with multiscreen video works — shown here in a film recorded by nine cameras of a Yorkshire road over four seasons — as “a cubist film, showing different aspects of the same scene as perceived by a moving observer,” uses backward-facing art-historical terms to describe something we expect to be forward-looking, straining to justify the artist’s ongoing relevance in a contemporary art world which, it must be said, is already leaps ahead of him in its use of cutting-edge technology.

David Hockney, “Hollywood Hills House” (1980), oil paint, charcoal, and paper on canvas, 1524 x 3048 mm (collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; gift of Penny and Mike Winton, 1983 © David Hockney)

David Hockney, “9 Canvas Study of the Grand Canyon” (1998), oil paint on nine canvases, 1003 x 1689 mm (Richard and Carolyn Dewey © David Hockney; photo credit: Richard Schmidt)

Despite its best efforts to justify the relevance of his digital experiments, the arc of Hockney’s career remains clear, well presented, and with precision focus on his varying intellectual ideas of pictorial representation. The sheer skill of draftsmanship similarly shines through in intervals as a key element underpinning his freedom to paint naïvely if he desired; as late as the iPad paintings are charcoal pieces observing his native Yorkshire, proof that he can draw if he wants to (though frequently he doesn’t: In his recent show of 80 portraits painted in recent years at the Royal Academy, the work was embarrassing in its wanton laziness). The epic heights he reached in the 1960s, however, are so magnificent that they have apparently given him a free pass ever since.

David Hockney continues at Tate Britain (Millbank, Westminster, London) through May 29.

The post The Digital Decline of David Hockney appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2nYPD2w via IFTTT