Word: elegiacally
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Note That the Buffalo's Gone is a six-minute, technically stunning lament for the genocide of the American Indian. I don't like elegiac works about Indian peoples by definition: it's too easy to forget their political situation in the present by mourning their past-something on the order of reading your own obituary notice. By running that same notice over and over again American consciences have written the Indian off. And Gershfield's work is of a piece with conventional liberal sentiment; there is the same failure to differentiate between various Indian peoples, the tired old noble...
Unlike Baillie, Gershfield appears unable or unwilling to go beyond the collective mythology, and that's a shame because he's really talented. His willingness to rework the old myths, admittedly in an exciting fashion, and his acceptance of the elegiac as the proper tone for treating America's Indian peoples are admissions not only of his limitation as an artist, but corporate liberalism's failure to reach its own fictions and remake the world. This should be, though it won't be, the last elegy for the American Indian; what we need now are films that remake both...