Word: gershfield
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...over close-ups of aged Indian faces. One man appears to be dying, or trying to sleep, turning his head back and forth over the industrialized landscape; the image exudes an eery sense of ancestors' graves plowed under, of the young dead and the old too infirm to protest. Gershfield then moves back to the negative-positive strobe; only much faster now-the beaten faces seem to be illuminated by antiaircraft fire or shells bursting all around them. One strange close-up even suggests a Vietnamese. A funeral ceremony in stills appears to draw the film to a familiar conclusion...
...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 savage myth, et al. More appallingly characteristic, there is no thought for the million or so Indians still alive; no disturbance to break his carefully...
Like Bruce Baillie's Mass for the Sious Dead Gershfield borrows freely from our collective mythology, a mythology composed, like his film from a series of inadequate images. The Indian on the nickel pervades the first two minutes, documentary footage of Indians cooking, eating, smoking a pipe in full headdress. All the color footage seems to have been solarized; the effect is to remove most of the colors and warp the remaining two or three primaries, giving every frame an hallucinatory quality. Purple warriors move out to hunt against an ocher...
...positive/negative strobe to dignified stills of the white man's armies. Indians on horseback in spectral pinks and oranges gallop to meet the U.S. Cavalry. The ensuing wars are filmed off the television screen and include one brief segment of an American GI gesturing to rows of unmarked graves. Gershfield's use of television implies an awareness that these shoddy images of Injuns stand between us and a real knowledge of how the West was Won from people who already owned the land...
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...