Earlier in the month, Sherman Alexie appeared on The Colbert Report, promoting his new book War Dances, but also making some interersting points about e-text books and readers such as Kindle, all and all, a good and entertaining interview:

Sherman Alexie on The Colbert Report, available at Hulu.com

Happy holidays from the Western Literature Association Blog!

I hope you enjoy this odd little video, which despite its northern orientation (referring to a famous inhabitant of the North Pole), is western in a couple of ways:  1) “Here Comes Santa Claus” is performed by singing cowboy Gene Autry; 2) the flashing lights synchronized to the song are located in that most westerly of states, California.

As noted in earlier posts, the past couple of years have been good ones for fans of African American writer and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951). Paul McGilligan’s comprehensive biography, Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only, came out in 2007. There was a major conference in February 2009 on Micheaux’s work at Columbia University, concurrent with a retrospective screening of his films at Lincoln Center. [See Faded Glory: Oscar Micheaux and The Pre-War Black Independent Cinema. ]

And, now, Stace England and the Salt Kings have just released an album of songs responding to Micheaux’s life and work, The Amazing Oscar Micheaux.

Although Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Illinois (and thereby came to the attention of the Illinois-based Salt Kings), he is of interest to scholars of the American West in part because of the several years he spent on a homestead near Gregory, South Dakota. His autobiography The Conquest (1913) and his novel The Homesteader (1917), both of which detail his trials and tribulations (and successes) on his South Dakota farm, are among the few books currently in print describing the experiences of an African American homesteader.

Micheaux is best known as a pioneering filmmaker. His film version of The Homesteader (1919) was the first full-length feature by an African American director.  Of the three Micheaux silent films still extant, Within Our Gates (1920), The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), and Body and Soul (1925), one of them, The Symbol of the Unconquered, returns to Micheaux’s homesteading experiences as the basis for the narrative, as does a later sound film, The Exile (1931). The Amazing Oscar Micheaux draws on both The Symbol of the Unconquered and The Exile as a source for songs.

Reviews of The Amazing Oscar Micheaux have been posted on Blogcritics and AssociatedContent.com (a review by Joseph Bridges that also reprints the albums liner notes). Click on either of the excerpts below for the full review.

Blogcritics: Over the last few years Stace England and his band the Salt Kings have put out two albums, Cairo Illinois and Salt Sex Slaves, which have [recounted] events that you won’t find a record of in most history text books. With their latest album they’ve moved into the twentieth century in order to give us not just a glimpse of events but a person. The Amazing Oscar Micheaux, available for download now and being released in the new year on Rankoutsider Records, introduces listeners to America’s first major African-American director.

From Joseph Bridges: Reading the liner notes to an album is an important part of listening to any album (Note: For those of you out there who think an MP3 is actually music, go buy a physical cd. It costs about the same and includes notations and pictures that add to the effect and tone of the music. i.e The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band). Some notes are sparse as the musicians would like you to dream some of the meanings to the songs. Some notes are copious. Those are the ones I like and on The Amazing Oscar Micheaux, Stace England remembers an almost forgotten legend in the seminal film director Oscar Micheaux. Wrapping up the life of a great director into an album is also a feat as England and his Salt kings break down the life, times, and accomplishments of Micheaux into twelve songs.

. . . or nowhere The Road. Although The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, opened with a big splash a couple of weekends ago, and with a lot of word in the press that the opening was going to be pretty widespread, it turns out that the film is still only playing on a few screens, much to the dismay of filmgoers who have been seeking it out to no avail. I’ve been hoping to post something about the film, but The Road to Maine is yet to be built, and that seems to be the case for most folks outside of major cities.

Click on the link for the full article:

Where is the Post-Apocalyptic Movie The Road Showing?

The Weinstein Company, co-owned by the brothers who were former heads of Miramax, may have miscalculated with their limited release of this picture. First, the movie was already bumped from being released last year, a notorious game of musical chairs played too often with pictures produced by this company. Second, the misinformation of a wide release for “The Road” has served to alienate some of the crowd who wants to see this picture.

There’s even an online petition campaign in favor of a wider release.

From Mary Scriver

Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Edge of Madness (2002): Review

The reasons that Canadian films don’t “catch fire” in the US are various and may include the idea that their films are too good for us to appreciate! But to be a little kinder, there are other factors. One of the more subtle and interesting is the “Wacousta Syndrome,” which is not much discussed on the States’ side. “Wacousta” was a novel about a fort and what a safe haven it offered to a people struggling to survive in a pretty harsh place, the Canadian prairies. The Canadian social consensus was that communities, even walled ones like the wealthy enclaves we sort of resent these days, are good, proper, and morally justified. The American idea was far more based on the fortunes of the individual and their resourcefulness. Success was the result of genius and effort, not community solidarity. The American Western is often about the heroic individual who has to save a wimpy, unformed and possibly corrupt town.

Canadian Westerns are hardly even defined as a category. I will suggest a candidate for this non-category: “Edge of Madness,” based on an Alice Munro short story I haven’t read, reinvented as a movie by Anne Wheeler. The core of the tale is about how much hardship and emotional challenge a person can take without madness and what their relationship to the community ought to be. Can the community save them or should it eject them, if necessary, through a hangman’s trapdoor?

A young and appealing but evidently insane woman shows up at the Red River “fort” where the authority (this is 1851), who is more of a Hudson’s Bay employee than a Mountie, must decide what to do with her.
She insists that she killed her husband but she calls out a second man’s name. She is put in jail, a confinement she finds reassuring, while things are sorted out. I won’t tell you much more than that, since it’s basically a murder mystery unfolded through flashbacks.

I suppose that to a city person, the little homestead this woman comes from and the long land with its stands of small trees along the river are both empty and scary. To me they look like home, since my father’s family homesteaded in northern Manitoba and the terrain is not that different from here. But also, currently in a cold wave that will sink to and below zero farenheit, I’m very aware of just how deadly a mistake can be. Everything depends upon planning, which is even more important than money.

Family/community fits between planning and money because the crucial safety net is often other people who come to help, who take you in, who teach you what works and what doesn’t. People who think they know it all and use force to subjugate the people in their household are doomed. (This theme is also explored in the movie “After the Harvest”, adapted from the novel “Wild Geese,” by Martha Ostenso which I reviewed a few years ago.) Sure, there’s a first flare of success, but the bill comes due. Unless you’re in an American movie.

I’m finding these movies in part by using Netflix to locate movies that include Tantoo Cardinal because I admire her so much. In this movie she embodies ordinary care and concern for others, an autochthonous moral foundation across this entire continent, not attached to “nation.” One of the recurring stories from “Indian wars” is the individual compassionate woman, often old, who would creep out at night to help a wounded or punished person, even an enemy.

If Canada is to the USA as woman is to man, assuming the usual stereotypes of gender, then it makes sense for fine Canadian movie directors to be female. Not unlike the Indie directors Jane Campion and Sally Potter in Europe, Wheeler has had the advantage of government support for the Canadian film environment. She has not thrown away her energy on trivial subjects or shoddy work. But she hasn’t been quite so experimental as those two continental directors. This movie is a calm, authentic depiction very likely to have been enacted repeatedly in frontier days when people risked their lives to take root in what they believed to be “unowned” land. This was only one of romantic misapprehensions that motivated their decisions, like the orphan girl in the story believing that if she were a “good wife” who could attract a strong man, she would be safe and happy.

“The predisposition to murder is rooted in feelings and beliefs people have toward government and their fellow citizens,” said Randolph Roth, author of the book ‘American Homicide’ and professor of history at Ohio State. I want to come back to this, but one of the lessons of this absorbing story is that the three young people struggling on their homestead come to grief in part because of turning away from the community. The brutal and obsessed murder victim is the driving force of what can’t be quite called a family since it’s only his young brother and orphan wife and he feels no need to protect them, only exploit them. When the neighbors extend good will he sneers at them and even shoots at them.

The young ones, in their desperation accepting this point of view, have only each other. Their natural affinity becomes sexual and the threesome triggers murder. When they are alone together and after considerable suffering, they each turn to the community — away from each other. In an American film this would never do. Our romantic standards require that they either live together forever or die together, not find happiness apart.

One of the nice features of the plot (I have no idea how much of this goes back to the Alice Munro story.) is that the younger man is the more emotional and unskilled one, while the young woman has a marketable skill (sewing) as well as being literate. The man is merely strong and healthy and must have a guide. The woman has an occupation.
There’s another sociological dimension, not much explored, in the origin of Hudson’s Bay factors on the Orkney Islands, a community of strong morality and independence without antisociality.

If I were showing this to a class, I would screen it juxtaposed to “The Missing” in which the Tommy Lee Jones character is the hero, though his daughter is also strong. He is not abusive. All that is projected away onto the Indians.

The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, opens this weekend. For anyone who has seen it, any thoughts?

I hope we’ll be able to have some discussion on the Western Literature Blog about the movie, The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel. The film opens in theaters this week.

There was an interesting interview with McCarthy and John Hillcoat, director of The Road (who also directed The Proposition, a dark Australian “western” that came out a few years ago), published in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve pasted in a couple of excerpts below:

WSJ: What kind of reactions have you gotten to “The Road” from fathers?

CM: I have the same letter from about six different people. One from Australia, one from Germany, one from England, but they all said the same thing. They said, “I started reading your book after dinner and I finished it 3:45 the next morning, and I got up and went upstairs and I got my kids up and I just sat there in the bed and held them.”

JH: Cormac, do you think we caught the spirit of the book?

CM: Yeah, absolutely. I haven’t seen the final print version.

JH: Be glad you didn’t have to sit through the assembly cut, which was four hours. Look, I’ve never made a film anywhere near two hours. I admire the films, back in the day, when they were 90 minutes.

CM: One school of thought says that directors shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own films. But the truth is they should be. And they should be really brutal. Really brutal.

JH: Viewers are being hardwired differently. In film, it’s harder and harder to use wide shots now. And the bigger the budget, the more closeups there are and the faster they change. It’s a whole different approach. What’s going to happen is there will be the two extremes: the franchise films that are now getting onto brands like Barbie, and Battleship and Ronald McDonald; then there are these incredible, very low-budget digital films. But that middle area, they just can’t sustain and make it work in the current model. Maybe the model will change and hopefully readjust.

For the complete article from the Wall Street Journal, click here.

From Mary Scriver (editor’s note: this was posted as a comment, but I thought I would move it forward into its own post for easier reading):

Indie films and Native Americans — okay, “Indians” — seem like a match so natural as to be inevitable. The newest one I’ve seen is “Frozen River,” just now being mentioned on the West Lit blog. (The cowboys have discovered the Indians! And they’re female!) This film is also highly suitable for the discipline called “border studies” which might be described as something like philosophical geography.

The Mohawk Nation preserves its autonomy strongly enough that their reservation/reserve sovereignty persists on both sides of the Canadian/US border, which is a river because many of the early treaties between nations of all sorts defined territory by physical features like rivers or mountains. Through Montana the border is the edge of the drainage of the Missouri/Mississippi rivers, created by a row of small volcanic hills and then defined by surveying the 49th parallel. The Blackfeet Nation is on both sides of the line, but it is not contiguous. The US side is against the line, but the Canadian side is scattered into small areas. Nevertheless, in theory tribal members have free passage between the countries. It’s sometimes hard to convince border agents of that.

Two women, one played by Melissa Leo (my favorite “Homicide” detective) and the other by Misty Upham. Misty is Blackfeet and must be part of the family of “Doc” Upham who used to play in club bands with Bob Scriver. She grew up in Seattle, a part of the Indian community over there. Every Upham that I’ve known has been pretty remarkable for brains and enterprise. Leo, who is coming up fifty, looks her age (she’s a smoker — that’ll do it) and Misty dumped her Pocahontas image by cutting her hair and gaining 65 pounds. (I’m not sure she realized what that would do to her health, but she has taken forty pounds back off.) This is a reality story, not a reassuring little parable. The two women collide more than they meet, and bad fortune throws them together into a scheme to make money by running third-world illegal immigrants across the border from Canada to the US. They don’t need a boat because the ice on the river is multiple feet thick in winter when temps go far below zero, though sun in the daytime produces a layer of slush.

Another border is between the Indian woman and the white woman, sociological but not economic. Thanks to racial profiling a white woman is not likely to be stopped by off-rez police, so she has a smuggling advantage. On-rez it’s the Mohawk who has the sympathy of the officials so long as she doesn’t ruffle the Tribal Council hens. (Mohawk keep the pattern of tribal matriarchy.) The ties between them are about their children: Leo’s husband was an addict and gambler who took off with the family’s hoard of money meant to buy a new trailer. Upham’s husband is dead, gone through the ice while smuggling, which is how she got into the racket, but he left her pregnant. Since she’s living in a tiny camp trailer with no water (she sleeps in her coat), she can’t keep her baby. So the strong bond is children, the most basic human motive for women. This pushes the plot and resolves it in the end.

Such a setting provides plenty of suspense and the same kind of bleak but sublime long horizons against the sky as on the prairie. The cast was mostly local with white bits most likely to be doubling crew members. There is a growing pool of experienced tribal actors, especially on the Canadian side where the government supports arts. Budget was under one million dollars. It was Courtney Hunt’s first writing and directing undertaking.

When one looks at amateur painting, the most usual deficit is in “values,” which means the dark/light dimension, white-gray-black. Colors, composition, drawing and so on may be pretty good, but the sameness or skewing of values will give away inexperience. Likewise, the element most often missing in Indie movies is what Marshall W. Mason calls “beats” in his book, “Creating Life on Stage: A Director’s Approach to Working with Actors,” which is drawn from his career with the Circle Repertory Company in NYC. When one listens to the voice-over comments for an Indie, the chatter is most likely to be excitement over how “felt” the story is, how realistic, how from the heart, plus a lot of memories of good times and scary times. When one listens to an old pro Hollywood or London director, the talk is far more technical and analytical, much more about art-form concerns. “Beats” are a way of divvying up the timing and emphasis into a coherent and controlled whole, rather than taking a sort of general scenario approach.

On the other hand, as Hunt points out, this story has children and dogs in it, found at the last minute and barely guided in what they did. Equipment was limited so camera angles were confined, there was no studio, and even local merchants controlled what could or couldn’t be done. (The local trailer sales emporium was leery of the low-class image of trailers.) This movie was made simply with heart and faith. It was “found” as much as composed.

One of my all-time favorite movies about Indians, “Loyalties,” is a big budget version of a similar theme that would be interesting to watch alongside “Frozen River.” One of Tantoo Cardinal’s early films (I would not hesitate to suggest that Misty is the next Tantoo.), it happens much farther north in Cree country. Anne Wheeler, who started out very much like Hunt, is the director but she had professional English actors and a budget. That story is about an English doctor who mysteriously arrives with his family to work in the Boonies. His wife is confused and paralyzed by the environment so the doctor hires a local woman to help her — that’s Tantoo. When I looked at the imdb.com remarks, I was gratified to see that people said that though they’d seen the film twenty years ago or more, it remained vivid in their minds. Same here. The two women become friends and then more than friends when she and the English woman must protect the children at a high cost.

Today, a time when immigrants are treated with such suspicion and when the long tradition of citizens being able to cross the border peacefully without a passport has ended, we all need reminding that it is the fate of our children that should be our ultimate loyalty.

This is an interesting television interview with Melissa Leo and Misty Upham, the two actresses who star in the film Frozen River.