The Business of Fancydancing and Journey to Nyae Nyae
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"So... what are you?
I snagged The Business of Fancydancing on the recommendation of qthewetsprocket. It's about four friends from the Spokane Reservation: one left, one tried to leave, one deliberately returned, and one took his own life. All of them face the hugely complicated question of the relationship between the rez and the wider world, and of their own identities (one is gay, one is half-Jewish).
I was struggling to think of what to say about it: Sherman Alexie's love of words and anecdotes, all the double-edged jokes, the moving performances, the time it takes to get used to the movie's style of storytelling... and then I hit a scene where two characters start quoting Hamlet back and forth, and my brain fell out of my ear.
For some reason I've had Hamlet on the brain recently. It's the icon of English language and culture - the greatest work by the greatest writer, etc etc. Any college-educated American will know it. The characters, a poet and a teacher, slip easily from their own verbal duelling into the Dane's, first paraphrasing it, then finally directly quoting:
Seymour: If we ever need money, we can get jobs hanging off rear-view mirrors.
Agnes: I'll be a dreamcatcher, and you can be a burden basket... I'm glad you came back. The rez, she's missed you.
Seymour: This place is a prison.
Agnes: What did you just say?
Seymour: The reservation's a prison.
Agnes: Well if that's true, then the whole world is a prison.
Seymour: The whole world is a prison. With a million confines, wards and dungeons. The reservation's just the worst.
Agnes: I don't think so.
Seymour: You can think what you want. But to me, it's a prison.
Agnes: You've wanted to leave here since you were six years old. It's your ambition that made the rez a prison.
Seymour: O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and call myself the king of infinite space, but that I have bad dreams.
Agnes: Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Seymour: A dream itself is but a shadow... it's amazing.
So thir conversation travels from the appropriation of Indian culture by the invading, surrounding culture - the twee dreamcatcher hanging from the New Age rear-view mirror - to the opposite: the use of the colonising culture's tropes to express the ideas of the colonised. (Whether high culture or popular culture: the scene's accompanied by Jim Boyd's "Rez-n-Roll" song, My heart drops but I'm proud.)
This is not appropriation: it's bricolage. It's the lively, creative turning around of culture and language that have been imposed. I find it fascinating. But the movie itself ends in the failure of language to express even a poet's feelings - or rather, the failure of English.
___
"When people saw my movies, I was very young. As you can see, I'm older now. But my heart and my soul are the same. Time hasn't really changed me."
I'd long been curious about the 1980 cult South African movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. You can easily Google up a ton of info and commentary about this weird little film, but what I'd like to direct your attention to is the documentary included on the DVD, Journey to Nyae Nyae, shot shortly before the movie's famous Namibian lead actor, credited as N!Xau (better rendered G!qau), passed away in 2003. Maddeningly, English subtitles have been omitted, so I had to use my shaky French to get the gist.
It's worth seeing the doco just for the contrast with the movies: G!qau is not living the life of a noble savage, much less a movie star. On the documentary-maker's first visit in 1990, the cows' milk has dried up in the drought, and G!qau's family are starving. "We're human beings. We can't survive by eating trees." The oft-repeated story that G!qau let his wages from the first film blow away is, of course, romantic rubbish. He tells us that when the film crew met him, he was working at the local school as a gardener. Asked about the movies, he explains that his hope was that they would help people from other countries understand the ancient San way of life. (He also jokes that he loves people who want to make films about him, because he's "really ugly"!) The documentary maker returns in 2003; G!qau is moved to tears by the 1990 footage, including his deceased wife. "It brings those times back to me. It's wonderful to see them again." How have things changed? "Life then was very hard. Now it's better. I've received money for my films." However: "For the Jul'hoan, life's very hard. They have very little food." Very sadly, G!qau passed away while the documentary was being filmed; it concludes with his funeral.
___
Browsing randomly in the library I stumbled across They're A Weird Mob, a 1966 comedy about an Italian journalist who arrives in Sydney and has to cope with the local slang and customs. Hmmm, I thought, here's a possible candidate - perhaps it gives some insight into what it was like to be a post-war immigrant to Australia. No such luck; it turns out that "Nino Culotta" is a pseudonym for John O'Grady, and the story is fiction, not the autobiography I took it for at first. Plus it's pretty excruciating - basically one long joke about Funny Foreigners - which includes Aussies and their hilarious colonial slang. At least there aren't any bloody kangaroos. (It was pretty interesting to see what Sydney looked like in '66, though, two years before I was born. The Sydney Opera House is still under construction.)
"So... what are you?
I snagged The Business of Fancydancing on the recommendation of qthewetsprocket. It's about four friends from the Spokane Reservation: one left, one tried to leave, one deliberately returned, and one took his own life. All of them face the hugely complicated question of the relationship between the rez and the wider world, and of their own identities (one is gay, one is half-Jewish).
I was struggling to think of what to say about it: Sherman Alexie's love of words and anecdotes, all the double-edged jokes, the moving performances, the time it takes to get used to the movie's style of storytelling... and then I hit a scene where two characters start quoting Hamlet back and forth, and my brain fell out of my ear.
For some reason I've had Hamlet on the brain recently. It's the icon of English language and culture - the greatest work by the greatest writer, etc etc. Any college-educated American will know it. The characters, a poet and a teacher, slip easily from their own verbal duelling into the Dane's, first paraphrasing it, then finally directly quoting:
Seymour: If we ever need money, we can get jobs hanging off rear-view mirrors.
Agnes: I'll be a dreamcatcher, and you can be a burden basket... I'm glad you came back. The rez, she's missed you.
Seymour: This place is a prison.
Agnes: What did you just say?
Seymour: The reservation's a prison.
Agnes: Well if that's true, then the whole world is a prison.
Seymour: The whole world is a prison. With a million confines, wards and dungeons. The reservation's just the worst.
Agnes: I don't think so.
Seymour: You can think what you want. But to me, it's a prison.
Agnes: You've wanted to leave here since you were six years old. It's your ambition that made the rez a prison.
Seymour: O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and call myself the king of infinite space, but that I have bad dreams.
Agnes: Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Seymour: A dream itself is but a shadow... it's amazing.
So thir conversation travels from the appropriation of Indian culture by the invading, surrounding culture - the twee dreamcatcher hanging from the New Age rear-view mirror - to the opposite: the use of the colonising culture's tropes to express the ideas of the colonised. (Whether high culture or popular culture: the scene's accompanied by Jim Boyd's "Rez-n-Roll" song, My heart drops but I'm proud.)
This is not appropriation: it's bricolage. It's the lively, creative turning around of culture and language that have been imposed. I find it fascinating. But the movie itself ends in the failure of language to express even a poet's feelings - or rather, the failure of English.
___
"When people saw my movies, I was very young. As you can see, I'm older now. But my heart and my soul are the same. Time hasn't really changed me."
I'd long been curious about the 1980 cult South African movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. You can easily Google up a ton of info and commentary about this weird little film, but what I'd like to direct your attention to is the documentary included on the DVD, Journey to Nyae Nyae, shot shortly before the movie's famous Namibian lead actor, credited as N!Xau (better rendered G!qau), passed away in 2003. Maddeningly, English subtitles have been omitted, so I had to use my shaky French to get the gist.
It's worth seeing the doco just for the contrast with the movies: G!qau is not living the life of a noble savage, much less a movie star. On the documentary-maker's first visit in 1990, the cows' milk has dried up in the drought, and G!qau's family are starving. "We're human beings. We can't survive by eating trees." The oft-repeated story that G!qau let his wages from the first film blow away is, of course, romantic rubbish. He tells us that when the film crew met him, he was working at the local school as a gardener. Asked about the movies, he explains that his hope was that they would help people from other countries understand the ancient San way of life. (He also jokes that he loves people who want to make films about him, because he's "really ugly"!) The documentary maker returns in 2003; G!qau is moved to tears by the 1990 footage, including his deceased wife. "It brings those times back to me. It's wonderful to see them again." How have things changed? "Life then was very hard. Now it's better. I've received money for my films." However: "For the Jul'hoan, life's very hard. They have very little food." Very sadly, G!qau passed away while the documentary was being filmed; it concludes with his funeral.
___
Browsing randomly in the library I stumbled across They're A Weird Mob, a 1966 comedy about an Italian journalist who arrives in Sydney and has to cope with the local slang and customs. Hmmm, I thought, here's a possible candidate - perhaps it gives some insight into what it was like to be a post-war immigrant to Australia. No such luck; it turns out that "Nino Culotta" is a pseudonym for John O'Grady, and the story is fiction, not the autobiography I took it for at first. Plus it's pretty excruciating - basically one long joke about Funny Foreigners - which includes Aussies and their hilarious colonial slang. At least there aren't any bloody kangaroos. (It was pretty interesting to see what Sydney looked like in '66, though, two years before I was born. The Sydney Opera House is still under construction.)