Excerpt (1) from "Reaction" chapter of the book "Navajo Talking Picture: Cinema on Native Ground," by Randolph Lewis
In her fine book Imaging Indians in the Southwest, cultural historian Leah Dilworth writes about sharing the work of Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesa with her college students in New York City. Much to their professor’s chagrin, the responses ranged from yawns to puzzlement to tepid curiosity. Rather than blaming her students for their lack of interest or understanding, Dilworth writes sympathetically about their reaction, realizing that a film like Itam Hakim, Hopiit (1985) comes from a world separated from New York by more than sheer distance. By design, Masayesva’s film presents images of the Southwest that do not conform to stereotypes of a magical “land of enchantment” nor to stereotypes of Indians generally. “Our assumptions about what we thought we knew about ‘Indians’ were not reaffirmed,” Dilworth recalls about her classroom experience with Masayesva’s poetic vision of a Hopi elder and his musings about traditional life. I suspect that like Itam Hakim, Hopiit, Navajo Talking Picture can be added to the list of indigenous films that “disrupt” primitivist discourse in a way that can perplex and put off outsiders expecting something more familiar and comforting.
At least one anthropologist has argued that Native filmmakers should avoid this disruption in order to get their message across. In an influential article published in 1997, Harald Print argued that indigenous media should pander, albeit carefully, to the stereotypical expectations of non-Native audiences, emphasizing the “harmonious,” “natural,” and “innocent” aspects of Native life in order to promote “a people’s general public appeal.” While there might be some strategic value to this cautious approach, the most interesting Native filmmakers, like Masayesa, Zacharias Kunuk, or Shelly Niro, have challenged mainstream assumptions in the way that Bowman seems to do in Navajo Talking Picture. To understand the merits of a more confrontational approach to intercultural communication, and to shed some light on the relationship between Native filmmakers and their audiences, in this chapter I will look at the powerful responses to Bowman’s film. I do so with some caution, painfully aware that we can never know what viewers have made of any single film. Indeed, I have little in common with the communication scholars who look for survey data to tell a neat story about the reception of a particular text, because I prefer to use a more humanistic methodology with its roots in literary criticism. To better explain my own approach to the subject of reception, let me provide some background that I hope will be helpful.
What makes audience research so difficult is the sheer multiplicity of interpretations that even a single individual could formulate, let alone two separate people with wildly divergent backgrounds. As the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein once said with considerable understatement, “a Czar soldier may not respond to images the same way that a peasant might.” This insight is nearly a century old, yet we still know relatively little about the infinitely varied reactions of soldier, peasant, or anyone else staring at a screen in the dark. In 1988 Ann Kaplan complained that we “need to know more about how the actual, concrete individuals ‘read’ films in concrete historical contexts.” Twenty years later, in an excellent article on the reception of Ken Burns’s Jazz, film scholar Hector Amaya offered the same lament when he noted that “only a small fraction of the work done on documentary has investigated actual interpretations by viewers.”
Indeed, accounting for audience behavior remains one of the great puzzles of cinema studies, one that has challenged scholars in film studies, sociology, communication, cultural studies, and other fields at least since the 1940’s. Working in the wake of the Second World War, scholars initially took a deterministic view of the problem, believing that audiences were like gentle sheep that were led by a “culture industry” wielding the power of a well-chosen image—it was a propaganda model that left little room for agency in the audience. During the same postwar decades, other scholars examined media “effects” on audiences, in an effort to show that passive spectators were ingesting harmful information. In either case, viewers were regarded as docile creatures with little mind of their own.
All of this began to change in the 1970’s. With the influence of a new cultural studies movement in the UK, the gentle sheep in the audience began to look more like foxes who could take care of themselves. Following the work of Stuart Hall, media scholars began exploring the possibilities of an “active spectator” who could resist ideological pressures with various sorts of oppositional readings—someone, in other words, who could say “no” to propaganda. A further twist was added in the 1990s, when Henry Jenkins and other scholars began to examine how these active spectators could unite under the banner of “fandom,” experiencing Star Wars or The X-Files well beyond the confines of dominant ideologies. As scholars with an interest in ethnography stopped conjuring an ideal spectator and talked to actual people, they began to see how audiences came together in “interpretive communities” (such as a Trekkie convention or a fan website) that could transform the viewing experience. Yet these new studies also revealed previously neglected fissures among audiences, which were often divided along racial, gender, national, or class lines in ways that have occupied media scholars ever since. If a bibliography of audience research could list well over a thousand entries in 1983, such a book today would need to survey thousands of books and articles representing many fields, many approaches, with the question of audience differentiation now at the fore. As film scholar Susan Hayward has noted, “studies of viewer-reception, initiated in television studies, have pointed to the eclecticism of viewers and acknowledged the difference in readings of the film depending on class, age, race, creed, sexuality, gender, and nationality.
Although race is now widely acknowledged as a significant element in spectatorship, it was painfully slow to emerge. In a 1988 rebuke to what he calls the “color-blind” studies of spectatorship that circulated widely in the 1980’s, Manthia Diawara became one of the first film scholars to explore the intersection of race and reception, and to do so in a manner that emphasized the variety of social and historical experiences that viewers might bring to the cinema. In describing how “black spectatorship may circumvent identification and resist persuasive elements of Hollywood narrative,” Diawara celebrated the “resisting spectator” who reads against the grain of dominant culture, thwarting any simplistic scheme of identification. With an analysis of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) that foregrounds his own responses as a person of color, Diawara demonstrated the problem with imagining a monolithic audience that responds to an “archetypical Hollywood text” in a manner that conforms to the dominant culture’s expectations. In other words, Griffith may have encoded his racist depiction of Reconstruction in a way that linked blackness with animalistic malevolence, but black spectators, among others so inclined, could refuse to play along. Although many scholars have continued Diawara’s line of inquiry, none have done so in the realm of indigenous media. As a result, similar work remains to be done in regard to Native American films, images, and audiences, and I hope that this chapter about the responses of my former students at the University of Oklahoma is a small step in that direction.
What should be apparent in this brief survey of reception studies is just how many variables are at work. Who is viewing the film? What is their age, race, gender, religion, class and educational background? What degree of media literacy do they possess? What is the setting of the viewing experience? Are they watching the film for a class of for personal enjoyment? If for a class, does the instructor frame the film in a way that makes some interpretations more likely than other? And finally, what is the best way to document these responses? Interviews? Ethnographic observation? Quantitative data? Written sources such as reviews or fan mail? As these questions may indicate, coming up with a methodology for audience research is a formidable task with uncertain end.
According to film scholar Carl Plantinga, “Estimations of the actual historical actions and interpretations of audiences will always be somewhat speculative, unless one limits oneself to self-reports, the empirical observations possible through viewing audience behavior or measuring physiological response, or the measurement of heart rates and facial expressions.” What I have to offer is far more impressionistic, though well within the more humanistic strains of audience research that rely on interpretations more than quantification. I have no intros in heart rates except as a metaphor for audience excitement, nor am I comfortable probing too far into the psychology of my students. And I am dealing with a film that does not have numerous published reviews, fan fiction, fan letters, or other texts that might illuminate its reception. However, I do know certain things about my students that seem to reflect the time and place in which I was sharing Navajo Talking Picture with them.
