Le lieu de la rupture, ici, se voit déplacé : s'il faut rompre, en cinéma autochtone, ce n'est pas avec ses propres prédécesseurs, comme l'ont fait Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et Agnes Varda. ...Des cinéastes tels Barnaby, Freeland et Grace peuvent ainsi s'appuyer sur le travail d'ouvreurs de sentiers tels le réalisateur māori Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, en traduction française, Nous étions guerriers, 1994), le réalisateur cheyenne et arapaho Chris Eyre (Smoke Signals, 1998)9, ainsi que des précurseurs incontournables tels Barclay, en Aotearoa, Nouvelle-Zélande, et la documentariste abénaquise Alanis Obomsawin, figure de proue du cinéma autochtone au Canada. Dans un récent document interne sur le cinéma autochtone en son sein, l'Office national du film (ONF), cet important producteur et diffuseur public d'œuvres audiovisuelles au Canada, explique que pour « comprendre la situation actuelle des cinéastes autochtones a l'ONF », il faut l'envisager a partir des « anciennes politiques gouvernementales visant explicitement a éliminer toute culture autochtone de la société canadienne10 ». Elle est également sous-tendue par le désir de proposer un storytelling, un art de raconter, issu des peuples autochtones, déterminé par ces derniers tant au niveau de la forme et du contenu cinématographique que dans le processus de production, de réalisation et de diffusion de ces œuvres.
Because my parents had run pell-mell across a Saigon tarmac in 1975, with me and little else in hand, I grew up on loss so engulfing I could never bear to uproot again. By that token, the global ...present is asplinter with timelines sent careening-by atom bomb or Agent Orange, slave traders or carpet bombing-through end times. In the former, the "majority of the world's nations have disintegrated, yet 'Britain soldiers on,' spurring mass populations to seek asylum there" (J. Brown 126). Children of Men visually references, through depiction of "cages and internment camps," "the hundreds of detention centers that spread across Europe, set up to indefinitely detain immigrants and asylum seekers from the global south" (126).
This article examines how “colonial time” is called into question in two short films of the National Film Board of Canada’s series Souvenir, from 2015. The question of time lies at the heart of this ...series, for which the NFB commissioned contemporary Indigenous filmmakers to take up their archives of visual material on Indigenous peoples. The colonial temporal framework is at work in the vast archives of ethnographic and documentary film and photography on Indigenous peoples dating back to the early twentieth century, in which Indigenous people are often represented as part of “vanishing” cultures. Thus, in this article, I underscore the temporal interruptions that occur when ethnographic visual material of Indigenous peoples is put into the hands of contemporary Indigenous artists. I focus first on what it means to repurpose dehumanizing colonial archives and ask whether visual sovereignty is in fact possible within the archives. By analyzing the reappropriation of archival footage in the short films Mobilize by Caroline Monnet and Etlinisigu’niet ( Bleed Down) by Jeff Barnaby, I elucidate how the filmmakers break with modes of colonial time through what I propose to call “reframings” that offer alternative ways of conceiving of time. By rehabilitating ethnographic images, these filmmakers refuse to project the material into the distant past and complicate the readability of Indigenous images in the archives, revealing how the reappropriation of old images can be just as powerful as the production of new ones.
The Wet'suweten struggle against the Coastal GasLink construction of a fracked gas pipeline, a struggle to protect the land and its relations as well as to uphold sovereignty over that unceded ...territory, is a particularly vivid instance of the tension between financial futures and the role that the neoliberal state plays in securing those futures, on the one hand, and the alternative futures pursued by Indigenous peoples and their allies on the other. The 1997 Delgamuukw decision, the basis for the long overdue negotiations between the Wet'suwet'en and the federal and provincial governments, still gives the state the power to assert sovereignty over Indigenous land for a "substantial legislative objective" such as "the general economic development of the interior of British Columbia," according to one interpretation of the Supreme Court Ruling (James Tully, qtd. in Coulthard, "Subjects" 451). ...if fictionality is about practising speculation to contend with capitalism and imperialism, the speculative quality of sf at least potentially heads in another direction-speculation about how and what might lead beyond the social, cultural, political ills that attend the violent subjection of Indigenous and racialized bodies for whom the legacies of colonialism, together with the effects of the current conjuncture, have been especially destructive. The kind of comparative work across Indigenous and Black speculation that we undertake in this issue also strives to address the challenge of comparing across the differences between "stolen land and stolen labor" that Mark Rifkin identifies (Fictions 1)-differences that we frame, in speculative terms, as those between the experiences of alien invasion and alien abduction.
Recent Indigenous boarding school movies have emphasized representations of surveillance together with the “living dead” as a central motif. After a brief review of surveillance in Indian education, ...this essay examines a cycle of films—The Only Good Indian (2009), Savage (2009), The Dead Can’t Dance (2010), Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), and SNIP (2016)—wherein the practices and technologies of surveillance mediate a dynamic interplay between settler educational institutions and the Native runaway or truant. These films converge a popular undead motif with this longstanding genre figure of resistance by Native/First Nations children to settler systems of administration, drawing on its literary formation that extends back to the first Indigenous writing on federal Indian education. Within this larger field of what we may call Indigenous surveillance cinema, discourses of bureaucratic rationality frame the figure of the truant. These films articulate the ways that representational practices ranging from literacy to cinema uphold systems of identification by which administrative surveillance of Indigenous people continues. Cinematic representations of the supervision of Indigenous bodies recall settler-colonialism’s mobilization of an array of early surveillance technologies for the assimilation of Native children. In this context, the watchful eye of the teacher—a proxy for administrative media—suggests a deeper embedding in settler systems of control. A visual poetics of truancy emerges in Indigenous surveillance cinema, as the truant figure operates dialectically with settler surveillance. The truant spatializes settler management and surveillance in her desire to escape cultural conversion at the hands of these proliferating technologies of representation.
Rhymes was released two years prior to the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2009-2015), the findings of which established what Indigenous people had known all along: ...that "the central goals of Canada's Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada" (The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 1). Central to this endeavour was the residential school system, which separated over 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children from their families and forced them into these institutions, which banned all Indigenous cultural practices and sought to replace them with, in the words of Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, "habits and modes of thought of white men" (qtd. in The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2). ...I highlight a more abject but important set of (re)mappings that subvert the legal, economic, and religious apparatuses designed to contain Indigenous peoples and the threat their presence poses to the stability of the colonial state and its claims to dominion. ...I illustrate how the (re)mapping effects of art and bodily disorder converge in the film's climax with a culminating act of anticolonial vengeance.
"Reading Nanook's Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)" puts ethnography and cinematic representations of Native Americans in crucial ...dialogue with the work of contemporary indigenous filmmakers. The author explores what it means for indigenous people "to laugh at the camera" as a tactic of what she calls "visual sovereignty," to confront the spectator with the often absurd assumptions that circulate around visual representations of Native Americans, while also flagging their involvement and, to some degree, complicity in these often disempowering structures of cinematic dominance and stereotype. She employs Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) (2000), the first full-length feature film directed by an Inuit, Zacharias Kunuk, and produced by Igloolik Isuma Productions, Inc., a collaborative, majority Inuit production company, as her primary context for analysis to examine the ways this film is embedded within discourses about Arctic peoples that cannot be severed from the larger web of hegemonic discourses of ethnography. She does this first by discussing the pervasive images of Native Americans in ethnographic films and then by theorizing the ways that Atanarjuat intervenes into visual sovereignty as a film that successfully addresses a dual Inuit and non-Inuit audience for two different aims. More specifically, she interrogates how the Atanarjuat filmmakers strategically adjust and reframe the registers on which Inuit epistemes are considered with the twin, but not necessarily conflicting, aims of operating in the service of their home communities and forcing viewers to reconsider mass-mediated images of the Arctic.
The past few times that I have taught my course on religion and film I have included a number of Indigenous movies. The response from students has been entirely positive, in part because most of them ...have rarely encountered Indigenous cultural products of any kind, especially contemporary ones. Students also respond well to the way in which many of these films use notions of the monstrous to explore, and explode, colonial myths. Goldstone, for example, by Kamilaroi filmmaker Ivan Sen, draws on noir tropes to peel back the smiling masks of the people responsible for the mining town's success, revealing their underlying monstrosity. Similarly, Mi'gmaq Jeff Barnaby's debut feature Rhymes for Young Ghouls makes cinematic allusions to 1970s horror films in its depiction of the residential school system. In this paper, I will draw on these examples to discuss how examination of the monstrous in Indigenous films can help us to introduce students to the ideological power of myth, specifically in relation to colonialism.KeywordsMonster, Indigenous, Horror, Noir, Pedagogy, Myth, Parable, Colonialism
This paper draws on “reintegrative shame” (engaging the offender(s) in discussions of the moral dimensions of the act), and scholars who position shame as transformative. This paper reasserts shame ...as an ethical matter arguing that reconciliation is a particular response to the historical shame generated from the establishment of the Indian Residential Schools in Canada. What would it mean to conceive of education as a site for working through shame? If we find a way to acknowledge our settler-shame, what might a responsible way of acting on it be? This paper considers these questions to present evidence for the importance of education as a space for making shame a social, ethical, and pedagogical project.
Canadian Movies at Fantasia Hanley, David
Offscreen,
04/2020, Letnik:
24, Številka:
4
Trade Publication Article
...in 1997, for its second season, they added an international section, featuring a selection of new and vintage genre films, mostly horror, from around the world. Another was Ripper: Letter from ...Hell, a Canadian-British co-production shot in Victoria, B.C. This is a slasher film which has earned something of a cult following due to the length and extreme detail of the sequences featuring its series of gory murders. ...maybe it wasn’t the nuttiest, since the festival also screened The Night They Returned, which features cannibalism, radiated body parts returning to life, death metal, and a fair amount of nudity. Made with the help of the Feature Film Project, an organization masterminded by (among others) Canadian movie luminaries John Paisz and Guy Maddin, the film had a higher than usual profile than the typical English Canadian Fantasia entry and there were hopes of it becoming a sleeper hit.
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