Seminars

If Indigenous people were represented as primitive and anti-modern, as mostly savage or docile at best, then white civilization required their removal and dispossession to properly settle the United States. Western movies reaffirmed these myths of conquest to solidify for white viewers their rightful place in America. If a western was about good triumphing over evil, then white cowboys conquering Indians helped to maintain a national story that safely contained settlement to the past. But for Native people colonization was very much a part of their present. How did Native actors in Westerns engage with the myths of conquest? How does a cultural history of Native entertainment and activism from the mid-twentieth century contribute to current understandings of settler colonialism and Indigenous acts of resistance? This talk presents stories of survivance by Native entertainers whose lives on and off screen, I argue, provide us with some responses to these questions.

As if anticipating this Columbia seminar, The Harvard Film Archive is just concluding its first series of the new academic year: “‘The Cold Heart is More Precious than Diamonds’: The Cinema of Graham Greene.” Since August 21 the archive has been screening a good sample of the thirty-six films based on his books. A few miles away at Boston College, one can consult an enormous collection of Greene’s materials. Another cache, even larger, is at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin Texas. I’ve spent time in both archives, though not yet at Georgetown, nor in London where additional letters and ephemera can be found, a portion of which deal with his involvement in the cinema. This topic has generated three books and countless articles. My concern is more general than most. By looking at Greene’s output and statements, I ask questions about the way subjectivity is constructed in film as opposed to fiction; about the ratio of description to narration obtaining in each art form or of direct dialogue to first-person witnessing, and so forth. But I am even more attuned to the specific historical situations that helped propel his way of writing, including his themes and stylistic strategies. These, it turns out, go far beyond him, though he is special because, although a free-wheeling international intellectual, his knowledge of both publishing and filmmaking was detailed and practical. Graham Greene exemplifies what André Bazin claimed was the postwar cultural relay race, in which film and literature passed a baton back and forth. I mention Bazin because he dominated the noisy discussions about the relation of film to literature at mid-century, just when Greene’s The Third Man won the Palme d’Or and just as he was writing the most personally important and experimental of his novels, The End of the Affair. Crossing paths in 1949, these two Catholic, quasi-existentialist leftists, bore witness to one another’s projects. At stake for both men was the development of a sophisticated culture, literate and cine-literate, able to experience and respond to a novel like The End of the Affair because they had learned to experience, if not relish, the ambiguities posed by modernist films.