Film Makers' Reflections…on the production of the American Indian Artists series

FILM MAKERS' REFLECTIONS

American Indian Artists series An icy wind blows corn-kernel hard snow against our cheeks. The stuff piles up, creating a white outline on the brown adobe walls of the Taos Pueblo. Its stacked cubicles are barely visible, their round wooden beams poking out evenly beneath the roof lines. There is no sky, no horizon, just the horizontal blowing snow blurring the buildings in a limbo of white. A lone figure, hunched, blanket-wrapped, appears from a narrow passageway carrying two metal pails. Her skirt glides effortlessly across the snow. She dips the buckets into a prehistoric stream that runs through the Pueblo and disappears again into the ancient building. The hundreds of tiny rooms are suddenly alive with unseen people, their presence given away by the one old woman re-enacting an ancient ritual going for water.

The viewfinder of the Arriflex camera is fogging up and the battery belt is quickly losing its charge in the cold. We fold the tripod and high-step through the snow drifts. The first 500 feet of film for the American Indian Artists series looks good. Forty-nine thousand five hundred feet to go.

CREDITS and ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

American Indian Artists Film Series: Jack Peter-son, executive producer; Tony Schmitz, Director; Don Cirillo, cinematographer. Narration by Rod McKuen, Poetry by James McGrath.

Special acknowledgement to Carolyn Kowalski, Public Information director for KAET, our principal liaison contact.

All KAET photographs not otherwise credited by Alton Walpole.

Editor's Note: The poetry complementing our text is excerpted in part from the film series, and, because we deem it worthy of special merit we present a very brief introduction to its creator James McGrath.

Jim McGrath is a former Director of Art, Institute of American Indian Art, Santa Fe, N.M. Currently Arts and Crafts Coordinator for the Dependent Schools in the Pacific Area, for the Air Force. Resides in Japan. While Director at the Institute, McGrath taught with Scholder and Houser. McGrath is not only a poet, but a painter and sculptor in his own right, having exhibited extensively in the U.S. and Far East.

McGrath knows all the artists personally. His attachment to the series was happenstance. While filming Loloma, the crew was having trouble with the narration necessary for the Hopi religious ceremonies. McGrath happened to be at the filming location, asked if he could try writing something that would help. The first poem was born, and McGrath did the rest in his perceptive, sensitive style.

By Tony Schmitz, Director

Productions of this sort begin long before the first foot of film runs through the camera. In 1973 Jack Peterson, producer at KAET the public television station in Phoenix located on the campus of Arizona State University - obtained a small grant from the Scottsdale National Indian Arts Council to do a documentary on Charles Loloma, the Hopi jeweler. Additional funds were provided by the Friends of Channel 8, the station's community membership group, and the production was completed in October; it aired nationally over the Public Broadcasting Service in April of 1974. Jack then submitted a proposal to do a series on five other American Indian artists and was awarded the grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The idea was to expose to a national audience the art of Native Americans, not as it has been romanticized by many as “quaint folk art from that colorful minority in the Southwest,” but as the product of individuals whose Indian heritage has inspired their art with new visions of the Indian experience.

With the advice of Paul Huldermann and the aid of Adair Jackman of the Scottsdale National Indian Arts Council, Jack narrowed a list of 120 potential subjects to those who are exemplars of this new Indian art: Fritz Scholder, Mission Indian, painter; Allan Houser, Apache, sculptor; R. C. Gorman, Navajo, painter; Joseph Lonewolf and Grace Medicine Flower, Santa Clara, potters; and Helen Hardin, Santa Clara, painter. Though each of these artists enjoys an ever-widening reputation in the world of art, most people know them only by their work. A few have seen them over cocktails at gallery openings, fewer have talked with them at length, and only a handful have intruded into those private moments when they are at work. What motivates and inspires them? How do they feel about themselves as Indians, as artists? How do they analyze their own work? Where do their images come from? We will seek the answers in 200,000 pictures. It is the unique quality of film to create feelings and impressions, an experience, out of a succession of words and pictures. Etched into the chemistry of thousands of tiny frames will be fragments from the lives of these artists. These pictures will flash onto a screen 24 times a second for half an hour. The writers, Christopher Hoy, Don Cirillo, and me, will have spent hundreds of hours deciding in what sequence these frames should occur. The editor, Jerry Hartleben, will look at the 10,000 feet of film shot on each artist a foot at a time, a frame at a time, and splice them together, selecting sounds to go with each picture. At times there will be four sound tracks running simultaneously: Allan Houser's chisel on stone, the voice of Rod McKuen, the music of Ron LoPresti, the New Mexico wind beating on the windows of Allan's studio. By the time the series is finished, five people will have traveled 9000 miles, exposed 50,000 feet of film, recorded 45 hours of sound.

Michael Becker, the soundman, will have pointed his microphone at the rattling of train wheels in Gallup, the tinkling of cocktail glasses in Aspen, the whistling of wind in a creosote bush, the jangling of bells on dancers' feet in the Santa Clara Corn Dance. Don Cirillo, cinematographer, will have set up and taken down his Arriflex countless times, cleaned the lenses, blown the dust from its casing, and listened for the slightest moan of discomfort from its precision-tooled innards. The camera's shutter will open and close 24 times a second for hundreds of hours, imprinting a memory of a moment in time on each passing frame. The camera's manylayered glass eye will see Fritz Scholder slash at 48 square feet of canvas, Allan Houser send the first chip flying from a 600pound block of marble, R. C. Gorman lay down the fluid charcoal outline of his Navajo model and call for his midmorning daiquiri. It will see Joseph Lonewolf and Grace Medicine Flower etch minute pottery designs with sharpened tenpenny nails, Helen Hardin carefully put down with a compass the first line of her painting, and Charles Loloma drive off into the sunset in his yellow Jaguar. Yet there are moments that go unseen by the camera the countless happenings lost but for the memories of the crew.

Jack Peterson will remember the powwow on Puye Cliffs, the ancestral home of the people from the Santa Clara Pueblo. Every July the Santa Clara return to the great open plaza amid the ruins of Puye, and surrounded by its crumbling walls they dance to drumbeat rhythms and turtle-shell rattles that echoed there as long ago as A.D. 1200. We wanted to shoot these dances as a climactic scene to the Helen Hardin film. Jack had written months earlier to the tribal chairman for clearance, but final permission was in the hands of the leaders of the individual dance groups. While the dancers cinched bells around their ankles and dusted their bodies with corn meal we completed our own ritual of putting on the battery belt and hooking up the camera and recorder cables. The Corn Dance was twenty minutes away and still no word on permission to film. The noon July sun highlighted the hundreds of multicolored umbrellas used by the Indian spectators as they sat in alumi-num patio chairs amid the decaying adobe walls. A mist of dust stirred up by the throng of tourists wafted through the empty dance plaza. Accompanied by Camilio Sunflower Tafoya, father of Joseph Lonewolf, Jack approached the chair-man and the dance leader in the shade of a two-story ruin. He introduced himself but was quickly interrupted by Camilio who spoke Tewa. The chairman remained motionless, looking impassively out into the empty plaza, while Camilio talked for a long time. The dance leader took up the clipped sing-song Tewa speech. Paul Speckled Rock, son-in-law to Joseph Lone-wolf, tried a few sentences. The dance leader turned to Tsasah-weeh (Helen Hardin) and questioned her deeply. All five were now shaking their heads negatively. Jack made little designs in the dust with his shoe and wondered if Chris Hoy would mind rewriting the script without the Corn Dance. The chair-man interrupted. Camilio grunted. No expression changed. The conference began again in earnest. It was interminable and incomprehensible. Then it stopped. Jack's mind quickly returned from Phoenix where it was rewriting scripts and travel orders. Camilio addressed him in English. "You make film with sound," he said. "All O.K. The dance is gift from the Santa Clara people."

The Pueblo peoples cling tenaciously to their old traditions - the dances, the songs, the ritual garments. They protect their mysteries, knowing that to share them too openly is to expose them into the poking and probing of insensitive minds, the nit-picking vivisection that drains the lifeblood from things held sacred. Their mysteries are the glue that holds together a culture and generations being pulled painfully apart by integration.

Charles Loloma, the Hopi jeweler, taught us our first lesson as filmmakers in the meaning of things sacred. We planned for a scene in which Charles would be planting corn in his small sandy plot below the village of Hotevilla. On the morning of the shoot Charles told us we could show him walking in his field but not planting corn. We were exasperated. What in the world was wrong with showing someone putting kernels of corn into the ground? It was not until some time later, after the film was complete, that we came to a small understanding and respect for the Hopi Way.

The Hopi villages have perched atop the high rocky mesas of northeastern Arizona since long before the coming of the Spaniards. The people live in a precarious balance of nature where water is scarce and the sandy fields move about at the whim of the wind. By some miracle the Hopi have been able to grow corn in a soil that seems barely able to support the driest of desert bushes. The Hopi live by the life their corn gives them, revering it as their Corn Mother. They sprinkle corn meal about them when they dance, asking the Long Hair Kachinas (clouds) to come from the mountains and drape their hair along the ground, leaving moisture. The corn kernels sprout deep in the dark-damp of the soil and new life is given to the Hopi for another year. Thus the very act of planting is sacred. The Hopi have woven a rich fabric of ceremony around the mysteries of water and wind and sprouting life a cloak in which they wrap themselves and hold tight in their villages, waiting for others to find what may be sacred to them.

But there are Indians caught in the cold whirlwinds of change who have not been able to insulate themselves in their mysteries. On a blustery March day we drove the streets of Gallup, New Mexico to film them. Gallup is the nearest large town to the sprawling Navajo reservation to the northwest. It has for many years been the center of trade for the Indians who have come to barter blankets and jewelry for groceries and pickup trucks. Two great arteries of Anglo culture pulse through the town, Highway 66 and the Santa Fe railroad, throbbing with the rumble of diesel engines, air horns, eighteen-wheel rigs, and the ever-present tourist RVs bound for Cali-fornia. In the abrasive grit of Gallup two cultures are grinding past one another, and in the parking lots, beside the railroad tracks, in the alleys, and staggering from the bars are those who have been spun out by the grinding wheels. This is an Indian Harlem.

We were accompanying Fritz Scholder who also comes to Gallup with his camera. He focuses on an Indian holding a can of Coors, another leaning against a pawnshop doorway, still another simply stopped uncertainly in the sidewalk, swaying off balance in the swirling crowd of tourists and traffic. Fritz's Kodachrome frames freeze them against an alien background, and he will later splash them against his own canvas backgrounds of purple, orange and pink. Scholder's Indians are often disfigured, distorted no noble savages in a setting of mythical buffalo and symbolic kachinas. Scholder's landscapes are cityscapes where spirits live in liquor bottles and the Indian is a monster. Many of his canvases hold up dead Indians in front of all who expect Indian art to be a docile reassurance that these first Americans are a thriving subculture. Says Fritz, "I have painted the Indian real, not red." Our cameras look for the "real" ones. The day is suitable gray, the low March sun throwing a cold half-light through the overcast. The trucks belch dark diesel fuel as they accelerate from the stoplights, and Indians wait at the crossings for the long freights to lurch by. Within our frame lines are the hapless ones, stumbling along the sidewalks, lying beside the tracks. The camera's eye is selective. Outside its limited vision is a whole Navajo nation rising in power, pride and self-respect. But that is another artist, another film.

Came to Santa Fe to be in the film. She sat by a window in her flowered cotton dress, and looking down at her hands, she sang an Apache love song from Fort Sill. Her voice was high and strong; there was no uncertainty as she wove together notes long familiar to her. To our unaccustomed ears the song seemed to be all vowels except for twice when we heard an unmistakable "Fort Sill." The camera whirred softly, the strength in Blossom's voice filled the room, and her modesty gave us the feeling we were intruders into a past held sacred and dear, a past to be shared only by those who had been there. Later in Allan's studio we shared another private time, those intense moments when the artist's energy gathers momentum to strike the first blow. Allan had selected a massive stone, 600 pounds of marble from Colorado. Allan is a fighter (his mother showed us a picture of Allan as a young man posed proudly with boxing gloves) and he would have a worthy adversary for this film. The roller track bowed under the weight of the stone as Allan and two of his sons, Bob and Phillip, forced it along to the pedestal in the studio. Allan strode around it, passing a large hand slowly, almost delicately, along a smooth side of the stone, like a matador might visit the pen and touch the flank of the bull he will fight. "Isn't this a beautiful stone?" A glimmer of a smile passed in his eyes, a kind of boyish anticipation before a good scrap. Don Cirillo, who did double duty on this film as director/cinematographer, readied his camera and signaled Allan to begin. Allan put on his goggles and gloves and gripped his mallet. I nestled a high-speed camera on my shoulder. Allan's mallet rose and fell onto the head of the chisel. A marble chip shot away and struck the window. I was startled as I pressed the trigger and the highspeed camera screamed in my ears at 400 frames a second. The sharp-edged fragments stung our arms as Allan whacked at the stone. There was an image within the stone and Allan would punch and jab and tear away everything that resisted its realization. It was a battle that Allan would win.

If there is a testimony to the triumph of the Indian spirit, it is in the person Allan Houser, an Apache whose heritage is read on the pages of history books. Allan's father, Sam Haozous, was an interpreter for Geronimo, the renegade leader of the Chiricahua Apache who violently resisted the government's attempts to settle his people. Allan's mother, Blossom, still lives near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where many Apache eventually located on federal alloted land in the early 1900s. Blossom has vivid memories of those days, and she willingly