A Lakota warrior gets her due at the opening of the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival.
In 1975, a BBC reporter visited South Dakota’s We Will Remember Survival School, created by the American Indian Movement (AIM) to reacquaint Indigenous youths with a culture that was erased in the state education system.
Interviewing founder Madonna Thunder Hawk about the Survival School curriculum of “natural resources, legal rights, and spirituality”, the skeptical Brit journalist protested: “But aren’t you making these children more Indian? Aren’t you making them less able to fit in?”
With a withering glance, Thunder Hawk snapped back: “Yeah, you bet!”
Coming about six minutes into Warrior Women, this tattered old film clip offers an uproarious introduction to a figure who is little known yet central to the rousing account of Indigenous radicalism that follows.
“Every once in a while, you get to see what I like to call the ‘face-melting Madonna’,” says codirector Elizabeth A. Castle, calling the Georgia Straight from Ohio. “It just reminds you that, you know, she has a presence.”
That presence will certainly linger with anyone who catches Warrior Women when it opens the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival at the Vancity Theatre on Tuesday (March 5)—even if the Lakota activist was, initially, a somewhat reluctant participant in the project. “She has little tolerance for agenda seekers or career builders when so much is on the line,” Castle says. “There’s a reason we don’t call it Thunder Hawk.”
Still, her utility to the filmmaker is obvious. As Castle says: “Someone once called her the Forrest Gump of Red Power. You name it, she was there.”
Directed with Christina D. King, Warrior Women marries archival footage with contemporary interviews to explore the role of women in some of Red Power’s most historic actions, from AIM’S 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island to the Women of All Red Nations’ successful expulsion of uranium-mining operations from the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1980.
As noted on-camera, it was “the first cowboys-and-indians alliance in the history of South Dakota”—a particularly poignant statement given the tales we hear of gang rape at the hands of white ranchers decades earlier in the same state and the vigilante ambush a young Thunder Hawk organized to decisively end an epidemic of sexual violence that the police ignored.
Even amid these tales of abuse, government attack, and cultural genocide, Warrior Women imparts an irresistible sense of joy. Thunder Hawk’s endeavours consumed her entire adult life—the film catches her still swinging away at Standing Rock in 2016—and it impacted her relationship with daughter, Marcy. But the film finds Thunder Hawk and her relatives cracking up over their frequently dangerous exploits.
“Of course, these women have very serious trauma that they carry with them,” Castle says. “But they think of that period in their lives as the most shimmering, empowered period, where they thought anything was possible. It’s scary, but what human being doesn’t want to have a purpose? And one that’s super in-your-face?”
There is, in fact, a lot of subtext that Warrior Women necessarily elides, partly to maintain the film’s focus. In her other life, Castle is a historian whose initial student work, under the supervision of political activist Angela Davis, was a comparative study of women inside the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. (A subject that was met with “laughter” when she took it to Cambridge. “They said, ‘That’s not history; that’s five angry women in a room.’ ”)
If it was depressingly common for the radical groups of the ’60s and ’70s to adopt patriarchal power structures, Castle also allows that “people were actively trying to change both policy but also social attitudes, and quite often their rhetoric about women and equality was way ahead of their actual daily behaviour.”
In any case, if Warrior Women is designed to redress a lopsided view of history, spiked with what the filmmakers call “the swagger of unapologetic Indianness”, then it can be considered a conclusive success. As we hear from one of the film’s rare male voices: “If you want good words, invite the men. But if you want something done, bring the women.” g The Vancouver International Women in Film Festival runs from Tuesday (March 5) to next Sunday (March 10) at the Vancity Theatre.
d THERE ARE now only two survivors of the nouvelle vague movement of the late 1950s, and at 90, Agnès Varda has seniority. Jean-luc Godard, two years younger, probably reached his upstart peak with 1960’s Breathless—still a film-school staple and a reference point even for people who’ve never seen it. His disruptive jump cuts and other dissociating tricks became so common, those early films probably don’t look revolutionary anymore, while the more humanistic films of junior partner François Truffaut have continued to attract new fans.
Godard’s “approachable” period ended with his 1968 dalliance with the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. The Swiss-french director subsequently created an idiosyncratic vocabulary that dropped standard narrative approaches—and bankable stars—in favour of bold-faced sloganeering subverted by playful nose-tweaking. His convoluted polemics have since spoken to a steadily narrowing
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from page 30 audience, but he certainly never lost interest in the act of viewing.
As suggested by its title, The Image Book is a Youtube-like compendium of moments stolen from movies that have affected him personally while influencing the course of cinema and—he would argue—perceptions of society itself. Snippets of L’atalante and Vertigo are butted up against Buster Keaton, the apocalyptic noir of Kiss Me Deadly, and Pasolini’s porntastic Salò. Godard, who also narrates, blends in newsreel footage of Algerian War torture and ISIS executions, plus a lengthy excerpt of an Egyptian movie, all held together, sort of, by bits of Bach, Prokofiev, and other unrelated music, as well as purposely nonsynchronized sound.
Ultimately, it’s not exactly clear whether he means to assert the movies’ power to mitigate human cruelty or that they abet it. Further complicating things in this challenging 84 minutes are his seemingly random format changes and manipulation of iconic images toward their harshest, primary-coloured elements—as if he just got new software and just had to push it to the max. Indeed, a long disquisition on hands suggests the primacy (and privacy) of the editing booth over the camera.
By the way, Varda also has a clip show in the works: a narrated retrospective of her long career. She’s been very hands-on as well, and is currently waving, not drowning.