Histoire, légende, imaginaire : nouvelles études sur le western
| , ,Framing Otherness in The Iron Horse and Little Big Man
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« I’ve killed more Indians than Custer. »
John Ford in Peck SM124.
« Indians are altogether different from anybody you ever knew. »
Jack in Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man, p. 31.
- 1 B. Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston”, in H. LGates, (...)
- 2 H. L. Gates, Jr., ibid., p. 2.
- 3 M. L. Pratt, “A Reply to Harold Fromm”, in H. L. Gates, Jr., ibid., p. 401.
1Both Ford’s 1924 The Iron Horse and Penn’s 1970 Little Big Man function as commentaries on what Barbara Johnson calls “[t]hresholds of Difference” in her 1985 eponymous essay and “the dynamics of an encounter between an inside and an outside, any attempt to make a statement about difference.”1 Otherness and its variations are of course to be variously defined in—sometimes—contradictory ways in the context of these specific Westerns, just as “inside” is opposed to “outside”. For all these notions to interact and literally make sense in relation to the Anglo-American norm, some instance of threshold figure mediating between two cultures and environments is needed. In this respect, Ford and Penn’s mediators (the most obvious ones being Davy and Jack) point at and elicit complex levels of figurations of the inside/outside conflict as they are themselves reversible variables, constantly changing sides, racial backgrounds and costumes, and at times, for some, even genders. The main protagonists assume a range of identities undercutting established ideas and set roles of white colonizers and savage Indians, males and females. As a direct consequence, they render race, gender and other forms of Otherness highly visible, no longer “a persistent yet implicit presence”,2 and make them more fluid, destabilizing “fixed, naturalized meaning systems around race and other lines of hierarchical differentiation.”3
2In “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Johnson, Pratt and Gates also underline these categories’ constructedness and provide useful tools to explore the way in which, to varying extents, Ford and Penn’s filmic narratives operate as counter-fictions deconstructing the ideas of culturally defined difference at large, and more specifically, of difference inscribed in the trope of a supposedly transcendent and essentialized racial category.
3Focusing on the two films’ representational modes, we will see how the first one constitutes a cinematic blueprint and constructs a peculiar spectrum of Otherness at the beginning of the heyday of the Western, which establishes a certain stereotypical consciousness of race, sex, gender, ethnicity and class. We will also explore how the second movie at the other end of the time period consistently destabilizes the conventional political representation of Native Americans as bloodthirsty savages impeding the Westward expansion which had solidified by the early 1950s.
- 4 H. L. Gates, Jr., ibid., p. 17.
4What kinds of fictions of Otherness do these movies construct and to what extent does race become a major signifier of difference reifying Western characters and interrogating what Gates, Jr. calls “the curious interrelationships between figures for sexual and racial Otherness”?4 And how did this construct, along with other fantasies of difference, come to be toyed with and–to a point–playfully inverted in the revisionist/anti-Western?
Close encounters of a new kind: framing the Others
5In her illuminating article “‘The Cross-Heart People.’ Race and Inheritance in the Silent Western”, Joanna Hearne underlines that,
- 5 J. Hearne, “‘The Cross-Heart People.’Race and Inheritance in the Silent Western,” 2003, p. 182-183.
Hollywood’s silent era did not change the prevailing negative cultural stereotypes about Native Americans, but it did produce a large number of Westerns and documentaries that offered alternative viewpoints influenced by the indigenous writers and filmmakers, reform movements, and racial theories that were widespread at the time.5
6Most of the early “Indian” films were actually shaped by the collective fantasy about Native identity. At a time when a massive influx of European immigrants shaped American society, assimilationist projects flourished such as Native American boarding schools to educate and integrate Indian children according to Euro-American standards. Even in his 1964 “sympathetic” Western Cheyenne Autumn, John Ford recycles the same dominant representational stance when focusing on the Quaker schoolmarm Deborah Wright (Carroll Baker) teaching her Indian pupils how to read and write in English, the colonizer’s language. The Indian language could thus be ironed out into convenient screen constructions, even though it was by no means congruent with Hollywood’s conventional dehumanizing pattern of representing Indians communicating through whoops and animal cries.
- 6 R. Abel, “‘Our Country/Whose Country?’The ‘Americanization’Project of Early Westerns,” 2006, p. 78.
- 7 D. W. Griffith’s The Mended Lute (1909) starring Own Moore as Little Bear and Florence Lawrence as (...)
7As a direct consequence, a whole new ideological discourse of Americanization and social progress which “sought to privilege the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the masculine as dominant in any conception of national identity”6 also impacted the Western genre. And the question of representation was further complexified when white actors in disguise, much like the white Minstrel Shows performers in blackface and impersonating African Americans, started playing at “being Indians” to borrow the title of Alison Griffiths’s article.7
- 8 Ibid., p. 101.
- 9 B. K. Alexander, “‘West of Everything’: Critical Reflections, Remembrances, and Representations of/ (...)
8The habit of casting predominantly whites in Indian parts actually contributed to establishing an array of formal and ideological parameters. These in turn set new ways of seeing Native Americans. The silent short Westerns were an odd mixture of Thomas Edison’s early 20th century film actualities documenting Indian customs and religious ceremonies in short movies usually shown in small nickelodeon theaters, and of formulaic narratives of life on the Frontier featuring the perennial conflict with bloodthirsty savages and the dangers of miscegenation. They exemplified the constructedness of Indianness and various ethnic stereotypes. “[T] hese ethnographic tropes”8 helped construct a type of “authenticity” that was to become the norm for decades, at least until the 1950s first pro-Indian Westerns, and to foster, as critic Bryant Alexander says, “a particular nostalgia of what was and never was−as it relates to the fixities of identities regarding race, sex, gender, class, the hierarchical notions of human rights, the ownership of land/water/bodies and the question of authenticity and the American west”.9 Ford and Penn’s constructed visions of these interrelated elements inform their narrative strategies and seem to stand at opposite ends of the representational spectrum, even though the latter only partially subverts Hollywood’s traditional generic conventions without fully replacing them.
- 10 R. Maltby, “A Better Sense of History—John Ford and the Indians,” in I. A. Cameron et D. Pye, (éd.) (...)
- 11 Ibid., p. 38.
9In “ABetter Sense of History: John Ford and the Indians,” Richard Maltby excoriates the director’s stereotypical iconography and “racist discourse in which racism was offered and enacted as a theory of history”.10 Ford most often frames the Other, whether it be Indians or the various ethnic groups of men and women living on the Frontier, by inscribing a type of iconography which valorizes the whites as the instruments of Manifest Destiny and reduces Native Americans to a threatening presence. In The Iron Horse, he materializes their jeopardy on screen in a way which justifies the violence of the actions taken against them thereafter. So that the conventional pattern of the conflict between civilization and savagery is played out again with variations. Toying with the generic hybridity of Charles Kenyon’s original screenplay, Ford uses the conventions of the Western, melodrama, epic film and romance, and even to some extent, of the documentary, to the fullest to construct a systematically white pattern. In other words, he exploits every narrative, visual and formal device to frame the whites as agents of progress impeded by the savage presence— whether it be lurking or overt. The way in which he inscribes the Indians’s first attack on Davy and his father in the movie is indicative of the constructedness of his vision of the Native Americans at large—one that Maltby identifies as being more akin to mythology than history and actually as being “the history of a mythology which masquerades as history but, like the senator Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, knows itself to be lying.”11
10The change in the music’s tonality with the sound of the flute rising foreshadows the savages’ intrusion: as father and son suddenly gather in fear, the frame is invaded by dark native bodies. The camera first inscribes on screen unattributed body fragments casting ominous shadows on the ground, thus literalizing the phrase faceless enemy and the Natives’ threat. Their radically different Indian identity is materialized by the mocassins and the legs covered in buckskin breeches (here deeply encoded icons) stealthily approaching the camp. These telltale signs of the Others’ invasion offer yet another variation on the stereotype of the treacherous Indians encircling their virtually defenseless white victims at night. They also dramatically invert the historical nature of the jeopardy: vulnerability is now attached to the colonizer desperately trying to save his child and hiding him rather than to the colonized. The final part of the scene is mediated through the white boy’s gaze. At the moment of the “unspeakable thing” of the scalping of the father—an expression Toni Morrison uses to refer to the central traumas of the African American experience—the scene becomes also literally unwatchable for Davy who closes his eyes before fainting. The shot obviously panders to a white mainstream audience’s limited and biased conception of Indian identity, and its direct consequence is to cause the spectator to side with the white character. The camera melodramatically foregrounds Davy’s horrified face thus de facto casting him as the locus of virtue and innocence as opposed to some generic “Indianness” becoming the seat of Evil for a white culture justifying its expansion.
11While it conforms to Hollywood’s stereotypical representational strategy of the Native Americans at the time, Ford’s treatment also displaces their traditionally negative characteristics onto Brandon Sr.’s murderer. The cruelty of the “white man” who’s dressed up as a Cheyenne and stirs up the Indians leading them to attack is compounded by the medium close up of the smiling Cheyenne chief’s as the surveyor is violently put to death and scalped by the fake Indian and the camera frames the tribe members’ brief victorious dance when looting the camp. The visual treatment of the Other is virtually identical to the encoding of the African American characters in Griffith’s Birth of ANation (1915). As the renegade Black soldier stalks young Flora Cameron, the flower of Southern womanhood, he’s captured as an incarnation of Evil fusing with the wilderness and disappearing into the dark frame.
12The brief moment when Brandon Sr. thinks that, as a white man, he can establish some kind of rapport with his counterpart in disguise is a troubling one in The Iron Horse. Whiteness is no longer the norm here. It is actually deliberately erased so that the Indian’s viewpoint may prevail and the white man—metaphorically for Deroux and literally for Brandon—be reduced to something other than a person and put to death. As Richard Dyer underlines in White,
- 12 R. Dyer, White, 1997, p. 1.
As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people. […] Whites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised and abled. At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they are just the human race.12
- 13 Ph. French, Westerns, 1973, p. 53.
13Ironically at this point, Deroux subverts the pattern of the centrality of whiteness as he chooses at times to renege on his original cultural dominance and racial background to appropriate what Philip French calls “the naked power of the symbolic Indian”.13 Already functioning as a Hollywood Indian who’s not a real Indian, Deroux also announces the white-man-who-goes-native prototype encountered in some revisionist Westerns of the 1970s and post-Westerns of the 1990s. Jack Crabb in Little Big Man and Costner’s John Dunbar in 1990 Dances with Wolves are for instance some of its later incarnations. The camera repeatedly frames Deroux’s maimed right hand thus inscribing on screen dysfunction and deviousness. As the figure of the disruptor, some sort of (fake) Indian trickster, Deroux emblematizes an extreme variation on the Frontier experience, radically different from the multi-ethnic crew workers’ on the construction sites along the railroad, whether Chinese, Italian, Irish or else.
14Sergeant Slattery or private Mackay’s Irish ethnicity, Tony’s Italian one or Willy Fung’s Chinese one materialize different styles of pioneering spirit and comic relief in the frame, contrasting with the more mainstream versions of the engineer Jesson and the contractor Marsh. Yet, Ford captures them all at the end coming together in a fitting illustration of Israel Zangwill’s Melting Pot metaphor in his eponymous 1908 play, thus echoing the country’s efforts at the time to assimilate its immigrants according to the dominant Anglo-American models. During the final battle against the Indians on the train, virtually no non-whites are shown coalescing around the common ideal, even though women feature prominently.
Dances with Stereotypes
15In Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin defines the white type of the “man who knows Indians” as follows:
- 14 R. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 1998, p. 16.
As the “man who knows Indians,” the frontier hero stands between the opposed worlds of savagery and civilization, acting sometimes as mediator or interpreter between races and cultures but more often as civilization’s most effective instrument against savagery−a man who knows how to think and fight like an Indian, to turn their own methods against them.14
Engraving of an Apache warrior scalping a U.S. soldier. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ApacheScalpingengraving.jpg

16From this perspective, Deroux proves to be a twisted avatar of the type: he certainly does not act as a mediator and interpreter, and actually precipitates their defeat in the final battle against the workmen and another ethnic band of Native Americans, the « trusted Pawnee ». His dealings with both communities are actually more akin to a series of performances and masquerades. By no means does his portrayal lead to a complex analysis of the interaction between the white and Indian communities and his reasons are clearly inscribed later on in the filmic narrative as being strictly economic. His most interesting dimension is actually the way in which his “portable” identities, and hence interchangeable bodies, are materialized on screen. Essentializing the stereotypical images of the Indian as a ruthless marauder and torturer but also of the devious and murderous white landowner, his strain of Otherness is never fully explained in the filmic narrative. However, it paves the way for a more in-depth treatment of the problem of race, ethnicity and class in the two cultures as the camera tracks him going back and forth between the two worlds and two social categories. His passage between the two societies echoes—and complexifies—the notion of passing (derived from the African American passing for white at the time). But it can precisely work both ways, only because Deroux is originally white, which in itself functions as an indirect reference to the difficulty of the integration and assimilation into a predominantly white society for the minorities in early twentieth century America.
- 15 R. Dyer, White, p. 2.
- 16 K. Nolley, “The Representation of Conquest. John Ford and the Hollywood Indian, 1939- 1964,” 2003, (...)
17Paradoxically then, such passing briefly de-essentializes the notion of race as it becomes—literally and aesthetically—reversible. During the final fight however, Deroux’s Indian clothes are torn off and his white half-naked body is eventually fully exposed to Davy’s gaze, suddenly appearing to be “de-racialized” once again for the spectator−which is to say, just a man, an assumption “endemic to white culture,” Dyer also exposes in White as being “not far off saying that whites are people whereas other colours are something else.”15 Still, even as this last image reaffirms a whiteness marked by instability, it’s endowed with the impenetrable mystery of the real nature of Deroux’s counterfeit Indian performance, and consequently of his somewhat privileged access to Indianness. To some extent, his figure also heralds Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man seeing that the main character Jack Crabb is characterized by the same unstable identity—even though it is exploited to very different ends. Instability and reversibility become essential formal devices structuring the entire satirical western epic and undermining every possible western cliché, starting with the stereotypical view of Indian cruelty that Ford was instrumental in spreading. As Nolley underlines in Hollywood’s Indian, “his constructed vision of the Hollywood Indian would begin to assume the status of historical truth for many viewers.”16 Jack’s constant oscillations between the white and Indian communities constitutes the main type of structural (and existential) instability. As announced by his own voice-over before the actual beginning of the image track, he is “the sole white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn,” consequently imposing from the outset his white narrative agency on the part Indian, part white tale he’s about to tell.
I knowed General George Armstrong Custer for what he was, and I also knowed the Indians for what they was. 111 years ago, when I was ten years old, my family, in crossing the Great Plains, was wiped out by a band of wild Indians.
18Crabb’s flashback starts as his voice-over operates some sort of “sound bridge” matching a dissolve from his wizened face to the endless and eerily quiet prairie, which carries the spectator back one hundred and eleven years ago to the aftermath of the slaughter of white pioneers by “a band of Pawnee”. In itself, Crabb’s identification of the attacking party’s ethnicity is the first attempt at dismantling enduring western stereotypes, here the traditional image of the Pawnee as “friendly” and the Cheyenne as bloodthirsty Ford uses in The Iron Horse. Shadow-That-Comes-In-Sight actually saves the two white children by riding back with them to the Indian camp. The child’s perspective shapes the type of comments older Jack makes as he starts describing the Cheyenne’s everyday life and feeding habits, in some ironical echo of Ford’s title card “And not even a dog remains” in The Iron Horse.
19Because Crabb’s narrative is presented as rooted in personal history and a specific historical timeframe corresponding to the 1850s to the 1880s Indian Wars between whites and Native Americans, the filmic narrative appears to be stamped with a seal of authenticity. And yet, Crabb is the sole white focalizer, the master teller who can re (con) figure his Indians whichever way he wants.
- 17 A. Prats, “His Master’s Voice (over): Revisionist Ethos and Narrative Dependence from Broken Arrow (...)
20In his seminal essay “His Master’s Voice (over),” Armando Prats highlights how, even in the revisionist Westerns which reinscribe the Native Americans in history while giving them their own voices/agency back, and with the “presumably redemptive vision that would atone for Hollywood’s past offenses against Native Americans”,17 the white man’s voice remains the essential prerequisite for the Indian’s new image, or rather, for a different viewpoint on the Indian:
- 18 Ibid., p. 16.
In the pro-Indian Western, no less than in the story of the Savage Reactionary, the Indian emerged through the narrative agency of the white man. Often in the pro-Indian Western this narrative agency takes the form of a voice that disabuses us of the stereotypes of the canonical Indian, censures the culture that once so pervertly misrepresented the Indians, and proffers, in such a morally charged context, the Indian’s ideal and genuine humanity.18
- 19 S. Lang, “Traveling Woman: Conducting a Fieldwork Project on Gender Variance and Homosexuality amon (...)
21In Penn’s film, such “disabusing” hinges on the parodic treatment of reversibility. Jack’s sister Caroline, who thereafter becomes “Caroline-who-never-did-have-any-luck-with-men”, or his childhood friend Little Horse, the Heemaneh who assumes the female gender, are also characterized by gender instability which operates as another major signifier of Otherness. Whether in the Indian camp or later on in the white community, Caroline is consistently inscribed on screen as the white version of the native “two-spirit,” the manly female who has partly adopted the role of a man as defined by her culture anthropologist Sabine Lang discusses in “Traveling Woman: Conducting a Fieldwork Project on Gender Variance and Homosexuality among North American Indians”.19
- 20 A. Griffiths, “Playing at Being Indian: Spectatorship and the early Western,” p. 106.
- 21 J. Turner, “Little Big Man, The Novel and the Film: AStudy of Narrative Structure,” 1956, p. 157.
22The use of the comic mode makes for an even more extreme inscription of difference as Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George from the Canadian [T]sleil-Waututh First Nation) smokes the peace pipe with her—somehow symbolically giving her the status of an Indian brave. Building on the previous fantasies of ethnographic realism found in Edison’s film actualities and nineteenth century paintings and photographs, Penn imposes a sort of revisionist visual mnemonic20 on the viewer. If indeed Caroline is just playing at Being Indian, Jack is soon captured fully adopting the Indians’ lifestyle: as the older Crabb specifies in voice-over, “I wasn’t just playing Indian, I was living Indian”. But if the intentionally comedic treatment works to a point for Caroline’s character, it becomes more questionable when Arthur Penn stages Little Horse (Robert Little Star) the Heemaneh, Jack’s homosexual childhood friend. While he captures him the first time as a little boy refusing to go to war, adapting for the screen the narrator’s comments in Thomas Berger’s source novel, “[i] f he wanted to stay behind with the women, that was all right with the Human Beings,” he relies on a much more stereotypical inscription of gender variance the second time around. When the adult Little Horse welcomes Jack back, he presents him as a movie stereotype of the homosexual, an effeminate “‘interior decorator’ in Indian clothing, [collapsing] Berger’s satiric contrast between Indian and white American attitudes toward sexual roles”.21
23Arthur Penn consequently chooses not to foreground the actual function of the Heemaneh anthropologist Walter Williams describes as being wildly accepted and whose union with another man was regarded as desirable in many Native communities (Williams in Lewin and Leap). In a similar vein, his brief depiction of the Contrary Younger Bear mostly relies on the farcical. Berger’s references to his form of reverse reaction which deliberately counters the other tribal members’ behavior very much resembles the way he would describe a European clown, leaving behind the social and ceremonial import of the historically institutionalized practice of contrary behavior of the Plains. In other words, while allowing some degree of inscription, comedy and satire obscure the actual meaning of such types and motifs, turning them into some sort of funny collection.
The question of miscegenation: which reconfigurations in Little Big Man?
24The question of miscegenation has been a filmic taboo during the first decades of the Hays Code period (1930-1968) when it started resurfacing in the early 1950s, mainly with Daves’Broken Arrow. Its potency derives of course from its intrinsic connections to race, sex and the conception of difference. Representing racial in-betweenness raises a number of issues, often resolved by the death of the (mostly female) Indian partner. By disappearing, she conveniently allows the male settler to legitimately inherit the land and get full custody of their bi-racial child. Borrowed from African American culture where the Black character’s part is usually played by a white actress (in the 1949 Pinky for instance, directed by Elia Kazan and John Ford—uncredited), such stories are mainly based on the Tragic Mulatta’s trope or the Pocahontas model: Audrey Hepburn/Rachel Zachary in J. Huston’s 1960 The Unforgiven for instance or Delmer Daves’ 1950 Broken Arrow, where Debra Paget/Sonseearhay in Broken Arrow. Her death causes Jeffords to inherit the land which has been given freely out of love as Joanna Hearne underlined in her December 2017 Sorbonne Conference.
25In Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille’s 1914 The Squaw Man, both the land and the child become legitimate for the white pioneer to own, after Red Wing/ Nat-U-Ritch’s suicide, the implication being that the interracial relationship is always destined to fail. The mixed-race romance plotline is thus a key factor in quite a few Westerns and reverberates through the history of the genre ever since its silent beginnings. Echoing America’s central racial problem of the segregation of Blacks in a predominantly white society and the African American Civil Rights movement from 1954 starting with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling desegregating public schools to 1968, it also reflects the development of Indian rights under the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA) which applies to the Native American tribes many—but not all—of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Hence after a long eclipse, the representational codes and conventions started changing, featuring once again various interracial family structures which often reactualized some of the early patterns of the 1910s. The Indian films of the American branch of French Film studio Pathé in the 1910s and 1920s are good examples of the process of assimilation at work at the time and of the production company’s efforts to penetrate the American market. In these early filmic tales of nation building, national identity is not so much forged from within as in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, as still imposed on the racial Other represented as partly assimilated. In Pathé’s silent film When the Blood Calls (1914) White-Indian miscegenation follows an inverted pattern as the white father has to give up his mixed-race child at the end.
26As Joanna Hearne underlines in “The Cross-Heart People:”
When the Blood Calls (1914), a Pathé film where the white father has to give up his mixed-race child (reproduced with the permission of Pathé-Seydoux Foundation, Paris).

- 22 J. Hearne, “‘The Cross-Heart People.’ Race and Inheritance in the Silent Western,” p. 183.
Films about mixed-race romance and mixed-race children in the first and second decades of the twentieth century articulated and influenced public opinion about Native American assimilation (particularly about the taking of land and children through the Dawes Act and the boarding-school system), as well as public and academic speculation about the nature of race and culture. The films consistently contrast the acquisition of land and export of gold, oil, and children from the West with the importance and value of family and even tribal obligations.22
27In Little Big Man, Arthur Penn dramatizes the pattern in the same satirical mode as in the rest of the movie and goes further than Ford’s timid suggestion at the end of Cheyenne Autumn. But even though his concern for history and accuracy seems to go greater than most Western directors before the neo-revisionist period of the 1990s, the sequence seems to reach its limit however with the full inscription of the horror of the 1868 Battle of Washita River. The massacre perpetrated by Custer’s 7th US Cavalry which is often read as an allegory of the My Lai Massacre of unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children by US Army soldiers in March 1968 puts an end to Jack’s brief bi-racial family fantasy:
I reckon right then I come pretty close to turning pure Indian and I would have spent the rest of my days with Sunshine and her sisters. But sometimes, grass don’t grow, wind don’t blow and the sky ain’t blue.
- 23 J. Turner, “Little Big Man, The Novel and the Film: A Study of Narrative Structure,” p. 160.
28The Irish tune “Gary Owen” which had become General Custer’s regiment emblematic march is played by fifes and drums and pitted against the minimal soundtrack which precedes the massacre and the near silence surrounding Sunshine’s death and Jack’s mute shout. It brings to a bleak conclusion this revisionist exploration of miscegenation when the Indian girl and her bi-racial child are eradicated in a devastating bloodbath. In his article “Little Big Man. The Novel and the Film: A study of Narrative Structure”, John Turner speaks of “[d] isorienting tonal confusions” and “anomaly in the structure of an otherwise comic tale”.23 Penn’s most problematic reconstruction may well be this arrested pattern of the miscegenation motif which once again ends up in tragedy and precipitates both a tonal and structural inversion the old chief’s comic “non-death” will not erase. Yet, in some contrapuntal effect, his remark “I’ve never been invisible before!” de facto points at his own presence, countering the pioneer’s colonial discourse. To some extent, Jack’s Indian wife Sunshine ends up being another “serviceable other”, the useful Other Toni Morrison highlights in her 1992 essay Playing in the Dark as the survivor is also a loser who can tell the story from both perspectives.
- 24 G. Braucourt, “‘Interview with Arthur Penn’ Cinema, May 1971,” in M. Chaiken and P. Cronin (eds.), (...)
“The winner gets to narrate” model is thus also partly recycled as Jack does survive to tell the tale. In the end, just like the viewer, he is therefore more of a spectator than participant. Rather than being a man of the West, he’s “more like a tourist caught between two cultures, quite happy to go where events lead him”.24
29Hence when framing Otherness, ambiguity also seems to be at work in Penn’s film. His representation of the relationship of satire and history is at times as problematic as Ford’s inscription of the relationship of myth, stereotype and history—or, rather, fictionalized historical discourse. They both chronicle the modalities of the death of the racial Other’s way of life, diversely foregrounding the Indian’s dependence on the white voice. By actually reinscribing the Native Americans in History and giving them at times a limited form of agency on screen however, Penn takes the fantasized exploration of the white and Indian sexual, racial and social politics closer to some measure of realism. Old Lodge Skins’ specific speech mannerisms and rhythms, songs, tales and decision to stage his own death all testify to it. As Arthur Penn pointed out in his Interviews,
- 25 Ibid.
“I also wanted to show that not only were the Indians going to be destroyed, but that they were also being condemned to live.”25
Notes
1 B. Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston”, in H. LGates, Jr. (ed.), “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 1986, p. 317-318.
2 H. L. Gates, Jr., ibid., p. 2.
3 M. L. Pratt, “A Reply to Harold Fromm”, in H. L. Gates, Jr., ibid., p. 401.
4 H. L. Gates, Jr., ibid., p. 17.
5 J. Hearne, “‘The Cross-Heart People.’Race and Inheritance in the Silent Western,” 2003, p. 182-183.
6 R. Abel, “‘Our Country/Whose Country?’The ‘Americanization’Project of Early Westerns,” 2006, p. 78.
7 D. W. Griffith’s The Mended Lute (1909) starring Own Moore as Little Bear and Florence Lawrence as Rising Moon provides a well-known example of this stance as referred to by Alison Griffiths in her article “Playing at Being Indian: Spectatorship and the early Western,” 2001, p. 105.
8 Ibid., p. 101.
9 B. K. Alexander, “‘West of Everything’: Critical Reflections, Remembrances, and Representations of/on/in Westerns,” 2012, p. 471.
10 R. Maltby, “A Better Sense of History—John Ford and the Indians,” in I. A. Cameron et D. Pye, (éd.), The Book of Westerns, p. 37.
11 Ibid., p. 38.
12 R. Dyer, White, 1997, p. 1.
13 Ph. French, Westerns, 1973, p. 53.
14 R. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 1998, p. 16.
15 R. Dyer, White, p. 2.
16 K. Nolley, “The Representation of Conquest. John Ford and the Hollywood Indian, 1939- 1964,” 2003, p. 76.
17 A. Prats, “His Master’s Voice (over): Revisionist Ethos and Narrative Dependence from Broken Arrow (1950) to Geronimo: An American Legend (1993),” 1996, p. 15.
18 Ibid., p. 16.
19 S. Lang, “Traveling Woman: Conducting a Fieldwork Project on Gender Variance and Homosexuality among North American Indians,” 1996, p. 105.
20 A. Griffiths, “Playing at Being Indian: Spectatorship and the early Western,” p. 106.
21 J. Turner, “Little Big Man, The Novel and the Film: AStudy of Narrative Structure,” 1956, p. 157.
22 J. Hearne, “‘The Cross-Heart People.’ Race and Inheritance in the Silent Western,” p. 183.
23 J. Turner, “Little Big Man, The Novel and the Film: A Study of Narrative Structure,” p. 160.
24 G. Braucourt, “‘Interview with Arthur Penn’ Cinema, May 1971,” in M. Chaiken and P. Cronin (eds.), Arthur Penn. Interviews, 2008, p. 82.
25 Ibid.
Table des illustrations
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Titre | The Iron Horse, the threatening Native presence. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/4345/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 42k |
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Titre | Birth of a Nation, Evil Gus blending with the dark frame. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/4345/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 42k |
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Titre | The Iron Horse, multi-ethnic crew members working together on the railroad. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/4345/img-3.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 32k |
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Titre | Engraving of an Apache warrior scalping a U.S. soldier. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ApacheScalpingengraving.jpg |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/4345/img-4.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 31k |
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Titre | A problematic comedic mode when tackling the Heemaneh and the Contrary. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/4345/img-5.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 31k |
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Titre | When the Blood Calls (1914), a Pathé film where the white father has to give up his mixed-race child (reproduced with the permission of Pathé-Seydoux Foundation, Paris). |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/4345/img-6.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 25k |
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Titre | Little Big Man, life and death on the Washita River. |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/4345/img-7.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 25k |
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Titre | South Vietnamese women and children after the My Lai Massacre, march 1968 (Official Army photographer Ronald Haeberle’s picture). |
URL | http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/4345/img-8.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 52k |
© Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2018