Film
Seitz, Michael H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz Final Solution? Idoubt that movies really have the power to effect social change or reverse government policy, but I hope nonetheless that Broken Rainbow will find a large...
...U Hits and Misses Desert Bloom A remarkably well-realized first feature film written and directed by Eugene Corr...
...that the tribal councils established by Federal authorities are puppet structures devised to circumvent traditional tribal leaders who oppose granting mining rights to the extensive uranium, coal, oil, and natural gas deposits on Na-vajo-Hopi lands...
...The film, winner of this year's Academy Award for best feature-length documentary, is a vigorous brief against the proposed relocation of several thousand Navajo Indians from lands to which they have ancestral, spiritual, and economic ties...
...In an interview, Representative Morris Udall, Arizona Democrat, says we live in a mobile society, after all, so the Navajo should merely "accept" relocation "and get on with it...
...The film has its enchanting moments but some parts seem casually improvised, and the attempt to mix satire with bittersweet nostalgia doesn't quite come off...
...Ginger & Fred Mid-quality Fellini, focusing on the reunion of a long-retired dance team (Giu-lietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni) and the corrupt world of contemporary television...
...The movie makes splendid use of locations in and around Ocean City, Maryland, but this does not make up for a trite plot and poorly developed characters...
...Broken Rainbow is a thought-provoking, deeply moving film...
...As we watch, herds of Navajo sheep are carted off by Federal agents, and bulldozers strip disputed lands of foliage to encourage "voluntary" relocation...
...Las Madres, nominated for an Oscar as best feature-length documentary, reminds us that Argentine torturers and murderers remain unexposed and unpunished, and that similar atrocities are being committed today in El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Peru, and Lebanon...
...Broken Rainbow addresses this situation in more compelling terms than anything I've read...
...But these were abstractions for me until I saw the film, which succeeds precisely because it translates the abstract into the concrete...
...If the letter of the law is observed, the result will be a tragic injustice: Some 1,250 Navajo will be forcibly removed from the land on which they live...
...The movie is strongly felt and its politics are on the mark, but Wexler has not been able to give his material compelling dramatic form, and he gets only mediocre performances from his earnest but undistinguished cast...
...that relocation threatens to destroy their cultural identity...
...Idoubt that movies really have the power to effect social change or reverse government policy, but I hope nonetheless that Broken Rainbow will find a large audience and a strong constituency for the cause it champions...
...The 1974 Hopi-Navajo Land Settlement Act has a July 1986 deadline...
...In a rocky desert expanse, a Navajo woman tends her sheep and dwells in a hogan admirably suited to her pastoral way of life...
...Still, they provide plenty of evidence that the Navajo are being cynically exploited and that the relocations being carried out under the law are among the most devastating of the many injustices and betrayals visited upon Native Americans in the name of the people of the United States...
...This is contrasted with the tacky rows of tract houses to which her more compliant neighbors have already been transferred...
...Broken Rainbow charges that the Hopi-Navajo land dispute that provided the pretext for the relocation law was concocted by the Government and mining interests...
...Violets Are Blue A familiar love triangle starring Sissy Spa-cek, Kevin Kline, and the wonderful Bonnie Bedelia, who easily steals the show whenever she appears on screen...
...Martin Sheen delivers a well-researched voice-over narration...
...One sees the faces of real Navajo and the places where people live and sustain themselves...
...that they are an essentially pastoral people...
...I'm inclined to accept all of these allegations, but I wish the filmmakers, Maria Florio and Victoria Mudd, had found means to document their specific claims more thoroughly...
...Katherine Smith, a traditional elder who resists relocation from her Big Mountain home...
...The title refers to the surprising beauty of desert flowers—the film is set in Nevada in the early 1950s—as well as to the coming-of-age of the young female narrator/protagonist and to the mushroom clouds of nuclear tests that form a background to intense family drama...
...Jon Voight gives an outstanding performance as a hateful, yet oddly sympathetic, World War II veteran...
...The fictional plot focuses on the conflicts and political education of a Mexican-born Green Beret who is sent to train and lead U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutionaries based in Honduras...
...Florio and Mudd have drawn on virtually all of the resources of which a documentary can avail itself—on-location shooting, interviews, archival footage, still photos, explanatory animation...
...Latino Anti-contra, pro-Sandinista agitprop, written and directed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who also turned filmmaker during the Vietnam war to make Medium Cool...
...I knew that the Navajo revere nature and regard the land as sacred...
...The film details the callousness of official policy toward the Navajo and the Hopi...
...The issue is timely and even urgent...
...Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo A more forceful and cogent account of the atrocities committed by the late Argentine junta and the protests to which they gave rise than is to be found in The Official Story, which won this year's Academy Award as best foreign film...
...that relocation has inflicted not only pain and alienation but early death on displaced Indians...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
