High Plains Drifter: Revisionist History in Wraith Form

I've been so busy with the two theatre companies I'm involved with, that history had taken a back seat. Well, here I am in the saddle again, and what better way than to write on my favourite supernatural western - High Plains Drifter.

And don't forget there is no historical accuracy.

Yep, that's what I said: Supernatural Western. They are rare but this one is the best in my opinion. Eastwood plays a wraith that is looking to payback the townspeople who didn't help him as three men whipped him to death. It's a gritty, dark film that I first saw at the age of 12. Which explains my love of revenge movies and westerns. Even then, I knew this was revisionist history: the real American Western frontier was rough but it was more about colonialism than shoot em ups.

The Real American West

High Plains Drifter is a film about one white town in California sometime around the 1870s. People are still screwed up from the huge changes: completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development. White settlers from the East poured across the Mississippi to mine, farm, and ranch. African-American settlers also came West from the Deep South, convinced by promoters of all-black Western towns that prosperity could be found there. Chinese railroad workers further added to the diversity of the region's population. These two groups are missing from the film, but some Mexican men who are treated very kindly by Eastwood are present. Their stories, however, are  not explored as they are background characters. 

The Library of Congress says that this time period, while pivotal in the creation of the USA as we now know it,  was not a win-win for everyone:

Settlement from the East transformed the Great Plains. The huge herds of American bison that roamed the plains were virtually wiped out, and farmers plowed the natural grasses to plant wheat and other crops. The cattle industry rose in importance as the railroad provided a practical means for getting the cattle to market. 

The loss of the bison and growth of white settlement drastically affected the lives of the Native Americans living in the West. In the conflicts that resulted, the American Indians, despite occasional victories, seemed doomed to defeat by the greater numbers of settlers and the military force of the U.S. government. By the 1880s, most American Indians had been confined to reservations, often in areas of the West that appeared least desirable to white settlers. 

I Wanna Be A Cowboy

By the middle of the 1870s, the term “cowboy” described the young mounted riders driving cattle out of Texas. This term was originally used east of the Rocky Mountains; the preferred term on the other side of the Great Divide was “buckaroo,” coming from the Spanish word for cowboy, vaquero. But this did not last for long. By the early 1880s, bolstered by the mostly mythical image of the “wild west” portrayed in dime novels, the love affair between the general public of North America and Europe and the “cowboy” had begun.

The cowboy became the symbol for the West of the late 19th century, often depicted in popular culture as a glamorous or heroic figure. The stereotype of the heroic white cowboy is far from true, however. The first cowboys were Spanish vaqueros, who had introduced cattle to Mexico centuries earlier. Black cowboys also rode the range. Furthermore, the life of the cowboy was far from glamorous, involving long, hard hours of labor, poor living conditions, and economic hardship.

And no women to dance with. But I wonder if some didn't mind so much,as the source FairClassrooms points out.

The myth of the cowboy is only one of many myths that have shaped our views of the West in the late 19th century. Recently, some historians have turned away from the traditional view of the West as a frontier, a "meeting point between civilization and savagery" in the words of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. They have begun writing about the West as a crossroads of cultures, where various groups struggled for property, profit, and cultural dominance. 

So, in High Plains Drifter, there is no gay cowboys, no Indians, no Chinese, no African Americans...no historical accuracy. It's pure fantasy and myth building, and it's fun. Or is it a bad thing? All this violence is very self-indulgent I admit.

In the ongoing historical analysis, the culture of violence in the American West of the late nineteenth century was created almost entirely by the U.S. government’s military interventions, which were primarily a veiled subsidy to the government-subsidized transcontinental railroad corporations. Should we point out the controversial genocide against the American Indians that's happily ignored in every film? (Controversial because was it intentional or just a "happy coincidence?")

But the one part they do get right is the need for a bath. Eastwood's character needs one and a shave. You can just see the stink coming off him. I'm sure the bath scene made my mom swoon though.

I'm a very dirty cowboy...

These Amazing Shadows: World War I on Film Part 1

Canadian Soldiers being silly: you're going to need a bigger tank

For the rest of the year, I will try to post a topic or issue on World War I (The Great War) as 2014 is the 100 anniversary of the beginning of the war.

This first entry is on the first hand footage available. Thanks to the Internet, there exists a huge amount of accessible newsreels, stills and archival footage from the war 

The reason was not to be fascinated by the dead bodies, but to learn about a conflict that kicked off how we think of war, how we go to war, and how we use technology in war, which I'll argue in a future blog post.

It also cements in my mind that these are images of people who died in the war, who had families and loved ones, or who lived to be old men with the memories of war staying with them. I wonder if politicians watched more of these films if they would be so quick to send men to their deaths?

Personally, my great-grandfather and his brother fought in the war as a recent immigrant to Canada. He also fought in the South African war previously for the British. These archives gives me some sense of what he went though and what he had to do.

From Canadian War Museum, two nurses near the front in France, enjoying a nice day out?

The top five resources I found:

European Film Gateway has a primer on the war, some great links, and a good list of archival footage from around the world and includes both sides. Germany, Spain, Netherlands and British film archives are all listed here with easy to access links. Newsreels, feature films, propaganda, and archival footage are all there.

British Pathe holds an amazing collection of British archival footage, with some material focused on the Germans, Turkish and other nationalities involved in the war. Most are really short clips and you can purchase them if you need to for a course or lecture. My current favourite is actually after the war. The Greatest Pilgrimage 1928 is film of British Legionaries and family members visiting battlefields of France and Flanders. The look on some of these men's faces is of pure desolation.

National Film Board of Canada has released their collection of footage for the centennial. Almost all the films are of Canadian forces, with the bulk of the films covering the actual war. They also have films on training, and times before and after the war back in Canada. A highlight is the tons of fragmentary films of Canadian troops on the Western Front during the Battle of Arras, April 1917. Amid the explosions are so many great moments of warmth and camaraderie of the men in these films.

The Library of Congress researchers have complied a Web Guide to World War I materials, which includes films. This site takes a lot to get through as really it's just a list of their resources, but it's worth the time to go through their archives. My brain felt full afterwards which was awesome.

The CBC Digital Archives of World War I is impressive with clips from film and radio for you to listen to. Most of them have been packaged into actual programs to provide more context for you to watch.

One Extra...

RMS Olympic in Dazzle paint. Not a zebra but an idea for ship camo in WWI

BBC Online has made available interviews with British veterans and civilians about the first World War. These were conducted in the 1960s, and all 13 interviews are amazing first hand accounts, including women who were involved in some way in the war effort, which is a rare thing in archives I've found. One interview made me cry: Katie Morter lost her husband in the war. However - these are only uploadable if you live in the UK but some of them ended up on youtube.

Next time I'll talk about the top five most accurate but also good to watch documentaries on the war. Till then, I leave you with the song my grandma use to sing. She said she learned it as a kid during the war: "Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag"

The Golden Naked Man and the Blackface Singer: The History of Blackface

This week I've been so busy with working at my library job and taking care of a sick aunt that history has been very far from my mind, until I saw this:

No. I don't care if you're wearing a suit, it's still not cool

This is from the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. Other than spitting out my tea as a man in blackface showed up, the film was quite good. The story of a Jewish man who becomes a great singer and finally wins respect is touching, if only not for the "Mammy" blackface song. Wow.

At this time, sound had just been introduced into film. The Warner Bros. movie The Jazz Singer-one of the first "talkies"-was not allowed to compete for Best Picture because the first Academy Awards committee decided it was unfair to let movies with sound compete with silent films. It did win a special production award, and two Academy Awards for Adapted Screenplay and Special Effects.

They had no problem then with what I consider personally the most bizarre thing I've seen since last week's movie viewing:

Yes I did watch it - sorry good taste, I know you'll never forgive me.

The whole black face thing began way back in theatre makeup. Remember the play Othello? There were no black actors in Elizabethan England so a white guy had to make himself up as a Moor. It was very common in European theatre after the 1700s that actors would put on ethnic makeup for shows. But the real increase in racist characters inflated in the United States, because beating down people you had as slaves is always a good idea. They created the Minstrel shows, where whites would sing African-Irish fused folk songs as black characters. Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice developed the first popularly known blackface minstrel character (“Jim Crow”) in 1830. The shows travelled over to England where their popularity grew.

Yum, chocolate?

The University of Southern Florida has a great special collection online that puts it all in context: why when the movement to abolish slavery was blackface so popular? It states:

"It may seem strange and ironic that abolitionists helped popularize blackface performance and black stereotypes, but minstrelsy tapped into a much wider audience than anti-slavery pamphlets, books, or speeches. Starting in 1832, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice took his Jim Crow act from New York to London, kicking off a craze for minstrel song and dance. Abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic seized upon this new format, including burnt-cork blackface, to promote the end of slavery. In one of Rice’s songs, the master of a slave named “Gombo Chaff” went to Hell after he died, where he was forced to perform the menial tasks he assigned to his slaves."

One other crazy thing happened before the age of minstrel shows died out: African-Americans performing all the minstrel songs. Unlike the majority of white blackface performers in the 1800s who were born in Northern cities prior to the Civil War, most African American blackface minstrel performers were born after the Civil War and in Southern cities. The differences between white and African American minstrel performers do not stop there. Although the age of urban industrialization brought great opportunity for whites in America, according to Karen Sotiropoulos, “for black Americans, the 1890s ushered in a decade of shrinking possibilities, and artists and activists alike desperately sought any avenue for advancement.

Yup - even Judy Garland int he 1930s did it because this is really how African Americans look.

By the early 1900s, people were still fascinated and watched blackface being performed by men and women, and accounts for the popularity of The Jazz Singer. The singer and actor Al Jolson rocketed to stardom with this movie with his music and face paint, becoming a house hold name. So painting your face like a black person and singing songs was popular up until the 1930s when awareness of human rights and the 1960s civil rights movement began.

If you think that blackface completely died out with the end of segregation in the US, you'd be wrong. Thanks to those "I think minstrel shows are cool" British people, The Black and White Minstrel show (1958-1978) was a singing and dancing show. It was extremely popular, until people noticed that it was really racist and finally made the BBC cancel it.

Because the sequence was the most offensive thing here.

 Unless a performer is doing some sort of historical retrospective, being in blackface is very rarely seen...except in Hollywood and the music industry. The controversy came back in 2008 with Tropic Thunder, where Robert Downey Jr. portrays a Australian method actor named Kirk Lazarus who immerses himself so thoroughly in his role as a gung-ho black sergeant that he undergoes what the script calls a "controversial procedure" involving pigmentation alteration. While I get that the film makers were trying to satire blackface, it still is a creepy thing to watch. Just like people in whiteface, yellowface, redface...sigh.

A dude playing another dude...