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About Smoke signals. (Grand Ronde, Or.) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 1, 1992)
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT I ) POWWOW CRAFT CLASS STARTS Are you ready for this year's powwow? Do you have your regalia made? That's right. With another new year comes another annual powwow and now is the time to start getting ready for it. Powwow craft classes begin on January 22 from 6:30pm to 9:00 pm at the Depot. The classes will alternate every other week between adult and youth. The first week will be for youth only (parents are asked to accompany their children). The next week will be for adults only and so on. A review of moccasin making will start off the series and loom and flat beading classes will follow. Hopefully, when the classes arc finished you will have all of your work complete. Don't wait till the last minute, bring your regalia projects for this year and have some fun. For more information contact Vivian DeMary at 879 5872 ext. 137. Arts: Crafts and Supplies The Economic Development Department is consider ing a proposal to open a arts and crafts co-op here in Grand Ronde during the spring of 1992. The arts and crafts co-op would sell the crafts of tribal members and, also, finance supplies for the artisans. Before any action can be taken on the part of economic development, they need to know how many tribal members would be interested in such a venture. If you are an artistically inclined tribal member and are interested in being a part of the arts and crafts co-op, then please don't miss the meeting on March 16, at 5:30pm in the Forestry Building to discuss the plans. Please bring with you samples or pictures of your work and an approximation of how many you could produce in any given amount of time. This is important because the Economic Development Department needs to know what you make, what price you sell it for, how much of it can you make, and what supplies you need to make it. For more information, please contact Shelley Hanson at 879-5211 ext. 153. FILM REVIEW: BLACK ROBE -E) Bruce Bcresford's Black Robe is a stunning work-emotionally complex, physically gorgeous, mystifying, maddening, haunting. Set in the wilderness of Quebec in 1634, chronicling the Jesuit mission work among the Algonquins, it's a complete work of art, a full-throttled time machine trip, and the best film yet made on Indian-white man relations. As a piece of filmmaking, Black Robe may be the complete opposite of Dances With Wolves. This isn't a feel-good movie. If you're looking for teddy bear Indians in a picture postcard country side, the pleasures of a shameless soap opera and adorable American heroes (the elements Dances With Wolves contained to effectively embrace both an Indian and a white middle class audi ence), you're not going to find them in Black Robe. You won't find the maudlin didacticism of The Mission either. What you do get, and it's overwhelming, is a vision of North American , history, so ironic and nightmarish, it unsparing realism plays like a form of tragic surrealism, i , As the Jesuit missionary dedicated (against his : own common sense) to bring Christianity to :; Quebec, Lothaire Bluteau registers both the;! , gravity and the insanity of his task. It doesn't take I : very long to figure out what his isolated bleary i eyes and hang-dog expression are truly revealing, n This isn't the face of religious enlightenment. " Bluteau's Jesuit never expected "evangelism" to be easy, it's not this difficulty he's expressing, this Jesuit is contemplating his commitment to his own death. Surveying his life, and the film's icy elegiac flashbacks reveal the choices he's made along the way, Bluteau's priest has made his bed and he's dying in it. What he's discovered in the Canadian outback are indigenous people who, while mostly respect ful, have not the time nor patience to hear his gospel. They're too complete unto themselves- ? they're not stubborn, they just don't need what he has to offer. With a value system all their own, , ideas like a "Paradise" with God and without sex are both repugnant and high comedy. They don't trust him (and his "black robe") either. And it's ( not only because his doctrine is often perceived as stupefying. They see him as a sort of helpless, sexless dullard. Bluteau is not the life of the party, i He creates a heartbreaking anti-hero, caught in 1 the tightening jaws of his own obsessive spiritual ; i: responsibility. It's an aching, despairing perfor mance, and it has its own kind of greatness. Though Black Robe is decidedly not anti-Catholic, true conversion is never just around the corner. . Beresford and Brian Moore, who adapted the , Screenplay from his own novel, have given the Algonquins the dignity to be responsible for their own belief system. In Black Robe, the Indians 1 have been given back their backbone. There's a sequence where tribal leaders discuss the possible 1 meanings of an enigmatic dream and the action to ' take as a consequence, and it's laden with intelli gence. We're asked to accept the caucus as is (and it feels saner than the Jesuit's flagellation and f tears). We seem to catch the Algonquins at the if point where even though the white man's presence is threatening, they understand only a special . people could ever adjust to or survive in their often frozen, wild and endless land. (And it's only the white man's disease that makes the Indians ;: even remotely receptive to European religious thought.) Though the Iroquois are depicted as an evil force, indeed the film's closing historical note tells us how far they went with this, it's here that the dreamlike logic of Black Robe takes over. If Black Robe succeeds as history, it's also a work of the i imagination. The vicious, angry Iroquois come , to symbolize what's untameable about the physical world they inhabit. They're depicted as a force of nature, or a freak of it-an extension of the land itself. They're demons, but they're flesh and blood, realistic. Because the wilderness itself is so unpredictable, both inhabitants. The real "star" of Black Robe, the center of the film's visual design, is Canada. Now teaming with cinematographer Peter James in Black Robe, Beresford takes a great leap forward. Using longshots and aerial views to dislocate the viewer and dwarf the characters - in the film, Beresford gives the land a larger voice than its inhabitants. The effect is all alienation and dread-snow hasn't been this deadly since Jan Troell's The Flight of the Eagle. It's interesting that the shamanic figure in Black Robe, the antithesis of the Jesuit, is an , irascible dwarf-intuition and cleverness are the tools of spiritual survival as they are in physical survival. The characters (and the viewer) seem not fcnly lost in landscape but stranded in the flow of history. Some of these photographic ' effects are staggering; Black Robe is as intri cately designed as any film in recent memory. Black Robe, a downbeat and heavy historical tragedy, creates a smothering visual delirium through paradoxically, majestic bird's- eye views of the wide open spaces. As if the moral, spiritual, historical dilemmas the film explores weren't enough, Black Robe immerses us in a physical universe so vast, there's no space or opportunity to ever diffuse the moral, spiritual, historical dilemmas! The effect is horrifying, ghastly, and for an audience, unforgettable. Review by Edward StaigerCourtesy of Vie Circle
