James Young Deer | The Red Girl and the Child / 1910

the indian cowboy

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Young Deer The Red Girl and the Child / 1910

 

One of the most explicit of early LGBTQ films concerning race, James Young Deer’s The Red Girl and the Child, is itself conflicted regarding racial relationships.

     The film begins with the arrival of villain Bill Duggins at the local store, part saloon, post office, and grocery run by a black man, performed in blackface. Duggins and his gang take out their guns and, after ruffing up the store clerk, proceed, to use the euphemism for shooting at an individual’s feet, “make him dance” in a high unpleasant scene of abuse.

      In the midst of this melee, Princess Red Wing (Lillian St. Cyr) of a local Indian tribe, enters to pick up some goods. Immediately Duggins and others turn their attention to her and begin to grope and pummel her as well.

 

     Meanwhile, cowboy Dick Sutton kisses his wife and baby daughter goodbye as he also intends to visit the store, only to discover, as “The Moving Picture World” synopsis describes it, “the jollification” within. Startled by what he observes, he immediately sets Red Wing free and slugs out Duggins, ordering him to leave. The rest of the men, who now come to Sutton’s support with regard to his protection of the Indian Princess, still busily abuse the symbolic man in blackface. Red Wing (who the synopsis incidentally describes as “an Indian squaw, hinting that the publicists still saw even an Indian Princess as something to denigrate*), expresses her deep appreciation to Sutton for his protection.

      Sutton’s young daughter toddles off into the fields with her water bucket to get some water from the well while her mother works in the house. Duggins and his partner encounter the child on their return to their camp. They lure her toward them and kidnap her, leaving a note on the Suttons’ door reading that Duggins has kidnapped the child in revenge for Sutton’s treatment of him. When Sutton’s wife finally discovers the note, she immediately rides into town to report it to her husband, who quickly rallies a posse.

 

       Red Wing, still evidencing her respect of Sutton, joins them, and when they finally find the girl’s water bucket, Red Wing points them in the right direction.

        In their run, the villains stop for a moment to make a small cut in one their arms, spreading the blood across one the child’s articles of clothing, leaving it behind with a note: “Follow and I will kill the kid.”

        Frightened for the child’s safety, Sutton and his friends ponder what to do. But Red Wing insists she will follow without them being able to notice. Dressing in cowboy garb, she silently follows, finding the encampment where Duggins has left the child in the hands of several apparently drunken, sleeping women of the group. Red Wing crawls under the wagons and snatches the child away.

 

    When the child’s absence is soon discovered, the entire gang goes after the “cowboy” as, with the child on his back, “he” climbs up a steep pile of rocks and down the other side before moving hand over hand on a rope stretched across a deep gully. When the “cowboy” reaches the other side, he cuts the rope, leaving those in pursuit to fall away or find themselves without the possibility of catching up.

        Crossing the rest of the plains with the child, the cowboy reverts once more to Red Wing, delivering up the child safely to Sutton and his wife, and establishing close relationships with the frontier townsfolk and Red Wing’s tribe.

        One commentator noted that the women in the villains’ camp seem to be wearing scarves, suggesting that it is a gypsy camp, and it certainly has that appearance, which, if so, adds yet another layer of racism (gypsies being the bad guys) to this film arguing for the respect of the Indian tribalism.

        Some of those conflicts may lie within the director himself. Born in 1876 as James Young Johnson in Washington, D. C., Young Deer identified himself as a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, the same tribe into which his wife, Lillian St. Cyr was born. But, in fact, Young Deer’s origins, as Angela Aleiss has explained in a fascinating article in Bright Lights Film Journal (May 2013) was much more complex. Perhaps without him even knowing the fact, he was part of the Nanticoke people of Delaware, variously described as the “Moors of Delaware,” a mid-Atlantic community of whites, African Americans, and Native Americans, sometimes described as “Delaware’s Forgotten Folk,” people of color who were identified as white if they looked white, and described as black or mulatto depending upon the hue of their skin. Young Deer’s Native American roots, according to Aleiss, “actually trace back to his father’s side of the family in 1881, when the Delaware General Assembly recognized the Nanticoke’s descendants as an Incorporated Body or a ‘special class’ with their own schools and churches.” Among the original 31 members was Young Deer’s great uncle Whittington Johnson. It appears that Young Deer was unaware of his actual Indian heritage, falsely claiming to be a member of Indian tribe of his wife.

       In any event the Indian couple made over 70 films together, most of them lost. And Young Deer, believed to be the first Native American filmmaker and producer had an enormous impact on the silent era for his portrayal of Native Americans in a positive manner.

       Starting out with Pathé Frères, the Jersey City based French studio, long criticized for their unrealistic representations of the Old West, sent him to Edendale in Los Angeles to make Indian-themed movies. He eventually become the head of the West Coast Studio operations in Edendale, acting in, writing, and directing over 150 silent films.

       By 1910, the date of The Red Girl and the Child. one-fifth of American films were Westerns, and due in part to Young Deer’s influence during those year most of them, as movie historian William K. Everson observes, most Indians were “generally portrayed in a positive way. During this period the Indian became accepted as a symbol of integrity, stoicism, and reliability,” while clearly at the same time Hollywood was generally mocking blacks, the Chinese, gypsies, and, of course, gays and lesbians.

        The brief, but important, drag transition that Red Wing makes in this movie has very little to do with a question of gender and almost everything to do with identifying and commiserating with the white male cowboy.

 

*As linguist Ives Goddard argued in the 1997 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, the word squaw, coming from the Algonquin tribe of Massachusetts, had a perfectly decent meaning, primarily indicating simply an Indian woman; and in the early Plymouth Colony, the early settlers such as William Bradford and Edward Winslow used it quite correctly, having picked up some Indian words from the local tribes. But over the years it accrued highly negative racist and sexist connotations that by 1910, the date of this film, were quite apparent. It is strange that James Young Deer and Red Wing did not protest, but perhaps they had no say in the publicists’ release of information.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Cam Archer | Wild Tigers I Have Known / 2006

the sleepwalker

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cam Archer (screenwriter and director) Wild Tigers I Have Known / 2006

 

Wild Tigers I Have Known is a fairly interesting fantasy film about a gay middle-schooler Logan (Malcolm Stumpf) who has befriended an equally unpopular nerd, Joey (Max Paradise), only to quickly recognize that his friend is just that, a fairly self-conscious nerd, while his own loneliness and school abuse emanates, perhaps, from something even deeper. Soon in their friendship, even Joey grants that Logan is not just unpopular, but actually “weird.”

 

    Logan’s painful experience of that between-state just before the full-out abuse of gay recognition of the high-school years is certainly worth exploring, but the problem is that by 2006, the date of this rather experimental work, we all knew the unhappy results and director Cam Archer takes an enormous amount of time and fruitless psychic energy getting there.

     Like many a young boy (or girl) gradually perceiving that their queerness is not just eccentricity or a difference of values, but actually has something to do with a sexuality that has not even been fully thought out about much less experienced, Logan is vaguely attracted to the fairly popular 9th grader with the unlikely name of Rodeo (Patrick White), far too mature for his age and already engaged in a kind of studied ennui of  the world around him that will surely later make him popular with either the bored intellectuals of high school or the drop-outs which by that time he may have joined.

      The important thing that he is “cool” and beautiful in a way that even as he matures into gayhood, Logan will never become. Moreover, he’s not embarrassed, like almost everyone else, by hanging out with a younger dork who his girlfriend and most others already sense is “queer.” Besides, he too lives in a kind of fantasy world which, like Logan, he’s woven around himself in the utter boredom of his educational experiences. The fact that in the Santa Cruz neighborhood where their school is located, mountain lions have been spotted—which predictably school and local authorities have exaggerated into a major crisis worthy of even creating a school alert signal in case of a viewing of such a beast—also provides them with a kind of imaginary jungle which as a team up they can together explore. Neither boy, younger or older, seems fazed by possibly encountering such a beast and both concur that the “wild tigers” (the tiger being the name of their school sports mascot) they daily encounter are all more dangerous than a real mountain lion seeking out food or just someplace to sleep.

     Archer uses the metaphor, somewhat predictably, as representing the threatening outsider world which both Rodeo and particularly Logan signify for the others with whom they daily must make their peace. But Archer, stretching the metaphor rather beyond belief takes the younger boy into a kind of transsexual world as the boy attempts to find a way to take his friendship with the heterosexual teenager into the world of bodily sensual satisfaction. While it’s certainly possible that a young boy in such a situation might be curious about why a girl attracts someone like Rodeo instead a boy like himself, or even might imagine ways that he might replace the female attraction in his older friend’s life, it’s difficult to believe that, without any history of transsexual behavior, Logan suddenly takes on a persona of a female. As a girl named Leah, the 13-year-old nightly makes phone calls to his daily friend in a highly sensual female voice that would be difficult for even for the best of drag queens to imitate.

     But then, Archer’s film does not attempt to in any respect make claim to realism. For much of the film, Logan simply tunes out everything around him, dropping into a kind trance while the boys around him go through their gym swimming heats or the entire school gathers in a heated auditorium for a rally to support their mountain lion eradication efforts.

 

    For far too much of the film, Logan simply lies in bed contemplating the world he dreads or lays down in the fields and beaches to pretend to be dead—actions, which the director might have been warned by his elders tend to send audiences into their own trances or, if nothing else, distance them from any involvement in the film.

      Perhaps the most exciting moment of the movie is when, pretending to be Leah, Logan actually agrees to meet in a nearby cave to have sex with Rodeo. Turned away from Rodeo, the mysterious form asks Rodeo to take off all of his clothes before turning to reveal itself as his friend Logan. The meet-up, a shock to older boy, ends as vaguely as everything else in the film. At first it appears there is simple shock and rejection, but then, as Rodeo turns back to look there perhaps at least the possibility that something might happen. Later Archer teases us with another clip, reminding us of the event. Did something actually occur between the two after all? We never know since the scene itself becomes a kind of fantasy, although we have to credit Logan, if nothing else, for his bravery, which he reveals evidently again when he actually comes upon a mountain lion on the school ground, facing him down without hesitation, while behind him some “caring” authority shoots the animal dead.

      Presumably, in that act, Logan realizes himself that he is actually a similar beast, something that others would rather get rid of instead of accepting and sharing the world in which they live with them. And in that act, we presume, Logan accepts being gay without having to bend his reality in playing out a fantasy to fulfill someone else’s notions of proper sexual gender.

      Unfortunately, by this time Archer has so distanced us from his central character that we can’t fully discern what is going on in the young boy’s mind. All we can do, is worry for him as he moves forward into the even crueler world of the mid-to-late teens. As The New York Times critic Stephen Holden put it, “As you watch the movie, you pray that, in the language of Tea and Sympathy, the future teachers of Logan’s life lessons will ‘be kind.’”  But by this point in the movie we’re no longer certain who Logan actually is, particularly when the film closes as he walks away from us over the horizon, waving goodbye.

      Perhaps most of us half-sleep our way through those difficult years, but watching it in a motion picture is a bit like being seated before the screen about to embark on Andy Warhol’s more than 5-hour 1964 film, Sleep. Even as cute as John Giorno is, I promise you I’ll sneak out after the first 5 minutes. I stayed for all of Wild Tigers, but there were moments, I admit, when I was tempted to doze.

    

Los Angeles, November 21, 2023

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (November 2023).

Juan Carlos Mora | A Salvo (To Safety) / 2016

shoot me, and i bleed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Carlos Mora (screenwriter and director) A Salvo (To Safety) / 2016 [20 minutes]

 

Spanish director Juan Carlos Mora’s laconic film Safe takes place over a period of three years, represented by five mornings in bedrooms.

     The first is when Victor (Alejandro Valenciano) invites Hugo (Jose Ovejas) into his den of safety, his bedroom. The two are in clearly in love and looking forward to a relationship, despite the fact that they met up through Victor’s former boyfriend Miguel. Hugo has brought Victor a postcard which also is posted to the wall, but the fact that on the same hangs one of Miguel’s paintings becomes a sore point for Hugo.

      Although the short film never explains the reasons why Miguel continues to come between the two, the situation hints that perhaps they had already developed a relationship before Miguel intruded. Their coming together appears to be is a reheeling of old wounds, an attempt to remake a relationship that never fully blossomed between them or was perhaps torn apart by the other. But in this first scene there is real love and the evidence of a new beginning.

    In the next scene, Victor is evidently moving into Hugo’s larger bedroom, bringing all his possessions with him, and moving out of the zone of safety he talks about in the first scene. But with him has come Miguel’s painting, which again angers Hugo and brings up further resentments.

     Over the next couple of mornings in the bathroom and bedroom that we encounter the two, that resentment broods, particularly in Victor who has destroyed the painting after Hugo’s complaint, but clearly also no longer feels that he himself is fully “safe” in their relationship. The specter of his other relationship still comes between them.

     Soon after Victor leaves, symbolized by Hugo pulling away the old sheets and replacing them with new.

      Years pass. Hugo receives a call from Victor saying that he believes he is still in love with him, Hugo paying a visit to Victor’s new, smaller bedroom, clearly also a bastion of safety for Victor. Victor deludes himself, suggesting that it is as if time hadn’t existed. But Hugo suggests that he can find no real memories of their relationship in this room, the postcard being the only sign of their former relationship. In the interim, Hugo has graduated with his Masters’ degree and is looking for a job. Hugo is working for the same “agency,” the line of work remaining a mystery; but it is clear he has not substantially altered his life.

  

     Although he might love to start over again with Hugo, or even begin where they left off, it is evident that Hugo cannot return to the past. When Victor pulls out a cigarette, Hugo expresses surprise at his now smoking. And Victor must face the fact that there are been too many changes for both of them. As he admits, it appears too much time has passed.

       Upon the first meeting, Victor had quoted a passage from a book, “If you shoot me, I’ll bleed,” which he interprets as meaning that you have to except things as they are. Now Hugo quotes the line back to Victor, “If you are shot, you bleed.” Their relationship has long ago been over, perhaps before it even began.

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

Søren Green | En Aften (An Evening) / 2016

before or after

 

Søren Green and Tomas Lagermand Lundme (screenplay), Søren Green (director) En Aften (An Evening) / 2016 [9 minutes]

 

Obviously meant as a follow up to Søren Green’s 2014 film En eftermiddag (An Afternoon), En Aften (An Evening) is only a slightly longer work that takes us to the moments after the two boys of the original, Frederik (Jacob Ottensten) and Mathias (Ulrik Windfeldt-Schmidt), have now sexually consummated their relationship.

     We don’t know if this is their first time together—a direct result of that afternoon meeting when they attempted to sound out one another’s sexual interest—or the ending of one of many of such sexual sessions they have shared. All we do note is that Frederik seems to be troubled, the fact of which Mathias notes, but seems fairly unconcerned. Frederik was moodier even in the first short film, and now seems to be worried about the state of things even more than in the first work where he received the happy news via text from their mutual girlfriend Amalie (Julia Wentzel Olsen) that Mathias was very much interested in him.

      All we can glean is that Mathias seemingly knows how to lure his friend out of his funk, gently touching and stroking him, although at one point Frederik pulls back. And most important, all seems to be fine once he suggests they call for a pizza with all the toppings.

 

       There are two interruptions in their troubled after-sex moments, however, which matter very much in terms of their ongoing relationship, but which we can’t tell whether they are flashbacks or a slip for a few minutes into the future.

        The first appears with Frederik and Mathias sitting on a table which appears to be in the schoolyard, Frederick in the same shirt which he has put on in the earlier scene, waiting, so he tells Mathias for Amalie to stop by. Frederick seems disturbed by what he sees as her intrusion, suggesting that Frederik seems always be with her. A pizza is again ordered, and the boys charmingly spar a bit, as Frederik replies that Amalie’s not his “type,” Matias replying that he couldn’t get her even if he wanted. The two engage in a mock fight the way young boys who enjoy one another’s company often do, engaging in wrestling simply as a subconscious way of being able to put their hands upon the other.

         Amalie comes up to the screen without them knowing and watches for a moment.

         The scene then switches back to the brooding, after-sex scene, which makes the schoolyard clip seem all the more like a flashback, connected by Frederik’s call for pizza.

         There is another such intrusion, however, which picks up where the other left off, this time the boys discovering Amalie’s presence and Mathias going over to her to talk momentarily about her evening plans to attend a movie. He suggests a romantic film for her to see.

          Eventually Frederik joins Mathias, he and Amalie greeting one another, with her responding, “You look cute.” Frederick asks what she means, Amalie replying, “You look cute together.”

          Frederik angrily reacts, “We aren’t cute,” storming off with Mathias following, wondering first what he’s doing and soon after, where is he going. Frederik turns back for a moment to answer: “I just can’t do this,” turning away and walking off with Mathias starring after in confusion.

       

     If this is a flashback, obviously, then the situation has, at least, been temporarily resolved, although Frederik’s behavior hints that he still having problems perhaps accepting himself as one of a “cute” gay couple. But if it is a continuation of his troubled, after-sex brooding, we can only imagine that the two may never be able to actually be a couple, that he is simply not ready for a relationship. The result may be similar, but the fact that they have been able to come together after recontextualizes the entire situation.

       There is no way of knowing. And perhaps their sexual encounter has only reified his lack of surety. But a great deal depends upon whether this is simply his reaction to what has happened to them or a pattern of behavior with which Frederik has learned to accommodate. I think that because the two intruding scenes are filmed in bright sunlight and the after-sex scene is titled “en Aften” that we must presume they have somewhat resolved their problems and may be moving into a new future.

       But they are young boys, after all, and, particularly in Frederik’s case, a full-out commitment to his sexual desires may still be something for which he is not yet ready.

       Interestingly, in the first film it was Frederik who was constantly texting Amalie, while in the second it is Mathias.

       Whatever, one must admit, they do make a cute “couple,” which someday they might recognize is not a put-down but an expression of their beautiful youth.

 

Los Angeles, June 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

D. W. Griffith | The House with Closed Shutters / 1910

the soldier who died as her brother

by Douglas Messerli

 

The Moving Picture World synopsis provides a much deeper explanation of the characters and their motives than D. W. Griffith’s 1910 silent film does, so I will use it to provide background information that is not evident on viewing the picture.

 

    The film ostensibly stars Charles Randolph (Henry B. Walthall), a young man of the South whose who father and other relatives were apparently killed in noble fights of the past. Like many a young southern boy, however, Charles is bombastic and haughty, and a heavy drinker to boot. But with the excitement of General Lee being bivouacked in a camp nearby, and with the fact that his two best friends, Wheeler (Charles West) and Carter (Joseph Graybill) have just become lieutenants and are about to go off to serve—each taking their turn to offer up affectionate goodbyes to Charles’s sister, Agnes (Dorothy West)—Charles is himself finally convinced to enlist, reappearing from another room suddenly in uniform.

     Both his mother (Grace Henderson) and, particularly Agnes, are overjoyed by his decision and proudly see the three friends off as they make their way, a bit like The Three Musketeers, to Lee’s headquarters, taking with them a full-sized Confederate flag which Agnes has just finished sewing and stitching together.

     Hardly do they have time to acclimate themselves to their new environment before Lee calls for a strong rider to take a message to the front, the three all volunteering, with the General choosing Randolph.

     Randolph sips on a whiskey flask he’s brought along, perhaps to fortify his courage, and rides off bravely. But almost the moment he hits the road, Yankee lookouts are on the chase, guns ablaze, and he turns and rides quickly in the other direction. They follow, and others along the way join in on the foray. At one point Randolph, now clearly terrified, stops off for a second for another sip from his flask, observing a nearby Rebel soldier falling dead, shot from the men at his heels.

     Randolph races off, arriving back to the family mansion, hardly able to stumble in before falling into a drunken stupor. Greeting him with great consternation, his mother and Agnes momentarily feel alarmed for him until they recognize his condition, and in trying to move and awaken him they discover the important message hidden within his uniform, realizing suddenly that he has not fulfilled his mission and certainly is in no condition to continue.

      With the impulse of a young ardent supporter of the cause, Agnes orders the servant to strip him and bring her his clothing. Almost like a minor St. Joan, she dresses as a soldier and rushes off to deliver the message, escaping Yankee soldiers by taking a shortcut off the road and hiding momentarily in the trees before she returns to the road, ultimately handing over her message to the waiting military unit, whose instructions apparently are to engage the enemy.

      She rushes back to Lee’s camp which is now involved in a full-out battle with the enemy, Griffith’s ability to make the scene appear real dramatizing both the adrenalin excitement of warfare and its horrors. Without a weapon, Agnes can do little but cheer on the musketeers, standing close behind them, and when they seem to rout the attackers, rushing forward with a flag in her hands.

      But almost immediately, those who have retreated are apparently reinforced by other Northern soldiers who come rushing forward to overwhelm the Southern defenses, killing Agnes among others in the process.

      When her mother receives word that her soldier “son,” has died after a series of brave actions, she is both bereaved and horrified that anyone might find her real son, a coward, still living and have to explain her daughter’s sacrifice of her own life for his.

       To keep out all others as well as to punish her son for his cowardice and drunken behavior, she orders all the shutters to be closed forever, as the house is sealed up in a manner that cannot help but remind one of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

       Eventually others begin to return from the war which the South has lost. They come bearing flowers for the loss of Charles, but also to resume their courtship with Agnes. What the mother tells them is never revealed, but she keeps them away at great expense. At one point Charles, attempting to unshutter his tomb and find out what is happening on the outside, is held back by his mother, who throws a blanket over her son to hide him and stands guard over the chair in which he sits, asking them to leave her in peace. When they obey, she commands the shutters closed again, and the ex-soldiers walk away confused and saddened.

       As the years pass, Charles ages, his mother becoming a now very old woman. From time to time the soldiers still approach the house with closed shutters, leaving memorial bouquets but not daring to knock. But at one point, when Charles’ old friend Wheeler can be heard on the porch, he commands that their old servant pull open the shutters, the sun pouring into the room so brightly that it clearly dazes Charles, causing him such consternation that he dies of what appears to be a heart attack. Their family’s dark secret has been kept.

      This early film demonstrates one of the most specific dramatic moments of a woman’s willing transformation into the male gender, even if it has nothing basically to do with sexuality; and this work, much like his later Judith of Bethulia explores, on a smaller scale, genuine transgender and perhaps even transsexual desires. If nothing else, Agnes outrides and displays a bravery not apparent in most of the other males.

     Yet there is been no mention of this film, to my knowledge, in any of the discussions of queer figures in film, not even on the extensive lists of films with possible LGBTQ+ subjects on the internet’s Letterboxd, despite the fact that his film is far more significant than the dozens of drag films touted as early indications of homosexual depictions in cinema.

     Finally, with its representation of an almost pathological fervor of regional patriotism and violence, Griffith’s film presents us with eerie characters who, having caused their own destruction closed themselves forever off in a world amazingly similar to Poe’s out of both shame for their inabilities to act and their shameful actions simultaneously. Griffith implies that the South has entombed itself in a pride based on enslavement. Perhaps Agnes’ vital and exciting sacrifice of her own life was the only alternative.

     The fact that the family’s all-too-loyal black servant was performed in blackface by the Irish actor W. J. Butler* speaks volumes that perhaps Griffith and his writer could not have comprehended.

 

*Butler’s grandson was David Butler, who directed two of the titles discussed in these volumes, Just Imagine (1930) and Calamity Jane (1953). The central character of the latter film bore a great deal in common with Agnes Randolph.

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).