With
The Great Fight
, John Ford wanted to apologize, at the end of his career, to the Native Americans for the way he had treated them in his films.
Filmed in 1964, it was his last western.
“I have killed more Indians than Custer, Beecher and Chivington combined and people in Europe always want to know things about the Indians,” the teacher explained to Peter Bogdanovich in the book of interviews
John Ford
(Hatari! Books).
“Every story has two versions, but for once he wanted to show his point of view.
Let's be fair: we have treated them very badly and it is a stain on our record;
We have deceived them and robbed them, killed them, massacred them and done everything;
But if they kill a single white man, by God the Army will come out.”
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The film, which was originally titled
Cheyenne Autumn,
recounts a historical episode in which a group of Cheyenne flee to their historic lands from the miserable reservation in which they are confined and end up being massacred, after the American authorities trick them into a and again.
The problem is that Ford filmed in Monument Valley, the setting for his great Western films, which belongs to a Navajo reservation.
Members of this tribe performed massively in the film, in which Mexican actors also play Native Americans.
It's something that today would be impossible to explain to the public, but Ford had no choice if he wanted to shoot the film.
Of course, the Navajos acting as Cheyennes took their revenge on the white men.
Since no one but them understood Navajo on filming—a language so difficult that it was used as a secret code during World War II—instead of reading the script they decided to say whatever they wanted.
With a sad, contrite expression, in the most tragic scenes of the film, they made all kinds of comments about the small size of the white officers' penises and other nonsense.
At least, that's what an old Hollywood legend tells, but John Ford made the doctrine clear at the end of
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:
“This is the West: when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” ”.
Historical photograph of a group of Osage natives.
ilbusca (Getty Images)
Narrator Tony Hillerman wrote a series of crime novels that take place on the same Navajo reservation where Ford filmed
The Big Fight
, on which the wonderful series
Dark Winds is based
,
whose two seasons can currently be seen on AMC+.
In one of them,
Sacred
Clowns
,
he describes a drive-in movie theater in Gallup where Navajos came again and again to see the movie.
One of the police officers who star in the series, Jim Chee, says that “they honked their car horns and died laughing” during the screening in the theoretically most dramatic moments.
And he remembers what he felt when attending a session with a Cheyenne who did not understand Navajo: “In exactly the same scene, he contemplated the destruction of his culture.
"We watched as our people laughed at the whites."
All this is something that could not have happened to Martin Scorsese, another director at the peak of his creative wisdom, who has launched himself into Westerns at the age of 81 with
The Moon Killers
(which can be seen on Apple TV), in which the Osage tribe plays an essential role and which has achieved ten Oscar nominations.
The film, which takes place in the 1920s, tells how dozens of Osage people were murdered with total impunity to steal their property rights to their oil wells.
Scorsese has not only relied on numerous native advisors to give credibility to the film, but has also worked directly with tribal representatives.
Of the 63 Native American actors who appear in the film, only 14 are non-Osage.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, in 'The Moon Killers'. Melinda Sue Gordon
Both Ford and Scorsese wanted to remember a forgotten history, buried by a vision of the past in which the roles are completely reversed—the invaders were the invaded and vice versa.
In fact, David Grann, the New Yorker
journalist
on whose book, Random
House
, Scorsese's film is based, relates that it was precisely that, the desire to remember something that should never have been forgotten, which led him to investigate crimes against the Osage for years.
“One day in the summer of 2012, having just arrived from New York, where I live and work as a journalist, I visited Pawhuska for the first time, hoping to find information about the murders that occurred almost a century ago.
Like most Americans, when I went to school I never read any books about these crimes;
It was as if they had been erased from history.
Hence I began to investigate when I accidentally stumbled upon a reference to those events.
Since then I was consumed by the desire to resolve the unanswered questions, to tie up the loose ends that the FBI investigation suffered from.”
The protagonist, Lily Gladstone, who has a great chance of becoming the first Native American actress to win the Oscar, received classes in Osage culture, which were not limited only to the language, but also to the stories that cement the traditions of this tribe .
“There are elements in this film that are clearly Osage,”
Jim Gray, one of the tribe members who helped make the film, told
The Harvard Gazette .
“Even though 99% of the audience is not Osage and won't know as much about this story as we do, the Osage sitting in the audience will pick up on many of the observations that Scorsese incorporated into the film that could only have come from the film. collaboration with the tribe.”
Decolonizing—museums, mentalities, the vision of the past—also represents the different way in which two masters of cinema, Ford and Scorsese, have faced the same problem 60 years apart: telling the story of America from the point of view of those who were exterminated.
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