STAR-ADVERTISER / 1956
One night, I was sitting on the couch and my Samoan father rushed to turn the channel to 60 Minutes. Tonight’s episode? “Samoa and American Football.” My dad watched in adoration while I observed and analyzed the way Samoan males were linked and depicted in terms of the American Sport of Football. N. Bird Runningwater seems to have had a similar experience. A filmmaker of Cheyenne/Mescalero Apache descent, he said,
I remember the first time I had a connection with an Indian on television. I was eight years-old and my cousin Cathy and I were watching a stereotypical cowboy and Indian western. The native characters were dressed like nothing we had ever seen in our world. At one point, two warrior-type characters entered the scene, and when asked by the lead Anglo character how many enemies they had spied, they replied “na’kii.” Cathy and I looked at one another in amazement and began jumping for joy. We ran to tell our family that we had just heard an Indian on television speaking our Apache language. We felt like the world had finally had a glimpse of our lives as they really were, and from that point on, everything would be different. We watched more and more Westerns after that, waiting and hoping that maybe we would see ourselves on television or hear our language one more time. We never did (Hearne, Visualities 47).
In Sherman Alexie’s film Smoke Signals (1998), one of the main characters named Thomas Builds-a-Fire says “The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV.” The character’s line refers to the irony of “indigenous consumption of the very genres that consistently exclude them” (Hearne, Visualities 43). The titillations prompted by the glimpses of Indigenous culture simulated and broadcast into popular media creates a longing for more of that presence but does not satisfy or remotely equate to the richness of the cultural element obtusely exposed.
Despite the rare example of feature films written and directed by Native Hawaiians such as Keo Woolford’s The Haumana (2013), Native Hawaiians remain underrepresented in the film industry. This could be due to a number of reasons including a lack of funding, education, access and opportunity. However, one could argue that Native Hawaiians are purposely excluded from the film industry in order to continue perpetuating colonial messages through American feature films.
One could also argue that it is ironic that Native Hawaiians are well represented in music, hula, and other forms of entertainment and simultaneously underrepresented in the film industry. Part of the reason why Hawaiian music and hula does not receive the same kind of back lash that certain films about Native Hawaiians sometimes receive is because Hawaiian music and hula is mostly dominated by Native Hawaiians. I would argue that this is because of access and exposure.
My niece was 3 years old the first time she saw me playing an ukulele. She grabbed her cheap, plastic, and pink ukulele and immediately mimicked my movements and the notes I sang to her. This type of exposure to music, hula, and the arts is familiar to many Native Hawaiians and others who are local to Hawai‘i. Due to the fact that our exposure and access to these aspects of entertainment have been readily available and passed on for generations, Native Hawaiians have been able to thrive in these said industries.
In contrast to that experience, film has only been in the archipelago of Hawai‘i for a little over a century. Access and exposure to the craft and education of film and its multiple layers has been limited to none in most Native Hawaiian communities and as a result, Native Hawaiians are not well represented as agents of films depicted in Hawai‘i or about Native Hawaiians. The idea and object of “the camera” was introduced to Hawai‘i so the education that might accompany the craft of film must be introduced and integrated into Hawai‘i’s current education system.
Me ke Aloha,
Bubzy
Some Facts:
· The first screening of a motion picture in Hawai‘i took place at the Honolulu Opera House in 1897. A year later, an Edison camera crew in transit from Yokohama to California stopped for one day in O‘ahu and shot the first Pacific Island moving pictures: Honolulu Street Scene (1898), Wharf Scene (1898), Honolulu (1898), and Kanakas Diving for Coins (1898) (4). Within a decade, movie theaters like the Orpheum founded in 1906, would be displaying movies on 1234 Fort Street on a regular basis (Schmitt vi).
· Hawai‘i has served as the backdrop and subject of some of Hollywood’s most viewed films and successful directors. Film directors who have worked in Hawai‘i include Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and Alexander Payne (Rampell Intro). The varied tropical terrains of Hawai‘i have been cast as the jungles of Africa, South America, South East Asia and Oceania.
· Hawai‘i as a subject or backdrop in American Cinema usually fits into 4 feature film categories and 1 television category –
1 South Seas Cinema (Bird of Paradise and Six Days Seven Nights)
2. World War II-era settings (From Here to Eternity and Pearl Harbor)
3 Hawaii as itself (50 First Dates and The Descendants)
4 Hawaii as elsewhere (Jurassic Park and George of the Jungle)
Film crime dramas in paradise have been relatively few, appearing exclusively in the television arena (Hawaii Five-0, Magnum P.I.)
Sources
Cummings, Denise ed. Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and
Art. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2011.
The Haumana. Dir. Keo Woolford. Hula Nation Filmworks, 2013.
Rampell, Ed and Luis I. Reyes. The Hawaii Movie and Television Book : Celebrating 100 years of Film Production throughout the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, c2013.
“Samoa and American Football” Youtube.com 20 February 2012. 60 Minutes.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A69Z8fCpuAImerican Football>
Schmitt, Robert C. Hawaii in the Movies 1898-1959. Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1988.
Schmitt, Robert C. Movies in Hawaii, 1897-1932. 73-82.
Sigall, Bob. "A defunct drive-in theater still evokes moving images." Star-Advertiser. 26 February 2016.
Smoke Signals. Dir. Chris Eyre. ShadowCatcher Entertainment, Welb Film Pursuits Ltd., 1998.