VIFF review: Inconvenient Indian finds playful visual poetry in Thomas King’s plainspoken call to action
A flow of imagery, old and new, subverts both stereotypes and documentary traditions
Still of a man wearing a headdress taken from Inconvenient Indian
Streams September 24 to October 7 as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival, via VIFF.org
“YOU HAVE TO be careful of the stories you tell and you have to watch out for the stories you’re told,” Thomas King tells us in Inconvenient Indian. The well-known author and thinker appears in leads us through the film, first roaming Toronto in a Trickster-driven cab, then eating popcorn in a movie theatre screening endless stereotypes and inaccuracies.
Director Michelle Latimer provides a playful, poetic, and powerful frame for King’s plainspoken call to action--the same voice that shifted the conversation eight years ago with his book of the same name.
Latimer simultaneously challenges the notion of documentary itself: she traces the form back to the patronizing, and patently false, depictions of the Inuit in Robert Flaherty’s seminal 1922 film Nanook of the North. In response to simplistic cliches, she forms a complex, farflung pastiche--Stagecoach, re-enactments of Custer’s Last Stand, empty skin parkas hanging ghostlike in museums, archival footage of residential schools, headdress Halloween costumes, all adding up to the colonial view of what King calls the “Dead Indian”.
Then Latimer shows us how very alive the culture is today, talking to everyone from rap renegades A Tribe Called Red to art star Kent Monkman (whose history-upending Shame & Prejudice at UBC's Museum of Anthropology complenebts this film perfectly). But perhaps her most resounding image is to portray a sort of anti-Nanook--an Inuit person who still hunts on the ice, but wearing Gortex pants and riding a snowmobile.
A genre-defying exploration worthy of the mind-blowing book.”
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