IN THE CINÉMA CLUB OF… CHUQUIMAMANI-CONDORI

ANGELS IN HELL, Tezuka Osamu & Hiroshi Sasagawa, 1981

Tezuka's made-for-TV movies are some of his best work. Possibly my favorite movie of all time. The connection of abolition, sovereignty, and animality makes me think of the work of Frederick Douglas and Che Gossett’s early writing as well.

BAGI, THE MONSTER OF MIGHTY NATURE, Tezuka Osamu, 1984

Another one of my all-time favorites, made for TV. The Japanese love for Native American culture is evident in Bagi, whose character is based partly on Andean legends and medicine like our usqullu and carbunclo. It’s a q'iwa or Two-Spirit story, Bagi’s search for her origin that leads to South America, and her unrequited love for the human that raised her. That the beastly Bagi is portrayed as more tender and capable of demonstrating deeper love than the human character is such a strong point that also takes on a racialized dimension, again recalling Che Gossett and Eva Hayward’s writing. “The love they denied us is our impulse to change the world” wrote Lohana Berkins on her death bed.

AN AMERICAN TAIL, Don Bluth, 1986

We would watch this movie all the time as kids. Back then I didn’t understand that the artwork and backgrounds for the movie were based on 1800s artwork like JMW Turner’s paintings, but the medicine was so heavy it felt like we were in a 19th century time frame watching it. That it is done from the tiny and overwhelming perspective of mice is also a very Aymara viewpoint. The giant black hands of the cats that grab at the mice in the market scene signal the captive Native-Black labor that built the economy. Interestingly, the infamous market in Potosí (where our people were sent to die in the mines as slaves) was called el gato, the Spanish word for cat, a play on the Aymara, qhathu, our word for market.

When the main character gets lost at sea, you feel Hortense Spiller’s vision of “nowhere” (or Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti’s “mama cocha”), just as the backgrounds and amber cel lighting reflect JMW Turner’s “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On”.

Re-watching the film last year, I hadn't noticed that the ending scenes follow the same foggy editing as the film's daydream or fantasy sequences, suggesting the main character never truly reunites with his family, but only carries the dream of being together with them while remaining an orphan.

BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON, Robert Altman, 1976

Another movie that really makes you feel like you are standing in the time frame the work is supposed to be set in. We shouldn't forget the scale at which popular culture (like Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show) has shaped and continues to structure both the nation’s view of Natives and our own understanding of ourselves as Native people. An elder of mine, Western Shoshone chief Jonny Bob, used to tell us something like: “Look Indian (and be proud)!”. But it was on us to determine what that meant, and I couldn’t help but notice that many of our AIM elders from the 60’s and 70’s had built their understanding of “looking Indian” from Hollywood and State photography, for better or worse.

The scribe of war during Tupaq Katari and Bartolina Sisa’s time described his confusion regarding why an Aymara leader like Katari would wear the gold arm bands of an Inka and quote the Bible, and why Sisa would dress like a royal from Europe (they nicknamed her “la virreina”). Our Native leaders were reclaiming and redefining what it meant to “look Indian” on their terms, but also within the confines of their historical moment.

THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER, Mike Gabriel & Hendel Butoy, 1990

The coloring in this movie is beautiful and I remember going to the theater to see it when it came out.

It wasn’t until re-watching this movie recently that I realized it’s a Missing and Murdered Indigenous People story, and given the time it was produced, could have been originally written to be from an Indigenous Australian perspective. From the jump, the golden eagle character is established as the boy’s ajayu (or soul), as it carries him through the sky, even gliding on water. In the scene where the boy is captured, the villain directly states he has already killed the eagle's mate or “father”, making us aware the balance of the child's chachawarmi or Two-Spirit medicine has been broken by the perpetrator. Nobody comes to help the child when he is captured— only rodents, insects, and other small animals organize to get him out. This reminded me of stories that our elders told us about Anata ceremony, where they say these small creatures showed us how to hide in the caves or subterranean places from the violence of the Spanish colonizers.