Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Chung Hua University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-04

Making Settler Cinemas

10.1057/9780230107915 - Making Settler Cinemas, Peter Limbrick



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Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand Peter Limbrick




MAKING SETTLER CINEMAS

Copyright © Peter Limbrick, 2010. A shorter version of chapter one appeared as “Playing Empire: Settler Masculinities, Adventure, and Merian C. Cooper’s The Four Feathers (US, 1929),” Screening the Past 26 (2010). An earlier version of chapter three was previously published as “The Australian Western, or, A Settler Colonial Cinema par excellence,” Cinema Journal 46, no. 4 (2007): 68–95. Some early material from chapter four was published in “The Flotsam and Jetsam of Film History: Hei Tiki and Postcolonial Translations,” journal of Visual Culture 6.2 (2007): 247–53; and from chapter five in “Looking Round The Seekers: Film History and Film Culture,” Historical Review 56.1 (2008): 7–10. I thank Screening the Past, La Trobe University, the University of Texas Press, Sage Publications, and the Whakata¯ne and District Historical Society for permission to reprint these materials here. Cover illustration: “Hard Yards,” © Sally Papps, 2007. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10264–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Limbrick, Peter, 1967– Making settler cinemas : film and colonial encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand / Peter Limbrick. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–10264–4 (hardback) 1. Imperialism in motion pictures. 2. Culture in motion pictures. 3. Indigenous peoples in motion pictures. 4. Motion pictures—Political aspects—United States. 5. Motion pictures—Political aspects—Australia. 6. Motion pictures—Politcal aspects—New Zealand. I. Title. PN1995.9.I42L56 2010 791.43⬘6581—dc22

2009046031

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



For my parents: Warren Edmund Limbrick Dorothy Jean Limbrick, 1939–1999




List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

A Note on the Text

xv

Introduction

1 Part One Making a Settler Cinema in the United States

One Two

Playing Empire: Settler Masculinities, Adventure, and The Four Feathers (1929)

29

Imperial Production, Settler Colonialism, and the Argosy Westerns

59

Part Two Three

Empire and Settler Cinema in Australia

Ealing’s Australian Westerns Part Three

97

Film History and Settler Cinema in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Four

Hei Tiki (1935): Film Histories Past and Present

131

Five

Unsettled Histories: The Seekers (1954)

171

Notes

207

Bibliography

237

Availability of Films

253

Index

255



Contents




1.1

1.2

1.3

2.1

2.2

2.3

3.1

3.2 3.3 4.1

Playing empire: Cooper and Schoedsack on the set of The Four Feathers, Cathedral City, California. Courtesy of Merian C. Cooper Papers, BYU Special Collections. 30 Cooper and Schoedsack, as “Fuzzy Wuzzies,” duel over Jean Arthur. Production still from The Four Feathers. Courtesy of Merian C. Cooper Papers, BYU Special Collections. 47 Expeditionary filmmaking within empire: Cooper and Schoedsack among the Amarar. Production still from The Four Feathers. Courtesy of Merian C. Cooper Papers, BYU Special Collections. 51 The precariousness of settlement: Ma McBean’s Trading Post in Fort Apache, Goulding’s Trading Post in Monument Valley. Ford added the stairs, verandah, and fence to the left of the building. (Frame enlargement.) 60 Indigenous control of space: York and Beaufort approach Cochise’s compound in Fort Apache. (Frame enlargement.) 78 Offscreen space withheld, “You think that’s a whipperwell?” She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (Frame enlargement.) 79 Indigenizing The Overlanders. Advertisement from The Film Weekly, September 13, 1945. Courtesy of AFI Research Collection. 110 The threat of offscreen space: Bitter Springs. (Frame enlargement.) 124 “Wild blacks” domesticated: The Overlanders. (Frame enlargement.) 126 The paˉ site built by Markey at Omori for the making of Hei Tiki. Photographer Henry Hope-Cross. Stills collection, New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Nga Taonga Whitiaˉhua. 150



Figures

Figures

4.2 Director Alexander Markey attends to lead male actor Ben Biddle during the making of Hei Tiki. Photographer Henry Hope-Cross. Stills Collection, New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Nga Taonga Whitiaˉhua. 4.3 Henry Hope-Cross’s tent on location during the making of Hei Tiki. Photographer Henry Hope-Cross. Stills Collection, New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua. 5.1 The inevitability of settlement: new colonists cross the beach at Otarawairere Bay in the last shot of The Seekers. (Frame enlargement.) 5.2 Launching a waka at Wairaka during production of The Seekers. Courtesy of Mrs. Cherry King and Te Iwi o Ngaˉti Awa. 5.3 Laya Raki and Cherry King (née Merritt) on location at Otarawairere Bay during production of The Seekers. Courtesy of Mrs. Cherry King and Te Iwi o Ngaˉti Awa.


155

156

180

197

199


x

Hours at the keyboard or in the archive inevitably feel like solitary endeavor, but the process of writing this book was always sustained by an exceptional community that stretches back to graduate school and beyond. A long time ago, in New Zealand, Patrick Fuery’s enthusiasm and Thierry Jutel’s mentorship changed the way I think and teach and set me on a journey that continued in Australia. At La Trobe, Chris Berry’s attention as a supervisor was matched only by his patience as I upended my location and schedule more than once. Barbara Creed lent her insight when Chris was on leave, and Bill Routt’s wisdom and erudition continue to influence me. The year I spent at UCLA was life-changing and I thank David Halperin for passing on a name, Edward R. O’Neill for welcoming me before he even met me, David Gerstner for conveniently moving out so I could move in, and David Pendleton for taking a chance with a new roommate; with Amy Bomse, Marc Siegel, Daniel Hendrickson, Tara McPherson, and Rob Knaack I got friends for life. At UCLA I was fortunate to study with Peter Wollen, Janet Bergstrom, Steve Mamber, and Fabian Wagmister, all of whom furthered aspects of my work in significant ways, and although she was not my teacher there, Vivian Sobchack began and maintained a supportive interest that I have valued since. In the back and forth of those years in Australia and Los Angeles, other friends like Nicholas Thorpe, Fiona Macdonald, Michael Alexander, Sue Collins, David Hodges, Andrew Dennis, Paul Pettit, Amelia Bartak, Murray McKeich, Bronwyn Weaver, and Suzie Gasper helped with the transitions and made Melbourne hard to leave and good to come back to. In North Carolina, Cathy Davidson plucked me from barista duties to direct the University Scholars Program at Duke. I’ve learned so much from Cathy it’s hard to know where to begin thanking her; her continued mentoring and friendship means I won’t be done for a while. On the other side of campus, Jane Gaines gave me courses to teach, a disciplinary home, and intellectual community. Durham also brought me the friendship of Ken Wissoker whose generosity of ideas, advice, and good fun I have been lucky to enjoy ever since. Postdissertation,



Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Linda Williams and Scott Bukatman gave me teaching opportunities and made Berkeley and Stanford feel like temporary homes; I thank them both for the chance to land on my feet on the west coast. This book truly took shape after I arrived at UC Santa Cruz where I continue to marvel at my luck at joining such an amazing department. The work wouldn’t have happened without the professionalism of our incredible staff, current and former, and the support of my faculty colleagues for my research and teaching has been unfailing. Among a remarkable group I must especially mention three: Shelley Stamp has granted me unending supplies of sage advice and support. Amelie Hastie’s early support for my work has never wavered and her own writing continues to inspire me to think differently about what I do. And since we began at Santa Cruz together, Irene Gustafson has gone from office mate to best mate and has made the junior faculty journey so much more fun. Beyond the department, I thank colleagues in other programs with whom I have talked about this work, our librarian, Paul Machlis, and especially our library’s interlibrary loan staff whose exceptional work on my behalf made it possible to think from multiple places simultaneously. I thank the students with whom I’ve shared some of these ideas in classes, and the undergraduate assistants who helped with research: Emily Calderone, Lauren Pasternak, Teague Schneiter, and Madison Waterworth. Research for this book took place in archives and collections in four different countries. I particularly thank Janet Moat and Jonathan Balcon for access to the Michael and Eileen Balcon Collection at the BFI Special Collections in London. In Australia, staff at the National Film and Sound Archive, the ACMI Access Collection in Melbourne, and the AFI Research Collection helped greatly. Special thanks to Quentin Turnour and Deb Verhoeven for their assistance and collegiality. In Utah, James V. D’Arc and staff enabled my research on Merian C. Cooper and Argosy, and provided the stills in chapter one. The New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitikia o Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua not only facilitated my work but even became a partner in it. I thank all the staff in Wellington, especially Kristen Wineera, Kiri Griffin, Di Pivac, and Kathy Dudding. Taking a show on the road with Jane Paul and Johnny Morris was immense fun. Huia Kopua was welcoming and gracious from before our first meeting, and I remain indebted to her wisdom and insight. I was honored to be led by Waana Davis and Himiona Grace at Wairaka. The Sound Archives in Christchurch moved things up the queue for me. At the Whakataˉne Museum, Paula Karkkainen offered ideas and facilitated new friendships and contacts, Rohi Kaimarama researched photos,



xii

xiii

and the other museum staff helped and made me welcome. Sitting in the staff kitchen, Jade Tangiaˉhua Baker joked to me that Whakataˉne was the center of the universe, and now I know why. Thanks to her for reading my work and continuing the conversations, and to Rachel Thomson for her hospitality in Te Kaha. Lee Rona Wells also caught the research bug and did her own work on The Seekers. Clive Sowry and Geoff Steven helped with photographic research on Hei Tiki. Much of the work in chapters four and five also relied upon the immense generosity of a number of people who had no professional reason to help me and did so voluntarily; some had far more urgent priorities than this work and I value their openness and assistance all the more. I cannot possibly thank all of them by name, and hope those I do not mention will still accept my gratitude. From Tu¯rangi and nearby, I particularly thank the Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa Trust Board, Loretta Christy, Tina Porou, Arthur Grace, Ranginui Biddle, and Hine Mohi. In Whakataˉne, Clark Jaram introduced me to Wairaka and then to Claude Keepa, Colleeen Maynard, and many others from Te Whare o Toroa marae who welcomed me back a year later; thanks to Pauline Chapman and Te Rauotehuia Chapman for their hospitality, and to the Ru¯nanga o Ngaˉti Awa. Lawrence Pook introduced me to the waˉnanga and made me welcome. Special thanks to Morris Meha, Horowai Hohepa, and all those who made us so welcome at Tapuaeharuru marae, and to Monty and Katerina Daniels in Horohoro. Cherry King was one of the first people I contacted about The Seekers and I especially thank her not just for her help with the work but for her love and kindness throughout; her family has also helped me since that first visit, for which I’m very grateful. Elsewhere, Jil Hope-Cross Richardson and Barbara Hope-Cross were generous in their help with photos. Other friends and colleagues in many different places have been part of this work—by reading it, talking about it, or simply distracting me from it. For all kinds of support and fun I thank Anita Brady, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Michael Gillespie, Jane Grogan, Tim Groves, Miriam Harris, Minette Hillyer, Annie Howell, Donna Malane, Annemarie Jutel, Matt Magoffin, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Lara Guille Otte, Leanne Saunders, Paul Shannon, Matthew Tinkcom, Ian Wedde, and Katy Yiakmis. Out of sight but not out of mind through the period of research were Nigel Taylor and Erin Watts. Kenda Autumn let me get to work every day and Kelly Weimer is continuing the tradition. Sally Papps became a friend during the writing and I thank her for the amazing image that graces the cover and for her conversations about our projects. Caren Kaplan and Eric Smoodin



Accknowledgments

Acknowledgments

have at turns been readers, mentors, and advocates for my work, and great friends throughout. I can only hope that continuing to ply them with New Zealand wine goes some way to repaying all their favors. Versions of this book were presented in talks at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Association for Cultural Studies in Istanbul, the UC Davis Cultural Studies colloquium and the UC Santa Cruz Center for Cultural Studies, and the Media Studies department at Victoria University of Wellington. I thank all those who invited me and who responded. Research for the book was supported by the UC Santa Cruz Senate Committee on Research, the Arts Research Initiative, and the UC President’s Enrichment Fund. Colleagues in my department gave extremely valuable feedback on two chapters in our faculty colloquia. Lisa Rofel gave extensive feedback on my introduction and chewed it over with me on the long drives to campus. Chris Holmlund, Thierry Jutel, Bhaskar Sarkar, Jo Smith, and Amy Villarejo all read, critiqued, and advised me on this manuscript over the years, supporting not only the development of this project but my professional well-being as well. And Anitra Grisales has become my ideal reader: with an incredible eye for detail as well as the big picture, she improved this book immensely by her careful attention and editing. I also thank the anonymous reviewers who read my work and whose suggestions also improved the final manuscript. At Palgrave, Brigitte Shull and Lee Norton have been generous and attentive editors, and Kristy Lilas and Rohini Krishnan have taken good care of the details. None of this work could have taken place without the support of my family and they get my final thanks. In Auckland, Susannah Limbrick and Mike Limbrick have kept me grounded, and Poata Eruera, Misa Kinoshita, and Elizabeth Niven have brought more cheer. In the United States, Stephen Bomse, Vera Bomse, Edie Silber, Nancy Bomse, Seth Bomse, and Jenny Carchman listened, helped, cajoled, and let me get on with it. My mother, Dorothy Limbrick, left me a legacy that I use every day in a thousand ways, not least among them research, and Warren Limbrick continues to show me that learning and writing are for life; this book is dedicated to them. Closer to home, Oscar Limbrick Bomse teaches me to see and hear differently every day, and Esther never stops shaking things up. When everything is said and done, I’m still in awe of Amy Bomse, with whom it seems anything is possible.



xiv

In keeping with current practices within Pacific studies, and because Maˉori terms are ubiquitous in part three of the book, I have not italicized Maˉori words in the text. I use macrons to designate long vowels in Maˉori. However, when quoting from written documents that do not use such orthography, I have maintained the original spellings (e.g., John Te H. Grace’s book Tuwharetoa, about the Tu¯wharetoa people). Where some Maˉori words have regional variations, I have used the spelling appropriate to the area.



A Note on the Text




As I was nearing the end of my research for this book, I was invited into the home of a resident of Whakataˉne, New Zealand. Sitting at his kitchen table, we opened up a scrapbook that he’d compiled in 1954 to document the production and release of The Seekers, distributed by J. Arthur Rank and shot at Pinewood Studios, in England, and in the Bay of Plenty area, where Whakataˉne is situated.1 Fifty-four years later, my host shows me where he carefully pasted newspaper clippings and fan magazine photos, and as we reach the center of the book we find a two-page spread from a weekly British fan magazine, Picturegoer. Titled “Sorting Out The Seekers,” the centerfold spread is itself modeled after a scrapbook: an editorial comment informs readers that what is assembled in its two pages is a selection of different accounts and opinions of the film. Production stills are overlapped by excerpts of newspaper reviews and comments by the film’s producer, and all the text is presented in ragged boxes as if to mimic the work of a collector. Reading the snippets of text and seeing the stills in this montage, I am struck by themes that will recur throughout my book, and not just in the chapter devoted to The Seekers. One excerpt praises the portrayal of a purportedly Maˉori dance by (non-Maˉori) actress Laya Raki, saying, “It’s real and it’s provocative . . . the rhythm is strictly tribal, primitive. And true-life.” Another, however, claims that the film’s authenticity was upstaged by the documentary films of the Royal Tour of New Zealand in 1953, which “stole too much of [the film’s] thunder,” especially when it came to representations of “the New Zealand scenery and the Maoris.”2 Producer George H. Brown stresses the “story of passion and adventure; of seekers [and] their encounter with savage Maoris.” But one reviewer retorts, “It falls between the two stools of historico-documentary and dismounted horse opera,” and another suggests that its protagonist “might have sprung straight from the ‘Boy’s Own Paper’ (about 1900).”3 These conflicting views reveal some of the narratives that animate popular and critical responses to The Seekers in the 1950s and today: questions about the relationship between indigenous and settler cultures in countries colonized by Britain; the cinematic representation of settler-indigenous relations and of native peoples before contact; the extent of cultural and political ties to Britain, to royalty,



Introduction


and empire; national identity and cinema in the former colonies; the popularity or local relevance of Hollywood genres like the western; the role of older imperial literary modes of masculine adventure and fantasy within the realm of cinema; and so on. As I will show, such questions have always been central to what I’ll be calling settler cinemas. But the two-page scrapbook spread is not simply evidence that such issues made their way into the public domain of fan magazines, newspapers, and the like. Rather, as an index of passionate collection and arrangement, the scrapbook itself shows us the labor of settler cinema, its materiality past and present, and reveals its conflicting voices. Settler cinemas are made and sustained in the friction of a cluster of practices both intimate and impersonal, across diverse colonial locales, and even across different temporal moments. They are made by different groups of people whose interests may not be the same, and may even be opposed. And they embody in their transnational, conflictual practices the uneasy, unequal status of the settler colonial societies and empires that produce and are produced by them. The fan who collected the Picturegoer clipping was making history as much as the historical society president who helped the producers and made his own scrapbook about the film’s production, which I will study later. Rather than simply describing abstracted narratives of colonialism, or just reading films, this book also focuses on the smaller objects and encounters that together shape settler cinematic histories.4 Making Settler Cinemas, then, is about the production, distribution, reception, and textuality of cinema across three settler societies and two empires. I argue that the making of settler cinemas depends upon colonial encounters of many kinds. Colonial encounters have been important narrative themes in the cinemas of each of these nations, but this book will not confine itself to narrative encounters alone. Settler cinemas are created by the traffic across national borders between industries, producers, studio personnel, actors, films, and the people with whom they come into contact. Those encounters have taken place within established routes of colonial exchange and continue to create new circuits of colonial meaning. In exploring the United States, Australia, and New Zealand in their relationship to Britain and each other, this book seeks to find out how the legacies of the British empire have mattered to the cinema of Britain’s former settler colonies, and how the advent of the United States as an empire and Hollywood as an economic power has shaped them. The three chosen sites are uneven in their national status: while Australia and New Zealand went through the gradual shift from



2

3

colonies to dominions (by which they became self-governing within the British empire) and then to independent nations, the American colonies overthrew British rule by revolution and the United States thus defined itself against Britain. But the extensive U.S. history of pre- and postrevolutionary settler colonialism, and its continued links to the British empire despite its rhetoric of republicanism, have important consequences for its cinematic culture. Moreover, the vexing status of the United States as both settler state and empire, with a dominant mode of cinematic production, distribution, and form makes it crucial to an informed analysis of the other settler societies and their shared relations. In the first two parts of this book, my focus is predominantly on the complexities of colonial encounters as they have organized feature film production and distribution within and between white, anglophone settler cultures. Rather than focus only on settler-indigenous relations, I explore how settler coloniality produces white settler cultures with doubled relationships of imperial allegiance and nationalism. In part three, however, I make encounters between settler and indigenous cultures more prominent within and outside the frame, and I consider how indigenous people and local institutions have refashioned archiving and exhibition practices. In the ongoing and unsettled histories of encounter that these films still provoke, I find a model for understanding how the practice of film history itself is crucial to the past, present, and future of settler societies.5 As an industrial, technological, and cultural institution that involves material relations of travel, labor, exhibition, reception, and textuality, cinema has enacted and shaped, more than simply represented, the messy, vexed relations that make settler coloniality distinctive from other types of colonial formations. Cinema in settler societies, like other forms of cultural expression, has often articulated those relations in nationalist terms. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of settler societies is the way in which they negotiate national identity in relation to imperial and colonial pasts. This book, however, works against the notion that settler coloniality is a wholly localized and national phenomenon produced out of the encounter between a colonizing settler culture and an indigenous one. Instead, it explores settler cinemas as transnational constructions forged through histories of imperial and colonial rule, by mutually formative encounters between settler and indigenous cultures, and, crucially, by the ideological and material traffic between and across settler societies themselves. My brief example from The Seekers, above, is instructive of the ways that settler cinemas often yield films whose national status



Introduction


seems incoherent and in need of “sorting out.” The film holds a marginal place in standard nationalist narratives of New Zealand cinema; classified as a British film with a small amount of “on location” production, most histories do not count it within the terrain of “New Zealand cinema.” Yet its marginality to the discourse of nation can tell us much about the narrowly constructed ways that cinema has been approached across settler societies. I argue that The Seekers, like the other films discussed here, must be situated as a transnational film and film event, whose production, distribution, exhibition, and narrative contexts are shaped by histories of both British colonialism and American cinematic imperialism. It is no accident, for example, that one British reviewer cited above referred to Rank’s film as a “horse opera.” That colloquialism is appropriate, as the film draws stylistically on a history of westerns and ideologically on British imperial history in order to portray a protagonist seeking “a big land where a man can breathe freely.” New Zealand and American reviewers made the same association with westerns, and their responses affirm the ways that the film seemed to easily cross boundaries between “empire adventure” (associated with Britain) and “western” (associated with the United States). Yet The Seekers was also, as I will argue below, profoundly localized in the 1950s, when local people contributed to its production as extras, sightseers, fans, critics, or set volunteers. Much more recently, since the New Zealand Film Archive/ Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua6 showed the film again in the locations where it was shot, local viewers, indigenous and not, have continued to “make” it anew in the present, with some of the fiftyyear-old debates rekindled too. Making Settler Cinemas explores cinema as a formative aspect of settler societies and shows the ways in which industries, authors, actors, viewers, and film narratives have collided, colluded, and made conflict with the complexities of settler coloniality. Transgressing the borders of each settler nation-state, settler cinemas have taken shape within the interwoven colonial histories and politics of Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The affinities between the settler cultures I address here have been noted by Tom O’Regan, whose extensive elaboration of Australian cinema as a national cinema offers various models for understanding the cultural transfers and complex relationships that attach to it. O’Regan suggests, “Australian cinema is the cinema of a new world settler society just as is the cinema of the USA,”7 and notes the fact that they share “a version of the ‘bush’ and the frontier which disposes each to the ‘western’ and similar kinds of conceptions of the wilderness and the environment.”8



4

5

Elsewhere, O’Regan’s framing of Australian cinema as “a mediumsized English-language cinema” also situates it in relation to both Britain and the United States and stresses the porosity of its borders in relation to outside influences.9 While O’Regan is right about cultural affinities, this book furthers a more sustained inquiry into cinema’s movement between sites, not just the effect of one national cinema on another national cinema, however expansive its definition. Moreover, by using the framework of colonial encounters, I extend the study beyond some of O’Regan’s grounds for a “new world cinemas” comparison that, for the most part, rests on narrative representation and stylistic similarity. Instead I attend to a wider range of texts and contexts through which we might understand the extent of cinematic traffic between these settler societies. To think of these films outside the frame of a single national cinema can reveal new insights about the way that settler colonialisms have functioned. Making Settler Cinemas reaffirms how films have mattered within settler societies and how we might best learn from the facts of their production, their textuality, and their circulation among audiences. This book investigates some films that have been canonical in nationalist discourses in their place of origin, and others, like Hei Tiki (Alexander Markey, 1935), that remain problematic or marginal to nationalist versions of history. In all cases, I try to establish the ways in which these films emerge from encounters whose implications exceed the explanatory limits of national cinema histories, theories of discrete genres, or accounts of one-directional imperial or colonial practices. In situating its objects within a transnational settler colonial frame, Making Settler Cinemas exposes the multiple forms of agency that have produced and shaped these films, and others like them, and highlights the ways that cinema itself has been a privileged site for the construction of settler cultures. Therefore, my focus here is on films that do more than dramatize or thematize settler-indigenous encounters. Instead, I explore films, figures, and moments that embody the underlying economic, material, and cultural conditions that have made settler cinemas across a key period of their development and consolidation. Such conditions, I argue, are transnational in character, determined by the interwoven ties between British imperialism, U.S. and Hollywood imperialism, and national and cultural politics within the settler societies themselves. The encounters and cases explored in this book take shape, as I will argue, at key moments in the production of settler cinemas as institutions in these sites. Studying films like The Four Feathers (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1929), Hei Tiki, or the



Introduction


westerns John Ford made with Argosy Pictures, allows me to investigate the interplay between the dynamics of British imperialism as a colonizing, foundational, political and cultural force; U.S. imperialism as it has shaped Hollywood production, distribution, and representational practices; and settler nationalism as it shaped cinema in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand over the twentieth century and as it is contested today. The particular films and encounters addressed in this book demonstrate the conditions of possibility of wider settler cinematic cultures and institutions in each place. Settler colonies have a distinctive place within imperial and colonial histories. Within the history of the British empire, colonies in the Americas and, later, in Australasia (Australia and New Zealand) put overwhelming numbers of British subjects and their descendants in contact with indigenous populations, not for the purpose of extracting particular resources, but with the aim of permanent settlement and colonization, the creation of “new worlds.” Transforming these new sites into “home” involved the systematic and violent alienation of land from indigenous ownership, the imposition of colonial governments, and the eventual establishment of independent states built on settler legal and political frameworks. It required a reckoning with those who were there first—indigenous populations—and the physical and representational transformation of landscape. The white settlers who became dominant in these places, never displaced by decolonization movements, have formed their identities in relation to each other, to land, and to indigenous presence, inflected always and to differing degrees by the traces of a British imperial past. These relations have taken shape differently in each place; the place of Maˉori people and history in the political life of Aotearoa/New Zealand10 is certainly different than that of Native American peoples in the United States. Yet this book makes the argument that because settler-indigene relations might function differently at each site does not mean that relations of commonality between settler societies and settler cinemas do not exist. Cinema in the settler colonies has not only visualized and narrativized the encounters that shaped those colonies, but has also played a role in the very creation of settler histories through its production, distribution, and exhibition arrangements, the movement and travel of its personnel, its use of locations, and the contemporary life of its historical films. When referring to settler cinemas, therefore, I am speaking of the dominant forms of cinematic practice, institutional and textual, that have emerged from settler societies and anglophone settler cultures, but that are always in tension with indigenous histories. Settler cinemas often engage local colonial histories



6

Introduction

7

Film and Colonial Encounters This book illuminates some of the ways in which cinema and settler coloniality have been articulated together through a variety of colonial encounters. Mary Louise Pratt introduced the term “contact zones” to describe the sites of such meetings; in the case of settler colonies, the space of the colony and settler society becomes a permanent and ongoing contact zone between indigenous peoples, settlers, and later migrants.11 Settler cinemas are made in such contact spaces. Cinema as an institution has always been forged from encounters on a grand scale and from its very beginnings was implicated in the practices and legacies of empires and colonialism.12 No matter what kinds of colonial contact filmic narratives might present, the very practices of producing, making, distributing, and watching films within histories of empire and settler colonialism include some of the following encounters: “Scouting” locations engages cartographic practices forged through earlier imperial encounters. The onset of production requires the physical travel of casts and crew across sometimes vast distances and terrains, within or across the borders of the settler state. Production also requires sustained engagement with the physical environs of a shoot (involving the transformation of land, water sources, animal populations, and other natural resources). Shooting involves the employment of human labor, paid and unpaid, at multiple sites including the “home” studio or place of production as well as the shooting location. It might require cross-cultural negotiations over labor and use of land, water, dwelling places, and physical properties (clothing, tools, and the like). Producers engage governments for financial or logistical support, and military forces for protection, logistical support, or as stand-ins for actors. Financial negotiations rely on transnational movement of capital at the time of production and in later phases of distribution and exhibition. Distributors and exhibitors engage individuals through advertising that situates them within ideologies of colonial settlement and nationalist sentiment, and viewers and fans engage those calls in affective and material forms. These are but some of the encounters that this book will unravel, not in the generality with which I present them above, but



in their narratives, and are localized through other arrangements of production or exhibition, as we shall see. But they are also made in the cinematic traffic they create with other settler societies and in their relationships to empire.


rather in the specificity of their settler colonial contexts. For while the logistical needs that motivate such encounters are common to many institutional practices of cinema, within the terrain of settler societies these encounters are unavoidably embedded in complex histories of colonial exchange. In the chapters to follow, I show how British and American studios, producers, and directors made settler cinemas across the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, both through their encounters with each other and in conjunction with settler and indigenous subjects and histories. The colonial encounters that form the basis of this book were thus constituted through discourses of travel, cinematic relations of production, distribution, exhibition, and textuality, and through the negotiations with space that are common to all settler colonial environments. This book finds in those encounters not the clues to a unidirectional or unchanging set of hierarchies and relations that we might suppose in advance or that is limited to the time of these films’ production, but rather to unpredictable negotiations between imperial and settler cultures, and between settler and indigenous cultures, that occur across past and present. Rather than seeing in these films an ever-stable ideology of an overarching imperialism writ large in their production and textuality, my focus here addresses what Thomas calls the “messy actualities” of colonial encounters, the ways in which their shape is never wholly predictable in advance.13 That unpredictability, I argue, is due to the multiple points of negotiation and friction that occur as settler cultures negotiate their place in relation to their own imperial “mother countries” and to the sites that they have violently transformed into home.

Settler Societies and Postcolonial Theory In the context of this book, “settler colony” refers to those former colonies of Britain in which large-scale invasion and settlement, rather than imperial management and extraction of resources, was the primary goal.14 Their place within theories of colonialism has at times been ambiguous. Some writers, like Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, included the former settler colonies within the terrain of postcolonial analysis from their earliest work, and they were provocatively among the first scholars to argue for a place for the United States within studies of postcolonial literatures.15 Others have rejected such an inclusion of settler colonies within a postcolonial theoretical domain on the grounds that power in the settler states has never been



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transferred back to those who were originally colonized and that, in the absence of successful decolonization movements such as were seen in the African colonies, indigenous populations in the settler colonies remain under colonial rule.16 Recently, however, there has been considerably more attention paid to the place of settler societies within the various moments and movements of colonialism, and many have seen settler colonial politics as important for understanding colonial politics more generally. Antoinette Burton, for example, has suggested that “Given the role of both the British Empire and British history in shaping the historiographies of former settler states like the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa . . . interrogating this legacy is crucial to a critically engaged postcolonial politics.”17 Far from being marginal to some more urgent version of “the postcolonial,” settler colonies and the cultures that inhabit them have always experienced colonial relations in ways that are radically proximate and intimate, given the immediacy of the jointly practiced “contact zone” and the continuing effects of dispossession on indigenous cultures. While the increasing analysis of settler cultures under the sign of postcolonial theory has rested most often on literary, art historical, or anthropological texts,18 this book will insist that cinema, with its extensive institutional infrastructures, is a crucially instructive site with which to understand the complex coloniality of settler cultures.19 As these films and the encounters around them demonstrate, settler colonial relations are constructive of seemingly irresolvable questions of identity for white settler-invaders and their descendants.20 Such questions concern the place of film culture within the nation as much as national identity within filmic narratives. Settler subjects, colonizing in regard to the native population whose land they usurped, historically began to perceive themselves as colonized in relation to the imperial center. If the most dramatic political results of settler antipathy to colonial rule were seen in the American Revolution, other manifestations of the ambivalence toward the “mother country” can be traced through the nationalist currents of Australian and New Zealand cultural production too (and will be seen in abundance in the chapters below). Yet no matter how much settlers choose to define themselves against the imperial authority that first set them in the colony, their situation in relation to indigenous populations has remained, structurally, one of colonization, as many writers have pointed out. Alan Lawson, for example, introduced the notion of a “double inscription” to describe the particular way in which the settler subject is split between complicity with, yet distance from, the



Introduction


authority of imperialism, while simultaneously enacting authority over, yet still desiring, the “authenticity” and (ab)originality of the indigene. Settler cultures have engaged that double inscription in what Lawson refers to as “a long series of familiar historical and fictional narratives of psychic encounter and indigenization,”21 all of which try to account for the cultural and psychic effects of the double inscription. Postcolonial resistance to colonialism, as it might be expressed in the cultural production of nonsettler colonies, is experienced differently and less absolutely in the settler state (since the nature of resistance was practiced differently by indigenous and settler groups). However, differential responses to colonialism, and the questions of complicity and ambivalence that circulate around them, remain an important facet of imperial and colonial histories; as others have noted, such problems may even help to articulate key questions about other imperial projects. 22 The ambivalent place of settler colonies within the field of postcolonial theory has often been addressed within debates over the very definitions of the terms “post-colonial” or “postcolonial.” I will not rehash those debates here; the arguments, while important, are easily surveyed. 23 For the most part, I refrain from referring to settler societies here as “postcolonial,” especially in the time period covered during the production period of these films. Stuart Hall suggests that the “post” of postcolonial is as much an epistemological position as it is a declaration of a temporal break between colonialism and some moment that succeeds it, and argues that such a tension is potentially useful rather than misleading. 24 But when used as a description of (rather than as an approach to) societies like Australia, New Zealand, or the United States, “postcolonial” can become a distraction. Objections to the term have had sufficient purchase that the expanded definition of the postcolonial that Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin proposed in 1989 (where they “use the term ‘post-colonial’ . . . to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day”) now seems difficult to deploy in relation to settler societies.25 No matter the theoretical complexity of one’s model of “post,” the prefix seems to have exhausted its welcome in settler colonial environments where histories of settler-indigenousmigrant relations make it seemingly inconceivable for indigenous peoples to experience something “beyond” colonial history. 26 Moreover, for some scholars, “postcolonial theory” does not always remain the most appropriate critical discourse within which to interrogate the pressing questions about cultural production in settler societies. For example, reading an important colonial



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New Zealand text, Alex Calder proposes instead a “settlement studies” that “might aim . . . to recover the transactional, mutually transformative, space between cultures.”27 Stephen Turner suggests that, from a local perspective within Aotearoa/New Zealand, debates about Maˉori sovereignty and settler law risk becoming merely academic or “self-defeating” if they are translated into the language of postcolonialism or globalization; such discourses tend to elide the particular quality of local struggles, he argues.28 Such challenges testify to the power of the local to problematize any grand postcolonial theoretical frame, but they also resonate with the arguments made by other Pacific scholars with respect to the particular quality of colonial encounters there.

From Comparative to Transnational Settler Colonialisms In dialogue with work on the Pacific, my own book attempts to take seriously the ways that colonial histories have been shaped through encounter, exchange, and mutual entanglement rather than binaristic certainties. Such concepts occur extensively in works such as Calder, Lamb, and Orr’s collection Voyages and Beaches and Thomas and Losche’s Double Vision. Both volumes turn to the histories of colonial encounter throughout the Pacific and not just in its anglophone settler colonies. But like the essays in Neumann, Thomas, and Ericksen’s Quicksands, I find the emphasis on unpredictable and nuanced encounters throughout the Pacific enabling for addressing cultural exchange and encounter within and between the settler societies. Such concerns underpin my approaches to films made in New Zealand like Hei Tiki and The Seekers, but they also enable analysis of films like Fort Apache (1948) or The Four Feathers. In other words, I use some of the concerns and insights of Pacific-based studies to animate my study of American films too. Furthermore, the invocation of a Pacific regionality in the work of these and other scholars is also germane to my project. While Lawson explicitly called for a study of “comparative settler colonialisms,”29 this book reflects a different impulse: not toward the comparison of discrete and bounded societies, but to the elaboration of a settler colonial transnationality through which settler cinemas are constituted across, not only within, the borders of nation. Attention to models of history that do not obey the limiting framework of nations has become an important facet of critical theorizing on diaspora, race,



Introduction


and identity. Paul Gilroy’s field-changing work, The Black Atlantic, for example, took the ocean basin and its multidirectional cultural exchanges as a means to reimagine critical histories of blackness outside of the frames of national or ethnic purity. More recently, Elizabeth DeLoughrey has proposed a model of “tidalectics” to account for the ways that indigenous oceanic movement and landfall complicate the reading of Pacific and Caribbean island literatures while also resisting some framings of regionality; DeLoughrey foregrounds indigenous migrations and traditions that subvert and displace the “Asia-Pacific” of transnational capital. Other writers have worked on the simultaneously local/global entanglements that form a variously conceived Pacific space while also interrogating the vested interests that contribute to different renderings of it as “Pacific Rim” or “Asia-Pacific.”30 While sharing a desire to understand the vectors of cultural production across the Pacific region, my own book differs markedly from some of this work in that my scope is considerably more limited. Here I focus on cinema as it has developed in three particular settler societies and I do not extensively engage with films that were made in other parts of the Pacific; I leave it for other studies to develop a geographically wider and historically more extensive account of cinematic production across the Pacific. In much of this book I concentrate on the creation of white settler and settlement narratives both on and off the screen, showing how these are built through the material relations of cinematic institutions and film culture; however, I also show at various places, and extensively in part three, how indigenous practices and meanings have tangled with and unsettled them. While I do not specifically consider indigenous production as it has later appeared within the settler colonies and islands (outside of the time period of this study), I argue consistently that indigenous participants were active agents in the films that were made about them, and show how we might understand some contemporary reception practices as a form of production thought differently. In its choice of particular settler colonies, this work is also partial. Eschewing a more exhaustive study of British settler history outside of the Pacific, I do not consider South African cinema.31 While recognizing that Canada offers another site in which British (and French) settler history has been inscribed along with U.S. influence, I leave it too for other more detailed studies.32 I hope that such selective decisions enable a better and more nuanced history of the conjuncture of settler societies that is presented by Australasia in relation to the United States and to British colonial history. Drawing together the work that has emerged on settler colonies through a postcolonial frame, along with the insights



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Introduction

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Denationalizing Settler Cinemas Consistent with the challenges posed by postcolonial and transnational theories, then, Making Settler Cinemas does not approach the films it analyzes from a national cinemas perspective. In that respect, this book continues the kind of investigation that Priya Jaikumar initiates in Cinema at the End of Empire. Jaikumar provocatively declares in the first sentence of her book that “We must abandon the rubric of national cinemas if we are to consider the multiple, conjunctural pressures applied by decolonization on the political entities of an imperial state and its colony.”33 Like Jaikumar, I argue that imperial and colonial forces work in ways that destabilize the primacy of the nation-state as an organizing category for critical discourse, even in the absence within the settler colonies of a history of decolonization such as the one she traces with respect to India. Indeed, I demonstrate that the films here are the products of transnational encounters between institutions and figures and the sites in which they produced films. The reader looking for a rendering of settler cinemas as national cinemas will thus be disappointed; it is less my intention to reveal a dynamic of, say, “New Zealand cinema” read in terms of settler politics than it is to address the conditions under which settler cultures have been forged across nations and in relation to each other. In particular, this book argues that understanding the dynamic interaction of Hollywood as a hegemonic force and British imperialism as a historical agent within local sites of settler and indigenous encounters reveals the ways that cinematic cultures have been constituted in settler societies. Understanding these multiple vectors of transnational coloniality thus offers us a better way to understand the shape of cinematic production in each place. This is especially true for Australia and New Zealand, where the large number of hybrid or transnational productions has posed a problem for film histories and popular criticism oriented around easy fits with official nationalism. Rather than see a production like Hei Tiki, for example, in terms of its marginality to an authentic national cinema, I show how it has been localized at different moments in its history, especially in its production and contemporary recirculation. Such localizing energies,



from related disciplines like Pacific studies and anthropology, Making Settler Cinemas traces the cinematic encounters that made a transnational settler coloniality across three settler societies in the shadow of British imperial history.


however, may still not place the film with even expanded definitions of a national cinema, and in the last two chapters especially I show why that might be a good thing. Other scholars, especially those writing from within an Australian context, have put pressure on the assumptions of purity that often underpin theories of national cinemas. Stephen Crofts’s important essay “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s” began to break apart and “disaggregate” the term by expanding its reference points beyond production, and O’Regan’s work, already cited, offers an exhaustive exploration of the ways that national cinemas might be thought across various complex modes. These writers, however, tend to maintain the organizing frame of national cinemas even as they expand their definition of what they might be. In O’Regan’s highly flexible model, for example, the settler cinemas I posit here might constitute one mode of cinematic production, distribution, and reception within a “permanently open” definition of national context.34 However, my book argues that there is often no single site of national origin for these films, and that their national affiliations have been complicated by the qualities of encounter that made them; it also signals that the goal of maintaining a national project within which they can be firmly located is misplaced. While some of these films, such as The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946) or Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1950) might fit within an openly conceived national cinema that is subject to cultural transfers, hybridity, and international influence, others, like Hei Tiki and The Seekers, were not conceived within national discourses and the complexities of their contemporary lives work against their potential recovery into settler constructions of nation. The iwi-based35 epistemologies and practices that I refer to in part three are neither national in the sense of being pan-Maˉori, nor do they fit easily within official discourses of “New Zealand” identity that can tend toward a reductive bicultural assumption of “one nation, two peoples.”36 Throughout this book, then, I show how the dynamics of settler colonial histories might suggest a different way of theorizing cinematic genealogies. Other recent works on Australian cinema, while having slightly different goals from this book, share my disinterest in constructing a national cinema as either a goal to be aspired to or a history to be definitively told. Deb Verhoeven’s brilliantly provocative book, Sheep and the Australian Cinema, which I will further engage in chapter three, uses two key “sheep films” in order to further displace “originary thinking” with respect to writing histories of cinema and nation. And Deane Williams reconstructs postwar documentary history in Australia as an international project while avowing that he makes “no



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attempt to represent a national cinema or the history of Australian cinema.”37 When I use the term “settler cinemas” in the plural, I do engage the open-endedness of some definitions of the national by implying that there is more than one settler cinema. I recognize that discourses of nation were often invoked in or even against these films and for that reason they have a dialectical relationship to the national that I recognize, too, in my chapter divisions. But instead of using my analysis to reinscribe the goals of national projects, however liberal in intent, I try to show the ways in which settler societies have been made by forces larger than nation and how they might be contested by local forces antithetical to nation; for that is what colonial histories and indigenous challenges, taken seriously, push us to do.

Past, Present, and the Archive In this book, I address films produced in and across Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand between 1929 and 1954. At one end of this period is the close of the silent era, when Hollywood attempted to enlarge its audience through the technological possibilities afforded by sound recording and reproduction. The earliest film I consider here, The Four Feathers, was released on this cusp in 1929 and, with its absence of synchronized sound, its antecedents include the silent colonial travelogues produced in Africa as well as silent actuality films of the Spanish American War. I turn to this particular film to expose the ways that settler cinemas, while developing genres and narratives of local-ness (as in the westerns of the next two chapters) also negotiate wider cultural and material ties with empire and have used figures of masculinity outside and inside the narrative to mediate between the local and the global. Studying The Four Feathers not in terms of its imperial genre characteristics but in its manifestations of settler coloniality allows us to see the formation of U.S. settler identities as they exist in dialogue with those of other settler societies. The period 1929–54 in American cinema coincided with the consolidation of the studio system and its system of vertical integration that extended internationally through theater ownership and practices of block booking. 38 In Britain, as in Australia and New Zealand, American films quickly overtook domestic and European cinemas in local theaters during the late silent period. As a result, the 1920s saw quota legislation enacted in Britain and Australia in an attempt to protect local production, and debates played out in



Introduction


the public sphere and in parliaments about the supposedly detrimental role of American cinema in the nation’s culture; these debates continued within British empire territories throughout the period discussed in this study. 39 In addition to structuring the production that took place in Australia and New Zealand, imperial and colonial policy toward Hollywood affected American cinema through the period discussed here, as the case of Ford and Cooper’s Argosy films will show. Addressing these canonical westerns by a director whose work is often invoked as iconic of an American national experience, I turn to production records that show how his and Cooper’s company, Argosy, was also implicated in wider British imperial circuits of exchange, revealing structural relations between empire and settler coloniality that suggest that we should further internationalize our understanding of the genre. At the other end of this book’s timeframe is the 1940s–50s, when British producers like Ealing and Rank were investigating new schemes for expanding their markets. In Australia, local production had languished and overseas productions became dominant in the postwar period, while in New Zealand, local production was minimal in the 1930s and completely ceased between 1940 and 1950. It was not until the local feature Broken Barrier (John O’Shea, 1952) and then The Seekers that the tide began to turn (even so, there were only two features made in New Zealand in the 1960s, and it was not until the 1970s that local production began to emerge again). Thus The Seekers and Ealing’s Australian films (made in the late 1940s and into the 1950s) formed important precedents for future productions. As the first color film to be produced in New Zealand, The Seekers set out a transformative vision of settler colonial landscape that had its later embodiment in films as different as The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001–3) both of which relied on transnational finance and production relationships. And the multiple forces at play in Ealing’s rise and fall in Australia are indicative of tensions between British imperial culture and increasing American influence that also structured the narratives and reception of many later Australian films. So while there were distinctive patterns of film production in each local site considered here, all were affected by the enormous profitability and expansion of Hollywood cinema and, in the case of Australia and New Zealand, by the inability of British or local productions to counter its dominance on local screens. The films that did get made during this period are important not because they are oddities within a hegemonic space of British influence or U.S. distribution, better put aside



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in favor of more authorized national productions, but rather because they are so instructive of the imperial-local relations that made settler cinemas. Politically and economically, the period 1929–54 corresponds to the rise of the United States as a military and economic power and the decline of Britain as an imperial force. The period following World War I saw the beginnings of Britain’s loss of empire, and the process was consolidated in the wake of World War II when the “jewel in the crown,” Britain’s Indian colony, was partitioned. Britain’s loss of India and the later decolonization of the African colonies like Nigeria and Kenya corresponded to the rise of the United States as an imperial power in the Pacific. Having fought in the Pacific theater following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States was in a dominant position in the Pacific and was reluctant to allow British influence to again assert itself in Polynesia or Southeast Asia. Despite its own rhetoric of anti-imperialism throughout the twentieth century and especially in the postwar period, the United States consolidated its imperial economic and military status during the period this book covers. Similarly, although Britain did not exert everyday political control over Australasia after its dominions developed independent settler governments, Britain’s imperial influence was still a fact during this period. Politically, culturally, and cinematically, then, the period covered by Making Settler Cinemas is one in which the relations of film production, distribution, exhibition, and reception were all forged within the changing circumstances of British and U.S. imperial influence and settler coloniality. This book will illuminate the particular circumstances of settler colonial histories as they are negotiated in relation to those imperial histories and practices.

Figures in Motion In the chapters that follow, I present certain historical figures as key to the analysis of settler films and settler histories. Merian C. Cooper and John Ford, whose films anchor the first and second chapters of the book, will be familiar to many readers for their Hollywood productions. Ford is, of course, prominent in the canon of American “auteurs”; indeed, he is one of the figures who anchored la politique des auteurs as it was first proposed in France. Ford’s films are the primary texts for my analysis in chapter two; his historical persona is also important as well in understanding how settler coloniality has been formed within U.S. culture. I, therefore, draw him into a conversation



Introduction


that begins in chapter one with Merian C. Cooper. Cooper, primarily a producer rather than director, is best known for his collaboration with Ernest B. Schoedsack on King Kong (1933). But his work before that, notably The Four Feathers, and his later collaborations with Ford in Argosy Pictures, the production company they formed together, offer a rich illustration of the way in which settler societies have produced figures who, in their public personas and in the work they produce, mediate the histories of imperial conquest and settler anxieties. Alexander Markey, who appears in the fourth chapter as the director of Hei Tiki, is crucial for understanding the dynamics of settler cinemas as they have been constituted transnationally. Markey, with only one other film to his credit, which he abandoned to his director of photography, appears in this text not as an auteur in control of meaning and style, but as a figure within a complex imperial-settler context that includes the United States, Britain, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. In such a context, Markey’s travel, actions, and material and social legacies are historiographically important. Placing Markey and Ford alongside one another would appear unusual were I to claim a similar auteur status for both, but as settler colonial figures in historical context, they usefully exemplify the tensions, practices, and possibilities of film culture within a transnational settler frame. I am interested in the ways that these men mediate form and production, certainly, but I find it even more productive to consider how they exist also as mediating figures within extrafilmic discourses—such as in the archival materials or press that I will study—their status there revealing the connections that existed between individual films, production practices, exhibition, reception, and wider histories of imperialism and settler colonialism in the three sites I study here. These figures, then, are the subjects of particular kinds of colonial encounter across histories of production as well as in public discourses of distribution and reception. Figures like Cooper, Ford, Markey, and the others who will be considered here (notably Harry Watt and Hal Williams, from Ealing Studios, and George H. Brown and the actors of The Seekers) become fulcrums in my text—nodal points for the investigation of the intersecting discourses of the settler colony. While all of the figures addressed here were actual individuals, and some, like Ford, had roles that we might typically regard as authorial with respect to their films, they have also functioned as imaginary figures within their respective settler cultures and locations. That is, through popular discourses like contemporary print media and fan material, in biographical or film historical accounts, or simply in oral culture or gossip, one can



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trace the ways in which these figures collected many kinds of conflicting cultural anxieties and expressions of settler colonialism and its relationship to empire. Markey was never just the historical figure behind Hei Tiki, an eccentric director from the United States who ran roughshod over indigenous protocols with his filmmaking. He is, in the present, a figure through which one can understand and narrate the economic arrival of an imperializing U.S. cultural force in the form of Hollywood, its potential relationship to indigenous social infrastructures, and the ways in which the legacies of both British imperialism and a nascent U.S. imperialism intersected with settler colonial histories and ideals within the place of production. The debates and controversies that have surrounded him and his film since its initial release have been sustained through oral traditions, written documents, and scholarship, and have even spawned another film, Geoff Steven’s excellent documentary, Adventures in Maoriland (1985). While the historical Alexander Markey is part of all these stories, the interactions that Markey initiated exist within a much larger field of cross-cultural relations that ever exceeded his grasp and that continued after his death, making him one of many potential sites for examining the operation of a range of settler colonial discourses of which his film was but one part.40 All the figures mentioned thus far traveled to make their films. In analyzing these figures and their role in the cinematic construction of settler cultures, this book will situate their travel within longer histories of colonial discourses. The production histories and narratives of many films here reveal aspects of those histories. The expeditions of Cooper and Schoedsack in Africa, Ford in Monument Valley, Alexander Markey or George H. Brown in New Zealand, or Harry Watt or Hal Williams in Australia were all formative of different kinds of imperial and settler colonial narratives: not just those in the films these men produced there, but narratives and ideas that were generated through their correspondence, articulated in their speech acts, or lived and facilitated in their encounters with those around them. For example, Cooper’s travels in Africa scouting locations for The Four Feathers and meeting with local colonial administrators and government officials were written up for publication in the style of heroic British travel narratives. Cooper’s journals and articles from those trips combined an ethnographic fascination with elements of the kind of masculine adventure genre that was popularized in Britain. More than that, the media constructions of Cooper that surrounded his films and his travel continued these imperial travel themes even more enthusiastically, and even a recent biography of



Introduction


Cooper is structured quite unselfconsciously around the same fascination with adventure.41 Many other encounters in this book are also shaped within histories of imperial travel discourses. For the Ealing personnel and those involved in The Seekers in New Zealand, travel to the place of production took shape under the sign of the British empire, with the economic and cultural ties to Britain’s former settler colonies enabling the producers’ missions even as their presence also created ambivalence for the local settler culture and exploitation for the indigenous. Alexander Markey’s histories of travel and production in New Zealand with The Devil’s Pit (1929) and Hei Tiki knitted together the imperializing ambitions of Hollywood with other models and methods of imperial travel, including that of the lone modernist traveler experiencing the encounter with a premodern and vanishing state of aboriginal innocence. When Ford traveled to Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border, he ventured directly into an indigenous space (that of the Navajo nation) where his and his crew’s presence added to an existing series of settler-native encounters that, I argue, shaped the colonial discourses of his films in ways more profound than the Valley’s function as narrative “location” might suggest. In all these cases, the travel that these films required and the encounters that thus ensued were embedded in narratives and tropes that are familiar through a range of imperial histories. I argue here that the production of these films ultimately generated specifically settler encounters: despite the long relationships between discourses and histories of travel and imperialism, the encounters addressed in this book took place across sites with specific histories of settlement colonization. Imperial travel discourses, therefore, meshed with the complexities and contradictions of colonial settler politics in the place of production, complexities that include the doubly inscribed relationship between the imperial power and the settler that Alan Lawson has put at the heart of the settler project.

Colonial Histories, Film History, and Film Culture Broadly speaking, this book engages both textual and contextual approaches to its films. My first encounters with these films initially prompted questions about representation: what did these films tell us about the ways in which gender and race function in colonial narratives? How did they utilize the colonial histories they invoked in the service of popular cinema? How did the visual and aural discourses of



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these films work to prop up or undermine colonial and national ideologies? Certainly there were models within postcolonial theory for asking these kinds of questions textually and that work has prompted cinematic studies that are informed by postcolonial theories of literature and culture.42 But eventually the questions I started to ask took me beyond the text and led into the realm of production and reception history: how is it that imperial films were produced in both Britain and the United States, and how would we account for their popularity in each place? How can one understand the nationalist tendencies of some of these films in relation to their transnational production histories? How might we understand the new lease of life that some colonial films in New Zealand seem to have among Maˉori viewers? These kinds of questions seemed not to be answerable through close textual reading, yet to ask and address them in the absence of the textual seemed to me to miss out on some of the pleasures and frustrations of the films as films. For that reason, the work I’ve done here has tried to respect the films’ textuality while simultaneously moving beyond it. However, rather than seeing there only material with which to recenter these films industrially, historically, or textually, I have found what happens around these films to be compelling and deserving of analysis in its own right. In other words, preceding and following these films, which are so often about colonial encounters, I’ve found evidence of other kinds of encounters that tell their own narratives of settler colonialisms. Going outside the films reveals an archive of materials that further elucidates the way in which imperialisms and settler colonialism have functioned in the sites I study here. To do the work in this way has meant certain choices about what kinds of materials and texts to seek out around these films, and how to read them. One of the places I go to understand the relations I’ve begun to sketch here is to the archive of materials about the production of these films. Some of those archives are institutional: the British Film Institute’s Special Collections library, for example, holds production records concerning Michael Balcon and Ealing Studios, papers that tell us a great deal about how Ealing’s Australian films were conceived and executed. The Merian C. Cooper papers and Argosy Pictures archives at Brigham Young University allow us to resituate the production of Cooper and Ford’s films and their collaboration. Other archives are noninstitutional: personal collections held by individuals; the libraries of book collectors who might hold an autographed novel upon which a film is based; or the memory archive constituted by personal recollection and oral history, which is crucial for issues affecting cultures with a strong oral base like that



Introduction


of Maˉori. In all these sites, personal correspondence, film treatments, programs, souvenirs, magazines, photographs, and ko-rero (or debate) allow the historian to engage with the work produced in ways that exceed a “reading” of colonialism through filmic narrative and representation. However, in the chapters that follow I use these archives as more than just windows onto the films. Instead, I treat many of the materials found there as texts in their own right and as part of the actual material fabric of colonial encounters that produced these films. In the final chapter of the book, for example, I rely extensively on a scrapbook of The Seekers production (created by Whakataˉne historian H.D. “Jack” London, mentioned above) that is now held in the Whakataˉne District Museum. This book is useful for what it tells us about the production: the when and where and whom of the shoot, which is valuable information in itself as it helps explain certain shots or scenes. But engaging with this scrapbook offers other rewards, for it becomes an index to the affective relations that also took place around that particular production. As Amelie Hastie has shown in her reading of Colleen Moore’s scrapbooks, an item like this is an act of collection that has its own material, textual qualities. Rather than study its pages as evidence of something external, something textual that the scrapbook merely contextualizes, Hastie encourages us to notice the object itself and to think seriously about its provenance and form. Following her lead is immensely productive in the case of London’s scrapbook, for its pages are testimony to something affectively rich that adds an even more complex layer to the settler colonial relations that the film’s production and reception construct, and that further mediates the colonial narrative represented in the film itself.43 Sometimes, too, these material objects do point to other kinds of colonial encounter that lie beyond both the object itself and the film. In the case of the Ealing films I discuss in the third chapter, the letters back and forth between Balcon and his representatives in Australia become important markers of the personal and affective dimensions of colonial relations that were themselves an important part of the films’ production, whatever colonial themes those narratives themselves may also have constructed. As I will show, these letters are enormously revealing of the psychological relations of distance, empire, and colonial labor. The colonial cinematic encounters that I am describing in this book take on a further dimension of extratextuality with respect to other histories of labor and cultural practice. My interviews with those who took part in the The Seekers suggest that the film and those like it, which in representational terms adhere



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largely to an imperialist vision of the colony, of indigenous peoples, and of colonial settlement, also produced or enabled relations among local people that support and complicate that imperialist vision and its colonial hierarchies, both at the time of production and in a contemporary moment. While local labor and creative agency began to localize and indigenize the films at the point of their production, more recent engagements with them by Maˉori who appeared in the film, or their families, have enabled people to extend genealogical connections and reinvest objects rendered in the mise-en-scène with new value based on their recognition and return to visibility. For many Maˉori I spoke to, this kind of involvement and reinvestment takes the film out of its more obvious colonial politics and reshapes it into something that has vitality beyond the screen. For non-Maˉori who were involved, the relations took on different qualities that also demonstrate the shifting arcs of imperial, colonial, and nationalist identities and politics. In their own labor or everyday practice around the shoot and in their activities as critics or writers, many Paˉkehaˉ New Zealanders intervened in the kinds of cultural debates that characterize a settler society in transition. Once again, that these practices are not necessarily encoded in the film’s narrative or mise-en-scène does not detract from their relevance or vitality, but one must be prepared to look around the text itself in order to find and make sense of them.

A Map of Making Settler Cinemas This book is divided into three parts; in each, a settler society becomes the starting point for investigations that which will link it to the other two. In part one, I isolate some of the ways that imperialism and settler colonialism have produced encounters that complicate our understandings of aspects of U.S. cinema and that reveal its affinities with other settler colonial cinemas. Central to this part of the book are the mediating figures of producer/director Merian C. Cooper and director John Ford. In chapter one, I begin with the various encounters staged in and around the film The Four Feathers, a title most often identified with the 1939 British version directed by Zoltan Korda. In the analysis of Cooper’s American film, I shift the attention from narrative content, at which level the film appears as simply another British imperial adventure, to address its engagement with the politics of a settler society as well as with British imperial histories. I do this by analyzing the film’s visual discourse and its transnational production processes, through which Cooper and Schoedsack enacted their



Introduction


own colonial encounters to bring together African and Californian locations and actors within the mise-en-scène. Chapter two further develops a transnational frame as it explores Cooper’s production relationship with John Ford in Argosy Pictures Corporation, a relationship that gives us new ways of understanding Ford’s western films like Fort Apache and Wagon Master (1950). Here I embed the films neither in an exceptionalist American ideology of nationhood nor in the confines of a specifically American genre, but within the overlapping histories of imperial and colonial practice within and outside the United States. I also study Argosy’s studio records and Cooper’s personal papers to elucidate the ways in which Ford’s key Argosy westerns took shape within a more extensive plan for Technicolor productions in the 1940s: to create colonialthemed narratives in British empire locations in cooperation with the British government. Although these films never went into production, looking at their plans along with the existing, better-known corpus of Ford’s work allows me to reconsider the textual strategies and address of that work and to illuminate the ways in which it constructs a settler coloniality that is transnational in its underpinnings, yet has been instrumental in exceptionalist, nationalist discourses of American-ness. In these ways, part one of the book firmly establishes the United States as a settler society. Extending work from the field of American studies, I argue that U.S. culture and national identity have been formulated in ways that intersect with the settler colonial negotiations of other settler sites. The encounters between British and European settler subjects, Native American lands and peoples, and imperial authority have remained instrumental to American culture and have been further complicated by U.S. imperial practices and ambitions in the Pacific. Indeed, part two of the book moves to the Pacific to consider a moment when British cinema met Hollywood in Australia, as the legacy of the British empire collided with the increasing growth of U.S. cultural and economic imperialism. At the end of World War II, Britain’s Ealing Studios experimented with local production in Australia, which resulted in a number of films that critics have dubbed “Australian westerns.” The arrival in Australia of key British Ealing personnel like Harry Watt, Reginald Baker, and Hal Williams provoked flurries of debate and speculation in the Australian trade press about Ealing’s intentions, and about the implications of their presence for Australian film production and for the distribution of Australian, British, and American products. Moreover, the Ealing encounter



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continued a longer history of debate about the place of Australian, British, and American films on Australian screens. Reading the papers of Ealing chief Michael Balcon in Britain and studying trade papers and archives in Australia, I trace the ways Ealing sought to position itself in Australia through the British imperial legacy. The chapter also addresses the colonial melancholia that afflicted Ealing’s representatives in the “colony,” Watt and Williams, as they responded in their letters home to their new conditions. I then situate these settler narratives in relation to the increasing dominance of Hollywood in Australia and the postwar hegemony of the United States within Pacific economies and societies. The kinds of colonial encounter I address throughout this book were always narrativized and visualized within the films themselves. Thus in part two I also use a close analysis of Ealing’s films The Overlanders, Bitter Springs, and Eureka Stockade (Harry Watt, 1949) to show how the films encoded the colonial dilemmas and politics of their making. My reading of these films thus isolates questions of nationalism, the formation of settler identities with respect to Aboriginal land and people, and the role of gender and race in the colony and dominion. In closely attending to the films’ visual style and narratives, I relate all these questions to the concept of the western genre with which the films have often been tagged. But rather than see them emulating an American national form, I show instead how the western exists as a form of settler colonial narrative that makes sense of the contradictions of settler life in Australia as much as it has within the United States. The final part of the book turns to the politics of cinema in Aotearoa/New Zealand in order to show the ways in which the whiteness of settler coloniality has been undercut by the material and cultural interventions of indigenous Maˉori practices. Here my focus falls again on the politics of production and textuality as they are established in the encounters around two films, Hei Tiki and The Seekers, but this time I concentrate more on questions of labor and reception. The chapter works against a critical tendency to historicize production and reception together in one particular historical moment and instead thinks about the dissonances that are produced over time when practices of culturally specific reception create, effectively, a different text than that made in the first instance, and place it within new networks of culture and politics. While Hei Tiki has been roundly condemned by some critics for its production techniques and for the cultural inauthenticity of its narrative (which purports to be a story grounded in Maˉori culture), the film has been effectively



Introduction


reconstituted by the involvement of the Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa iwi in its current preservation and screening. While thinking about the politics of place and labor in the film’s production, and thus producing an awareness of the “messy actualities” and small resistances to imperial power that were enacted then, the chapter also situates the more recent reengagements with the film in relation to current archiving practices with respect to indigenous material, as they have been developed by iwi groups and the New Zealand Film Archive. These practices for reconnecting iwi with moving images have been instrumental to my approach in the final chapter of the book on The Seekers. With mixed critical reviews at the time of its release and inhabiting the no-man’s-land between British and New Zealand cinema in many accounts, the film has had little sustained criticism devoted to it. I begin with the notion that we cannot understand the film’s full impact unless we are prepared to go well beyond the text itself to also consider the ways that local people engaged with the film during the time of its production, and how they have made sense of it since. Informed by work on colonial intimacies by Ann Laura Stoler, Lieba Faier, and others, and on ethnographic writing on filmic and other encounters, such as that by Stephen Caton and Anna Tsing,44 I turn to scrapbooks, photographs, newspapers, and original interviews that I have conducted with the film’s participants and their descendants in order to trace the affective and material dimensions of the encounter between film, place, and people. Chapter five, then, argues that this transnational imperial production, on its face so disconnected from the realities or cultural life of New Zealand, paradoxically created the circumstances for its own localization and for practices of historical engagement (retracing geographies, lost objects, and genealogies) that have taken root between Paˉkehaˉ, Maˉori, and the film. In 2008, the New Zealand Film Archive took the film back to the communities where it was filmed, screening it in local marae (meeting places) according to Maˉori protocol, as well as in commercial theaters; my final chapter details this work and assesses its implications for the processes of understanding, and writing about, settler cinemas.



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Making a Settler Cinema in the United States



Part I




Playing Empire: Settler Masculinities, Adventure, and The Four Feathers (1929) Sometime in 1929, a photographer on the set of The Four Feathers took the picture that appears in figure 1.1 At this time the Four Feathers production was located in Cathedral City, California, not far from Palm Springs and a few hours’ drive from Hollywood. In the picture, Merian C. Cooper, dressed in desert fatigues and carrying a fedora at his side, stands to the left of the frame, with his codirector, the rangy Ernest B. Schoedsack, to the right. Each man has a pipe jutting out to the left of his mouth, and together they stand selfconfidently, legs wide, before a large stenciled sign: “Camp of The Four Feathers. Ladies or Women Not Allowed. Schoedsack-Cooper.” The image generated by this production still, and the very fact of its existence and staging, is striking for the way it reveals the ideological stakes of this film and its production. The photograph works to confirm the narrative of The Four Feathers as a masculine affair, an adventure story generated around an almost exclusively male world that privileges masculine power and military prowess in a time of empire. Moreover, the arrangement of the men and signage in this scene redoubles that kind of masculinist ideal within the very production of the film itself, making of that experience another kind of male adventure to which women are not admitted.1 Yet the grins and perfectly posed pipes in this picture hold the key to yet another understanding of the photo: its self-consciousness. With their direct look at the still photographer’s camera and their gleeful pose, these men are undoubtedly playing for the camera. Rather than suggesting a disruptive parody of gender exclusivity, however, the ludic performance here seems to both acknowledge and reenact that exclusivity, as if the two recognize that The Four Feathers production, the narrative it tells, and their own inscription under the “sign” of the film are all constructed within a longer representational history of imperial and settler masculinities that has adventure and play at its core.



Chapter One


Figure 1.1 Playing empire: Cooper and Schoedsack on the set of The Four Feathers, Cathedral City, California. Courtesy of Merian C. Cooper Papers, BYU Special Collections.

To play the imperialist in such a context of production and narrative is to involve oneself in the kind of adventurous performance that was encouraged throughout the British empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ideologies of empire constructed in the literature and popular culture of masculine adventure and play were extensive throughout Britain’s self-governing and former settler colonies. Indeed, tracing these discourses of imperial adventure can reveal some of the distinctive negotiations of empire, colonialism, and national identity that have taken place within settler states. Schoedsack and Cooper’s performance in this picture is but one clue to the existence of a long and complex American relationship with British imperialism even in the context of a postrevolutionary United States. The Four Feathers is based on a famous British imperial novel whose iconography of male soldier-heroes is self-consciously recreated in the still, 2 though this reconstitution is produced in a then recently colonized landscape, the Cathedral City area, in which white settlers displaced Native Americans. While the film and still imply a foundational relationship to Britain as “mother country” for the



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original American settler colonies, they also remind us that postrevolutionary white settlers and their descendants continued to colonize Native American land and develop their own ideology of adventure and masculine play (e.g., in the settler literature of Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper). However much a tradition of American frontier adventure sought to legitimize itself in contradistinction to the Old World that had preceded it, it was nonetheless implicated within the wider context of settler societies forged through empire; similar pioneering narratives appeared in other settler societies too. Thus, by virtue of its settler qualities, even an American tradition of adventure was a direct function of the very imperial histories from which it sought to distance itself. 3 With these contradictions in mind, then, the production still from The Four Feathers, and the other colonial encounters that surround it, can help us to understand the particular qualities of the United States as a settler culture; moreoever, they help us see cinema’s role in continuing to shape that culture across the twentieth century. My reading of the films and encounters in part one of this book shows some of the ways that Hollywood responded to the ambivalence of settler coloniality, producing imperial-themed films that dramatized adventures drawn from a British legacy and offering westerns that narrated a relationship to landscape and space that is crucial to settler negotiations. Pulling the films out of a privileged national cinema status and looking beyond their diegetic narratives reveals tensions that are typical to the cinemas of settler states. As Jon Stratton has argued, locating the cultural production of the United States as “postcolonial” in this way can reveal how “the United States [has been] forced to confront its own history as a settler society and to deal with the same problems of displacement, identity, and the experience of living in an Other’s land that are a part of the histories of other English-speaking settler societies, including Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia.”4 In accounting for the settler coloniality of the United States, I also show how the encounters that Merian C. Cooper forged in the making of his film reveal the anomalous position of the United States with respect to the other settler colonies: that is, the way in which it has also established itself as an imperial power in its own right. The Cooper persona, as a discursive construct, perfectly expresses the contradictions of a U.S. settler coloniality that is constituted through a historical and cultural relationship to British imperial history, to settler practices within the colony, and to U.S. political, military, and cultural hegemony in a globalizing frame.



Playing Empire


To historicize and relocate the United States as settler state thus helps to better ground what other critics have characterized as Hollywood’s fascination with empire. A string of Hollywood “empire films” followed The Four Feathers, including popular sound films like The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935), Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939), and Beau Geste (William Wellman, 1939). The little that has been written on Cooper and Schoedsack’s Four Feathers addresses it primarily in relation to these later more elaborate imperial films from the sound period, and sees The Four Feathers as foreshadowing them in its themes and popularity. Moreover, critical attention to these later films has often focused on questions of imperial narrative and representation and has elucidated the ways in which their narrative conventions had been forged in imitation of a longer history of British imperial popular culture.5 But my analysis will move us beyond questions of narrative representation and the idea of imitative generic formulas. Rather than situating The Four Feathers within an imitative discourse of imperial narrative, I want to show the ways in which the film is constituted through a complex web of material settler colonial encounters in which Cooper’s own construction as a historical figure merges with the film’s conditions of production. Looking beyond the film text here helps us to understand how settler colonial relations have been actively produced by cinematic industries and agents—that colonialism in Hollywood cinema is far more than a matter of generic formula or narrative or visual style. Cooper and Schoedsack’s history of colonial travel and ethnographic film production, their encounters with African locations and peoples in shooting for The Four Feathers, their staging of scenes within the California desert, and the performance of imperial masculinities embedded in extratextual images like the one above, all constitute a web of settler colonial encounters. Those encounters situate the film in active dialogue with other settler discourses on empire, landscape, and culture. That is, they combine to mark The Four Feathers as particularly illuminating example of the transnational settler discursivity that is the focus of this book. To understand the consequences of that settler discursivity, it is crucial to reject an Americanist, exceptional framework, even while recognizing the particular position of the United States as a settler society with power like no other. To adopt an exceptionalism with respect to the films I discuss here would be to further cement the cultural dominance of the cinema that Hollywood produces and to further naturalize its form as a “cinema qua non.” Certainly, one way that imperial-themed films like The Four Feathers have been thought of locally (rather than



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being seen as simply an extension of British imperial ideologies) is to situate them through generic characteristics that are then determined to be American at root. Brian Taves, for example, has suggested that adventure in cinema is a quite particular genre that captures a “timeless need for liberty and freedom.” When depicting other countries, films of this genre apply “American ideals to past foreign struggles for freedom” and thus use adventure as “a metaphor of the American experience, particularly the Revolution.”6 To understand Hollywood empire films like The Four Feathers as intrinsically American in their representational and generic logic is, I argue, to take them out of history. If we are to understand better the role of the United States and its cinema in a world system in which it is a hegemonic force, it is crucial to understand how Hollywood has functioned in relation to other cinemas and colonial histories. The films discussed in part one of this book are not determined by discourses of nation but rather produce and encode settler relations that are themselves constitutive of the national. The Four Feathers demonstrates how a web of practices, both material and discursive, is formed in encounters between filmmakers, locations, filmed subjects, and audiences, creating a composite “text” whose settler coloniality is transnational in scope. The practices that constitute this coloniality are material and discursive and include histories of British imperial culture, colonial travel, ethnographic filmmaking, on-location production, and settler transformation of landscape. Yet it is through those such colonial encounters that discourses of nation are also constituted; the construction of Cooper as an American figure of heroic masculinity is but one example of this. Taken together, such practices allow us to see the ways in which British colonialism provoked common realities and concerns across the new settler societies. Moving beyond representations alone and focusing instead on the many encounters that produced those representations, I show that relations within and between settler societies have created distinctive cinematic contexts within the United States and across the former British empire. As the United States engaged its history with Britain while creating its own local colonial practices, it created a film industry that came to dominate the other settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand; there, the white settler culture of British influence met the advancing settler hegemony of Hollywood in productions that defy easy national categorization. Like the productions discussed in other chapters, The Four Feathers reveals the traces of fractured colonial encounters that are impossible to organize under a sign of national cinema. All are riven with the ambivalence and complicity characteristic of settler societies and settler cinemas.



Playing Empire

34


The Four Feathers was the third filmed version of Mason’s novel, following two earlier silent versions in 1915 (dir. J. Searle Dewey) and 1921 (dir. René Plaisetty). The film follows the history of Lieutenant Harry Feversham (Richard Arlen) whom we first see as a small boy cowed by his father’s war stories. As the plot moves forward in time, we find the adult officer Feversham, having just decided to marry his fiancée, Ethne (Fay Wray), celebrating with his officer friends, Trench, Castleton, and Durrance. A courier, however, interrupts to bring Feversham orders to depart for the Sudan (here the film, like Mason’s novel, was based on historical events; Britain’s General Charles Gordon was killed in 1885 and the film is set a decade later, when British and Egyptian troops attempted to recover the Sudan from Mahdist forces). Feversham reads the marching orders, surreptitiously throws them into the fire, and tells his friends he will resign his commission on account of his marriage. However, as he does so, one of his fellow officers finds and reads the missive, which failed to ignite in the fire. Accusing him of cowardice, each of the three sends him the gift of a white feather, the symbol of a coward; a fourth feather comes from Ethne when she learns what he has done. Traumatized, Feversham decides to redeem himself in their eyes and travels to Sudan alone, disguises himself as a Sudanese, and rejoins his comrades after committing brave feats that save them from certain death. After the British forces almost suffer defeat when their famous square battle formation is broken, Feversham helps them defeat the Fuzzy-Wuzzies.7 Returning to England, he reclaims Ethne’s hand and the respect of his friends. As the still discussed above suggests, Cooper and Schoedsack’s production of this film can be profitably understood by placing it within a long history of settler, white masculinity with which Cooper was engaged. This history is still being invoked and reinscribed today, as two recent texts show. Turner Entertainment’s DVD, King Kong: Two-disc Collector’s Edition (2005), includes a documentary about Cooper and his career, titled I’m King Kong! The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper (Kevin Brownlow and Christopher Bird, 2005) and Mark Cotta Vaz’s biography, Living Dangerously, also lionizes Cooper in terms of heroic deeds and a larger-than-life persona. In turning to these texts, as well as to the many materials that were produced by and about Cooper during his film production career and beyond, I analyze the film’s treatments of masculinity within a wider context of



Settler Masculinity, Imperial History, and Merian C. Cooper

35

gender and settler coloniality. Instead of recentering the film through its authors, I here place the film and its authorial figure alongside each other and read both in relation to the many extratextual materials that surround them.8 Consequently, the Four Feathers photo described above is key, rather than tangential, to my analysis here for it further establishes the settler coloniality of the film, a context that is lost if one attends only to its narrative conventions. Cooper’s personal history lends itself to mythologizing of all kinds, and historical records reveal a discursively created public fascination with Cooper’s biographical narrative together with evidence of Cooper’s own settler self-fashioning. Indeed, these two aspects of the Cooper persona and narrative are completely intertwined: Cooper as a public and personal construction is an integral part not just of the film’s genesis but of its circulation and effects. Cooper was born in Florida in 1893 and grew up there before attending the Lawrenceville School near Princeton, New Jersey and, later, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland from 1911. Cooper had already developed an interest for flying, however, and left the Naval Academy before graduation, believing he would not find a way to pursue his air interests there.9 When he did eventually join the U.S. air service in France, he piloted a bomber and was shot down behind Germany enemy lines, sustaining serious burns to his lips and hands in the crash. He was taken prisoner and remained in a German hospital for the remainder of the war. After the war, believing that the Bolsheviks had to be stopped, he joined the Polish Army and commanded an air squadron there. In July 1920 he was shot down, and this time spent many months in a Soviet prison camp until escaping with a Polish officer and reaching safety in Latvia.10 Upon his return to the United States he became a journalist and, later, a filmmaker. Cooper came from a family whose role in the southern colonies was historically significant and bound up with a militaristic version of settler masculinity. The first Coopers in the Americas settled in the Carolinas in the 1600s and later generations spread out around the southeastern colonies and territories. Cooper’s great-great-grandfather was a colonel in Savannah, Georgia, and, according to Vaz, created the first Georgian cavalry that fought the British there. His son, James G. Cooper, departed Georgia for what was then the Florida Territory, and commanded troops against the Seminole Indians there. Vaz creates a portrait of a family for whom oral histories of military prowess were passed down through the generations, making their effect felt on Cooper, who (like Feversham) grew up with a sense of masculinity as something molded by toughness and bravery.11 “The notion that



Playing Empire


one’s manhood was best forged in the crucible of battle,” writes Vaz, “was a long-standing Cooper family tradition.”12 Hence, if we are to believe Cooper’s own comments and those of his biographers about his own weaker frame and timidity, we can see that his attempts to compensate for that weakness were part of a process of making good on lack, a process that mirrored that of his protagonist in The Four Feathers. Cooper’s biography also became a key element in the promotion of The Four Feathers and, more than that, became part of a complex construction of Cooper as a “star text” that also incorporated travel narratives and other items discussed below. In I’m King Kong, the documentary about Cooper made for Turner Movie Classics, David Strohmaier suggests: “Merian C. Cooper was a little bit on the short and stocky side, and he wanted to compensate for this. So he worked out a lot, he would swim rivers, he would do all kinds of things that other kids couldn’t do, because he really knew he wanted this life of adventure and exploration.” Archivist James V. D’Arc, who collected Cooper’s papers at the Brigham Young University, suggests that “Cooper being a timid child and then turning out to be the most robust of explorers certainly fits within the American character, at least the American character that’s championed at this time, the turn of the century in the United States.” And in a historical interview excerpted in the documentary, Cooper himself remarks: “I was a little timid boy, put that on your tape if you want, and made myself be a champion boxer, wrestler, and fought three successful wars. I’m King Kong!” Crucially, Cooper’s comment suggests not just his dedication to a corporeal self-transformation in his youth but also reveals a careful construction of a related star persona later in life—“put that on your tape!” His self-conscious performance for his interviewer here is closely related to his performance for the still photographer’s camera in 1929: Cooper, indeed, was a self-made man behind and before the camera. Moreover, Cooper’s extraordinary identification here with the fictional gorilla that he created yields the title of Brownlow’s later film, and the outburst seems to suggest a fantasmatic self-aggrandizement, an extreme overcompensation for whatever inadequacies he felt as a boy. Cooper himself admitted that “it is true that probably all my life I’ve been trying to compensate for [his brother and father’s] intellectual accomplishments; I . . . always had more physical courage than either of them . . .” D’Arc, however, insightfully picks up on how this fantasy of self-transformation becomes part of the national character at the time. In addition to being national, of course, the fantasy is both raced and gendered, as it perpetuates a certain kind of whiteness and masculinity that characterized the United States in the 1920s as it did other



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settler colonial environments. D’Arc goes on to suggest that Theodore Roosevelt embodied the same ideals by overcoming his boyhood asthma “through hard work, exercise, and what he called ‘the strenuous life.’ ”13 Roosevelt’s own masculine persona provoked the nickname “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” for one of the fighting units that embarked on the Spanish American War at the turn of the century. As national figures of heroic masculinity, Roosevelt’s troops thus furthered America’s nascent imperial interests in war while the construction of Roosevelt himself drew upon the self-transformational qualities of American masculinity. Indeed, as Gaylyn Studlar has shown in a painstakingly researched chapter on Douglas Fairbanks and American masculinity in the 1920s, Roosevelt’s ideal of “the strenuous life” was based on his sense that essential qualities of masculinity were being lost and that the nation was in danger of growing “old and soft and unwilling to endure hardships.” To compensate, American men had to “stave off the effeminacy” that followed such degeneration.14 Tellingly, this is the same language that accompanies Cooper’s own protestations (Marguerite Harrison once remarked that Cooper was “disdainful of all the refinements of life which were ‘soft’ in his opinion”15) and it evokes the charges that are turned toward Harry Feversham by his father in The Four Feathers.16 Studlar shows how masculinity became an object of national anxiety in the 1920s and an emphasis on the reform of boy culture reverberated throughout the United States. Answering these concerns, the star roles of Douglas Fairbanks stressed “adventurous, dangerous journeys” in “ ‘uncivilized’ parts of the United States or in foreign lands.”17 Fairbanks’s persona thus articulated the very conditions of filmmaking and representation that Cooper prized so highly. But what is national in D’Arc’s phrase and Studlar’s analysis is also definitively a matter of transnational settler masculine ideologies too. The qualities of toughness, bravery, and the ability to use strenuous activity to define one’s masculinity are qualities that attach to pioneers and other settler representatives of the New World. They were the necessary qualities that supposedly allowed men to go out in the world and build colonies, later “protecting” a family against the threat of Others, as Cooper’s great grandfather had done in his military role against Seminole Indians. These attributes of physical toughness and stamina were certainly, then, more than national and one can trace them across new world settler colonies in ways that authors in other disciplines have examined.18 What is particularly interesting in the case of Cooper, however, is how the performance of a certain kind of white masculinity in fact exceeds the bounds of settler identifications and becomes



Playing Empire


performatively imperial in its scope and ambitions. That is, rather than embrace only the resourceful, canny, pioneering masculinity of a Longstocking or similar American frontier hero, what Cooper appeared to be drawn to is the “Biggles” hero of imperial British literature. In W.E. Johns’s series of adventure novels, James “Biggles” Bigglesworth is a pilot, adventurer, and explorer figure whose manly qualities made him a figure of identification and play for boys. Emerging out of the popularity of flying stories, the Biggles persona drew on the growing importance of military air power and the concomitant rise of the fighter pilot as popular star. As Dennis Butts describes it, “the war in the air, with its opportunities for speed and individual combat, rapidly acquired a romantic glamour” and “a new word, the ‘ace’ was coined” for those who fought it.19 The Biggles books capitalized on this situation by taking their hero into hostile terrains and setting his fair-skinned masculinity against foreign others. Biggles’s tenacity, chivalry, and good humor were precisely the qualities of masculinity that the empire sought to foster and that Britain thought itself to be losing during the early years of the twentieth century.20 Jock Phillips, writing of Paˉkehaˉ or settler masculinity in New Zealand, argues that for European New Zealand men in the early 1900s, fighting in the Boer War21 solidified ties to empire and demonstrated the positive qualities of manhood that the colonies could produce. “In England the effect of the Boer War had been to produce anxieties in the ruling class about national decline. There was a fear that the urban life was producing a physical deterioration in British manhood, which would serve the country ill in the Social Darwinist struggle with other races. In this context the relative success of the colonials [as fighting troops] was a reassurance— . . . they saw in them a safeguard for the race’s future.” Kipling, adds Phillips, reiterated this concern in his poem “The Islander” when he characterized Britain as fawning “on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!”22 Phillips thus distinguishes between the kind of manliness that was forged in the colonies, which tended at times to the anarchic, and the “imperial virility” that Empire encouraged, a virility that still suggested “a reaffirmation of [the New Zealanders’] pioneering past” but which “sought to substitute the language of the frontier with different language—with terms like honour, duty, valour, self-sacrifice, loyalty, courtesy . . . to fight honorably became the essence of manliness.”23 These were qualities that Cooper attempted to enact after he was forced to resign from the Naval Academy in his senior year, reportedly for his own anarchic behavior. According to Vaz and others, his effective expulsion embarrassed Cooper, who set out to redeem himself in



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the eyes of his brother and father by enlisting to fight in Europe. His exploits there as a bomber pilot and then prisoner of war not only fulfilled the kinds of imperial masculine heroism that he had read about but also provided the material for a later mythologizing of these very qualities as part of the Cooper public persona. When he was first shot down in Germany, Cooper reportedly prepared to jump to his death from his burning plane after his hands and lips were badly burned. But seeing his copilot alive and injured, he returned to his cockpit, performed a clever maneuver that extinguished the flames, and landed the plane, all the while using his elbows and knees to control the machine. He remained in a prison hospital for the rest of the war and then was captured again a few years later on active voluntary service with a Polish squadron fighting the Soviets. On that occasion, he managed to escape from the camp, and during his flight killed a guard in the manner that he had learned from Mason’s novel, The Four Feathers. The book was one of the four that he managed to take into his German camp with him, and Vaz describes Cooper as profoundly moved by the book’s tale of heroism; Vaz, too, argues that Cooper identified with Feversham.24 Cooper thus played out in his own life the kinds of heroic fantasies he had reportedly nurtured as a boy in Florida. Behlmer suggests that it was a gift from Cooper’s great uncle, the book Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa by Paul Du Chaillu, that sparked Cooper’s desire to become an explorer. Du Chaillu’s book, published in 1861, was a memoir of his travels in Africa and in particular his quest for gorillas. Thus the settler boy, already influenced by the lineage and stories of masculine heroism within his family (even the uncle that gave him the book was a Confederate hero, notes Vaz),25 was taken with the imperial adventure stories that defined not simply the rough-hewn masculinity of a settler, but the courage, valor, loyalty, and chivalry that were forged within exploration, empire, and adventure. The appeal of such narratives within the United States during the first few decades of the twentieth century is borne out in the public constructions of Cooper and in the wider appeal of imperial imagery. Cooper’s personal history and public persona—a persona that he himself helped to mold—indicate the shape of settler masculine culture within the United States at the time.

Imperial Adventure and the Cooper Persona Evidence of the way Cooper’s persona was shaped as an imperially styled hero within a settler context is found throughout the publicity



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materials for his and Schoedsack’s films. While I will address The Four Feathers’ promotional material in more detail later, it is worth noting here that material for all Cooper’s films stressed the kind of epic qualities of exploration and adventure that I’ve already begun to sketch. For example, a cartoon-style biographical piece by American cartoonist Stookie Allen (from his syndicated column “Above the Crowd”) that appeared in the Daily Mirror in 1934, is devoted to “Major Merian C. Cooper, Hollywood Film Executive.”26 The cartoon has Cooper depicted around the edges of the frame in various heroic and dramatic poses: as his aircraft is shot down; as he, bare-chested and buff, scales the walls of his Russian prison; as he crouches with Schoedsack and their camera before a tiger in Chang (1927); and, wearing a pith helmet, as he holds a baboon. The imagery draws heavily on the adventure tradition of British imperial culture, and in its layout and iconography the cartoon strongly resembles the kind of “Boy’s Own” or Biggles imagery that circulated around the empire; Cooper, as a persona, becomes inseparable from that kind of imperial narrative. An article by Lowell Thomas entitled “The Adventurous Road to The Most Dangerous Game,” intended as publicity for that film, gave an account of Cooper’s entire career. Describing Cooper and Schoedsack as “camera adventurers extraordinary [sic],” the article itself begins to take on the vocabulary and syntax of imperial ventures. This is not at all surprising given Thomas’s own credentials: an American journalist and broadcaster, Thomas was the creator of his own travelogues and was instrumental in bringing T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) to prominence when he followed Lawrence’s campaign in Palestine against the Ottoman Turks. Noting the men’s experience of filming in Abyssinia in 1922 and 1923, when the prince Ras Tafari arranged an army for them to film, Thomas writes: “from a high platform Schoedsack filmed the stirring charge of the black warriors. On they came, the dark barbaric horde, Fuzzy Wuzzy—tens of thousands of him. ‘Boy, oh boy!’ shouted Cooper. ‘What a picture!’ ” Drawing together the public’s fascination with Hollywood and its mechanics of production with the Kipling-esque language of the “Fuzzy Wuzzy” and “barbaric horde,” Thomas celebrates the filmmakers as imperial adventurers even as he conducts its own colonial misrepresentation by confusing the actual geographies and peoples that Cooper encountered in Eastern Africa: The “Fuzzy-Wuzzies” were, as Cooper described in some detail in an article for National Geographic, a tribe of the Sudan, not Abyssinia; while Tafari presented his own army of warriors to Cooper and Schoedsack, it was the British who marshaled Sudanese tribes for them five years later. Thomas’s article conflates Cooper’s accounts of the two different expeditions in order to



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present a picture of the man as an avid adventurer and documenter of the “barbaric hordes.” In doing so, his article further evinces the masculinist imperial discourses that existed within the United States at the time and perfectly reflects the Orientalist tendencies of many popular Western accounts of Africa.27 Cooper himself was involved in a broader Orientalist discursive project in which his public persona as adventurer was combined with a self-construction as an ethnographic reporter-cum-filmmaker. After his return to the United States from Europe in 1921, Cooper worked as a journalist at the New York Times. On his own time, he also conducted research at the American Geographic Society on possible trips, one of which would eventually come to pass in his and Schoedsack’s expedition film Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925). In 1922 Cooper joined a nautical expedition on the yacht Wisdom II, skippered by Captain Edward Salisbury, a trip that was to further extend and develop Cooper’s role as adventurer and ethnographic filmmaker. Cooper was to report on the voyage in a series of articles that were promised to Asia: the Journal of the Asiatic Society, and he adopted the position of first officer among an ethnically diverse crew drawn from around Polynesia and the United States.28 Between 1922 and 1923, the yacht explored the Pacific and Indian oceans. In early 1923, at Cooper’s recommendation, Ernest Schoedsack joined the crew as a cameraman, boarding the ship in East Somaliland. Their subsequent trip into neighboring Abyssinia was documented in Cooper’s three articles for Asia which appeared in print in October, November, and December 1923; in the first of these, Cooper includes a transcription of the personal invitation that His Imperial Highness Ras Tafari, at that time prince and heir to the throne of Abyssinia, issued to Salisbury and Cooper.29 In these articles we learn of the ways in which Cooper actively produced, rather than simply documented, various spectacles for his American readers. For example, at Cooper’s suggestion, Tafari assembled a huge group of Abyssinian warriors in a military maneuver for the express purpose of Cooper and Schoedsack filming, photographing, and writing about the spectacle. Cooper’s team enlisted the help of local Abyssinians to construct a thirty-foot-high viewing platform from where Schoedsack, with a movie camera, might shoot the spectacle of the troops’ arrival. “Here was a chance for a wonderful picture,” Cooper wrote30 (it was this scene that Thomas misreported). When the warriors did appear on horseback and on foot, there were thousands of them, and Cooper rode out on horseback to meet them. While Schoedsack continued to shoot, Ras Tafari himself, “a moving spot of golden light,” as Cooper described him,31 arrived in his crown and



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bejeweled costume. Cooper allegedly intended Schoedsack’s footage to be made into a film that he envisaged as The Golden Prince (thus named for Ras Tafari) but due to a dispute with Salisbury, the film was never made. While some accounts mention that a fire on the ship destroyed all the negatives, Brownlow and Vaz suggest that Schoedsack’s footage did survive, and Brownlow suggests that Salisbury used it for his films Ra-Mu (1929) and Gow the Headhunter (1933).32 Salisbury and Cooper also published a book of the expedition, Sea Gypsy, that Cooper claimed he wrote himself, despite Salisbury’s avowed authorship and the book’s first-person narration.33 In one section, however, the book definitively situates Cooper as narrator and surveys the Abyssinian trip the crew undertook; lengthy passages are based on the Asia articles. Cooper’s biographer Mark Cotta Vaz constructs this voyage as an innocent adventure in which two young men encounter the thrill of unknown lands and peoples and manage to relate those experiences to a public back home.34 Yet the very scope of this adventure and its narration and visualization are implicated in a much wider question of settler and imperial endeavors. Cooper’s activities in Abyssinia and his production of these narratives are evidence of the tendency of all settler societies, but especially the United States, to produce their own colonial encounters beyond the shores of the settler colony as well as within it. Settler societies are characterized by this very doubleness, a tension between sameness and difference from the imperial culture that created them. In the case of the United States, that tension has been expressed in a colonized relationship to a British past, a colonizing relation to indigenous Americans, and a developing imperial role outside of the space of immediate settlement. As Mishra and Hodge have pointed out with respect to Australia, other settler societies developed their own cultures of imperialism (in Australia’s case, by an imperial presence within Pacific territories), but among the former British settler colonies it is the United States that has pursued such a program most intensively. 35 While expeditions like Cooper’s above produced an imperial knowledge of a place other to the settler colony, by their narration in popular form such expeditionary sites become deeply implicated in settler national discourses. By creating a coextensive colonial space that draws together the “here” of the settler colony and the “elsewhere” of adventure, the putting-into-narrative of voyages like Cooper’s functions to shore up the home settler environment by rearticulating relations of gender, race, and spatial conquest for a reading or viewing audience. Moreover, the voyage and its organization into imperially ordained structures of geography and meaning was evident not just in the narratives and images that Cooper and Schoedsack produced, but



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also in the U.S. imperial political power that Cooper tried to solicit because of this journey. Cooper indicated in his stories that Tafari was interested in the ideas of “progress” and modern civilization, and Cooper hoped to capitalize on this sentiment by making himself a bureaucratic liaison between the U.S. government and Abyssinia for the purpose of economic exploitation. In correspondence with the state department in 1923, Cooper expressed his opinion that Ras Tafari was interested in American diplomatic relations and Cooper offered to send to the state department his own report on his activities and on conditions in Abyssinia. The document that he later sent was a ten-page report titled “Outline of Plan for the Development of Concessions in Abyssinia” that suggested that the prince was eager for U.S. capital investment. Cooper argued that “American capital and American business men would take over control of the future development of all the natural resources of Abyssinia not heretofore granted to others. This control is to be obtained by means of one large blanket concession from the Abyssinian government” that was to cover, Cooper thought, minerals and oils, cotton, and coffee, among other things. Cooper proposed that he himself would be the liaison for this venture and “for his services shall receive a salary which shall be graduated according to the earnings of the Concessions Corporation”; he also proposed retaining 10 percent of its stock.36 Cooper’s papers also record some evidence of another proposal he made for a dam; this project floundered due to a dispute with potential funders, J.G. White and Co. The encounters that I have described thus far are not simply episodes in a colorful life. Rather, they are part of a construction of the Cooper persona as a settler construct: a figure of white masculinity who makes himself through an engagement with two intersecting empires: the British empire that helped mold the role of settler in the first place, and the nascent American imperium that had begun to emerge during Cooper’s own lifetime. And, as the Abyssinian trip and Wisdom voyage show, these events were directly connected to Cooper’s emergent role as a filmmaker. The relationship with Schoedsack that was formed during this voyage was instrumental on Cooper’s next project—the expedition that led to the film Grass.

Ethnographic Film, Documentary, and Travel Along with settler constructions of masculinity, adventure, and travel and their embodiment in historical subjects like Cooper, the travelogue



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and ethnographic film traditions also intertwine with the advent of The Four Feathers. Cooper and Schoedsack began to specialize in this type of filmmaking through their experiences of shooting material in Abyssinia. Their films Grass and Chang were examples of a genre of visual construction of travel and the Other that developed with the very earliest uses of motion picture technology and that, indeed, even predated motion pictures in other, pre- or protocinematic forms of visuality, as Alison Griffiths has shown.37 Moreover, as Griffiths and others have pointed out, the ethnographic film had its roots in other kinds of anthropological and colonial practices of travel and rule and at times has been inseparable from imperial practices.38 Indeed, the practices that Cooper had engaged in with his Abyssinian work, in the reportage he did for Asia, the footage that he and Schoedsack shot, and his own attempts at using the trip for further political purposes, were all consistent with the varied practices of the travelogue or ethnographic documentary more generally.39As Hamid Naficy, writing about Grass, suggests, activities like publishing, lecturing, and touring with a film together helped constitute “the cross-fertilizing culture industry infrastructures that were coming together for both fiction films and documentary films. The wide dissemination of such ideologically loaded projections of non-Western people would ensure that these ideologies would become part of the political unconscious of Westerners, helping, in the words of Edward Said, to ideologically ‘produce’ the ‘East,’ or the ‘Orient.’ ”40 After Cooper’s initial research for Grass, conducted at the American Geographic Society where he became interested in Asian migratory tribes, Cooper, Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison traveled first to Turkey and from there south and east to find possible migratory subjects for a new film. While their first intention was to film in the Kurdish areas of Turkey, the political situation in the wake of Turkey’s creation made this impossible and they instead settled on filming the migration of the Bakhtiari peoples in Iran. As Naficy explains, this decision was facilitated by British government and business interests: British politician Sir Arnold Wilson, chairman of the board of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, wrote letters of introduction that enabled their free movement within the area of the migration, which was also under company jurisdiction, and Gertrude Bell, at that time chief of British intelligence in Iraq, a country whose borders she created, also advised the filmmakers.41 Harrison herself was a former intelligence agent and newspaper reporter who had worked in Europe and, after meeting Cooper at the Koschukovski prison camp in Russia, had sent him food while he was imprisoned.42



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This filmmaking trio lived with the Bakhtiari for six months and followed their annual migration, with Cooper and Schoedsack shooting memorable sequences of the 5000-strong tribe of people and 50,000 animals crossing the Karun River and traversing the Zadeh Kuh mountain pass. Yet despite its documentary pretensions, Cooper and Schoedsack’s first expeditionary film already demonstrated the embellishments, fictionalized elements, and dramatizations that would also structure their later film, Chang. Behlmer notes that the filmmakers wanted to “dramatize exploration” and that from the outset they intended that Harrison would become a “ ‘heroine’ and the only one of the three to be shown on camera. She was supposed to be setting forth on a quest for a ‘forgotten people’ living somewhere in the heart of Asia”43 but the realities of their choice of subject and location were more mundanely organized by the expediencies of Anglo-Persian Oil capital and the help of the British government. Naficy also recounts that the filmmakers staged events for the camera, such as a sandstorm that they created by blowing bran into Harrison’s face in pretrip footage that they shot around Anatolia and the Taurus mountains.44 While Grass presents itself, therefore, as an ethnography and travelogue, Naficy reveals it to be ideologically split due to the discrepancies between its more disinterested images and its “ethnocentric, Orientalist” intertitles and extratextual contexts. 45 Suggesting that the filmmakers themselves embodied these qualities, Naficy shows that the film was made possible by the “exceptionalism, expansionism, and triumphalism of the U.S. film industry, emblematized by Hollywood’s dominance of the world’s screens since that war.”46 Thus even as aspects of the film were implicated in British interests in the Middle East and wider European histories of travelogues, the trappings of imperial and ethnographic adventure in Grass and Cooper’s other films are not confined to an imperial history located “over there.” Instead, the film’s ideological and formal characteristics are produced coextensively within and outside of the United States, the settler society that has also constituted itself as an imperial power. The complexity of material histories and artifacts that surround the film demonstrate its reinscription of imperial cultures within settler relations, bringing together the ethnographic adventure of traveling filmmakers with the circulation of the film within a U.S. settler context. Within this seemingly contradictory mix of elements one finds a characteristic colonial preoccupation with relations of difference across colonial space. The film’s investment in settler negotiation and historicization of whiteness is visible through the intertitles’ focus on



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the Aryan origins of the Bakhtiari, and is further cemented in the comments Cooper and Schoedsack made in differentiating their Iranian subjects from African tribes that others had filmed.47 Masculinity also becomes central to the film as it lionizes its male adventurerheroes for their role in creating the spectacle. Harrison’s on-screen role thus becomes less important than Cooper and Schoedsack’s offscreen role, which is privileged again by the titles and the discourses of distribution and reception around the film. Several sources also suggest that Schoedsack was furious at Harrison’s presence on the set and thought she was superfluous to the expedition.48 Rony brings all these concerns together when she argues that the “frontier” of the United States is reinvoked in this document of foreign travel and that Cooper and Schoedsack, in the process of the film, adopted the “macho, individualist personae of modern Davy Crocketts who risked their lives in order to film distant places.”49 Chang continued the Cooper-Schoedsack brand of “distant, difficult, and dangerous”50 by presenting documentary-style animal cinematography in the setting of the Thai jungle, but with more of a narrative structure than had Grass. Schoedsack managed compelling footage of animal attacks and stampedes that the men orchestrated and provoked—among the most dramatic were a tiger leaping into a tree toward Schoedsack’s lens, and an elephant stampede shot from below with a camera in a pit—and the film was a commercial success in the United States. Cooper and Schoedsack often relied on a method of quasidocumentary realism by observing the actions of Thai and Laotian villagers and the wildlife around them and then reenacting or staging scenes for the camera. Dana Benelli has referred to this approach as a kind of generic hybridization that “set out to combine component aspects of travelogues with traditional Hollywood narrative filmmaking,”51 and it furthered the attempts they made in Grass to produce a narrative effect from documentary footage. In its increasingly sophisticated use of location shooting, animal wrangling, and production of foreignness for American viewers, the film became an important precursor for The Four Feathers, in which the adventure of the jungle and encounters with the Other were returned to the terrain of the imperial adventure.

The Four Feathers: Imperial Narratives and Settler Encounters Given what I have outlined so far regarding Cooper and Schoedsack’s histories of travel and the complex discursive contexts of their work,



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Figure 1.2 Cooper and Schoedsack, as “Fuzzy Wuzzies,” duel over Jean Arthur. Production still from The Four Feathers. Courtesy of Merian C. Cooper Papers, BYU Special Collections.

the publicity still for The Four Feathers in figure 1.2 becomes all the more meaningful. The image shows Cooper and Schoedsack mockdueling over the figure of actress Jean Arthur, carrying swords and shields modeled after those of the “Fuzzy Wuzzy.” As a performance of masculinity not unlike the one that is analyzed in the beginning of this chapter, this image is further charged with a familiar triangular drama of heterosexual rivalry, as the two men fake a duel for possession of a woman. The cultural centrality and importance of such a triangular structure has been radically and productively rethought by Eve Sedgwick in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Drawing on the work of literary theorist René Girard and anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Sedgwick brilliantly elucidates the way in which such triangles are in fact a structural means for shaping homosociality and for facilitating the contest and transfer of power relations between men. That Arthur herself did not in fact appear in the film (the hero’s love interest is played by Fay Wray) is only the most obvious corollary to understanding that the erotic drama that is



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played out here is not about her. Rather, the duel is a reminder that, in Sedgwick’s words, “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power.” Arthur here inhabits a position that Sedgwick characterizes as an “exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men.”52 Such bonds were already invoked in Grass where, as I have noted, Schoedsack resented Harrison’s triangulating presence, preferring to keep the film’s masculine adventure between just two men. This still, like the one before it, reveals in its staged humor some of the underlying ideological principles and affinities of The Four Feathers. In this case, of course, the image unwittingly foreshadows the narrative drama of the film itself, in which the insult Feversham suffers from his friends precipitates a kind of homosocial rivalry in which he must prove his heroism and redeem the slight to his masculinity before winning the “prize” of the woman. He does so through physical combat with the Fuzzy-Wuzzies that Cooper and Schoedsack mock here. In Korda’s 1939 version of the film, the erotic triangle becomes even more literal as the film sets up a rivalry between Durrance and Feversham. The mopey Durrance pines for Ethne in an early scene, relinquishing her to Feversham; he then repossesses her after Feversham’s supposed death; and then finally moves aside in a gentlemanly manner when Feversham returns heroic from Africa. But as a staged, extrafilmic text in its own right, the production still reminds us of the real colonial travel beyond the narrative frame of The Four Feathers that was the inspiration for the still’s studio performance. Those extrafilmic encounters began with the African expedition that Cooper undertook in 1927, along with Schoedsack and Ruth Rose, Schoedsack’s wife. Cooper planned in advance for The Four Feathers to include the kinds of attractions that he and Schoedsack had become famous for—exotic locations and “primitive” tribes, encounters with wild animals, and adventure—and after Paramount had purchased the rights to Mason’s story, Cooper was able to devise a shooting program that was to include African material shot on location with studio work and further shooting in California. In 1927, Cooper traveled with Schoedsack and Rose to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Sudan to shoot the African material for the film. No other Hollywood crew or actors accompanied them, which meant that the journey took on even more the small-scale expeditionary qualities of the travelogues or “safari adventure” films analyzed by critics like



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Amy Staples. Reminding us that many expeditionary films “continued to be framed in the heroic mode of mid to late-nineteenth century explorers, scientists, missionaries and others,” and that expeditionary “filmmakers were deeply influenced by the popular adventure books of Paul du Chaillu and Rider Haggard” (she might have been talking about Cooper, although he is not the focus of her essay), Staples addresses an archive of “travel books, autobiographies, photographs, and newspaper and magazine articles” that together constitute the particular kind of filmic practice of the travelogue.53 We have already seen how Cooper’s trip with Salisbury produced film footage, photography, a series of published articles, and a travel book, Sea Gypsy, and that Grass, too, left a trail of other texts and practices. The Four Feathers trip generated its own archive of materials beyond actual film. For example, it is described extensively in the article Cooper wrote for the National Geographic Magazine, published in 1929. Paramount released The Four Feathers in the same year and we can thus see these two texts creating colonial meanings for different types of audience—armchair ethnographers and popular moviegoers alike. The article, “Two Fighting Tribes of the Sudan,” concentrates on the second part of the group’s travels in the Sudanese terrain of the Messeria and Amarar tribes who are referred to in the essay’s title.54 The article does two important pieces of work. First, it extends the scope of Cooper and Schoedsack’s African encounters beyond their ostensible goal of film production and into a much wider practice of travel and ethnography. Cooper’s article is mostly focused on the historical relationships of the various tribes, their nomadic lifestyles, their clothing, and their rites and rituals, including the comingof-age skirmishes with swords and stones that were the model for the mock-duel photograph staged back in the United States and referred to above. Indeed, the accompanying photographs for the article show many instances of the weaponry used by the tribes and the captions give descriptions of the various objects: “The swords are of the crosshilted, Crusader type, and the heavy round shields are of elephant or rhinoceros hide.”55 Other images and captions are evidence of the way that a much longer history of colonial encounters structures Schoedsack’s photographs and Cooper’s text. Some seem factual and ethnographically inquisitive: below a photograph of a storage house is the caption, “Nubas keep their precious grain in a cylindrical storehouse. They make various dishes from durra (millet) and maize, but vary the menu with live, honey-covered flies and locusts,” and so on. 56 Others evidence a fascination with the exotic combined with a condescending racism: “With leather tassels flying and ostrich plumes



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waving, a bull moves ponderously under a huge framework piled with rugs, pots, pillows, and all the other personal and domestic luggage of the Messeria chief. Sitting on top is one of the women of his family, herself a barbaric vision of brilliantly colored dress.”57 Another caption, beneath a photograph of three young Messeria women with elaborate facial jewelry, suggests with implied disbelief that “In the Nazir’s eyes, these girls are beautiful.”58 These photographs and captions thus address a fascinated Western and educated reader but help also to produce a viewing position for The Four Feathers, which will include such spectacles in its visual track, allowing the Western viewer to contemplate in awe, and from a distance. Along with its imbrication within well-established genres of ethnographic and imperial travel is a second and related function of the essay: the admiration of and complicity with British colonial rule that it effects. Cooper’s essay credits the British with making possible the entire expedition. Expressing incredulity at the peaceful nature of the terrain after years of “dervish rule” in which “all white men were slaves or prisoners,” Cooper reflects on the history of how a few British colonial administrators prevail over a peaceful terrain: First came Kitchener’s great march—the complete defeat of the dervish army near Omdurman. Then, after this, came the British administrators. Courage, unshaken belief in their race and their caste, and rigid, absolute, unswerving, impeccable justice have given to these administrators this mastery over the war-like and still fanatically religious tribes of the Sudan. It is because of this prestige of the white race which the British administrators have established that we . . . were able to live alone, without protection . . . among two of the most famous of the former fighting tribes. 59

This passage explicitly racializes the colonial encounter between the British and Africans and, further to that racialization, it establishes these American visitors as heirs and beneficiaries of the hegemony of whiteness that is thus established. Moreover, the passage continues to enact and reascribe the very qualities of fanatical religiosity and warlike intent that were used to justify the British aggression toward the Sudanese tribes, even as it suggests that those conditions have been ameliorated by British force. It is important to note that this move on Cooper’s part does not effect an American presence despite an undesirable or anachronistic British imperialism but precisely because of and in complicity with it. In other words, the kind of proimperial sentiment



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evinced in Cooper’s essay runs counter to the standard narrative of American exceptionalism, which holds that the United States, in overturning British imperial control, embarked on a new ideal of democracy that rejected the imperial designs and excesses of British rule. Such affinity for and complicity with British colonial rule, then, is not confined simply to the narrative of The Four Feathers with its story of imperial masculinity; it is embedded in the discourses that Cooper produced around this film and in the very relations of the production itself. As Cooper and Schoedsack traveled in Africa, their adventure-cum-production was assisted and enabled by British colonial authorities. For example, as a caption in the “Two Tribes” article describes, “When Britain called, the Fuzzy-Wuzzies came forth.” At British instigation, a group of more than 500 Amarar warriors rode into the vicinity of Cooper and Schoedsack’s camp to film a scene in which a final massed attack of Fuzzy Wuzzy warriors is staved off by Feversham’s bravery. “Though only a handful

Figure 1.3 Expeditionary filmmaking within empire: Cooper and Schoedsack among the Amarar. Production still from The Four Feathers. Courtesy of Merian C. Cooper Papers, BYU Special Collections.



Playing Empire


of white men rule this vast country,” explains the caption, “they have made the Empire’s name respected to the four corners.” Having explained for his readers the origin of the term “Fuzzy Wuzzy” by quoting Kipling’s poem, Cooper went on to mobilize it throughout the article, referring to the fact that these people “were to this very day sullen, quarrelsome, vindictive, and dangerous” but that after some initial reticence on this account, British authorities eventually agreed to allow the filmmakers to stay in the area. 60 The tale of imperial cooperation is redoubled by the images presented with this account, such as the photograph that shows Cooper, in safari shirt and hat, and Schoedsack, wearing a British-style pith helmet, standing amid three camels with a “Fuzzy Wuzzy” at either side (figure 1.3). The caption in National Geographic read “The Author and Photographer Make Friends with the Fuzzies,” and has them “living among” the tribesmen,61 but the composition of the image and the demeanor of the two white men at its center seem to suggest a commanding white imperial presence that is consistent with the narrative of effective colonial administration that is the focus of the article. The sense of white agency and control, also effected in the film’s ideal spectator position, is profoundly articulated in Cooper’s accounts of his and Schoedsack’s travels in the earlier part of this expedition when they spent several months around the area of the Rovuma River at the border of what was then Tanganyika and Portuguese East Africa. It was here that they shot the animal scenes that are included in the finished film. Three scenes in particular made the film famous. As Feversham and his fellow officer, Trench, whom he has just rescued from the slave prison at Omdurman, flee from the slave trading camp where they are taken, a chase begins. A group of African men sets a fire in low scrub and grass (something Cooper and Schoedsack actually did, burning off about twenty square miles of bush), which quickly develops, causing animals to flee its path. After some shots of the blazing surrounds, Cooper and Schoedsack’s camera cuts to a following scene in which a huge group of baboons tries to outrun the fire. As they attempt to cross a suspension bridge over a river, it gives way and they plunge to the water below. In this very river are Feversham and Trench, attempting to cross by canoe when a herd of hippopotami stampedes off a small cliff and into the water, almost capsizing their small craft. These scenes were crucial to the promotion of the film and helped make the film’s production distinctive; by connecting the African



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footage to his local footage, Cooper further conjoined the imperial with the settler colonial. As Cooper proudly recounted many years later, “this was the first picture in history where people had gone into the wilderness of Africa to shoot scenes to intercut with Hollywood scenes.” His fuller account introduces the familiar tropes of brave imperial travel or safari adventure with the excitement of Hollywood production: We camped first on the Rovuma River . . . It was the dry season and the Rovuma River was pretty well dried up except for huge pools filled with hippopotami and crocodile. The nearest white man was a Portuguese Sergeant a few days trek away. As you know, there was no airplane or automobile communication in those days in that part of Africa. One day I saw a hippo tuck his squat little legs under him and dive off a bank about twenty feet high. As a result Schoedsack and I decided to capture a lot of hippos and run them over a bank and photograph them. It taxed our ingenuity, but we succeeded, and got some really remarkable shots which you will probably recall. Schoedsack and I unfortunately lost three men, as I remember it, in accomplishing this! We would have lost our interpreter if I hadn’t rescued him myself, after he and I were knocked over in our canoe by a mother hippo.62

Cooper’s bluster and bravado here seems not all diminished— perhaps perversely increased in the rhetoric of this account—by the death of the Africans who were present to assist. Later in this letter he explains how the baboon sequences were created in a similar manner; hundreds of animals were amassed and forced over the suspension bridge, which was then cut. The baboons fell into the river, with Schoedsack’s camera recording the fall and little moments of drama in close-up, such as young baboons scrambling for rocks midstream. This sequence, like the hippo series that follows it, occupies a prominent place in the film and Cooper relates with pride that “not one baboon was killed that I know of” in the “remarkable sequence.”63 In both cases, shooting was preceded by lengthy and elaborate preparations that further embedded Cooper in the racialized dynamics of the safari (he spent approximately three months researching and documenting the baboons’ lifestyles) and the imperial encounter. During the phase when the hippos were being trapped, Cooper noticed that one of his African helpers was missing. Furious at the disruption and the challenge to his authority, Cooper responded by using a rhinoceros-hide bullwhip to lash every villager he could find.64 The result, he said, was full compliance for the remainder of the shoot.



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While European imperialism in Africa permitted the actual extraction of natural resources like rubber or diamonds for the sake of metropolitan desires, this American filmmaking team exploited labor, animal life, and landscape for the audiences of their film. But the promotional materials that Paramount produced for this film remind us of a different, no less relevant sense of “exploitation.” Paramount’s press book for the film, which included promotional materials such as poster designs that exhibitors could order, lobby display ideas, and press releases laid out as newspaper articles, includes a banner headline called “Practical Exploitation for Every Showman.” Under this headline are many ideas for how to jazz up a lobby, sell tickets, or tie-in with local authorities, institutions, or people (e.g., using “a monkey on a string, led by a small colored boy with a sign,” to entice patrons to the lobby; planting a local newspaper story, ostensibly about the local zoo’s baboons but really about the film and its animal scenes; hiring a bagpiper; or partnering with a bookstore selling the novel). Many of these promotional materials further enact the kinds of discourses of imperial allegiances that were created around the film and its formative expeditions. For example, some press material included in the book further underscored how the British imperial administration in Africa made possible what the Americans alone could not. The book included a story in which Cooper recounted the marshalling of the Amarar warriors. “Repeated calls through their African interpreters produced only a handful of extras. ‘We waited a week, offered presents and more pay,’ relates Schoedsack, ‘but the blacks refused to budge. If it hadn’t been for the help of courteous English officers, to whom we appealed, we might still be tempting Fuzzy Wuzzys to appear before our camera.’ ”65 Another promotional idea was to solicit the help of school teachers under the guise of educational value. Citing the film’s depiction of an important moment in English history, the article explains that “it concerns the battles fought with African natives in defense of the Sudan by her majesty’s troops” and that history teachers should be pleased to recommend The Four Feathers “as a supplement to [students’] school work.” The same story also recommends a tie-in for English literature teachers, since “it picturizes [sic] the famous A.E. Mason novel and also recreates some of the very popular poems of Rudyard Kipling.” A related item recommends prominent display of New York publisher Grosset and Dunlap’s new 1929 edition of the novel, which included many stills from the film. All of these ideas reveal the extent to which



“Exploiting” Africa

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Paramount was happy to market the film for its imperial qualities and allegiances, not simply as a generic “adventure.” The language of “daring” and “thrills” that was used throughout the press book was combined with an evocation of exotic setting and with a citation of earlier films. “Beau Geste and Chang Combined!” exlaims one popular poster and promotional line, drawing together the popularity of the Foreign Legion drama starring Gary Cooper that Paramount had released in 1926 with Cooper and Schoedsack’s earlier film. “Two years in the making, with locations extending from Hollywood to the dark jungles and burning sands of Africa. Thrill to the wild charge of a host of natives on racing camels! See the amazing fight at the desert fort . . . a hundred brave soldiers against thousands of savage natives.” The images that went with such tag lines included turban-clad Arabs, massed African fighters with the shields and swords that Cooper and Schoedsack used in the dueling publicity still discussed above and that Cooper had revealed in his National Geographic essay, and British troops at the ready to defeat them. And even the descriptions of the available window displays invoked again the structures of encounter and domination that the film’s narrative and production revealed. One enticement to exhibitors, under the title “Put this pulling power to work in your lobby,” entreats: “There’s a dominating power in these human-appeal Colored Photo Enlargements which moves the multitudes to your box office in droves.”66 In many ways these promotional materials resembled strongly the way that Korda’s Four Feathers and The Drum [U.S. title Drums] (Zoltan Korda, 1938), also based on a Mason novel, would be promoted in the United States within the following ten years. Even though romance was also a part of the film’s promotion, the role of Fay Wray and of the love plot of the film were most often made secondary to the imagery and catch-cries of empire, adventure, and masculinity. This observation returns us to the staged, mock-duel in the photograph that I have analyzed above. Its structured homosocial relation reminds us that what was key to the encounters around Cooper and The Four Feathers—and, I am arguing, was one important element of settler masculinity more generally—is the question of “playing empire.”

“Tying It All Together”: Playing Empire in Settler Space It was Cooper’s point of pride that in The Four Feathers, location footage from Africa was cut together with material filmed in a Hollywood



Playing Empire


studio. Cooper “tied it all together by building an integrating location between Palm Springs and Indio, about six miles from the road.”67 While publicity materials did not make so much of this tactic, it is something Cooper himself talked about in letters, interviews, and other venues and it became part of his narrative of how he thought King Kong might be possible. “We built a fort there and I built a camp . . . for about 1800 people, and we shot up there about a month,” he explained.68 To do so, Cooper and Schoedsack also had to create new footage to match what they had shot of the “Fuzzy-Wuzzies” in the Sudan, where British authorities had orchestrated the arrival of hundreds of warriors with weapons. In these key sequences, Richard Arlen’s character of Feversham fights to defend the fort against the onslaught of Africans as the Scottish regiment of British forces arrives to save them. While the African footage contained shots of the hundreds of warriors staging a charge, together with some close-ups and medium shots, the hand-to-hand combat and shots with Arlen and other white actors had to be done locally, for the team took no actors with them (Cooper occasionally stood in for Arlen in Africa). For the new, matching footage, then, Cooper and Schoedsack turned their earlier encounter—of white settler Americans with imperial authorities and colonized Africans—into one between white settler Americans and African Americans. In Cooper’s words, they “hired a thousand dark boys from Central Avenue [Los Angeles] and put wigs on them—they looked just the same as the Fuzzy-Wuzzies—they charged out and hit the square.”69 In the only published historical accounts where this episode is mentioned—Brownlow’s program notes and Vaz’s chapter on the film in Living Dangerously 70 —its implications go unremarked upon. But the fact of this production detail and the nature of its characterization by Cooper and Schoedsack are, like the matter of the location itself, illustrative of some of the ways that settler colonial encounters have been visualized in relation to empire. First, evoking Central Avenue places their account within the geopolitics of the Los Angeles basin in which the effective segregation of neighborhoods was (and is) a shorthand way of mapping the city’s racial composition.71 But more importantly, the fact of this kind of production engagement creates a complex kind of “passing” in which the histories of colonialism and slavery within the former American colonies and in the postrevolutionary United States—histories that are engaged in Cooper’s casting and production activities—are reconnected to their roots in British imperialism through the narrative device of the film. As African Americans play Sudanese in a recreated colonial drama, a white American racial history and narrative are



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inserted back into a colonial contest. The collapsing of race between the settler society and Cooper’s African encounters is further exemplified by the numerous comments about racial inferiority that Cooper developed in his own imperially organized travel. For example, his accounts of the first voyage to Africa mention that when he first saw Abyssinians in the desert he remarked to a Wisdom companion: “The books say these fellows aren’t niggers, but they look like the same darky breed we have at home.”72 Thus the construction of whiteness and blackness within U.S. settler culture is transposed to Africa, while the later production activities in California bring the imperial versions of racial classification and ordering forged in Africa back into a local settler frame. Cooper’s discussion of race in The Sea Gypsy went even further than did the articles in Asia on which the book chapters were based. In the chapter that closes his account of the Abyssinian trip, Cooper suggests that the Abyssinian nobles with whom he fraternized are of a higher status than most of the Abyssinian population they rule because the nobles lack “negroid blood.”73 Yet on the next page, Cooper sounds a cautionary note that these Abyssinian nobles “have committed the same great error as the Arabs in the coast towns of Yemen” in which generations of slave-owning have meant that “a strong negroid strain has been introduced into even part of the ruling class. If the [Abyssinian] Empire falls,” Cooper concludes, “this will be the chief contributing cause, for the negro race has always been, and will continue to be, an inferior one, incapable of self-government.”74 In this extraordinary passage, Cooper effectively aligns himself with a ruling class within Africa whom he takes pains to establish as “a mixed Hamito-Semitic people” whose blackness is of a different quality than those whom they rule. His comments above also make clear that the African Americans he employed on his set, the “darky breed we have at home,” were, for him, inferior under both Abyssinian and white settler racialized discourse. The complex scene of racial passing that was constructed with the fort near Cathedral City and Indio is connected to the other major dislocation in these sequences, which concerns landscape. Here, too, the film’s editing juxtaposes scenes of landscape organized by a U.S. history of settler encounters with sequences that, as we have seen, relied upon British imperial expansion in Africa. The innovation of Cooper’s editing here renders a contiguous colonial space out of the profilmic material of colonized California and colonized Africa, cementing California (controlled by Spain and then Mexico before the United States) within a longer history of British imperial and settler encounters as it is made to “play” Africa. The area of Indio (its very



Playing Empire


name evocative of prior indigenous presence) was part of the “wilderness” that Hollywood’s westerns had, by the 1920s, constructed as a tabula rasa for white enterprise and settlement in its films; such wilderness areas were, in reality, landscapes of indigenous settlement and meaning. The next chapter will further explore the complexities of settler colonial and indigenous landscapes in relation to the westerns Cooper produced with John Ford, but for now we might note that the Cathedral City sequences in The Four Feathers confirm the way that settler constructions of landscape are often highly malleable. Responding less to the facts of the land than to preexisting colonial visions of it, and disavowing indigenous habitation and meaning, this film imagines and stages a drama of imperial masculinities across a space that had experienced its own, much more localized, colonial encounters. In so doing, The Four Feathers exemplifies what Nicholas Thomas terms “the doubleness of European vision—a vision that sees home via abroad, that thinks the familiar through the strange as well as vice versa.”75 This doubling within the text of The Four Feathers is what makes of it a text and an encounter that is deeply localized as a settler production within an imperial history. In conclusion I want to return to two of the production stills that I analyzed above. For if we end this chapter in the American desert, we also end it back in Cooper’s camp where “no ladies [are] allowed” and not far from the studio, where Cooper and Schoedsack duel like Fuzzy-Wuzzies over Jean Arthur’s body. In both these scenes of settler masculinity, a narrative of empire is constructed and performed that wishes away the realities of settler colonial expansion, settlement, and racial ordering within the settler society itself. In The Four Feathers and especially in the encounters that took place around it, as Cooper and Schoedsack efface local specificities in their reconstructed African adventure, they simultaneously reveal some of the limits not of a straightforward or intrinsically American cultural identity but, I have argued, of an identity that is settler colonial in nature, one that is connected to other settler identities through histories of British imperialism.



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Imperial Production, Settler Colonialism, and the Argosy Westerns Early in the film Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948), a stagecoach carrying Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) and his daughter, Philadelphia (Shirley Temple), arrives at a trading post, Ma McBean’s (figure 2.1). Their stage is traveling west so that Thursday can take up his new command at Fort Apache, and the stop will allow Thursday to change coaches and horses. The shot in which we see their arrival uses a mobile frame, beginning in extreme long shot, with the coach in the middle ground and the iconic landscape of Monument Valley in the background. As the camera pans right, however, a building comes into view, along with a fence that separates the small outpost from the desert beyond. The building is modest, just two stories of cut stone with small windows, a verandah, and a lean-to out the back. While it seems arbitrary, isolated, and out of place within the space constructed by this sweeping pan shot, this building, unlike the fort that we see in subsequent scenes, really did exist in the Monument Valley landscape. It was in reality Goulding’s Trading Post, the business and home of Harry and Leone (“Mike”) Goulding, the first white settlers in Monument Valley, who introduced Ford and his production company to that location in 1938 (for Stagecoach, 1939) and enabled their many subsequent visits. The Gouldings built their residence with rocks from the immediate area, using Navajo labor to have them cut and laid. It was Ford, however, who added a verandah to the structure and built its fence expressly for his film productions. Fort Apache thus records in its mise-en-scène a real and multilayered history of encounters between settlers, Navajo, and cinema in the West. This is a history that does not exist simply in the film’s narrative, but one that is instead embedded in its very photographic images, which register a settler colonial spatiality within the frame. By becoming an object central to Ford’s production, the Goulding’s house is also caught up in a much wider settler coloniality that this chapter will unravel.1 Whereas chapter one addressed the way that Merian C.



Chapter Two


Figure 2.1 The precariousness of settlement: Ma McBean’s Trading Post in Fort Apache, Goulding’s Trading Post in Monument Valley. Ford added the stairs, verandah, and fence to the left of the building. (Frame enlargement.)

Cooper’s productions mediated the settler histories of the United States through Cooper’s own self-actualizing narratives of imperial adventure, this chapter turns to his collaborations with Ford in the production company Argosy Pictures Corporation. Interrogating the settler spatiality of the westerns Ford and Cooper made, this chapter draws them into a complex material history that extends the context for those films beyond the realm of auteur-director, beyond the western as genre, and beyond the United States as a singular place of production. Drawing on historical archives and production records that internationalize Ford and Cooper’s work, this chapter furthers an approach that relies upon much more than the films’ narrative content or style and attends to the broader historical place of Argosy within imperial modes of production. To treat these Argosy westerns as examples of a settler cinema is to think of them as more than straightforward examples of U.S. imperialism, as others have argued. 2 This book complicates the relationship between settler colonial discourses as they emerge in these films and the wider imperial projects, British and American, in which they are embedded. While British imperialism created the American



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colonies as sites for a New World expansion, and while the United States has created its own empire beyond its national borders, U.S. cultural production has produced a more specific manifestation of settler identity than the term “imperial” suggests. The settler coloniality of the United States, rather than being wholly separate from either British or U.S. imperialisms, has existed within, not separate from, those larger imperial projects. As Ann Laura Stoler notes, the complexity of the imperial/colonial relationship in the case of the United States exceeds any simple formulation of either term, suggesting a need to better understand how each has functioned in the United States as well as in other imperial/colonial contexts. Stoler asks: “how might the messy distinctions in the United States, the very discomfort and overlap between imperialism and colonialism in U.S. contexts, help us think the tacit assumptions about European empire elsewhere?”3 My question, however, could be formulated slightly differently than Stoler’s: how do the relations of settler coloniality in other settler societies help us to think the overlap between imperialism and colonialism in U.S. contexts? Rather than seeing westerns as straightforwardly imperial, I wish to show the way in which the settler coloniality of Argosy’s western films is located within a wider imperial context of production that was planned beyond the physical borders of the continental United States and that was worked out in relation to both British and U.S. colonies and territories. As the British empire fell into decline at the end of World War II, the United States cemented its cultural dominance through a form of imperialism in which Hollywood was central. Argosy entered directly into that shared space of empire, creating westerns that dramatized the new settler identities and spaces that had been forged with the defeat of the British and the subsequent colonization of the West, while simultaneously planning productions in British empire locations in which imperial history was to be reinscribed through popular adventure narratives and British themes. This apparently contradictory situation is in fact no more unusual than the situation we observed in the previous chapter, where the version of The Four Feathers that British producer Alexander Korda popularized in 1939, which supposedly led to a surge of empire films in Hollywood, was in fact a remake of Cooper and Schoedsack’s 1929 film, which had successfully embedded A.E.W. Mason’s empire novel into a Hollywood production. Rather than see the settler society of the United States in a wholly separate conceptual space from that of the British empire, then, the production histories, narratives, distribution, exhibition, and reception of these films demonstrate the



The Argosy Westerns


interpenetration of imperial histories, settler domains, and indigenous histories. Indeed, it is this very relationship, the transnationality of its formation, and its uncertain consequences that situate these films within the settler cinemas that I study throughout this book. This chapter presents the Argosy westerns as examples of an encounter between producer/director figures within Hollywood whose collaboration and professional plans within the United States and outside it shed new light on their production company, its films, and their role in making a settler cinema. The Argosy westerns are most often read as either the products of a singular auteur (Ford), as distinctively American in their expression of a nation-building project, or, with an attention to race and history, as examples of an imperialist expansionist history of American presence in the West, which unambiguously casts Native Americans as intruders and whites as the natural occupants of the land.4 By placing the Argosy westerns in the context of the company’s other produced films, however, and in relation to films that Argosy planned but never made, this chapter situates these classic “Ford westerns” within a more nuanced and complicated history of settler coloniality within the United States. Attending to Stoler’s suggestion that the definitions of imperial and colonial, and their interrelationship, are always worthy of more thought in the U.S. context, I will show how the settler politics of space that these westerns produce are embedded in a larger imperial and colonial spatiality that was effected through the production and distribution of motion pictures in the postwar period.

Argosy Pictures and Cooper and Ford’s Postwar Westerns As I have argued in the previous chapter, Merian C. Cooper is a figure through whom the relationship between imperial histories and settler identities come sharply into relief; his encounters with Ford in Argosy continue to show how a historical figure has mediated the creation of a settler cinema. Cooper’s working relationship with Ford began in 1933 while Cooper was a partner in Pioneer Pictures, a company he cofounded to make films using the new Technicolor process. Continuing his interest in colonial settings, Cooper offered Ford a story about a doomed group of British soldiers surrounded by unseen Arabs in the Mesopotamian desert (when Britain controlled the area now known as Iraq), which Ford made as The Lost Patrol (1934). Then, after merging Pioneer with R.K.O. Radio Pictures, Cooper



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began to work with Ford on a script called Stage to Lordsburg, which they tried to pitch to R.K.O. director David O. Selznick as a new kind of Technicolor “classic western.”5 When Selznick would not agree on the choice of stars, Cooper and Ford quit R.K.O. to form Argosy Corporation (in 1939) as their own production company, with Ford as chairman of the board and Cooper as president.6 Ford went on to make the film as Stagecoach for United Artists. Despite its eventual critical pedigree as a key “Ford film” or its actual production credit as a Walter Wanger picture (Buscombe notes that it is Wanger’s name that first inscribes the opening credits),7 Stagecoach represents the beginning of significant collaboration between Ford and Cooper, signaling what both men saw as the viability of the western and its ability to transcend its reputation as a lowbrow form. Indeed, as Buscombe points out, this was Ford’s first western since Iron Horse (1925), and represented the blending of the melodramatic elements of a “quality” Hollywood A-feature with the appeal of the action film.8 After the commercial and critical success of Stagecoach, it was the Argosy collaboration with Cooper that gave Ford many of his other important westerns, especially the “cavalry trilogy” of Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), as well as Wagon Master (1950). After Argosy’s dissolution as a company in January 1956,9 Cooper worked with Ford again as producer for The Searchers (1956); his involvement with this film, like Stagecoach before it, made The Searchers practically an Argosy picture as well.10 Argosy produced ten films during the period that it was in existence, half of them westerns. Taken together, the westerns create a settler spatiality that is not, as this book makes clear, narrowly confined to this particular set of films, or even to the United States as place of production or stuff of western narratives. The Argosy westerns, however, are particularly well suited for understanding how settler cinemas are formed through the intersection of local encounters and wider imperial relations, through exchanges within the settler colony, and between other sites of empire. Just as Cooper’s productions like The Four Feathers brought the broader histories of the British empire and imperial cinema into the production, content, and distribution of Hollywood, Ford and Cooper’s Argosy westerns are situated in a shared space of imperial and colonial history. In the “cavalry trilogy” of Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande, the complexities of settler coloniality and its relation to a larger imperial history that enables it are evident in the very mise-en-scène and narrative focus of the films, which dramatize the



The Argosy Westerns


movement of U.S. Cavalry across a landscape that is constructed visually as dramatic, transcendent, or even overpowering in the tradition of other images of imperial discovery and encounter.11 In those three films, relations between cavalry and Native Americans are key to the narratives, which turn on the differing types of military strategy that surround settler invasion and Indian resistance. In this way, the films dramatize the logic of an imperializing military force, acting on behalf of settlers yet often organized by the East, meeting with the realities of colonial space as it is lived in the West. In particular, the films present characters (like Wayne’s in Fort Apache or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) who represent tenuous possibilities for a new settler subjectivity that might create a rapprochement with colonial space and indigenous subjects. Even though they reject the imperial hubris of characters like Thursday in Fort Apache, these masculine characters are, in every case, finally returned to the normative narratives of cavalry conquest and continuity. The films dramatize such positions not only through diegetic conflicts but also in their very discourse: cinematography and editing reveal a complexity that even exceeds the films’ story material. Wagon Master, appearing after the trilogy, instead narrates the movement of Mormon settlers and their interactions with white and Indian groups, and in its narrative emphasis on settlement and the promise of a new kind of space, looks forward to The Searchers, Cooper and Ford’s post-Argosy film, with its ambiguous and anxious imagery of white racism contrasted with possible settler futures. Another Argosy film, 3 Godfathers (Ford, 1948), about a trio of fugitive bank robbers who adopt and care for an orphaned baby, contains an eschatological tendency even more obvious than that of Wagon Master (with its band of refugee Mormons), and reveals the religiosity that underpinned many narratives of American colonization (in 3 Godfathers, this is quite explicit: the town to which the fugitives travel is New Jerusalem).12 In all these cases, the Argosy films construct spatial encounters that not only share distinctive qualities with other settler colonial narratives, but that also were formed within a shared space of empire. Argosy participated in that shared space where cinematic production and discursivity, as much as content, were shaped by imperial and colonial histories. While other films outside this Argosy history, including Ford’s others like My Darling Clementine (1946), can show us the ways in which settler colonial discourses operate generically and thematically in the western, the films discussed here reveal the ways in which settler colonial spatiality has also developed extratextually in a production context that is historically, ideologically, and



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Ford and Cooper’s Imperial Production Program Before turning in more detail to the textual aspects of the westerns that Ford directed for Argosy, therefore, this chapter will explore the context in which they took shape. The spatial politics of settler coloniality and its relationship to imperial production and politics in Ford’s films were always more than narrative constructions and bigger than the national boundaries of the United States. Ford’s Argosy westerns are the settler colonial manifestation within the United States of a broader imperial production program with which Argosy was involved. This program was established in part through more extensive efforts to forge a transatlantic cooperation in film distribution and production, efforts that preceded Argosy’s.13 But in the attempts to further a “special relationship” in production and distribution between Britain and the United States,14 imperialisms—both as the story material for films and as enabling structures for distribution and production— played a key role in Anglo-American cooperation.15 The materiality of empire as it was established by Britain and recapitulated by the United States, especially in the Pacific, steered the course of Anglo-American competition and cooperation in film production and distribution between the World Wars and after. Aside from the producer Alexander Korda, whose popular empire films like Sanders of the River and The Four Feathers (1935 and 1939; both directed by his brother, Zoltan Korda) combined imperial masculinities with exotic spectacle, the preeminent figure linking U.S. and British imperial narratives with film distribution and production in the 1920s and 1930s was Cooper. While Cooper’s work with his producing partner Ernest Schoedsack was instrumental in the creation of settler masculinities through discourses of adventure, his work with Ford in the Argosy Pictures Corporation was equally significant in its furtherance of an imperial space of film production and distribution. Although the documents that illuminate these relationships are accessible in the Cooper and Argosy Pictures archives at Brigham Young University, Utah, they are not discussed in the existing critical literature on Ford or Cooper.16 In addition to providing further background to completed films like Fort Apache, the letters



materially inflected with the history of one empire and the ascendance of another. These encounters thus make visible the underlying conditions of settler discourses within a U.S. context.


and memos in the collection show evidence of work that was advanced on many other projects with imperial themes. For example, Argosy did initial work on films to be made in the Pacific and Africa and extensive preproduction work for a complex four-film Technicolor program that was to utilize British empire locations and British production assistance. Many of the documents detail proposed productions that drew on U.S. and British imperial interventions in the Pacific and Africa. A 1946 memo, for example, records that Cooper paid Katherine Spaatz, Argosy’s research assistant, to work on an idea for a film about Honolulu during the colonial whaling period, when it was, in Cooper’s words, a “very unusual bawdy kind of sea frontier town” comparable to Dodge City, Kansas in the days of cattle drives.17 Comparing the whalers to cowboys, Cooper cited their interracial affairs as a reason to portray Honolulu as “a gaudy, hell-raising western town on a perpetual Saturday night spree.”18 Cooper’s interest in the Pacific was not confined to its film production possibilities: he also explored the prospect of leasing land from the French colonial government in Polynesia in order to open a resort.19 Other documents from 1946 to 1948 also show a continued interest in making adventure films set in colonial Africa. The files include correspondence with Zoltan Korda about a film that Cooper would produce, based on a book by A.E.W. Mason, 20 a note about a script for The African Queen (later directed by John Huston and released in 1951), 21 a series of 1948 memos that tracks Cooper’s pursuit of books by the British imperial author Rider Haggard, which Cooper planned to propose to Ford, information on British explorers in the Nile and Sudan, 22 and many other examples of script treatments about Africa and Polynesia. The most extensive evidence of Argosy’s aspirations to an imperial production program, however, is the existence of plans that are referred to in Argosy’s archives as the “four-picture Monopack deal.” Argosy’s postwar strategy involved an elaborate set of proposals for adventure films that relied on imperial histories and colonial locations. The memos and letters in the archives reveal far more than simply an interest in a particular kind of thematic or narrative content to the films. Rather, there was an economic imperative behind this production program. The “four-picture deal” was based on Cooper’s reasoning that the cheaper production costs of foreign location shooting coupled with spectacular adventure would translate into success at the box office. But the economic factors were not simplistic, nor were they nationally bounded; indeed, Argosy’s proposed narratives of empire adventure and exploration were embedded in the



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transnational economic relations of empire. The proposed production program that Argosy pursued between 1946 and 1948 was based on the concept of coproduction with British interests. The films were to be produced using the Monopack Technicolor process, and Cooper engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Technicolor’s representative in Britain, Kay Harrison, as the plan took shape. As Harrison explained to J. Arthur Rank (whom he approached as a potential distributor for the films), “Argosy film Productions . . . will undertake the production (in British Empire territories) in the next few years of up to four Technicolor feature films of outdoor subjects. They will be stories of adventure with the British Empire as a background.”23 For Cooper, these films were a return to what he did best, but this time with Ford producing and perhaps (according to some later memos) even directing some of the films. 24 Cooper claimed that it was he who had encouraged Alexander Korda to make imperial adventure films after the depression, and cited the American success of Korda’s imperial trilogy (Sanders of the River, The Drum, and The Four Feathers) as evidence that the idea worked. In a telegram to Harrison in 1947, Cooper explicitly constructs a kind of imperial triumvirate of film production. Referring to the Technicolor “outdoor pictures” (the term was synonymous with westerns and imperial dramas during that period), Cooper wrote that the “only people who have ever successfully made them are Ford, Korda and myself.” He continued that distribution would be better secured after the movies were finished, since the viability of these films would be “difficult to explain to hackneyed Hollywood bigwigs who have [the] idea that Africa is in [the] moon. . . . One way or other [I] am going to make these outdoor pictures.”25 In a letter to Giovanni Pagnamenta, a possible funder, he writes: “I am quite confident that if we work in supposedly ‘wild’ foreign countries with self-evidently adventure pictures, we can make money.”26 In the correspondence with Harrison, and citing his experience in “outdoor pictures” with films like Chang and The Four Feathers, Cooper also stressed his willingness to “use British money wherever possible and photograph in lands under the British flag.”27 Cooper’s stated preference for British finance and locations was partly to make the films eligible to count as British under the Cinematograph Films Act of 1938 (the second of two such “quota acts”). A cable from Harrison in 1946 made this goal explicit. He advised: “In order to take advantage of British quota requirements, production should be undertaken in Canada, British West Indies, Africa or any other British territory,”28 but other correspondence also suggests locations



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like India, Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, British Samoa, and Tonga. Quota legislation in Britain was aimed at complex and sometimes contradictory goals and Argosy’s entry into the domain of British quota production placed it in the center of such contradictions. With the original Cinematographic Films Act (or Quota Act) of 1927, Britain attempted to safeguard its film production interests by stipulating that distributors (“renters”) and exhibitors in Britain show a particular percentage, or quota, of British-produced films. The 1927 act and its revised 1938 version at first glance appear to be bound up completely within a desire for British national particularity in defending its screens from American imports; in this sense the acts might be seen as a systematic defense against a globalizing Hollywood. However, Priya Jaikumar has argued decisively that quota legislation was always more than a national and domestic project and that to treat it as such is to overlook “the centrality of empire to Britain’s geopolitical position between the two world wars.”29 Jaikumar meticulously details the slippage between the terms “British” and “British empire” in the acts’ provisions and shows that quota legislation attempted to mobilize the empire as a domain that could benefit Britain even in a time of decolonization. One aspect in particular of Jaikumar’s argument helps us to understand Argosy’s place within this complex terrain of trade and protectionism: that is, the way in which empire became precisely a matter of “trade rather than territory.” Jaikumar shows how Britain attempted to bolster its national industry by counting as British films made in or by its empire colonies and dominions (such as Australia or New Zealand), “treating empire less as a (static) point of production and more as a (mobile) space for British enterprise.” Thus, Jaikumar argues, “the empire becomes not so much a place as a spatialization of British industry, which disaffiliates territories from their regional politics and economies only to assimilate them as a transnational space for British trade.”30 Argosy’s commitment to shoot in empire territories and thereby exploit the quota legislation was not just an attempt to breach a British market that had stymied American imports, but constituted an entry into this now-ambiguously structured space of empire. For not only was the declining British empire a space of changing political realities, but it was at the same time a mobile space of production and distribution that no longer followed a British imperial logic. That Britain recognized such a “transition” (to use Jaikumar’s term) is quite clear in the complex language and shifting terms of the debates about the British film industry, as state officials attempted to



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recognize the gradual loss of empire while simultaneously attempting to mobilize that empire to national advantage. At the end of the war and in the years immediately following, Britain understood not only the ongoing impact of Hollywood on British screens but also the growing neoimperial or globalizing role of Hollywood (culturally) and the United States (politically) within its former empire territories. Argosy, then, with its four-picture Technicolor production plan, was entering this disputed terrain (which Britain was attempting to control) by conforming its plans to British quota requirements that were instituted to protect British, or British empire, interests. Paradoxically, however, Argosy’s activities threatened to further the scenario that the British legislation was ostensibly designed to protect, that is, increasing U.S. involvement in the film industry of Britain and her colonies and dominions. Enabled by the contradictions of the Quota Act, which in fact encouraged Anglo-American productions despite its nationalist rhetoric, 31 the contradictory nature of U.S.-British industry relations was furthered by the 1947 ad valorem tax, which imposed a 75 percent tax on all American films. Technicolor’s Kay Harrison protested to Cooper that the tax had caused “both Americans and English alike to register their profound disgust at the illconceived measure, and their violent opposition to it,” affirming that “their interests in every respect are identical.”32 When the ban was lifted in 1948, the British government blocked the remittance back to the United States of funds earned by U.S. film exhibition within Britain. With a significant percentage of their profits frozen within Britain, many Hollywood studios chose to sink those funds into British productions, as they had done in the early years of the quota when funds were also frozen for significant periods.33 Here then, within the very logic and rhetoric of British protection, was an obvious solicitation for precisely more, not less, U.S. involvement in the British film industry and economy. Like the quota legislation, the ad valorem tax is located within the wider question of Britain’s attempts to regulate a home market that was formed within a space of empire. While Britain continued to experiment with the economic viability of its empire as a market and a producer of cinema,34 empire as the stuff of narrative continued to be profitable and popular throughout the period between the wars and after World War II. Consequently, while negotiations on the four-picture deal proceeded through 1947, there was a renewed vigor to them in April 1948 as the tax was lifted, and Cooper’s memos through this period indicate Argosy’s deep commitment to what he called the “Argosy quota pictures.”35



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The Argosy plan was based on the premise that the American and British public had an appetite for adventures set in environments that were presently or historically part of the British empire. For Cooper, this had been proven in the 1920s and 1930s with his and Korda’s films; the four-picture plan was a return to such narratives that drew on the exploration and adventure themes that imperial authors like Kipling and Haggard had popularized. In reply to the memo in which Harrison called to restart negotiations with a vigor, just two days later Cooper sent a six-page memo that uses the original four-film plan as a base, but also suggests other possible scenarios that would create box office appeal through the combination of Technicolor and imperial adventure. African Cowboy was to focus on “the roping of wild lions by American cowboys” and another production was to center on the drama of a white family isolated in the jungles of Africa. Cooper proposed a film set in Malayan teak plantations using a managainst-beast theme, and another one set within the rubber industry.36 An earlier memo offers details of Motua, an “idyllic [south] sea love story entirely with native characters [that] can be done in British Samoa or Tahiti.”37 In yet another memo he suggested that someone “look into New Zealand and see if [it would be] possible to use Maoris” whom he hoped could “make war canoes and use them.”38 Across all these potential productions, in multiple empire locations, Cooper was consistent in suggesting that the star in all cases was to be “cameras invading the last frontiers of civilization.”39 Despite Cooper and Ford’s ambitious plans for overseas productions with Ford directing and advising, Argosy’s financial realities in the wake of The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947) made it more sensible to concentrate on local production and as a result the Technicolor empire films were never made.40 While Argosy was constituted as a company through an encounter between two significant individuals, one of whom has preeminent auteur status within American cinema, their planned and finished productions exist in a settler colonial context that goes well beyond the agency of either man. Through a distinctively local geography and discourse, Ford’s Argosy westerns worked out issues and problems of coloniality, gender, and national identity that are more than authorial, more than generic, and more than American. The Argosy westerns construct a settler spatiality that exists within a larger U.S.settler cultural frame, sharing features with other films, literature, painting, and forms of cultural production. Such a settler spatiality, however, is deeply embedded within imperial histories and the broader imperial spatiality that Argosy engaged with as it planned its



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British empire projects. Conscious of the ways that settler coloniality is always articulated within empire, I have shown that Argosy, as part of a dominant cinematic industry within a settler society, was engaged with a wider imperium in two related ways: first, through its implication in the rise of Hollywood and of the United States as imperial agents and, second, in the historical relationship between the United States and Britain, the imperial power that instigated the dominant phase of settler colonialism in North America. These related geopolitical and cinematic effects of empire frame the settler politics of the United States and its film production, and are particularly visible in the case of the Argosy westerns. The colonial encounters that are narrativized in these films are not simply story constructions of an American settler experience. Rather, they are shaped within a much broader set of settler colonial relations that have been produced from the extension of imperial power around the British empire. These encounters are generative of colonial formations of whiteness, indigeneity, and the attendant discourses of gender, sexuality, and class that are articulated along with them. Moreover, as the following analysis will show, these narratives are further embedded in the local and material encounters that attended the making of the films, as Argosy, Ford, and his company forged relationships with the geographies and peoples of their now-iconic location, Monument Valley.

Colonial Encounters and the Cavalry Trilogy Argosy’s westerns dramatize the processes of colonial settlement, conflict, and settler negotiations with space and indigeneity. Ford’s “cavalry trilogy,” Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande, has typically been discussed for the way its films present an authorial interest in community, tradition, and group cohesion. These films have also been thought of as some of Ford’s most politically conservative.41 Here I want to shift attention from the films as presentations of cavalry life or, more simplistically, as assertions of an authorial political position, and instead read them for their settler spatial politics within the context of Argosy’s other planned productions. Fort Apache, the first of the three productions, was based on the story Massacre, by James Warner Bellah, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947. Ford’s notes on the story suggest an immediate interest in it: “Cooper—get a price—also deal with Jim Bellah for script . . . I have an idea with Fonda-Wayne . . . period



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1896—frontier . . . Technicolor or Monopak [sic] . . . This is rough but will work on it. Don’t get excited—this is just an idea.”42 The finished film proceeded according to Ford’s rough sketch. Colonel Owen Thursday is a West Point graduate whose cavalry service has been conducted in Washington and Europe. A widower, he begrudgingly arrives at Fort Apache with his daughter, Philadelphia, on a commission he considers beneath him, in a setting, Arizona, he despises. Thursday quickly antagonizes the close-knit cavalry community with his arrogance and intransigence and insults the immigrant family of Sergeant O’Rourke (Ward Bond) by discouraging a romance between O’Rourke’s son, Lieutenant Michael O’Rourke (John Agar), and his daughter, Philadelphia. Captain Kirby York (John Wayne), by contrast, appears to be comfortable with frontier life and respectful of the Apaches in the area. After an unscrupulous Indian trader, Meacham, precipitates the return of a group of Apaches to land from which they were banished, Thursday disrupts an attempt at mediation that York and Beaufort (Pedro Armendariz) stage with the Apache leader, Cochise, and war ensues. Thursday recklessly leads his troops into battle in a strategy that his officers protest but are powerless to resist; Thursday and most of his men are killed. After York takes over the regiment in the wake of the carnage, he appears to defend Thursday and the necessity of tradition and obedience. In the second film of the trilogy, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Wayne plays Nathan Brittles, a widowed officer on the verge of retirement who is given one last patrol. He must escort his commanding officer’s wife, Abby (Mildred Natwick), and niece, Olivia (Joanne Dru) from the fort, across Arapaho country, to a waiting stagecoach at Sudros Wells. As a chaperone to civilians, Brittles is unable to intervene when he witnesses an impending Arapaho attack or to prevent trading of guns between an Indian agent and a young Arapaho chief who is threatening war. Brittles later arrives too late to foil an attack on his troops and, after he and his old Indian friend Pony That Walks (Chief John Big Tree) are unable to forestall a second imminent attack by a renegade Arapaho band, Brittles forces a stampede of horses to successfully avoid further carnage. After his retirement officially begins, he returns to the small cemetery where he regularly visits his deceased wife. Rio Grande is set in the wake of the Civil War and follows the familial drama between Kirby Yorke (John Wayne), a colonel based near the Rio Grande whose son, Jeff (Claude Jarman, Jr.), arrives in the regiment as a West Point dropout and new recruit. Assuring the son he’ll do him no favors, Yorke must also resist the attempts by his



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ex-wife, Kathleen (Maureen O’Hara) to take Jeff away. The central drama of the film concerns the ongoing raids by Apaches stationed on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, where the U.S. cavalry are prohibited from entering. One such raid on the fort frees the army’s Apache prisoners and Yorke, fearing another attack, orders the women and children to be moved to safety at nearby Fort Bliss but the wagon train is attacked and the children are taken captive across the border. Yorke’s son is one of the three troopers who traverse the Rio Grande to secure the children’s rescue and, as the regiment gives support, Yorke is wounded. His son removes an arrow from his chest and they are reunited with Kathleen, who waits for them at the fort. Ford reportedly regarded the Argosy westerns as “potboilers [that] served a purpose . . . I had to do something to put my company back on its feet,”43 and we might thus see them less as privileged vehicles for his authorship than as the economic engines of his production company through this period. As I have shown above, Argosy committed itself to films that narrated the imperial histories of Britain and the United States and, in particular, it incorporated and addressed the settler colonies in its project. Of the three films in this trilogy, Fort Apache is perhaps the starkest example of the spatial contradictions and tensions that lie at the heart of the U.S. settler colonial experience as represented in film. The film is marked by what Lawson has termed the “double inscription” of postcoloniality that is typical to settler colonies, in which white settlers are colonized in relation to an imperial power but are colonizers to the indigenous populations.44 Thursday demonstrates a class snobbery, Eurocentrism, and contempt for the landscape that mark him as an Easterner, out of place in the West, where men like York are comfortable. Thursday, with his Eastern idiosyncrasies, is thus positioned closer to the imperial past than those on the frontier of the new West, where settlers (and cavalry, here) are more practiced at managing the contradictions of colonial life. In this way, the film dramatizes the first sense of Lawson’s “double inscription,” where the post-Independence break from Britain as colonial power creates a sense of distance from British and European models, and privileges a “New World” settler experience. Thursday seems like a hangover from that imperial past. But Fort Apache and the trilogy also demonstrate a settler specificity that corresponds to Lawson’s second inscription; that is, the film demonstrates that white settlers in the West were also colonizers of a local, indigenous population. These films dramatize the way in which colonial exploration and settlement of the West proceeded through the ongoing displacement



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of Indians and the constant negotiation of contested space; to think of the films in this way brings focus to the continued settler colonial interventions within a place called “the American West” and to understand their relationship to a wider set of imperial discourses. The locational term, “the American West,” operates precisely to disguise the coloniality of those interventions, constructing instead an always-already nationally defined geographical place. Thinking spatially and transnationally, however, allows us to see the western’s focus on cowboys, farmers, Indians, and—especially—landscape as a cultural expression of precisely a settler colonial project, not just a national one. Taking the Argosy westerns seriously within the company’s wider production history, rather than simply imagining them as archetypal expressions of a western genre, or as emblems of authorial vision, can further our understanding of the coloniality of their project. The three films in the trilogy at first appear to be unlikely candidates for understanding the complexities of settler coloniality, since they explicitly concern cavalry and not small farmers or settlers (of the kind found in Wagon Master or The Searchers, for example). While it should be immediately noted that the U.S. Cavalry was a settler army working on behalf of a settler enterprise, there is a better reason why the cavalry trilogy is illuminating for an understanding of settler coloniality: the films’ spatial discourses enclose and outstrip their narrative focus on the army. While at the level of story, these films privilege cavalry over settler, in their cinematic discourse and their extratextual context, they offer stark contrasts between, on the one hand, the fantasies of total colonial control that sustained the U.S. cavalry’s role in the West and, on the other, the other kinds of response to colonial life that are the province of settlers: the shifting possibilities of disavowal of, or rapprochement with, space and the Other that are required for ongoing settlement. All three films construct the colonial landscape as potentially overwhelming to white intruders, and each invokes a different strategy to attempt to contain that realization. In the opening scenes of Fort Apache, the viewer encounters Thursday and his daughter en route to the fort, traveling in a lone coach. As Thursday rails against the “godforsaken country,” the camera offers several glimpses of the vast Monument Valley landscape through the window of the coach. Near the end of the scene, two extreme long shots sandwich a medium shot in which the coach drivers reassure Thursday that the next stop is close. In the first of these two shots, the camera pans right to left as it follows the coach, now reduced to an insignificant scale before the towering buttes and open sky. The second extreme long shot,



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which I described at the beginning of this chapter, pans from desert to fence to create a stark contrast between the enclosed world of the settlement and the openness and overwhelming scale of the terrain. While hinting at the potentially destabilizing effects of the landscape, however, the arrival scene offers sufficient interior shots in the wagon, animated by dialogue, to emphasize narrative development over any apprehension of the landscape’s overwhelming qualities. The film’s two plotlines develop as the action shifts to inside Ma McBean’s trading post, the romantic plot between Philadelphia and Michael O’Rourke, and the “work plot” that concerns Thursday’s imperious behavior and racist disdain for this film’s “ethnics,” the Irish cavalrymen. The viewer’s attention is thus held inside, diverted from the spatial problematics that might emerge from too much contemplation of landscape, and organized instead toward the standard classical narrative lines of action. This spatial dichotomy continues throughout the film. Shots of the barren desert beyond the fort alternate with scenes inside the fort’s boundaries and within warm domestic interiors such as the O’Rourke residence, which the film constructs as an inviting locus of family life to which Philadelphia is drawn. The dichotomous relation between the two types of space, interior and exterior, is so pronounced that there is little or no possibility of a continuity or connection between them. Instead, camera placement in Fort Apache works to actively separate the fort from the desert; the two exist in separate visual spheres. Within the visual logic of the film, Fort Apache itself and the cavalry as an institution maintain their coherence only through the active exclusion or denial of the landscape and what it signifies and contains. That western landscape is organized here in a way that Ross Gibson has studied in Australian settler culture. Fort Apache’s version of Monument Valley is an example of what Gibson, himself drawing on an American landscape tradition, would term a “badland,” a “natural space deployed in a cultural form to persuade citizens that unruliness can be simultaneously acknowledged and ignored.”45 This unruliness, Gibson writes, is the sense of a “savagery” that existed in precolonial times but whose existence the colonist must deny or violently suppress in order to continue the project of settlement. The badlands of Fort Apache tell us much about the paradoxes of settler colonialism. Within this film, whose mise-en-scène is unsettling in the extreme and which narrates the unsuccessful attempt to violently suppress an indigenous tribe, the buttes and open desert of Monument Valley become spaces that are radically irreconcilable. Rather than holding the promise of settlement they appear as sites of death and



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disarray. As Gibson suggests, the existence of such spaces within settler cultures is an attempt to construct bounded regions whose uncontainability is repressed in order to continue the more optimistic vision of settlement, taming, and new world transformation that the settler project also embraces. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon manages the unsettling potential of the Monument Valley landscape very differently from Fort Apache. Its Technicolor vistas construct Monument Valley in a more romantic light. Here the dominant yellows and blues and the theatricality of the film’s mise-en-scène render the valley as a fantastic space in which imperial domination has, at first blush, transformed the wilderness into a space of romantic grandeur and contemplation. Where Fort Apache tries to quiet the unsettling qualities of the colonial landscape by cutting away to warm interiors, Yellow Ribbon manages the crisis by creating a kind of sublime excess of light and landscape, a fantastic space that suggests transcendence rather than imminent threat. While the influence of painter Frederic Remington is certainly obvious (Ford said that he’d tried to consciously mimic his style),46 some sequences, such as the troop’s slow march across the desert during a lightning storm, seem to also bear the luminous and transcendental appearance of landscapes by Alfred Bierstadt or the Hudson River school. In other notable sequences, Yellow Ribbon organizes its landscape within the reassuring frame created by the fort’s entrance gate, making of the gate not so much a border as a pictorial frame. Here the desert is contained and made safe for the viewer’s consumption. In Rio Grande, small scenes of “desert domesticity,” such as when Kathleen washes the officers’ clothes next to the Rio Grande or irons shirts before a backdrop of mountains, suggest a way to settle and domesticate the landscape that elsewhere in the film threatens to overwhelm. Despite the trilogy’s focus on cavalry and the absence of settler families within their diegeses, then, all three films are organized by a spatial politics that is intimately bound up with settler colonial discourses. Their highly spatialized narratives underpin a politics of colonization and settlement just as much as a film like Wagon Master (1950), in which the protagonists are cowboys and settlers, not cavalry. In Fort Apache, for example, the ethnically diverse group within the fort comes to function as a group of settlers who, unlike Thursday, will find a way to eventually negotiate the unfamiliarity of colonial space. The Irish cavalrymen, for example, attract Thursday’s contempt, yet move with ease between desert and fort. York and Beaufort travel confidently through the borderlands region on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande to entreat with Cochise, as Beaufort pauses on the



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way to honor “la tierra de mi madre” as he looks across the river into Mexico. His verbal aside affirms the spatial and cultural proximity of Mexico and highlights the way in which Beaufort, Cochise, and York all use Spanish as the borderlands lingua franca that allows them to cross the boundaries of race. As Charles Ramirez Berg points out, the use of Spanish here is the sign of a complex multicultural space within the film that many Ford critics have overlooked or dismissed.47 Thus the conflict between Thursday and York in Fort Apache, most often discussed in Ford literature as a debate about competing styles of leadership and approaches to duty and tradition, is really a conflict about different apprehensions of space and different modes of white masculinity. In these Argosy westerns, white masculinity is constructed not primarily through direct encounters with Native Americans within the diegesis, despite the genre cliché of “cowboys and Indians,” but rather through spatial interactions. While the film’s narrative highlights Thursday and York’s different tactical approaches, what is at stake here is a way of negotiating race and gender within colonial space. York’s reluctance to punitively enforce the reservation borders within which Cochise and his people are confined is coextensive with his willing and respectful entry into Cochise’s compound. In that scene, camera placement (higher than Wayne and Armendariz, sometimes on cliffs above them, figure 2.2) and shot sequence (cutting between Apaches who look down at the intruders) stresses Cochise’s spatial control and York’s deference to it, something that puts him at odds with Thursday’s expansionist version of whiteness, as Joan Dagle has also pointed out.48 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon also contains sequences that suggest Indian control over space and white vulnerability to it. For example, as Captain Nathan Brittles (Wayne) and his troops leave Fort Stark for the first time in the film, a series of long shots has them pass across a background plane of Monument Valley buttes and mesas and a middle ground of tepees, probably those of “friendly” Indian scouts, that suggest a prior and still active native civilization. More striking still are the compositions that follow after the camera pans right, when a group of Native Americans is placed on a slight bank in the foreground, their backs to the viewer, watching the troops depart as if to observe or supervise their mission. The next shot also contextualizes the cavalry within visual reminders of indigenous presence as the camera, at ground level, shows a tepee wall and two Indian jugs in the foreground as it looks toward a middle ground of watching Indians who stand before the background plane of fort, flag, and departing cavalry. In a later sequence in which the cavalry rides



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Figure 2.2 Indigenous control of space: York and Beaufort approach Cochise’s compound in Fort Apache. (Frame enlargement.)

through a ravine, the camera is placed alongside the Indians at the top of a cliff, waiting and watching. The sequence is short but its effect, cutting from the cavalry to the watching Native Americans, is to suggest that the troops have freedom of movement only at the assent of Indians, whose presence remains unseen and undetected to the troops. Such a surprising moment of unrestricted narration, going as it were “behind the scenes” of white mobility, reminds the viewer that there is always a parallel narrative of spatial control taking place in the cavalry westerns, even as the dominant narrative of cavalry securing land for settlement, driving back the Indians, and creating a crucible for American nationhood and values, remains. An alternative narrative of indigenous spatial practice is also invoked by the many deployments of offscreen filmic space in these films. In Rio Grande, for example, such space is associated with an unknowable and threatening other, and the nervous offscreen glance of four cavalrymen that accompanies the sound-off of “coyotes,” shortly before the first Indian attack, works to similar effect in a nighttime sequence in Yellow Ribbon, when Cohill warns Olivia Dandridge that they are being watched as an offscreen whistle is heard (figure 2.3). Here, as in many other places, the ambiguities of



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Figure 2.3 Offscreen space withheld, “You think that’s a whipperwell?” She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (Frame enlargement.)

sound effects are also important, as indigenous people and nature are collapsed within an anxiety about what lies beyond settler comprehension (yielding more status to those characters who can tell the difference, like Cohill, here, and York, in Fort Apache). The lack of any matching eyeline shot in sequences such as these breaks a more typical Hollywood narrativization of space, in which offscreen space is continually evoked but contained “in a constant movement of reappropriation.”49 Some sequences in Ford’s films utilize a more complete eyeline match, such as in The Searchers, when the Edwards’ worried looks offscreen from their porch at Ethan’s approach or before Scar’s attack are sandwiched together with the occasional shot of the desert. But the ubiquity of the offscreen look remains powerful with or without the radical break in continuity. The device is notable in Wagon Master too, as I will show below, and it is so important to these films that we might be tempted to call it Fordian, if it were not to occur in other westerns like Ealing’s Australian film, Bitter Springs (figure 3.2). The ubiquity of the offscreen look is, therefore, certainly generic, in that it conforms to the western’s dominant ideological tendencies to center and normalize point of view around settler



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subjectivity.50 But, more importantly, in this context it is culturally and spatially overdetermined with the needs of a settler disavowal. David Bunn, writing of South African colonial landscape painting, reminds his reader: “Colonial space, remember, is a site of regular ontological shock. It is filled with competing indigenous meaning, a foreign semiotics . . . which must consequently be rewritten so that it appears willing to admit colonial appropriations.”51 In my example, the combination of offscreen space and its association with the threat of Indians, the frequent withholding of a matching eyeline shot, and restricted narration, which allows the viewer only the effects of native agency and seldom its visualization, all suture the viewer into a white apprehension of space and an expectation of masculine control over it (making it safe for families or for the formation of a heterosexual couple). Yet as they do so, they perpetually remind one of the comprehensive spatial practice and vocabulary of an Other. White subjects—including Ford’s viewers, who are positioned as white by this textual strategy—do not have access to that practice or vocabulary and remain confined within their own culturally specific spatial practices. It is this countervailing, indigenous discourse of space that Thursday cannot apprehend in Fort Apache, and it results in the dramatic defeat suffered by the cavalry. Thursday’s refusal to honor Cochise is not just a personal slight, a matter of racial prejudice, but also a refusal to honor a spatial practice that he does not understand. When he insists on returning Cochise to a reservation in order to attack him, when he persists in using a military formation designed for other (European) battlefields, or when he assumes that Cochise is not waiting in ambush because he can’t see him (York replies that the reason to know he’s there is, precisely, that they can’t see him), Thursday refuses to admit to the more powerful symbolic and literal control of space that Cochise possesses. 52 Thursday’s resounding defeat at the hands of Cochise’s forces thus represents the failure of a white masculinity that would seek to control space absolutely. 53 As a settler representative who seems to carry with him all of the negative attributes that the post-Independence American would attribute to a British colonial power, Thursday becomes the figure whose death enables a more indigenized settler masculinity (York’s) to accede to power.54 Yet Fort Apache offers an unsettling picture in which the perpetuation of violence and disappropriation is assured, despite York’s command, and indeed York is made complicit with that very violence. In this way, Ford’s film resists the ease of a disavowal and confronts the contradictions of colonialism and its various agents head-on.



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All three cavalry films, then, turn on questions about colonial space and the extent to which its control is possible or complete. In Yellow Ribbon, successive scenes suggest that Native Americans are everywhere and have complete control over space, able to move at will without detection or obstruction. Their superior strength, knowledge of landscape, and spatial control is confirmed as the cavalry consistently arrives too late, the film thus conjoining a melodramatic trope to the failings of a settler masculinity. In Rio Grande, Indians constitute a disorienting force that often emerges, threateningly, from an indistinct landscape, yet the hegemony of that narration is broken by moments that suggest another, indigenous cultural system of using and interpreting space. The Indian prisoners, for example, seem to escape their narrative placement: while they live below a bridge near the cavalry camp, the film’s soundtrack reveals the extent to which they disturb the nascent cavalry-settler space of the camp and are not culturally (or literally) containable within its borders. Before one significant attack on the cavalry, by outside Indian forces, the Indian prisoners’ diegetic cries disturb the camp until another Indian scout, Johnny Horseblanket (uncredited), is asked to quiet them. The abject quality of their cries, in a film that is notable for its many popular songs, is the aural reminder of the inability of an imperial or settler culture to fully erase the signs of indigenous presence and knowledge. Another sequence is marked by an Eisenstinian collision of shots as the film cuts from the sentimental singing of the Sons of Pioneers to a close-up of an Indian and the sound of his wailing, the mismatched graphic contrasts provoking for the viewer a shocked recognition of another symbolic world, its repressed voices suddenly louder and more visible than ever. The narrative resolutions of the cavalry trilogy films, however, present white control over indigenous space as historically inevitable and in so doing they constitute an awareness of the wider contexts of imperial and colonial histories within Britain’s former empire. Forged within a production context in which Argosy was closely working with British imperial histories, these films seem to graphically convey the stakes for individual settler Americans in the constitution of an American western history, while simultaneously exposing those psychological contradictions of settlement to our scrutiny. In Fort Apache we see the ideological bargains made within a U.S. settler culture that ultimately succeeded only by force. York takes on the accoutrements of Thursday’s leadership after his death, affirming the official version of Thursday’s demise as heroic and gallant. Yet the irony with which Wayne inflects his words in the scene (“correct



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in every detail,” he mutters, in response to reporters’ assertions that Thursday died gloriously) implies that York has made a settler’s pact with himself to disavow the realities behind the legend of Thursday’s achievement. That is, the film at this moment suggests that York admits the reality of white vulnerability and yet chooses not to recognize it. As Dagle writes, “It is as if the only way York—and at least to some extent Ford—can resolve the contradictions that the narrative has raised is by refusing to consider them and, instead, substituting for the anxieties of history a glorification of the regiment as an entity unto itself.”55 The structure that Dagle describes, though she does not name it as such, is one of disavowal or, as Gibson describes it, “sensing but trying not to see.”56 While Dagle is right in pointing to the scene’s contradictions, which seem finally unresolved, she ultimately implies that it is Ford himself who disavows the violence of the settler project. Instead, we might do better to read such moments closer to Gallagher’s assertion that “Ford’s intentions are to give accurate depictions of the system, not to give us ‘happy endings.’ ”57 Certainly these films leave the viewer with uncomfortable truths and it is ultimately irrelevant whether to attribute some or all of this discomfort to authorial intention. I argue that the contradictions and ambiguities in the Argosy westerns are in fact indicators of a larger set of settler contradictions that exceeds a Fordian or American frame and that places these films squarely in the contested domain of other anxious settler constructions of home. Such problems are found in the other films of the trilogy too and, in every case, one can see the formal discourses—visual and aural—of the film as ultimately telling us more than the deliberations of the characters or the assumed subject positions of Ford as the Americanborn son of Irish immigrants, as military captain, as racist, as hero, or as drunkard. In Yellow Ribbon, a final voiceover offers a kind of closure to the film by eulogizing the cavalry, but its tone of resignation leaves as many questions as it answers. “Wherever they went, whatever they fought for,” intones its uncertain narrator, “that place became the United States.” In Rio Grande, Yorke’s reconstructed Yankee masculinity is finally able to unite the estranged couple and reconstitute correct Oedipal relations with his son, and the children are rescued. But the native tribes’ influence and presence across the border remains, and the fundamental clash between white settler culture and Native Americans is the loose end that is never narratively addressed or resolved, surfacing in the visual tensions noted above. In Fort Apache, one should remember the low angles and massive clouds that loom behind Thursday and his troops before battle or



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the almost supernatural landscape that completely overwhelms the human figures of Beaufort and York as they ride to Cochise’s camp. The visual discourse and spatial dichotomies of that film resist the vision of imperial control that Thursday offers and that York must assume, and while the narrative may compensate for defeat with a form of ideological closure, we are left nevertheless with the constant reminders of unease that Monument Valley and its cinematic rendering have generated. Writing about Australia, Gibson outlines a process of settler disavowal that should, by now, be familiar from the films discussed here: Over time, white settlers tried to become accustomed to denying that otherness was in their midst . . . Great tracts of the landscape spurned agriculture and pastoral profitability, but the colonists continued trying to wring profits from it. Aboriginal people were everywhere and culturally distinct but the colonists avoided the quandary of them by insisting that they were dying out. This is how the colony was maintained: by sensing but trying not to see, by fearing and knowing but trying not to acknowledge. 58

The landscapes of the cavalry trilogy taunt the viewer with the sense that Indian space cannot be completely subdued by imperial force; that it will always contain the potential to overwhelm intruders; and that the indigenous symbolic practices that have been enacted within that landscape do not die out or disappear with the advent of white settlement. These landscapes, made iconic and American in representation, are the landscapes of settler projects in a much larger empire. In two later films within the Argosy period, we will observe somewhat different ways of negotiating such complexities.

Colonial Spatiality and Settler Space Settler colonialism, as I argue throughout this book, becomes culturally visible in narrative film as a discourse about space. Its cultural and material practices have always turned on spatial negotiation, conflict, and potential transformation, reckoning with the many interactions (agricultural, cartographical, and especially intersubjective) required for the colonist to occupy and settle land. Thus, to “settle” suggests two connected meanings: it is to colonize by establishing permanent residence, and to settle in the sense of taming or quieting the land, bringing it into conformity with a settler colonial imaginary. It is just this kind of practice that produces space in the sense that de Certeau



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defines it, as a place (lieu) that has been practiced or transformed by human agency into space (espace).59 Settler colonialism produces space from the preexisting indigenous realities of place, transforming it through acts of imagination and colonization into multivalent colonial space. What is actively forgotten during this process, however, is that the place that is subjected to colonial spatial transformation is always the space of an Other. In the case of the American West, the land that settlers took to be available for transformation was already embedded in a complex indigenous mode of life and symbolic system that never disappeared despite the violence of colonial authority that was exacted upon it. Settler colonial space as I have referred to in this chapter, then, suggests the complex, contradictory space of the West as it is rendered in the western film. I do not presume to account here for the spatial transformations and negotiations that indigenous cultures themselves practiced. My point, instead, has been to stress that white settler cultures, despite the imperial fantasy of empty lands or cultural superiority that often justified their invasion, do end up creating cultural texts that in some way disclose an awareness of another, preceding, cultural system, be it valorized in the discourse of noble savagery, appropriated (as I will discuss below) in a discourse of primitivism, or denied through the disavowals that emerge in the cavalry trilogy. Such expressions of settler culture are fundamentally anxious, torn by the recognition of the role of colonial violence in the constitution of the colony and the deeply felt utopian desire for what the land might yet allow. The contradictions that accompany spatial transformation in the West, as settlers remade space in the shadow of indigeneity, are found not in the textual systems of these films alone. This chapter has already shown how those issues are embedded in larger, transnational networks of imperial and colonial power and representation. The Argosy westerns discussed thus far, however, also emerge out of another set of spatial encounters that is local to the films’ place of production. All three films in the cavalry trilogy, and The Searchers, were shot in Monument Valley, straddling the southeastern corner of Utah and northeastern Arizona; some scenes in Wagon Master were shot there and others nearby in the Professor Valley, near Moab, Utah.60 In choosing these locations, Ford was, as Buscombe points out, creating an imaginary geography rather than a real one; while the films at times contain names of real places, those places are generally placed into a somewhat fictionalized geographical relation and include towns far from Monument Valley itself.61 Nevertheless the films did address their locations in other complex and specific



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ways. In the numerous visits he made to Monument Valley, Ford created distinctive and far-reaching encounters with Navajo through the mediation of a settler-trader figure, Harry Goulding, who introduced Ford to the valley.62 The encounters between Ford and the Navajo, and between Goulding, the Navajo, and the Valley are all crucial here. Ford employed Navajo as extras, playing his “Indians” in each picture. As the geography was imaginary in the diegeses of these films, so were its peoples: Navajos played themselves in Wagon Master but often played other peoples in other films. The objection to this practice that has been raised in ideologically interested, textual-based criticism is easily made and to large extent well-founded: the practice turns specific Native Americans with histories and language of their own into generic ciphers for whatever nation is named in the diegesis—Apache, Comanche, Arapaho, and so on.63 But to make such a critique in the absence of extratextual contexts is actually to miss the history of encounters that go beyond narrative alone and whose complexity is precisely illustrative of the contradictions of settler coloniality. While Ford may have misrepresented the actuality of Navajo life on film, outside the text he was a welcomed employer of Navajo labor. Navajo who worked on the films as extras and laborers of all kinds were paid five dollars per day; those who had rode horses were paid eight dollars a day plus feed for their horses, and Hosteen Tso, a medicine man who Ford relied upon to produce good weather, got $15 a day plus a bonus at the end of the film.64 Harry Goulding, a source for these figures, does not suggest exactly which film attracted these wages, but at the time of Stagecoach, when Ford began to work in the valley, federal hourly minimum wages in the United States were $0.25; at the time of The Searchers in 1956 they were a dollar.65 Davis notes that Ford spent $48,000 on Navajo wages in the making of Stagecoach and that he insisted on “the Hollywood scale” for all the Navajo he employed.66 The boost to the Navajo economy provided by these films was, according to sources like Goulding and others, what enabled them to get through the atrocious winter that followed the She Wore a Yellow Ribbon shoot, when an airlift brought food to the Navajo during snows that were twelve feet deep.67 Davis suggests that Ford arranged the airlift and that he had already spent $150,000 in the valley during the film.68 Goulding affirms that “there were two times that [Ford] came in here just before a bad winter and saved a lot of Navajos. They had the money, so they got a lot of food in the hogans, they got clothes, maybe new saddles, and their hogans were filled up just



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got in touch with Ford, and be darned if he didn’t cook up one of these pictures and he came in. [He] said that he read that letter and he got to thinking, “Maybe we’ll try to get out there.” And did; he come out in the late fall and made the picture. So the Navajos just felt that the gods had something to do with this man coming in here. Mr. John loved those Navajos.69

By these accounts, the encounter between Ford and the Navajo was mutually beneficial and productive. During the time he spent in the valley, Ford was given the name Natani Nez, or “tall soldier” and was later initiated into the tribe through a ceremony in which Navajo presented him with a deer hide “just like they have in their ceremonies.”70 One of the Navajo inscribed the hide with words that began, “We present this deer hide to our fellow tribesman, Natani Nez.”71 While it is difficult to access Navajo accounts of the period that are unmediated by white Americans, Moon’s Tall Sheep, a biography of Harry Goulding, includes many interviews with Navajo whose impressions of Ford’s impact on their economy is also favorable. As much as Ford’s work in Monument Valley was an encounter with Navajo, it was an encounter with a space jointly made by indigenous and settler practices. Ford’s access to the valley was from the outset mediated by a man who was not only the first white settler there but who also traded with the Navajo and live in Monument Valley for approximately fifty years. Harry Goulding’s own history presents an ambiguous set of colonial circumstances. Arriving in the area in 1921, he consciously encroached on the Navajo reservation in order to explore terrain unknown to him. At that time, Monument Valley was inhabited partially by Paiute Indians, spread out across the Paiute Strip, which ran along the Arizona/Utah border. Relations between Paiute and the Mormons in the San Juan River area of Utah (the valley to which Wagon Master’s Mormon’s travel) were strained, and Goulding “decided . . . that them Paiutes might be getting ready to move out of the Valley, and that might make room for me. I sure liked that country.”72 After the Paiutes were moved to a reservation further north in Utah, Goulding settled in the Valley in 1925 with his new wife, Leone (whom he called “Mike”), at first in tents and then, after 1927, in a two-storey building that they called Goulding’s Trading Post. The building had a profound affect on life in the area for it established a permanent site of economic exchange between settlers



before the bad weather hit.” After “the snakes had told the Navajos it was going to be bad,” Goulding reports, he

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and Navajo within the valley and led directly to Goulding’s invitation to Hollywood. Indeed, this is the exact building that I describe in the opening of this chapter. Originally built from stones cut and laid by Navajo workers, it had a ground floor for trading and a second floor as living quarters. While shooting Fort Apache, Ford added an outside staircase, a front porch, and a rail fence,73 all of which are clearly visible in his finished film. Rather than building a temporary set, Ford actively intervened in the built settler environment of the valley, leaving permanent physical traces of his production in the midst of settler life. The building was further evidence to the Navajo of Goulding’s immoveability: Goulding tells of receiving a visit, before the building was constructed, from Navajo who sought to know when he and his wife planned to leave; he defiantly made clear that his intentions were to stay.74 Goulding’s occupation of this part of Monument Valley was soon officially sanctioned by the state of Utah, which facilitated the alienation of Goulding’s block of land from the Navajo reservation. When it was incorporated as a state, Utah followed federal guidelines and set aside various blocks as “school sections” that could nevertheless be sold to individuals if a price were agreed upon. After leasing the section for some years in knowledge of this provision, Goulding succeeded in having the land appraised and advertised in 1937. On April 20, 1938, Goulding’s offer to buy the block was accepted over the express dissent of the Indian Service and Navajo Agency, which sent a telegram to state officers on the day of sale urging that “proposed land sale . . . be withheld from sale pending negotiation by Government to purchase the tract. This land is within boundary of Navajo Reservation.”75 The sale proceeded regardless. Thus Goulding’s private holding, legitimately purchased from the state, was nevertheless completely contained within the Navajo reservation, putting native land practice (which did not recognize such an arbitrary demarcation of a school section within a reservation) in direct conflict with state law. Goulding, then, achieved private ownership of land within the reservation just months before he invited Ford to film in the valley for Stagecoach in 1938, and it was this contradictory space of dispossession and cohabitation into which Ford and Argosy entered. Goulding’s solicitation of Ford followed the depression years in which trade had suffered (the Gouldings were unable to sell outside the reservation the goods they acquired by trading within the Navajo) and Navajo themselves had been badly affected by a drastic federal policy that forced a reduction in stock numbers in the valley. The Gouldings, having heard on the radio about some Hollywood plans to make “an



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Indian picture,” packed some possessions and drove to Los Angeles. Goulding tells that he simply walked into the United Artists lot with pictures of the valley under his arm and refused to leave until he met with someone. A location manager eventually appeared; then Ford and finally Wanger. A team then flew out to scout the valley, returned, and confirmed arrangements with Goulding to take their units to Monument Valley, use his trading post, and shoot in the valley.76 Ford’s encounter with Monument Valley was thus bound up with the presence of Goulding as a white settler-trader and Argosy again entered into a set of complex colonial relations by its repeated presence in the valley, relations that always went beyond narrative. Indeed, the Gouldings themselves stand as the kind of ambiguous figures that the remaining Argosy westerns, Wagon Master, and the Cooper/Ford production, The Searchers, all dramatize. While Goulding’s acquisition of Navajo land is, despite its lack of violence, certainly part of a more extensive settler colonial project of dispossession,77 the Gouldings themselves emerge from all published accounts as figures who made a coexistence with the Navajo in a set of relations that were multifaceted, nonviolent, and not always purely exploitative.78 Moon’s account of the years after Goulding’s purchase of the land suggests a sustained engagement between Navajo and the Gouldings, such that each affected the other’s world in ways that were important and far-reaching; the presence of Ford’s company continued that process of engagement. While this set of settler encounters does not reach the fully shared, borderless world that Richard White has described in The Middle Ground, his study of white/Indian relations around the Great Lakes,79 it does nevertheless demonstrate an environment not irremediably structured by assumed hierarchies of white-Indian relations. These meeting points of indigene, settler-trader, and film studio in the Monument Valley are part of the settler colonial context of Argosy’s westerns. While the cavalry trilogy invoked and engaged such encounters, it is in Argosy’s next film that we see further resonance of these narratives and their material contexts. While the cavalry trilogy highlights the uneasy contradictions of settler discursivity, Wagon Master constructs a sense of settler colonial transformation and belonging that is more extensive and reassuring for white settler culture than anything in the earlier films (which perhaps explains why some Ford scholars have found it more “optimistic” or “simple” in its vision of the West).80 In this film, a group of Mormon settlers travels west in search of a “promised land” in Utah in which to settle. At the beginning of the film, as the Mormons are expelled from



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Crystal City, they meet two horse traders, Travis (Ben Johnson) and Sandy (Harry Carey Jr.). Mormon leader Wiggs (Ward Bond) hires the two men as wagon masters and together they set out west. Along the way they adopt a group of medicine show performers who are stranded without water and later encounter a gang of outlaws named the Cleggs. As romances develop and later falter between Travis and one of the performers, Denver (Joanne Dru), and between Sandy and a Mormon girl (Kathleen O’Malley), the wagon masters must also keep the Mormons safe from the Clegg gang, which continues to threaten them all. When the Mormons create a peaceful dialogue with the Navajo whom they encounter, the Cleggs disrupt the scene with an assault on a Navajo woman. Eventually, Travis and Sandy shoot and kill the Cleggs and the Mormons continue toward the valley they have chosen for settlement (in reality, the San Juan river valley in Utah, just north of Monument Valley). The film ends with the valley just out of sight and the romances rekindled. While its mise-en-scène is considerably less unsettling than that of Fort Apache, and less fantastic than Yellow Ribbon, the film’s discourse still invokes the notion of a potentially threatening and opposing cultural space: in this case, that associated with Navajo. As with the earlier films, the offscreen glance represents a trace of the settler’s inability to achieve epistemological control of the landscape, that is, to ensure an ease of comprehension and control of the space that he would claim to inhabit. In the case of Wagon Master’s Mormons, to achieve such certainty would be to guarantee the “promise” of the land. In The Road to Botany Bay, his attempt to construct a “spatial history” of Australia, Paul Carter argues: the process of settlement was not a laconic replacement of one culture by another, a mechanical imposition of superior technology, a simple, physical “taming” of the land, but, on the contrary, a process of teaching the country to speak. . . . Particularly in the absence of a bilingual nomenclature, the would-be settler was more than ever obliged to settle the country rhetorically . . . he had, more than ever, to conjure up the object of his desire and, through the act of articulating it, to bring it into being.81

Carter here reminds us of the way in which settler societies needed language and rhetorical systems in specific ways that imperial contact and exploitation of other forms did not. In order to construct “home,” the landscape had to be managed in ways that made it intelligible, that “settled” or neutralized its foreignness. Fort Apache seemed to suggest that that process was either impossible, or would happen



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only through massive disavowal and violence. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the mise-en-scène offers a fantasy of sublime landscape tempered with various strategies of containment. In Wagon Master, however, a more extensive rhetoric of settlement and naming becomes more audible and legible in the film. The Mormons undertake a rhetorical task of conjuring and “bringing into being,” as Carter has it, through their prayers and invocations about the seed grain their wagon contains, while the soundtrack also includes many songs of hopeful migration that are both diegetic and nondiegetic (the most significant example of the latter being the song “Wagons West” that accompanies the film’s closing credits). Yet none of these rhetorical gestures of naming and settlement manages to wholly erase a sense of unease about the enterprise of settlement, and it is here that the use of Mormons as a narrative device becomes particularly significant. First, it provides a narrative motivation for the film’s self-consciously eschatological tendency to present white settlement as a religious (and “manifest” destiny), a tendency that is not isolated to this film (it appears prominently in 3 Godfathers, and many of the painterly compositions of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon gesture toward it too)82 but is deeply embedded in U.S. settler colonial culture. In fact, such eschatological tendencies are one of the markers of a particular U.S. version of settler coloniality, as Jon Stratton has argued.83 But the role of Mormons in the narrative also displays Ford’s continued interest in white characters that are ethnically or culturally marked as other to the puritan mainstream of colonial society. In Wagon Master, the Mormons’ marginality allows for a complex gesture of cultural equivalence to be made, one that functions to manage the visual and epistemological crisis of the settler encounter with space by comparing Mormons to Navajo. Ramirez Berg has noted that in Ford’s films, ethnic characters are often implicitly compared to Native Americans in that each struggle for cultural legitimacy. Indeed, he asserts that the degree to which Ford’s ethnic characters understand and appreciate Native Americans marks their capacity for justice and tolerance, values that are crucial in the Fordian cultural system. “Probably the best rendering of this cultural equivalence,” argues Ramirez Berg, “comes in Wagon Master, where the Mormons and the Native Americans each confront and tolerate the mysterious other, locking arms and circling a flickering campfire in a Navajo dance.”84 Ramirez Berg is exactly right in noting that the film effects this move, but by confining itself only to Ford, his essay overlooks the way in which such a tendency is in fact not simply Fordian nor even



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only western but also settler colonial: the cultural equivalency that is established between native and settler is a familiar colonial gesture for managing the contradictions of settler life within indigenous space. Conforming to a tendency that Nicholas Thomas calls “primitivism,” the film legitimates the presence of white settlers and their claims for land by constructing them as “brothers” to the Navajo they encounter. Primitivism, according to Thomas, allows the settler colonist to identify more fully with his new home, since the native whose identity is adopted “is not foreign but indigenous: self-fashioning via the Sioux or the Aborigines does not exoticize oneself, but makes one more American or more Australian.”85 This, of course, is one of the tensions implicit in the narrative of the Gouldings in Monument Valley, who most certainly acculturated to Navajo ways in part to more effectively cement their own presence in the valley. In the present case, Wagon Master does not just neutralize the threat of Indians as antagonists by scenes like the one above, but also indigenizes the Mormons and their cowboy wagon masters by equating them with the displaced Navajo, and by shifting the narrative conflict to one between honorable and dishonorable whites. Moreover, one should not forget that the diegetic relation here between Mormons and Navajo is redoubled in the actual history of the southern Utah locations where the film was shot; as I have noted above, Mormon settlement in the areas close to the Paiute Strip and Monument Valley put them in direct proximity and potential confrontation with Paiute and Navajo residents of those areas.86 As further evidence of the primitivist gesture that the film effects, the main antagonists within Wagon Master turn out to be not the Navajo but the outlaw Cleggs, who among other things disrupt the bicultural dance between Mormons and Navajo that the film privileges. Within a Ford film, where the dance always holds a special place in the establishment of community cohesion, this affront not only marks the Cleggs as outside the bonds of community but, more importantly, strengthens the film’s conceit that the Navajo and Mormons are fundamentally alike. In fact, their equivalency is established before the dance, in the scene where the Mormons and Navajo first meet. After a tense initial standoff (the Navajo, discovered by Travis, have followed him back to the wagon train, threatening to attack), Sandy’s fluency in the Navajo language allows the two groups to communicate, and the Navajo leader and his men murmur approvingly when they learn that the group is comprised of Mormons, whom he refers to as “our brothers,” and “just little thieves” when compared to other white men.



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This encounter not only provides tacit acknowledgment of the fact that Navajo have legitimate claims to land, but also simultaneously strengthens the Mormons’ claim to their “promised land” by comparing their displacement and desire to found a home to the displaced condition of Native Americans. Wagon Master’s primitivism, then, is not a form of psychological self-fashioning seen in a film like Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990). Rather than provide for a certain kind of subjective transformation, it is fundamentally spatial in nature: it allows the film to better manage the kinds of spatial crises we observed in the cavalry trilogy and that I have addressed above. In keeping with its characters’ pronouncements of an agrarian utopia to come, the film itself constructs western space as malleable, live-able, and attainable in the near future. Such space also corresponds to what Mitchell has observed of other holy landscapes, that they hold a kind of “double temporality,” signifying both “the place of origin and the utopian prospect of the future, always fleeting beyond the present”87 (significantly, the valley the Mormons finally arrive at can never be definitively grasped by the viewer; it is seen in a succession of ambiguous shots). The West of this film, then, is a space that, unlike Fort Apache’s, seems to ultimately respond to the settlers’ demands for home: for demarcation and boundaries and fences, for production, and for a combination of settler farm and reproductive heterosexual family life.88 The Argosy westerns thus mark out different aspects of settler culture as it has manifested itself in the United States. While Fort Apache narrativizes the national “forgetting” that is required to sustain a sense of colonial control and stability, the film simultaneously exposes through its own discourse the precariousness and contradictions of that forgetting.89 While York and the multicultural, ethnic groupings that surround him at the fort might represent some form of potential settler coexistence with indigenous space, York’s assumption of Thursday’s command at the end of the film suggests that a totalizing, disavowed form of white identity and power will, by necessity, prevail. Wagon Master, at the other extreme, avoids the unease that attaches to Fort Apache’s stark vistas and offers instead a relatively untroubled settler space in which Mormon settlers, indigenized by the film, move toward the fulfillment of their religiously sanctioned settler home. That home is suggested as a place that they will rightly occupy after their forced expulsion from Crystal City; their marginality to a dominant, puritan settler society further aligns them with dispossessed Native American cultures to which they are, by the logic of the film, structurally equivalent. In other words, by presenting a group



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that effectively incorporates the status of indigeneity for itself, the film localizes and produces a home in order to allay the insecurities of colonial life. This, as Stephen Turner writes from a New Zealand context, is one of the fundamental strategies of settler societies that must construct conceptions of home in a New World. Histories of second (i.e., nonindigenous) settlers, Turner argues, emphasize the impossibility of returning to a “mother country” because “home is now here . . . The very idea of home has been remade, and the indigenous presence [has been] co-opted for this purpose.”90 The Argosy westerns, then, offer no sustained models for how a settler politics of space could operate in a way that fully recognized otherness; what they offer, instead, are fleeting moments of spatiocultural encounters (York and Beaufort’s communication with Cochise; Brittles’s friendly entreat to Pony That Walks) or cultural appropriation (Wagon Master) contrasted to a more extensive and dominant refusal to recognize or engage with indigeneity. As settler colonial texts that narrate such vexed engagements with the cultural actualities of indigenous and settler space, they can be understood as the local manifestation of a much broader imperial discursivity in which Argosy was involved and in which these films are embedded. That this imperial context structures the settler coloniality of Argosy’s westerns will prepare us to understand how Ealing Studio’s productions in Australia, which were part of the complex settler coloniality of Australian film culture in the postwar period, also took shape within a shared imperial space that involved both Britain and the United States.



The Argosy Westerns





Part II

Empire and Settler Cinema in Australia





Chapter Three

Perhaps the first critic to address the seemingly oxymoronic prospect of an Australian western was André Bazin. In an essay that affirms his sense of the intrinsic Americanness of the Hollywood western, Bazin notes, almost parenthetically, that “sometimes,” as in The Overlanders, a western theme is borrowed—in this case the traditional cattle drive—and set in a landscape, central Australia, reasonably like the American West. The result, as we know, was excellent. But fortunately no attempt was made to follow up on this paradoxical achievement, whose success was due to an unusual combination of circumstances.1

Bazin’s easy and familiar “as we know” seems to reassure the reader that even as we might appreciate The Overlanders, we know that it was not really a western or, at least, that it was a historical curiosity, something that, “fortunately,” was destined not to be repeated. The film he cites, The Overlanders (Harry Watt, 1946), was produced by Britain’s Ealing Studios and starred the Australian actor Chips Rafferty. The film was shot on location in the Australian outback, with an Australian cast and a mostly Australian crew. While it was, for Bazin, a “paradoxical achievement,” The Overlanders was the first of a series of three films produced by Ealing that shared Australian locations and a number of western conventions and images. After The Overlanders came Eureka Stockade (1949), also directed by Watt, and Bitter Springs (1950), directed by Ralph Smart. All were produced at a time when Ealing was actively pursuing the possibilities of future production in Australia. Although their plan for continuous production faltered, Ealing did return to Australia to make two more films, The Shiralee (Les Norman, 1957) and The Siege of Pinchgut (Watt, 1959). Of the five Australian productions, all except Pinchgut used a mise-en-scène and story material familiar from westerns. Since Bazin first raised his eyebrows at the notion of an Australian western, other scholars have paid closer attention to “international westerns” as they have emerged in different national contexts.



Ealing’s Australian Westerns


Christopher Frayling’s work on Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns,” for example, reassessed the genre and further displaced the view that a non-American western would by definition lack “cultural roots.” While citing Jim Kitses’s famous remark, “First of all, the Western is American history,” Frayling affirmed, along with Kitses, that such a sentiment does not preclude others from producing successful genre films based on that history, even if those films are made outside the United States itself. 2 Much more recently, Tassilo Schneider has addressed the phenomenal success of some German westerns such as Der Schatz im Silbersee (1962) and notes that they too were once ridiculed, along with the Leone films, for their cultural inauthenticity.3 Peter Bloom has studied the refashioning of a French western in relation to postcolonial Algerian politics, revealing its potential to address contemporary realities there.4 Collectively, these writers have certainly displaced the idea that westerns can be only produced in the United States in order to be artistically or culturally “viable” and have produced insightful readings of the now-internationalized genre. Yet despite the international pedigree of their archive, the films discussed in these studies still take American history as the stuff of their narratives: Leone’s films are set in the Southwest, even if filmed in Spain by Italians, and Der Schatz in Silbersee was made in Northern Yugoslavia but based on novels with American settings by the German writer Karl May. Functioning as commentaries on U.S. history and their places of origin, these films are affirmed as “westerns” by these scholars in part because of their self-evident connections to narratives of U.S. history. Janet Walker’s eloquent introduction to an excellent collection of essays on westerns closes by affirming that the genre is “bound up with the incarnate fortunes of North America and the United States [which constitutes] its most salient and enduring aspect.”5 The work she and these other authors present has led to a far more nuanced understanding of the western and some of its international aspects, even though it does not finally explain the paradoxical examples of these Australian westerns. The films I discuss here are particularly compelling because though they have been described as westerns, their narratives ostensibly have nothing to do with the United States. Their claim to being westerns within the terms set above is thus less self-evident (despite the frequency with which they were described as such in their distribution and reception). In the absence of an extensive critical literature on the phenomenon of a western that is not about the American West, Bazin’s comment retains considerably more contemporary critical purchase than we might first assume. While Bazin may appear at first



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to have been left behind by multiple studies of international westerns, the question that he posits is certainly still active: how does one account for the seemingly strange phemonenon of an Australian western? And why should his easy dismissal of the idea seem at first glance self-evident, uncontroversial, and still plausible today? This chapter approaches these questions not just from a textual vantage point but by also considering primary materials relating to production, distribution, and reception. It argues that the material histories that surrounded Ealing’s films prompt us to recognize the western as more than a matter of iconography, narrative conventions, or national history. This chapter engages the western genre as a privileged mode of settler cinema in which certain narrative and representational strategies contribute to a larger cultural project of grounding white settler cultures within colonized landscapes. Certainly, with that definition in mind, one can analyze the Ealing films to show how they produce a settler imaginary in visual terms. But in this chapter I will focus predominantly on how these particular films, which appear to sit uneasily across critical categories of genre and nation are embedded in material histories of colonial encounter between British, Australian, and American forces, encounters that mark them as settler productions. Understanding the settler coloniality of the Ealing films enables us to better “place” these productions that have often seemed marginal to an Australian national cinema, eccentric to a British national cinema, and exceptional, even “paradoxical,” to the supposedly American genre of the western. Ealing’s Australian westerns thus bring the conditions of settler cinemas into relief: their “western-ness” derives from their settler colonial negotiations of the imperial histories of Britain and the United States within Australia, not from an imitative and unoriginal miming of genre models. These vectors of imperial influence were manifest in unequal ways: while Britain’s role was cultural, economic, and governmental, the United States held sway in the local terrain of film distribution and production. Australian governments, filmmakers, distributors, critics, and filmgoers engaged with those forces in multiple ways, and it is within this shared space of settler colonial and imperial practice that Australian westerns were formed. The implications of arguing for a settler colonial specificity to the western and its appearance in Australia, then, are threefold. First, studying the production and reception histories of these Ealing films illuminates imperial and colonial histories that are partially narrativized in the films themselves. The nationalism of their narratives, seemingly antithetical to their genre trappings or British lineage, emerges





as a discourse formed within a complex set of colonial encounters. Second, thinking in terms of settler coloniality also resituates our understanding of the seemingly wedded relations between genre and national histories that are assumed by formulations like Bazin’s, and that are continued in work that has succeeded his. As I argue throughout the book, while setter coloniality in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand is often experienced in locally specific iterations, it has been shaped transnationally in significant material ways. Consequently, to think of the western as an intrinsically American form that was “paradoxically” found in Australia is to misunderstand the transnationality of settler colonial relations between these sites. And, third, thinking about these Australian westerns as settler texts opens up a possibility for better understanding American cinema too. Rather than consider Hollywood westerns as unquestionably tied to a U.S. national mythology, this book sees them as attempts to deal with the contradictions of a much wider set of settler projects and histories. For example, while much genre criticism has typically thought of the western through concepts like the frontier, or the dichotomy between wilderness and civilization, and has then assumed those concepts to be nationally particular, this book sees them as aspects of settler spatiality that are produced out of colonization and are thus found in other settler societies too.6 Consequently, rather than seeing Australian westerns as bad copies of a Hollywood original or, in Bazin’s words, as “counterfeit, pastiche or parody” (142), I want to see them as complex illustrations of a settler colonial construction of “home” in an environment crossed by multiple lines of imperial and colonial traffic. Turning to the specific example of the Ealing films, then, this chapter concentrates on establishing their context by using primary materials from the archives of Ealing Studios chief Michael Balcon and from Australian sources such as trade papers, interviews, and personal collections. I study encounters that took place across a range of levels, from the governmental film trade policies to the register of personal and affective relations; for example, I consider the letters between Ealing personnel Michael Balcon, Harry Watt, and Hal Williams, which together narrate a story of colonial hopes and despair. I demonstrate that Ealing’s project in Australia, through the period that permanent production was considered (i.e., during the production of The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade, and Bitter Springs), was both imperializing—seeking expansion through the existing networks of the British empire—and explicitly settler colonial in the working out of Ealing and Britain’s relation to Australia. I then consider the



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ongoing economic and cultural ties between Australia and Britain as part of the production context for the films. In a brief analysis of the films themselves, I show how their narratives are testament to the intertwined and overdetermined colonial history of Britain and Australia and how their formal strategies are familiar from the films of the previous chapter. I also briefly examine the malleability of the term “western” within the exhibition and reception practices attached to these films, and thus reveal a surprisingly consistent public discourse about the western that illuminates it as a transnational mode of settler cinema. While dislocating the western from a specifically American setting, however, this chapter keeps sight of the broader history of U.S. interests in Australia. For it is here that we find the ironic ending to Ealing’s fortunes in Australia. Though U.S. imperialism in Australia did not develop through active colonization and settlement, it has nonetheless an extensive material history that can be traced in economic, political, and cultural terms. Ultimately, Ealing could not continue in Australia because the dominant postwar imperial relation was not one between Australia and Britain, whose empire faltered in the wake of the war, but between Australia and the United States, whose Pacific power and presence increased in the postwar years. The film industry in the former British colony, Ealing discovered, was in thrall to another imperial power even as the wider Australian culture still imagined itself in relation to its former “parent.” Moreover, that imperial power (the United States) was itself a settler society with historical similarities to Australia. Thus, while one could attribute the very narratives and visual tropes of the Ealing films solely to Hollywood’s hegemony and influence, I will show that their production and textual qualities are conditioned by a settler colonial experience in which one must account for both Britain and America’s relationship to Australia.

Settling the “Australian Western” While Ealing’s films are instructive texts with which to examine the criss-crossing imperial traffic within Australian film production, distribution, and reception, there were still earlier precedents for the notion of an Australian western. For example, many of the silent “cattle duffer”7 and bushranger films of the 1900s–1920s were instrumental in setting in place a visual relationship between white settler families, masculinity, and the bush that was to remain highly influential in later





decades of Australian cinema, and was familiar to viewers of American silent westerns. In their constructions of space and subjectivity, films like Thunderbolt (John Gavin, 1910) and Robbery Under Arms (Kenneth Brampton, 1920) placed their subjects in a landscape that was new, unfamiliar, and spectacular to viewers (such as the bush into which Ned Kelly’s family retreats or in which the duffers hide) or one that was already colonized, with white cottages and fenced paddocks signifying the successful demarcation of a space hauntingly devoid of Aboriginal people who were, as in so many American westerns, tellingly absent from most of the diegesis. Other films of the pre–World War II silent and sound period, such as Girl of the Bush (Franklin Barrett, 1921) or The Squatter’s Daughter (Ken G. Hall, 1933), established the racialized nature of the outback, and set white settlers, Aboriginals, Chinese, and even Afghans in asymmetrical relations of gender, sexuality, labor, and property. Many also offered viewers a visual argument for the importance of the wool trade to Australian industry, thus joining nationalist expression (pride in Australia’s wool production) with imperial context (the importance of Britain as an export market) while grounding themselves in the virtues of the local (the bush, which is usually privileged in these films against the spoiled or exploitative city).8 One way of understanding the place of the Ealing films or these antecedents, and the extent to which they might be called westerns, is to think of them as directly imitative of American models. That, after all, is the underlying logic to Bazin’s comment: that in the case of The Overlanders, “a western theme [the cattle drive] is borrowed” and a landscape, familiar to viewers from American westerns, is used. Yet Bazin’s framing of the question, in which borrowing is a form of cultural appropriation, only admits a one-way influence from the supposed generic center to its margin; the possibility that Australia might have something to teach us about the United States is disallowed. Stuart Cunningham has discussed the Australian director Charles Chauvel’s work within a similar logic of dominance and subordination. Referring to Chauvel’s film Greenhide (1926), Cunningham writes: Greenhide is a so-called “kangaroo Western,” a weak form of generic hybridization that seeks to transpose a Hollywood genre (with established popular embedding) into an Australian—and more particularly, regional—setting. This was the project followed consistently by Chauvel through the 1920s.9

Despite the implication that such a transposition is “weak” by dint of its unoriginality,10 Cunningham’s use of the term “hybridization”



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these relations [of generic similarity] are the result of certain cultural coincidences between Australia and the Western United States rather than the outcome of direct influence of the one upon the other. Viewed in this light, “the American cinema par excellence” can perhaps be more reasonably understood as the epitome of a global cinema—not an original myth of nationhood, but a story of no-place retold everywhere and at all times, even in terra nullius itself.12

Like Routt, who also deploys Bazin’s bemused reaction to an Australian western to address questions of genre, I wish to see relations between sites—in this case, between Britain, Australia, and the United States—as meaningful and more than unidirectional. But I want to use Routt’s suggestions to push even further at the settler specificity of the western as revealed by its Australian examples. Rather than seeing it as “a story of no-place told everywhere . . . even in terra nullius itself” I emphasize the way in which it is always a story of some place, told especially in a place like terra nullius. Terra nullius is the legal doctrine that was invoked to justify the colonization of the Australian continent by Britain; the term denoted a concept of “land belonging to no one” and carries also a sense (which I think Routt exploits here) of “no place.” In either case, it presents the place to which it refers as available for—even demanding of—white settlement.13 In Routt’s sentence, however, the reflexive pronoun also makes terra nullius the very definition of Australia “itself.” In all these senses, I argue, the western becomes especially appropriate for Australia because it is the story of the creation of a complex settler colonial space from the seemingly inert place of terra nullius—a process that was, in specific ways, common to both the United States and Australia.14 Certainly the western is global in the sense that it is transnational and not simply yoked to an American national mythology, as Routt makes clear. But it is not global in the sense that its story can be retold “everywhere and at all times,” at least not in the same way. In other words, its production and even its narratives can be transnational (crossing borders, effacing or relocating national specificities) without being simply global (homogeneous and nationally nonspecific).15 Therefore, I argue that the transnationality of the



is suggestive of a more nuanced model that has become dominant in the historiography of Australian film.11 But the questions raised by the Australian western require an even more particular focus, one that allows for the problematization of the American western too. Bill Routt argues something similar when he suggests that


western functions according to and within the transnationality of imperial and settler colonial relations, forging national particularity within imperial discursivity.16 Routt’s notion of a “cultural coincidence” between Australia and the United States, then, can be used not just to inform ideas on the relationship between genre and national cinema, but also to interrogate wider cultural and geopolitical histories. When he writes that the western is more than American national mythology and that myths, after all, “are founded in certain actual relations and cultural practices which are transformed by being ‘mythologised,’ ” I want to further specify those “actual relations” of the western myth as inherent to processes of settler colonization.17 As I argue throughout this book, the encounters that structure settler cinemas emerge from a conjunction of imperial power and place that does not follow a singular trajectory from metropolis to colony. Rather, settler coloniality is forged out of the particularly complex relations between settlers, natives, and the space that they practice together. White settler societies were usually founded at a geographical distance from a metropolitan center to which their agrarian economies would address themselves, creating dynamic relations of exchange that complicated the metropolitan/colonial axis. Settler societies developed in relation to a landscape that was generally treated as empty or available, and in relation to indigenous peoples who were variously considered to be savage, noble but doomed, or nonexistent. As one of the “cultural practices” that has attempted to make sense of those actual relations, then, settler cinema has developed narratives about settler families working the land, male outlaws or bushrangers and their relationship to the law, the formation of settler masculinities, white/indigenous relations, and has created distinctive spatial tropes for representing those themes, such as the use of extreme long shots of landscape and the construction of a visual dichotomy between “empty” landscape and settled farms. Moreover, the critical and social discourse about these films also constitutes a cultural practice in its own right, one that further narrativizes and mythologizes the settler relations as constructed in the narratives. It is evident from studying contemporary reviews and promotional materials for the Ealing films that the Australian and British publics were little concerned with policing national boundaries when it came to genre. The term “western” was used liberally in relation to these films and, even when it was not, other responses nonetheless located the films within a western generic frame. The press book for The Overlanders, in its long account of the film’s making, describes



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“the day when the complete production was whisked from civilization to the desert beyond Alice Springs” in a phrase that echoes the structuring dichotomy of many western films and a great deal of literature, as I have noted above.18 Eureka Stockade’s press book praises the “virile action and romance filmed against the splendour of Australia’s vast open spaces” disclosing how the key elements of white heterosexual masculinity and landscape were promoted together. Others were more direct; for example, a review of The Overlanders claimed that the film “break[s] down America’s monopoly of the super ‘western.’ ”19 A British reviewer puzzled: “That the obvious wealth of film-material in Australia and the other Dominions has been so little utilized by our cameras is one of the major mysteries of cinema. It is not as if the Americans had not shown us the way a hundred times with their Western epics. . . . The Overlanders not only takes the tip from the Americans, but beats them to it. . . . ”20 One review of Eureka calls it “a good new type of ‘western’ ” and a New York Times review notes that the film “follows an old formula easily recognized by devotees of Westerns.”21 A lengthy review of Bitter Springs in the Motion Picture Herald suggests that “pioneering in the vast expanses of Australia was apparently little different from our own westward movement. . . . There have been incalculable films about the early settlers of the American West. Bitter Springs differs from these only in that the scenery is novel and the savages are aborigines instead of Indians.” (The review also praises the inclusion of kangaroos into the picture).22 While many reviews, and much of the promotional material for the film, went to great lengths to stress the Australian-ness of the films (the pressbooks in particular took this direction) there existed simultaneously an assertion of the films’ relationship to American westerns. The films’ discourses of distribution and reception thus demonstrate the many ways in which the term “western,” with all its connotations of American cinema and history, was deployed unselfconsciously alongside affirmations of Australian innovation.

The Ealing Experiment Ealing’s experiment in Australian production began with the mutually entwined imperial history of Australia and Britain. During World War II, British producers made a number of films glorifying the British role in the war.23 Feeling that Australia’s war efforts had not been sufficiently covered on screen, the Australian government approached the British Ministry of Information asking for consideration.24 British





officials in turn contacted Ealing Studios chief Michael Balcon, who sent Harry Watt—known for his documentary work on films like Night Mail (Harry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936), London Can Take It (Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt, 1940), and Target for Tonight (Harry Watt, 1941)—to Australia to research possible story ideas and to investigate the prospects for making films there. While certainly demonstrating the manifest connections between Britain and Australia that lingered from Australia’s days as a colony, this story of friendly imperial or Commonwealth cooperation obscures the real financial incentives for Ealing to expand its production into Australia. Those reasons become clear in press reports of the Australian visit of Ealing’s chief financial officer Major Reginald Baker. Baker’s arrival in Australia, two years after the release of The Overlanders, was preceded by two years of speculation in the trade press about the prospect of Ealing’s continued production in Australia. By the time of his arrival in 1948, a climate of heightened expectation had been created. The Australasian Exhibitor reported Baker’s arrival with the headline: “Not Father Christmas Says Major Baker. Declares Fabulous Production Figures Quoted by Press Untrue.” The article continued: “Since he arrived in Australia he had wondered why he was being greeted like Father Xmas. True it was the hope and desire of Ealing to make more pictures in Australia, but he had no idea where the fabulous sums quoted by the lay press were coming from.” But a frank admission followed later in the story: Ealing’s interest in Australia is due to the fact that there is not enough studio space in England to produce the number of films required to boost Britain’s export market. . . . Major Baker gave his view that the vital need for stepping-up British production was sadly handicapped by the lack of proper studio space which could not be overcome in years. This left as the only desirable alternative the idea of pushing ahead with British production in other Empire countries. 25

A Sydney newspaper, The Telegraph, reported Baker declaring: “Ealing is interested in making films here because it is a good thing for the Empire, and a good idea to expand the British film industry. England herself is suffering from lack of studio space, and there is no improvement in sight for years.”26 Here, then, the underlying structural reasons for Ealing’s interest in Australia are laid bare. In the postwar economic climate, Britain’s need to build exports and restrict imports led Ealing to see Australia as a source of production and hence future revenue.27 Moreover, such



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a strategy was in keeping with Britain’s desire to retain its imperial influence and strength around the world. While The Overlanders was something of a gamble in 1946, its phenomenal success led Ealing to consider expanding production in Australia. Such consideration was already evident in even the early correspondence that Watt sent back to Ealing. In January 1946, during production of The Overlanders, Watt compiled a seven-page document entitled “Report on Australia” to send to Balcon. In it, Watt laid out his thoughts on the Australian film industry, offering curt assessments of Australia’s then preeminent directors, Ken G. Hall (“well intentioned, honest, and uninspired and I don’t think can ever be expected to produce anything about the ‘B’ class”) and Charles Chauvel (“who has got very little story sense and is burdened by a wife who insists on a considerable say in his scripts, with disastrous results”); its facilities (two studios, both lacking); and its acting talent (“Amongst the public generally the accent is an almost complete barrier”). 28 Watt’s frank report is vital to an assessment of the Ealing period in Australia, because it reveals a tension that ran throughout the project. On the one hand, Ealing’s archives reveal the studio’s determinedly imperial ambitions to conduct production activities in another country with the aim of maximum wealth extraction from the “film colony.” Certainly in this respect Ealing was able to draw on the very real history of Australia’s place as a colony within the British empire. On the other hand, there are moments where the declared interests of Ealing’s representatives in the future of Australia’s film industry displayed a genuine degree of affective identification with the place. Ealing’s Major Baker later emigrated from Britain to Australia on his retirement; Watt himself seemed eager to foster Australian production; and the films themselves, in their naturalistic mise-en-scène and predominantly Australian accents and performances, offered a sense of national specificity despite their imperial genealogy. This tension, of course, is part and parcel of the settler colonial enterprise: as a colonial phenomenon, the settler’s movement necessitates both the initial extension of imperial control (to achieve dominance and to create the material conditions for settler life) and requires the fostering of a nationalistic sentiment in the settler colony itself as a precondition of its continued viability. 29 Watt seems to unconsciously acknowledge both demands— imperial continuity and settler nationalism—in the framing of his report. For example, in suggesting a continued program of production in Australia, Watt points out the many ways in which the industry and country are lacking when compared with Britain. Yet





he also recognizes that in its underdeveloped state, Australia offers opportunities for both British and American interests, and that with Britain’s cultural and political affinity as former colonial power, the prospects for British involvement were extensive and urgent, if Hollywood was to be met head on. “In the Dominions is the chance for the British film industry . . . to consolidate its success against Hollywood,” he wrote. “We can challenge this monopoly in our Dominion films. . . . By creating a solid foundation for a film industry in a young country like Australia we can establish the cultural roots that transform a country into a nation. . . . I hope this empire film idea comes off, because I’m willing to stake my career and future on it.”30 Not only that, but Ealing, as Watt recognized, was in the perfect position to capitalize on precisely that nationalistic sentiment that strove for differentiation and uniqueness—for the ideals of a national cinema. “At the present moment,” writes Watt in January 1946, “there has arisen another of the periodic urges to make films—‘Culture’ is the cry.” He continues, “The prospects for a co-ordinated film production programme in Australia seem bright. The Government have [sic] become exceedingly film-conscious.”31 Watt realized that Ealing’s position as a British studio gave it certain possible concessions with the Australian government with respect to import duties on filmmaking equipment and that this gave them a further financial incentive. Watt’s suggestion, then, was for a series of pictures that would include, at the outset, “an open air action picture of the Western type” as well as other historical and modern subjects. Watt calculated that if distribution was handled by one of the Rank Organisation’s companies such as Eagle-Lion (Ealing’s British distributor), the profits could be considerable since the film would almost cover its costs in the Australian market alone and then even a modest run in England would mean that “a considerable profit should accrue.” Not only that, but since Australia was in a key position in the South Pacific, it could also become a base for escalating documentary and feature production in other parts of Polynesia and South-East Asia.32 In order to accomplish this plan, however, Watt saw a need for British technicians to move to Australia to train and supplement the Australians, whom he regarded as enthusiastic but unskilled. 33 Here again, Watt’s suggestions are inescapably imperial in their logic. Watt’s plan for Ealing was to capitalize on the oversupply of film technicians in England, encouraging that particular “surplus population” (a subset of the greater surplus population whose constitution as a problem by the state propelled the movement of settlers and the



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As such a project outlined would be a pioneering one, it would necessitate young, ambitious people, willing to work hard and take chances. . . . Many of these would be willing to settle in Australia and the knowledge that the success of their films might mean a permanent film industry there, of which they could be founder members, would make them anxious to do their utmost.34

Watt’s plan, then, demonstrates the potential of this “film colony” to be a site of production in which Britain would be favored and in which the new settler-workers would create a new industry while still maintaining cultural ties to their home country. This divided attention—a tension observable in the conflicted letters that Ealing representatives like Watt and Hal Williams sent home—is a settler colonial condition that can be observed in much of the cultural production of Australia in the first half of the twentieth century. Such seemingly contradictory attitudes to the idea of Australian nation in the context of empire are dramatized perfectly in the final scenes of Charles Chauvel’s Heritage (1935) where, in a climactic and nationalistic speech before the Australian Parliament, the film’s protagonist (a Northern Territory farmer-turned-politician) declares “the chains that bind us to the Empire should be chains of steel!” As Routt observes in his extensive analysis of the scene, “national identity has been gathered up into Imperial identity and vice versa” as characters struggle for a heterosexual coupling that will cement the entity of “race-empire-nation.”35 The complexity of these interwoven threads of empire and national identity is also evident in the public discourse that surrounded the Ealing films in Australia. In the triumphant aftermath of The Overlanders, for example, Watt received a prize from the Victorian state branch of the Royal Empire Society. The society’s newsletter reported: Empire Day [May 24], 1947, was aptly chosen as the day when the trophy won by Ealing Studios, London, for its production of The Overlanders in Australia could be most appropriately presented, for the making of Motion Pictures in Australia by a British Company forged a new link in the chain which binds Australia to Britain. 36

The metaphor employed here—of imperial chains that bind—is uncannily close to Frank’s in Heritage. Watt replied, “Our ambition



relocation of convicts to places like Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century) to emigrate to the New World:

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was to make a film so really Australian that it would be accepted by Australians” and he reassured the society that Ealing would continue to make films that would be “just as Australian as was The Overlanders.” Here is further evidence, then, of the extent to which the Ealing project inhabited a space of settler coloniality that took shape between the avowed goals of an altruistic, if vicarious, form of

Figure 3.1 Indigenizing The Overlanders. Advertisement from The Film Weekly, September 13, 1945. Courtesy of AFI Research Collection.


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nationalist industry formation and a hard-headed form of imperial capitalist ambition. Similar expressions are ubiquitous in the advertising materials that accompanied The Overlanders. Indeed, the imbrication of different kinds of nationalist and imperial discourse are especially evident in materials whose advocacy for the film took the form of “congratulations” to its makers or distributors, thus declaring affiliation and accruing potential prestige and profit for the advertiser. One such advertisement, printed in a special advertising supplement within the trade paper Film Weekly, was sponsored by Filmcraft Laboratory and congratulates Ealing for helping to “Advance Australia” with its production. While “Advance Australia Fair” had not yet become the official national anthem, the advertisement alludes to the popular nationalist song while also, with its imagery of intertwined Australian and British flags, stressing the imperial continuity referenced in Heritage or Watt’s speech.37 Another advertisement in the same section performs another complicated localizing act (figure 3.1). Advertising two Brisbane theaters in the state of Queensland, this image, like the previous advertisement, congratulates the film’s distribution company, British Empire Films, which was in fact an Australian company formed to distribute Ealing’s pictures within Australia. However the advertisement balances the imperial ring of such an invocation with an indigenizing strategy that localizes the film by association with aboriginality and the bush. A handwritten statement, purporting to be that of exhibitor Dan Caroll declares: “I learn from ‘Blackfellows wireless,’ the most reliable source of information in Australia, that this is going to be a great picture.”38 Carroll’s conceit of an indigenous network rallying to praise The Overlanders plays to the regional audience that his theater chain served (the Wintergarden theaters were found in country areas beyond the city of Brisbane), 39 associating the film even more strongly with a local authenticity. And it borrows the idea of indigeneity to further authenticate the Australian-ness of the film: even the “Blackfellows” are talking about it.

Imperial Ambition, Colonial Melancholy Other contemporary material of a private, rather than public, nature also reveals the imperial ambitions and colonial contradictions of Ealing’s proposed production plan. Both Watt and Eric Williams, Ealing’s production representative in Australia during the late 1940s,





wrote long letters to Balcon during their time in Australia.40 These were prompted, no doubt, by Balcon’s interest in all aspects of his productions (he famously formed a tight-knit group of staff whom he allowed creative freedom within the bounds of strict allegiance to the team) but the letters also reveal the economic conditions under which the plan took shape, and later failed, and the emotional ebb and flow of the mission.41 As documents of the emotional arc of the Ealing mission, the letters are, at times, strongly reminiscent of those collected in Nicholas Thomas and Richard Eves’ compelling study of colonial failure, Bad Colonists. Thomas and Eves trace, in the letters home of two inconsequential British colonists, the breakdown of white masculine identities under the pressures of colonial life: weather, boredom, and even the impossibility of letter-writing itself all become indices of colonial failure. In the present case, the Ealing letters function as more than simply a source material with which to understand the production details of the film. Instead, they offer an insight into the affective dimensions of settler colonial encounters that are, as Ann Laura Stoler argues, just as important as any military or governmental history might be.42 Williams’ and Watt’s letters, and Balcon’s replies to them, are particularly noteworthy during the period of Eureka Stockade’s production in 1948 and 1949. This film, Ealing’s second “outdoor picture” and one that, as many reviewers noted, continued the “western qualities” of The Overlanders, showed in many respects the underside of Ealing’s dream.43 As Baker was on his way to Australia, hoping for future production and some investment from Australian interests, conditions on the set of Eureka were becoming difficult for Watt; his and Williams’ letters over this time read like a catalogue of disasters. (Watt’s, in particular, suggest a writer depressed and ready to quit: enumerating the various illnesses and injuries of the cast and crew, he continues: “Altogether it is difficult not to believe that ill luck does not dog this picture. . . . Rather than have you feel that I am letting you down, it would be better to let me go altogether,” he wrote to Balcon in February 1948).44 That same month, Williams wrote to Hal Mason, another Ealing executive in London. After detailing breakages of equipment that the company had suffered in the transit of material from England, Williams continued: “The weather has been dreadful and the forecast varies from merely disappointing to very disastrous; given only ‘disappointing weather’ we shall probably get through the exterior schedule in, say, another 12 weeks, at a cost of about £30,000.” The letter goes on to suggest that the total budget for the film may reach £200,000 (which it eventually did) and that at some



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point they may be better to cut their losses and relocate production to England “where facilities are available at a definite price and with certain security.”45 The next day, Williams wrote to Balcon, saying, “The weather, as stated in our cable, has been an outstanding failure from our point of view, and we have had the heaviest rainfall since 1921: this has resulted in the schedule being 2 months behind.”46 In addition, Actors’ Equity had objected to the use of Army personnel as extras who had occasional spoken lines. Williams also relates that due to the bad weather, the Australian Ministry of Defence, who had loaned Royal Australian Army soldiers as extras for the shoot, were asking for release from the project. Next to these comments, Balcon’s handwriting appears: “Big shock. We did not [arrange] weather. If [they] are merely ‘fair weather’ people the sooner we change our minds about Australia the better.” The underlining of the first passage quoted above (indicated here by italics), seems to have been done by Balcon himself, as it appears in pencil on his copy of Williams’ letter (held in the Balcon Collection). The frequent appearance of handwritten emphasis and marginalia on many of Balcon’s copies of the Australian letters demonstrates the intense personal interest he took in the success of the Australian project. It is also, as I will show in subsequent chapters, another sign of how primary documents of colonial histories become, in their own right, texts of colonial encounter and affect. In his reply to Williams, Balcon mentions that Major Reginald Baker is on his way to Australia and that his presence might relieve the situation. He continues: Although we are engaged on commercial production our activities are of terrific importance to Australia. We were not responsible for this very bad weather and we would not like to think that the Australians were fair weather friends only. It is because we are in a jam that we need their help and they must give it to us whatever trouble it may be. It seems to me also that Major Baker should consider a big stick approach and if he gets no help it would be as well to state publicly that it will be the turning point in our long-term arrangements and we shall pull out of Australian production unless they are more co-operative. This goes for Equity too and the other unions. Personally I think that Major Baker will do the trick over there. If he wants me to see the High Commissioner in London to get his support in our predicament, I will gladly do so, but I don’t think it will be necessary.47

Balcon’s text constructs a hierarchical imperial relationship under which the Australians must labor (“they must give it to us whatever





trouble it may be” or face “the big stick”) and which relies on the implicit threat of intervention by metropolitan authority if needed. By July of that year, things were going much better on the Eureka shoot, but Williams still confided in Balcon with other concerns about possible future productions, saying, “the main difficulty, however, is in the word ‘inconsistent’ and this applies to everything and everybody connected with production in Australia: the local factors, such as coal strikes, transport difficulties and so on, merely aggravate conditions.” He continues: Personally, if I may express my thoughts—I would rather work elsewhere if active and genuine co-operation is forthcoming to Ealing. Australia hasn’t given Ealing much real encouragement and the goodwill it has secured by perseverance and production will not be much diminished by our absence—we may even be missed!!48

If Williams’ comments, along with Watt’s occasionally disparaging remarks about the state of the Australian industry, are evidence of a sense of disillusionment felt by Ealing’s agents on the ground, it is clear that Balcon’s approach was to attempt to balance those negatives with the prospect of future economic gain. Ealing’s time in Australia was thus marked by ambivalence about its possible future; such ambivalence, I argue here, is wholly symptomatic of the complex negotiation of a colonial relation.

“De-dominionisation” and Ealing’s Anachronism While many Australian press reports about the Ealing plans were positive, there were occasional signs of nationalistic dissent. For example, while Eureka generally garnered favorable reviews within Australia, it did not receive good reviews in Britain and this reaction began to be picked up in the Australian papers. An article in Sydney’s Sunday Sun provoked a small flurry of correspondence between Balcon and various Australian press and industry people. The article, titled “Why Didn’t an Australian Make Eureka Stockade?,” which was sent to Balcon by Sydney Wynne, proposed that Australia needed its own film industry, not one dominated by British films.49 Wynne wrote a long letter to the editor in which he disputed the characterization that Australians were developing an attitude against Ealing’s venture, saying that such comments displayed “a not exactly helpful attitude



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towards British production.” Wynne continued, “We, in Britain, have every desire to see a flourishing Australian production industry. At the same time you will, I think, agree that there is room in your territory for ‘outside’ units as well as for a home industry.”50 Eager to clear his own name from any such suggestions of discontent, Ken G. Hall wrote to Balcon to dispel the idea that “there is some attitude of mind here which suggests that British Producers should keep out of Australian Production. This is positively not so,” wrote Hall, “and I say that as an individual who might be considered to be reasonably well informed.” Rather, he continued: People in Production here, independent or otherwise, welcome Ealing’s entry and know that the only way an industry can rise up here is for people to produce films. . . . The public is not interested in the politics of the thing. But it is glad to hear, I know, that good films are being made in Australia. It doesn’t really give a tinker’s cuss who makes them! . . . If, as an impartial observer, [I] can convey the truth of the situation to you, it is that there is no resentment of Ealing or its operations and that 99.9% of Australians want to see you make successful pictures here. 51

Balcon’s reply to Hall is telling for the way it makes explicit the underlying imperial ambitions of Ealing’s investments in the country: [T]hank you also for your further reassurances about our activities in Australia. As you know, Ealing has always had the imperial plan. I think the ideal would be 4/5 films a year here, 1/2 in Australia, 1 in South Africa and 1 in Canada. This, however, is a very long-term plan and one which is beyond our capitalization for the time being. The only way to get it going would be to have capital support from the Dominions. . . . I suppose, however, that capital in the Dominions is not as yet interested in film production. I don’t know about this, but taking the long term point of view I think they ought to be. . . . I have always believed that this country and the English speaking Dominions should be completely independent of the American market as far as film production is concerned. The way sanity seems to lie. 52 (Emphasis mine)

Balcon’s letter thus yields two key points. First, his plan is explicitly imperial, from his acknowledgment that Britain could extend production overseas for capital gain, to his belief that the dominions, Britain’s former colonies, were the place to start. But while the history of British colonialism in Australia may make such sentiments unsurprising, the assertiveness of their expression at that moment





in time is remarkable in its failure to recognize changed conditions at the level of government and especially with regard to the film industry. Despite Balcon’s repeated mention of “the dominions,” the reality was that Australia had already been granted de facto independence from Britain by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and officially adopted the statute by law in 1942, seven years before Balcon’s comment; Jim Davidson argues that through the postwar period the pace of “de-dominionisation” began to quicken.53 Balcon’s statement is thus symptomatic of Ealing’s failure to relinquish the colonial relation with which Britain had once held Australia and which Balcon expected to exploit in order to organize film production. The determined disavowal of Australian settler nationalism is clear in the statement that investing in British production is what the “dominions should” do to achieve independence from (rival empire) the United States (while remaining, of course, bound to Britain). Second, however, the letter also acknowledges that Ealing cannot in fact raise sufficient capital to accomplish such a state of affairs, and that it would have to secure financial commitments from Australian interests first. This, in truth, was to be Ealing’s downfall: as Baker recounts it, Ealing was offered little to no real assistance in the execution of its plan. It was always Ealing’s hope that financial support could be found in Greater Union Theatres, who owned British Empire Films (the company established to distribute British films in Australia, and responsible for the distribution of the Ealing films there). In particular, Baker, whose job it was to negotiate such a prospect, found Norman Rydge, the chairman and managing director of Greater Union Theatres, to be quite disinterested, since Rydge’s monopoly on distribution meant he was quite happy to continue making money distributing American films for guaranteed percentages. 54 Much later, Baker recalled in an interview that Ealing had to reconsider their plans for a permanent production program at the point when Rydge said: “No, I don’t want to help.” That’s what he said, virtually. . . . That’s not very encouraging, is it? . . . Especially when you’re the people who have delivered him films for a number of years, and he’s done very well out of them. . . . That’s what made us eventually say, ‘We don’t want to be in Australia.’ ”55

One might compare Baker’s comments here to Williams’ petulant comment, cited earlier, that “we may even be missed.” Along with this resentment, however, comes recognition from Baker that perhaps, in hindsight, such a rejection was inevitable for a former colony trying



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to establish its own industry.56 In 1980, interviewed in Australia (where he’d lived since 1967) Baker could say, “but Norman’s god [was] money. You can understand it; it’s a new country.”57 Baker intimates that as a “new country,” part of a colonial “new world” established by but trying to distinguish itself from Britain, Australia was, perhaps predictably, open to all sources of capital, even those outside of the imperial circuit.

The Transnationality of Settler Cinema in Australia Ealing’s failure to establish permanent production in Australia can plausibly be read as further evidence of the settler state’s realignment away from Britain and toward the United States (in foreign policy, as well as in film) in the wake of World War II;58 after all, within a few years would appear films like Kangaroo (Lewis Milestone, 1952), On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), and The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960), all of them American productions with Australian locations. Yet the evidence shows that Australian cinema was already subject to a far greater degree of “Americanization” than such an interpretation implies. Certainly one can place the Ealing experiment in the context of the postwar geopolitical realignments through which Britain lost formal control over its empire as the United States gained global hegemonic status. The Pacific was a crucial site where this transformation was played out economically, militarily, and politically. As it dominated the Pacific military campaign against Japan’s empire, the United States established the basis for postwar economic influence in the Asia-Pacific region. 59 Against the prospect of increasing U.S. control over its colonies (especially those captured during the war),60 Britain fought politically for the continuance of imperial preferences and the sterling trade bloc it had established in the 1930s;61 Ealing’s plans for a Dominion film production program are legible as precisely part of such a project. While Britain did eventually manage to retain a sterling trade area until 1949,62 its hopes for the continuity of empire eventually foundered in the face of its material dependence on the United States for financial assistance. While U.S. rhetoric of opposition to empire and support for national self-determination certainly masked the nation’s more insistent economic interests—that is, penetration into world markets and freedom from trade barriers—a fact not lost on some British imperialists,63 Britain could not afford to maintain an empire in its near-bankrupt postwar state.64 Within the





next two decades the changed balance of world power led its former dominions to negotiate their own defense arrangements with the United States, independently of Britain.65 Thus Ealing’s failure to sustain its planned program exists within the wider economic and political context of the postwar period in which the United States became the ascendant world power in the Pacific and beyond. But to render a radical break between pre- and postwar tendencies would overlook the longer and more complex history of U.S. involvement in the Australian industry before World War II. Hollywood was already the dominant force on Australian screens as far back as the 1920s, when between 82 and 98 percent of films screened in 1920s were American.66 Critics like Tulloch and Cunningham have detailed the ways in which Hollywood’s involvement in Australian cinema since the silent period necessarily disputes the notion that Australian nationalism and Australian cinema were forged only in relation to the dominance of England as “mother country.” Tulloch, for example, refers to Australia as caught within “competing imperialisms.”67 At the level of public discourse and official policy—seen most starkly in the debates and hearings at the 1927 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Moving Picture Industry of Australia, and the 1934 New South Wales Commission, where many speakers railed against the degrading influence of American films while proclaiming the importance of empire—the imperial relationship with Britain was culturally dominant and was regarded by many as something to be fostered. For the film exhibition and distribution industry (the “trade”), however, British and imperial interests had long been secondary to American. Even as community groups and some government officials cried “Americanization” in the 1920s and 1930s, Union Theatres and Hoyts, eventually with their interests merged as General Theatres Corporation, were for the most part content to keep distributing Hollywood films at large profit through techniques such as block booking. There was thus little financial incentive for either company to support local production in any significant way through most of this period or into the 1940s.68 One must, therefore, read Ealing’s failure in terms of a more extensive terrain of imperial conflict between the United States and Britain for control of Australian screens, for that was the environment that preceded Ealing’s entry into Australia in the 1940s with its aim of continued production. In this way, Australian cinema appears as a more complex transnational space in which both British and U.S. flows intersected with and even helped formulate settler nationalisms of the kind we have observed above.



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While the kind of British imperial affinities that Ealing hoped to exploit were still partially active at the level of governmental and official public discourse and even of public sentiment, Ealing’s hopes to receive industry support for further production were out of step with the dominant direction of the Australian film industry’s economic and industrial forces. Where there was evidence of overseas investment in local production, it came from the United States, as in Universal’s contribution to the financing of Chauvel’s Sons of Matthew, or from interests that were closely aligned with Hollywood, such as Greater Union Theatres. In this sense, a certain irony creeps into the industrial and cultural context of Ealing’s adventure. The British empire’s influence was active at every level of the culture in the 1920s, so much so that Tulloch refers to the attempts of the U.S.dominated film trade to establish itself then as “in effect, trying to enter an already occupied hegemonic space.”69 Just as it did in New Zealand, however (as we shall see in the next chapter), affective cultural ties to Britain masked a reality that was less straightforward and in which the United States played an increasingly large role economically and culturally. That situation was only exacerbated by the postwar period. As Ealing attempted to establish long-term production and hoped for investment from the industry, it tried to enter a space that was now controlled by U.S. industry interests. While, by the time of Ealing’s arrival, U.S. dominance was not yet true at the level of government policy or official public discourse, which remained yoked to Britain despite the beginnings of “de-dominionisation,” the film industry had for three decades been dominated by U.S. features, U.S.backed distribution, and even increasingly U.S.-dominated exhibition circuits. While Ealing tried to continue the strategy that Britain had pursued in its own attempts to fight off Hollywood dominance of British screens, that is, by creating an empire market for its films, it underestimated the extent to which it had already been beaten by the United States in a scramble for Australian distribution, exhibition, and—to the extent that it took place—production.

Making the Australian Westerns In his study of Australian postwar documentary, Deane Williams reveals the internationalism of the Australian documentaries during that period and further contributes to a rethinking of the aims of national cinema criticism. In the last chapter of his book, Williams briefly takes up the idea that many of the questions of influence and





imitation that he considers, by which Australian documentaries are seen to engage with or even mimic with other international precedents, might be specific to settler cultures. Williams’s book, like mine, sees the possibility of a settler cinematic relation between Australian films and other cinemas as antithetical to a linear, developmental history of a national cinema.70 While Williams’s explicit focus is documentary, his concerns overlap with mine not least because The Overlanders discloses a documentary impulse as part of its discourse, due in part to Harry Watt’s background in the British Documentary Movement and to the participation of John Heyer as a second unit director; Heyer later directed the much-praised Australian documentary Back of Beyond (1954). Despite his focus on documentary, Williams leaves room for one suggestive footnote in which he comments that the structure of “settler journeys” that he traces in his final chapter also plays out in narrative feature filmmaking from Australia in the postwar period, and that “the American Westerns of this period are one international parallel.”71 Thus, although he does not pursue it, the reference to westerns as something meaningfully shared by Australia and the United States stems from an insight that is in dialogue with this book. In particular, Williams’s work further contextualizes my claim that in the case of these Ealing films, we should think less in terms of origins and foundational discourses, whether British, American, or Australian, and instead see “a convergence of international forces and local inflection.”72 The Ealing films were made through the intersecting forces of imperial influence, coloniality, and settler nationalism. Here the Australian government played a mediating role, supporting Ealing’s endeavors and thereby confirming the continued political, cultural, and economic ties to Britain that were inherited from the empire; yet they did so under the banner of Australian nationalism, thus helping, as the Carroll ad put it, to “advance Australia.” The production of The Overlanders, for example, was supported by the Australian armed forces in multiple ways. Daphne Campbell, the female star, was released from duties in the Australian Army Medical Women’s Services to make the film and Flying Officer Ralph Smart came from the Royal Australian Air Force to work on the script. The production had the assistance of other departments of the Commonwealth Government, including the Department of Agriculture, Department of Information, and the Department of the Interior.73 In addition to air transportation to Alice Springs, Ealing sought the use of a Royal Australian Navy vessel in Sydney, a quarantine wharf and buildings, trucks, the supply and deployment of



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campus for crew, a sound recordist, the right to important cameras duty-free, and more.74 Such assistance redoubled the kind of nationalist sentiment expressed in the film itself. Dan Macalpine (Chips Rafferty) decides to take on the 2000-mile cattle drive from Western Australia to Queensland as World War II creates the threat of a Japanese invasion. With the slogan “bullocks are more important than bullets,” he and his team save the cattle by taking them across half the continent, in the process mapping a space for a settler identification with landscape and saluting the nation’s achievements, such as the all-bitumen road stretching from Alice Springs to Darwin that the group encounters. Along this road arrives a convoy of Army trucks heading north to pursue the war in the Pacific, which Dan salutes with cries of “good on ya, digger!” as Mary (Daphne Campbell), who has proved her mettle as a stockhand, excites the soldiers by riding alongside them on horseback. The film, as Williams argues, thus manages to praise Australia’s own “New Deal” culture of national works while fulfilling what British documentarian John Grierson called “an integrated view of the national war purpose.”75 At the same time, it offers the kind of familiar western material that Bazin noted with its wide landscape shots and cattle drive. Further government assistance was to be found on the set of Eureka Stockade, whose story was based on the goldminers’ strike at Ballarat, Victoria, in 1854, long celebrated as a key moment in local sentiment against colonial rule. What began as a strike against the high cost of miners’ licenses ended up as an armed struggle between British troops and striking miners. As director, Harry Watt was attracted to the story for its historical importance and the prospects of extending the kind of realism he had practiced with The Overlanders; he also favored the nationalistic possibilities of the project.76 Woven into that nationalist intent, the Australian government’s cooperation with Ealing’s aims and objectives nevertheless discloses the continued efficacy of imperial ties on which Ealing continued to capitalize. This film called for several scenes in which troopers were pitted against striking miners. Australian soldiers were present throughout much of the shoot, on loan from the Army, and Baker enthused that “in the making of the Eureka picture the military authorities have responded liberally in making personnel and material available.”77 Such was Ealing’s debt to the armed forces that they were unable to reject an unusual request from Australia’s Minister for the Army “to speak a foreword for Eureka Stockade expressing the Government’s interest and pleasure in the production.”78 Initial resistance to the request from Williams and Balcon was met with “official concern and disappointment in view





of considerable assistance rendered [by the government].”79 Balcon eventually agreed, in part, it appears, because he recognized the government’s frustration that another planned Ealing project, an Army recruiting film, was behind schedule and because he wanted to maintain effective relations with the government.80 In addition to agreeing to the minister’s introduction, Ealing included in the credits the title: “We wish to acknowledge the full co-operation of the Commonwealth Government of Australia and particularly the enthusiastic help of the Department of the Army.”81 Once again, Ealing found itself in an uneasy relationship with the government: whereas its production scheme relied to a great degree on goodwill that followed empire sentiment, its own colonial encounters with the government revealed a degree of Australian independence and national self-interest that ultimately proved difficult for Balcon. The local government support rendered for Bitter Springs was also substantial, and the implications of such involvement for the film are extensive, particularly in relation to its narration of settler-indigenous relations. Bitter Springs was offered considerable support from the state government of South Australia, and opening credits acknowledged the assistance of the state premier, the Government Tourist Bureau, and the Aborigines Protection Board of South Australia. Publicity for the film also stressed the role that the premier had played in the film’s production. Film Weekly noted, for example, that the film “was made in Quorn, S.A. [South Australia], partly through the efforts of S.A.’s Premier, who sent movies of location sites in S.A. to Ealing executives in London. . . . Premier Playford and Mr. Menzies [the Prime Minister of Australia] looked in on the film while it was on location.”82 As part of an extensive and brilliant analysis of the film, Deb Verhoeven exhaustively documents the history of this production as it concerned the Aboriginal actors on location. In so doing, she shows the way that the different British and settler Australian parties involved in the production of the film forged a relationship of mutual gain by acquiring the participation of indigenous men and women. As we have seen, Ealing’s interests were not always neatly aligned with those of the governments, state and federal, that assisted it but, in the case of Bitter Springs, the necessity of Aboriginal actors catalyzed production relations that aligned the two groups. As Verhoeven argues, Ealing’s role in the film, the cooperation of the state government, and the film’s narrative itself all became implicated in the policies of assimilation that the Australian federal government was beginning to pursue.83 The state government paid almost 20 percent



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of the film’s total budget and organized the employment of a group of indigenous actors whom the government transported from a mission station at Ooldea.84 These men and women, “130 genuine Aboriginal natives,” as the film’s press book referred to them, were transported approximately 300 miles by rail in “two closed vans and an obsolete dog-box type carriage,” under the supervision of a mission representative. On arrival, they were told that their camp was not ready, and were “herded into Quorn Oval refreshment room, a draughty wood and iron structure measuring 30ft by 50ft, until the following day.” Ealing spokesperson John Rix denied any role in the mistreatment, pointing out that Ealing had delegated to state government the responsibility of all aspects of the Aboriginal actors’ employment, transportation, and treatment.85 The controversies that followed, of meager rations and wages withheld, played out in the contemporary press and were also addressed by Aboriginal people themselves, who became agents of such debates in direct dialogue with the government officials who were responsible for their withheld payments.86 Bitter Springs plays out the racial dramas of its production in its very narrative which, like the westerns we saw in the previous chapter, actively recognizes the dilemmas and conflicting historical complexities of colonial encounters; as Verhoeven argues, it mobilizes different positions of sympathy and identification.87 I would add that in this way it resembles Ford’s earlier Fort Apache, and the unresolved issues in the endings of each film point in each case to dilemmas about the representation of history and the possibilities of settler-indigenous relations beyond the frame. Wally King (Chips Rafferty) takes his family on a 600-mile trek to 1,000 square miles of land that he has leased from the government with the promise of water and grassland for grazing sheep. When they arrive, Wally’s family and their accompanying drovers find that a people called the Karagarni (a fictional indigenous group) is already living at the water hole. The question of what will happen next is posed throughout the film right up until its final shot. The press book for the film tells this story in the manner of a fatal impact theory, complete with a tone of resigned liberal interest in the “blacks” who will be displaced: “There is only one water-hole in the area—who does it belong to? To the people who have had it for thousands of years? Or to the man who has a piece of stamped paper?” Early in the film is a scene that epitomizes the concerns over control of space and here we observe the same battle of onscreen and offscreen space that we have seen other westerns narrativize so strikingly in the previous chapter. Wally’s team stops their wagon and pitches a





Figure 3.2 The threat of offscreen space: Bitter Springs. (Frame enlargement.)

camp for the night but is disturbed by offscreen sounds that put them on edge. Suspecting Aboriginal attackers, the men grab guns and there is an exchange of anxious looks offscreen (figure 3.2) before a trooper (Michael Pate) appears alongside a group of Aboriginal men. As Trooper Ransome, Pate performs a role not unlike the familiar western type of “the man who knows Indians,” speaking the local indigenous language and advocating early on for peaceful coexistence in the face of the seemingly inevitable clash between settler and indigene. Hearing of Wally’s plans to find his land beyond the Truscott Ranges he tells him of the Karagarni’s claim to the springs and warns him of the injustice of his quest: “A thousand years,” he proclaims, “and one day a man walks into the government land office . . . bangs down eighty quid, they hand him a bit of stamped paper; Karagarni haven’t got a tribal home anymore. It’s a sheep property.” He continues with a declaration of the settler colonial dilemma as it is implicitly posed in countless westerns, Australian or otherwise: “When whites take over ‘abo’ land there’s three ways of dealing with the natives. One, you can shove ’em off, two you can ease ’em off, three you can find some way of taking them in with you. Now you’ve gotta make



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up your mind what you’re going to do. You’ve both gotta use the same waterhole some way.” After King’s family arrives at Bitter Springs, a series of scenes stages the escalation of conflict between the two groups. One attempt at mediation between the two groups occurs in a fashion that is strikingly similar to the one portrayed in Fort Apache. Just as York and Beaufort’s approach to Cochise’s compound is seen from high on the clifftops in a series of point-of-view shots from Indian perspectives (figure 2.2), so is the settler arrival to the waterhole in Bitter Springs. A series of shots from a clifftop shows the approach of the settlers until eventually we begin to apprehend Aboriginal figures in the frame, looking down at the settler invaders. Later, of course, as Verhoeven points out, the viewer’s perspective alternates and as the climactic battle occurs we have low-angle shots from a besieged settler’s point of view as the Aboriginal men charge toward the camera.88 The possibility that each group may have a valid claim to the land is strongly suggested in such alternation but even that recognition does little to prepare the viewer for the film’s final fantastic reconciliation of black and white interests. The film’s resolution juxtaposes, across a single cut, the aftermath of the attack on Wally’s homestead with the film’s final shot, in which Wally shears sheep side by side with the Aboriginal man who led the attacks. The ending thus stages a rapprochement that disavows the obvious and more historically accurate conclusion for which the film has prepared viewers: that the white settlers would simply kill or displace the Aborigines.89 But as the film’s press book optimistically suggests, “in the end the white man’s magic prevails; not the magic of the gun, but that other magic, the magic of compromise of finding a way to give both sides a chance of living side by side without violence.”90 Verhoeven devotes sustained attention to this “magical” final scene, not only through a tour-de-force close reading of the image but through an extensive citation of press reviews of it.91 Ultimately, she argues, the final thirteen-second shot not only stages an assimilationist fantasy that was sustained in the film’s production arrangements, but also reveals, in its very inadequacy, the impossibility of fixing or representing an originary, unifying moment within the settler state, for the reason that any such fantasized assimilation will by design erase the prior existence of an indigenous culture.92 Here, then, Bitter Springs fulfils the similarly fragile tendency of the first Ealing western, The Overlanders, to rewrite white conquest as peaceful coexistence or, as in Eureka Stockade, to ignore black claims to the land entirely. In this way the films are again consistent





with the settler coloniality that both Hollywood and Australian westerns exemplify. Many American westerns had, by the advent of sound, removed Indians entirely from the diegesis; their presence was encoded into the many spatialized conflicts between white settlers and the land, between East and West, or between various white ethnicities and their claims to various parts of land.93 An alternative scenario was to present native peoples as already colonized, docile or compliant, or assimilated. The Overlanders does just that in another scene in which the camera is located high on the cliff-tops, among a band of indigenous men carrying spears, as the droving team approaches. The sequence strongly resembles those already noted in Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), when camera placement suggests indigenous presence and control of space. But here, as McAlpine looks up and sees them, he calls “look, wild blacks!” (figure 3.3) and there follows an eyeline match to the Aboriginal men who wave back at the band of drovers as they and their cattle continue on their way. Overturning any potential threat posed by indigenous presence, the scene domesticates the “wild blacks” as safe, docile, and controllable. This is the only scene that offers any Aboriginal presence in the film

Figure 3.3 “Wild blacks” domesticated: The Overlanders. (Frame enlargement.)



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aside from the constant presence of “Blackjack” the drover, and the combination of an agreeable black worker and friendly indigenous onlookers eliminates any suggestion of threat and confirms the totality of white control over space. Significantly, both the film and much of the discourse around it self-consciously established whiteness as central to the narrative and the intentions behind the film. As they leave Darwin, McAlpine says in voiceover “they were the last white people we’d see for months.” And an advertisement by Leon S. Snider’s theater chain in Film Weekly’s Overlanders supplement in 1945 places the film in the context of a racial, imperial quest: “Set away from the centres of sophistication . . . is placed Australia—the site of the most interesting experiment in the development of the white race.”94 In Eureka Stockade, on the other hand, the complete absence of Aboriginal people from the diegesis is marked by a sequence of shots in which Peter Lalor (Chips Rafferty), the leader of the miner rebels, rides out in a wagon to a grassy piece of land, accompanied by his schoolteacher fiancée, Alicia Dunne (Jane Barrett), Tom (Gordon Jackson), and Alicia’s class of schoolchildren. Sitting on the grass, Lalor muses, “I was just thinking about this new country. We’re among the first white people ever to see this creek.” He confesses he’s more interested in settling down with a plot of land than mining. In the pastoral scene that follows, the children play with a koala that Tom has removed from its mother’s back to give to them. This scene, in which the native marsupials seem to do the metonymic work of standing both for the Australian bush and for the invisible indigenous humans,95 sets up the dream of the “family on the land” that, as Wexman has shown, underpins the western genre.96 The camera here dwells on the physical beauty of the space and the picnic on the grass suggests a utopian vision of home in which the landscape no longer threatens but almost magically conforms to settler desires. These films, then, exemplify the settler coloniality that underpins and produces the western and they thus help to further dislodge an exceptionalist view of the genre as oriented only around a U.S. frontier. Because of the history of Britain’s imperial relationship with Australia, however, these films also embed within their narratives the tensions about loss of empire and the growth of Australian national identity that were particular to their time. Moreover, they encode the cinematic and political relationship between Australia and the United States that was active at all levels of industry and in the wider economic and political context. Most importantly, however, the histories of these films offer insight into the ways such seemingly marginal projects—those that sit uncomfortably on the borders of national





cinema or genre histories—are in fact part of a transnational settler coloniality that has been forged through British imperial history and its encounters with other colonial and imperial contexts. In resisting critical moves to fix their origins, they prove that settler cinemas are made of more ambiguous genealogies. In the next part of the book, this experience is extended into New Zealand contexts where production, distribution, exhibition, and textuality are further complicated by indigenous and settler practices. These practices, which include everything from the labor of production to archiving, viewing, and reception strategies, are further testament to the ways that film history can help write the pasts and present of colonial encounter.



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Film History and Settler Cinema in Aotearoa/New Zealand



Part III




Hei Tiki (1935): Film Histories Past and Present The Ealing films exemplified some of the ways that imperial and settler histories shaped and complicated public discourses about a national cinema in Australia. The case of Hei Tiki, directed by Alexander Markey, an American, and shot in the central North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand with an all-Maˉori cast, makes for an even more complex interweaving of imperial, settler, and indigenous histories and cinema. The film creates a Romeo and Juliet romance from the story of two rival Maˉori tribes, framed by a sequence in which Markey, as narrator, suggests that the entire production is his ethnographic record of a people reenacting their ancient legend. Already, then, the film seems to be something of an oddity and certainly its status as a film shot in New Zealand, with Maˉori actors, but by an itinerant American director has rendered it problematic for histories of New Zealand cinema. In most discussions, Hei Tiki fast disappears from view, with attention turning instead to productions with more prestige and better national credentials. In this chapter I wish to take seriously the seemingly odd case of Hei Tiki because I believe it can reorient the writing of New Zealand film history with respect to issues of the transnational, the national, and the local and can suggest ways of understanding the condition of settler societies in the present. In particular, I will show that this film and its multifaceted history embody a transnational coloniality that manifests itself in more than just narratives of settlement or colonization. Rather, Hei Tiki reveals the transnational shape of cinema as an industry and an institution in settler societies like Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, where local production and exhibition have taken shape under the combined influence of other nations. I will show that in the case of Hei Tiki, however, the transnationality of its history does not somehow remove or disqualify it from the local. Rather, the film is pulled into settler and indigenous histories and narratives of belonging by a set of encounters that involve more than textuality or histories of production alone.



Chapter Four


Although it is easy to leap to a narrative of colonial exploitation when addressing this film’s representation and production, those who took part—Maˉori and Paˉkehaˉ both—were not simply duped. Rather, they were agents in a messy process of colonial encounter in which many parties interacted and were thus transformed. To measure the film by the yardstick of authenticity, as some critics have done, and to then use that measurement as a final assessment about its production relations is to recenter the director, Markey, in a narrative that he neither owned nor controls. In the end, this film is not about its American director. As Hei Tiki’s contemporary life makes clear, it’s about the many New Zealanders who took part in it—especially the Whanganui and Tu¯wharetoa iwi who were both its subjects and, by their agency then and now, its authors. To adequately address this film in the present compels the historian to attend to both the time of the film’s production and to a new moment of its making and remaking, where the film’s physical location in moving image archives and the relationships that surround its presence there and in the world become central. In the process of this exploration, I will thus address questions that go beyond our usual notions of film reception to explore the role played by iwi groups as kaitiaki or guardians of the film.1 The domain of indigenous cultural guardianship and archiving practice is one that remains largely unaddressed by contemporary film historians and theorists. However, the ways in which the New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua has handled this film and its relationship with Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa and Whanganui, the iwi most involved with its making, suggest a series of encounters and practices that need to be considered as part of the film itself. Such practices do not simply involve practical considerations for archivists working with images of indigenous peoples, although the New Zealand Film Archive’s protocols have been discussed internationally in that context. 2 They also pose a challenge to the ways that film history is conceived and written, by questioning the relationship between text and context, by challenging assumptions about positive and negative images, and by creating a history that does not assume an easily charted teleology from mongrel or hybrid origins to a truly national cinema. Rather than ignoring such contemporary indigenous practices completely, or reducing them to a coda in my analysis, an afterthought to the “main attraction” of the film “itself,” I will here draw together the many moments in this film’s historicity as a way of tracing the shape of the many possible encounters of cinema and coloniality. This chapter and the next use questions of indigenous archiving



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and distribution to think across the past and present of these films, bringing their earlier histories together with their unfinished business now. While my focus here is cinema as an institution and film as a material and aesthetic form, I see the issues that emerge here as instructive for a wider understanding of how settler societies have addressed or ignored the entanglements of coloniality and indigenous custom that continue to unsettle them.

Hei Tiki and Nationalist Film History Hei Tiki has not fared well in discussions of New Zealand film history. Either hastily condemned or sidelined from the national picture of early heroes (notably, Rudall Hayward, John O’Shea) and hits (The Te Kooti Trail [1927], Don’t Let It Get You [1966]) the film has for most of its history been critically dismissed or overlooked. Bruce Babington’s recent history of New Zealand cinema, for example, details some of the controversial conditions of Hei Tiki’s production, recounts the plot, and ventures little more on the film’s significance other than to place it within a genre of “Maoriland” films that were predominant in the first three decades of cinema in New Zealand.3 The arc of Babington’s book shows how films like Markey’s pale in significance to the accomplishments of a filmmaker like Hayward, the New Zealand director of Te Kooti Trail and Rewi’s Last Stand (1925, remade in 1940). Hayward’s career and films, of course, deserve sustained attention, as do those of O’Shea, whose three feature films are only one aspect of a lifetime’s work of local production.4 But if the circumstances of Hei Tiki’s production are as truly interesting as critics have hinted, one might imagine them to have been the subject of more sustained critical work. Martin Blythe’s book Naming the Other briefly assesses the film in the context of its representational tropes but does not offer a fuller account of the film.5 Maˉori filmmaker Merata Mita develops a short but illuminating critique of the film, addressing it alongside Markey’s and Lew Collins’s production The Devil’s Pit/ Under the Southern Cross (1929).6 Her few paragraphs on Markey center on the controversies of his films’ productions as they were discussed among Maˉori, and on the relationships between Markey’s apparent attitudes and his American cultural context. Laurence Simmons argues that we should pay more attention to films like Hei Tiki that are made by non–New Zealanders on location, but ultimately devotes more attention to other productions like Green Dolphin Street and The Seekers.7



Film Histories Past and Present


On the historiographical level, however, there is another problem that has rendered Hei Tiki insignificant or invisible. That is, information about the making of Hei Tiki has been treated as merely contextual to a film that, so defined by the context of its making, becomes a bad object, irredeemably lacking in historical or cultural value. The written records, oral history, and ephemera that exist around the film have not been utilized for any sustained critical projects other than for Geoff Steven’s documentary, Adventures in Maoriland. Indeed, that film is a work of film historical research and criticism in its own right and it gives closer attention to the film and its production than has any academic or popular history before or since. Steven’s and Julienne Stretton’s research was extensive and impeccable, the interviews illuminating, and the film itself remains immensely watchable and informative.8 Ultimately, the film presents the Hei Tiki encounter as a good story, but the narrator’s flat conclusion that the film “remains as film history” relegates it to a static past far from the vital conjuncture of past and present that I will propose here. Hei Tiki is thus presented as emblematic of a period that most critics would imagine is beyond reach, when a foreign filmmaker could work directly within Maˉori communities to produce something that bore little or no relationship to their traditions or life narratives. In other words, the material that informs Steven’s documentary is rendered as a fascinating account of a controversial production and an eccentric foreign personality who, as the documentary pointedly suggests, was never at home in New Zealand. Crucially, however, such a documentary has yielded no more work on Hei Tiki or the conditions that produced it, nor has it fostered critical interest in the contemporary life of the film. Although Adventures does not itself attempt to theorize a role for Hei Tiki in understanding the conditions of cinematic encounters in settler societies, it offers a wealth of material with which to do so. Unfortunately, however, the impact of the documentary has been to forestall or replace other writing on the film, as if there is just nothing more to say. Having laughed, cringed, or marveled at Markey’s foreignness and his conduct, having wondered how such a film could exist, it is as if we have license to move on without pause and consider more notable moments in New Zealand film history. While the circumstances of Hei Tiki’s production are particular, its genealogy as a film can be mapped in relation to other productions made in New Zealand and the Pacific. Tracing the contexts for the film fosters an understanding of the ways colonial histories within Aotearoa/New Zealand, histories in which British culture is usually assumed to be a dominating force, were in fact more complex



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and multivalent than has sometimes been assumed. Indeed, while the impact of British culture on New Zealand’s settler society has been assumed in many general historical accounts of the nation-state, the history of cinema in New Zealand reveals a less singular narrative of imperial power and colonial influence. Despite the nationalistic terms in which cinema history has usually been written, the circumstances surrounding the development of film production and exhibition in New Zealand tell a story that involves multiple conjunctural forces that are transnational in nature.

Cancer Cures, Hollywood, and Poesy: Markey’s New Zealand Travels Alexander Markey first visited New Zealand in 1925. At that time he was editor of Pearson’s Magazine, a monthly arts and politics magazine owned by C. Arthur Pearson, a prominent British publisher and advocate for empire. The mixture of articles on science, the arts, and technology that had established the magazine in Britain was exported to the U.S. publication, which had its own editors and was published in New York from 1899 to 1925. Markey was the editor from 1919 until the demise of the American version in 1925.9 Markey’s first visit to New Zealand was made specifically to promote a machine that promised to cure cancer, one of the dubious inventions of a Dr. Albert Abrams. Markey was a champion of Abrams and ran articles in Pearson’s about the cancer-curing machine in 1922.10 Curiously, at the time of Markey’s New Zealand visit, Abrams had already been discredited by a series of articles in Scientific American that ran through 1924.11 Nevertheless, Markey made the trip with one of Abrams’s machines, though the tour generally did not go well.12 Regardless of the negative reception, Markey had apparently fallen in love with New Zealand and, especially, with the impression of Maˉori that he gained when he visited Rotorua. He returned to the United States and sought funding from Universal Pictures to return to New Zealand to make a film there based on a story of Maˉori life. Markey returned in 1928 with his companion, Zoe Varney, and a small Universal crew and set about making a film under the working title of Taranga. An extensive story in the New Zealand Sporting and Dramatic Review, a popular newspaper, detailed the arrival of Markey and his American crew that, with Lew Collins as assistant director, included the cinematographers Wilfred M. Cline and Harold Smith. According to the story, Markey, “having visited the Dominion





a couple of years ago, was so imbued with its wonderful possibilities that the desire was born in him to give the world something new in the nature of motion pictures.” Said Markey in an interview with the paper: “I conceived it when I was here two years ago, and in developing it I endeavoured to catch the soul of the Maori, with all the poesy, the traditions and drama of this remarkable race, set against the almost unbelievable scenic background of New Zealand.”13 Markey discloses here the kind of “Noble Savage” discourse of a “poetic” and “remarkable” people that was common to both early ethnographic cinema and to the kind of feature filmmaking that followed it in the 1920s and 1930s, which I will discuss further below. Markey reportedly began his shooting for the film in Rotorua, a popular site for Maori cultural tourism and events, and the Review suggested he also planned to shoot other scenic areas of the country to create footage for travelogue films. Much of the finished film was shot at Ohiwa, a small, sparsely populated harbor not far from Whakatane (the base for some of The Seekers’s location shooting considered in the next chapter). A promotional book that Markey produced sometime after Hei Tiki’s release, publicizing his availability on the U.S. lecture circuit, recounts that his foray into cinema was spurred by his recognition of it as “the most flexible medium of creative expression.” Markey’s biographical note continued that “his desire to achieve something unique in this newest form of art soon culminated in an expedition to New Zealand . . . for the purpose of producing an authentic film of the strange Maori tribes.”14 His promotional book thus conforms to two of the dominant tendencies in Western constructions of native peoples in the early years of the twentieth century: that is, the belief that an authentic representation of customs might be made before the inevitable “vanishing” of the race, combined with an avowed declaration of their strangeness to Euro-American eyes. Once production was underway, however, Markey allegedly fought with studio executives and with his crew, and was eventually fired from the production. The film was eventually completed as The Devil’s Pit with Lew Collins credited as director. The film is dedicated in an early title to the New Zealand Government, “whose permission and whole-hearted cooperation during the year of filming of this picture made its presentation possible.” Another opening title claims that the “search for the unusual has led motion picture cameras to the four corners of the world. The picturization of an ageold Maori legend, is enacted entirely by natives.” In fact, the story, like Hei Tiki’s, resembles something of a Romeo and Juliet romance



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across warring tribes, and the film is a curious mix of some realistic elements of food preparation or the inclusion of poi (a flax ball used in music and dance performance) and other props like taiaha (long wooden fighting weapons), along with a great degree of fictionalized material; one of the tribes goes by the unlikely name of the “Wa-tees.” One of the key attractions here is the natural landscape, and the narrative makes the most of volcanic eruption, bubbling geysers, mudpools, and hot springs (all of which except the volcano could be found between Rotorua, where the Dramatic Review press clipping placed them at the beginning of the shoot, and the Ohiwa location that was used for most of the film). The Devil’s Pit, therefore, contains many aspects that are familiar from other ethnographic films from the early twentieth century, especially those in the mode given anthropological credibility by cultural anthropologist Franz Boas and practiced by filmmakers like Edward S. Curtis and Robert Flaherty. As Rony argues, Boas advocated strongly for a “representation of indigenous cultures in the mode of salvage ethnography, that is to say, as he thought native peoples looked before they met the white man.” Seeking a kind of ethnographic picturesque, Boas (in his own forays into filmmaking, as well as his writing) focused on achieving “scenes of rituals, dance, food preparation, indigenous technology . . . all that is replete with ‘authentic’ detail and without the influence of European culture.”15 The Devil’s Pit, like Hei Tiki, however, goes further in its dramatization and fictionalization and, while it borrows from the discourses of documentary ethnography that Curtis, Flaherty, and others deployed, it creates it own narrative scheme that exceeds the documentary mode. The film that Markey funded and completed himself, Hei Tiki, continues the faux “salvage ethnography” of The Devil’s Pit, but even more explicitly and problematically.

Vanishing Races Hei Tiki purports to be the story of two warring tribes who are united by the love of a young woman, Mara (Ngawara Kereti) and her lover, Manui (Ben Biddle). Mara is the daughter of Te Rangi, chief of the Tahai tribe, and by tribal lore is promised as the virgin bride to a war god who will soon appear in a cloud of smoke to elope with her and render the Tahai tribe rulers of all the land. Manui is the son of a rival chief whom the Tahai defeated a generation earlier. The two meet in the bush while Manui is spying on Mara’s people in preparation for a





revenge attack. The two fall in love and, to overcome the impossible situation of getting united, Manui and his people stage a faked appearance of the war god. Manui successfully absconds with his lover, but when evidence of the fraud is discovered, war breaks out between the tribes. As her lover and father are locked in hand-to-hand combat, Mara intervenes, revealing her role in the plot. Her father relents, proclaims a new twist to the tribal tradition, and decrees that the two tribes should be united, with Mara’s hei tiki pendant standing as the symbol of the newly conjoined tribes and their lovers. The film includes a framing device that presents the entire production as the product of an ethnographic encounter. After the titles, we see Markey standing in a room before a curtain, one hand on a table, the other in his suit pocket. In the only sequence to include synchronized sound, we hear and see him introduce his film: It was my privilege to live four thrilling years among the most extraordinary natives on earth on the North Island of New Zealand where, assisted by my coworker, Zoe Varney, who the Maoris call Te Ra, “the sun,” and assisted by a small gallant crew of New Zealanders, headed by “Bridgey,” Howard Bridgman, my cameraman, this record of an ancient people was created. There are no actors in this picture, no makeup, no painted scenery, not a studio shot. Every scene was taken among the natives in their own habitat. So far as I know, this is the first genuine major native drama of yesterday, relived on the screen entirely by natives without benefit of actors or studio facility. I found the Maoris fascinating, their Isle of Ghosts enchanting, their friendship exhilarating, and I am keen to share with you the pleasure of my experience with them. Forget your cares and problems for a brief interlude, and join me on a voyage to the Isle of Ghosts. You will feast your eyes upon a sight no living white man has seen before.

Markey’s emphasis here on “the record of an ancient people,” the authenticity of “no painted scenery,” and the evocation of four years spent among the Maˉori, are all reminiscent of the discourse of other ethnographic filmmakers such as Curtis. Alison Griffiths has shown that Curtis’s film, In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), was supported by claims that he had rejected all studio fakery in favor of greater authenticity.16 Rony notes that Curtis even claimed he had been adopted by the peoples with whom he had lived during the production of his film.17 Griffiths’s discussion of Curtis and his contemporaries, like Joseph K. Dixon, however, demonstrates the paradoxes of such ethnographic filmmaking, paradoxes that Markey’s work, coming a decade or



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more later, would continue to embody and further complicate. The claims of authenticity that Curtis generated were ultimately undercut by his own production practices and representational strategies. In his desire to present Native Americans as a proud and ancient race who were inevitably vanishing under the onslaught of white civilization, Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters “suppressed all visual evidence of the actual contemporary lives of the Kwakwa-ka-’wakw [the Native American people who were the film’s subjects], preferring instead to represent Kwakwa-ka-’wakw culture in a remote nineteenthcentury past that had to be extensively re-created by members of the tribe who participated in the film.”18 Similarly, Markey’s claims to have found an ancient people unknown to the West, what he later called “the remnants of a vanishing race of noble men and women,” relied upon an idealization and complete fabrication of historical fact. By the time Markey arrived, the iwi of Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa, who populated the area where Markey’s film was shot, had experienced almost a century of contact with white missionaries and settlers.19 They had a firmly established system of agricultural trade within the settler economy, having formed a dairy company and built a butter factory, and had received assistance from the settler government to begin sheep farming around the shores of the lake. 20 In fact, even my source for this historical information embodies further evidence of the history of such contact: John Te Herekiekie Grace (1905–1985), the author of a definitive history of Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa, is descended from Thomas Grace, the first British missionary to settle in the area and, on his mother’s side, from a long line of ariki or chiefs going back to the Te Arawa canoe, whose people embarked at what is now called the Bay of Plenty and spread out into the Taupoˉ area. 21 Markey’s subjects, then, came from neither a vanishing race nor a forgotten people but rather from a tribal group with a century-old history of contact, conflict, adaptation, and engagement with settlers. Of course, historical fact is not the only thing to undermine Markey’s prologue. The script that Markey wrote contains its own contradictions and paradoxes: by dint of his film and its production crew (with names like Varney, Bridgman, Hope-Cross, and so on), Markey’s claim to be showing a “tribe that no white man has seen before” is already a fiction. While the prologue begins with Markey standing alone and narrating to the camera in the mode, perhaps, of the returned ethnographer in his office, with the line “forget your cares” a montage sequence begins to dramatize the journey from what he calls “the miracle city of the modern age” (New York appears in long shot) to the “Isle of Ghosts.” Thus we





have moved quickly from the promise of the ethnographic actuality film like those that Griffiths extensively analyzes—however compromised and staged she reveals many of those “actualities” to be—and into something that more readily resembles a Hollywood fictional production, complete with montage sequence. A series of vertical wipes takes us from, first, a spinning globe that comes to rest on the Americas, then the aforementioned shot of Manhattan, which gives way to a close-up of a hand on a map pointing to the Panama canal that, in turn, is followed by a shot of a ship in a canal lock. The montage continues in this fashion, each shot separated by a wipe, as Markey’s voiceover continues to narrate a journey that detoured north to San Francisco, “the Golden City of the Pacific Coast, three thousand miles from New York, then over the placid surface of the vast Pacific, to exotic Hawai‘i,” represented by a shot of surfers riding waves. After Hawai‘i, the viewer is taken “past the myriad islets of the south seas, miniature paradises of tranquility, to the strange, fuzzy-haired people of the Fijian islands.” Certainly there is something here that is reminiscent of what Rony describes, employing Patrick O’Reilly’s designation, as a documentaire romance—a genre of “scripted fictionalized travelogues.”22 Hei Tiki, however, is devoid of the white actors that Rony notes often accompany those films. Instead, Markey quickly dispenses with his own diegetic role in the initial travelogue sequence described here and, as the montage ends and we see the people who purportedly live in “The Isle of Ghosts” (no longer described as Maˉori but with the invented name “Tahai”), Markey’s disembodied voice comes to function as that of an omniscient, nondiegetic narrator who comments on the action but is not implicated within it. Indeed, that tendency is in keeping with the kind of “salvage ethnography” of Curtis, Dixon, and others who attempted to maintain the illusion of an authentic indigenous life before the arrival of colonization and fostered a vision of native peoples through what Griffiths refers to as a “timeless construction.”23 In keeping with that fictionalized erasure, Markey’s film stages a diegetic time of the narrative that is constantly interpreted by the nondiegetic narrator and that is enclosed by a nondiegetic frame of travelogue. After the montage of travel, culminating in a sequence of several shots of New Zealand landscape, the film finally arrives at a location on “the secluded western shore” of a “mysterious sea of a thousand winds” that the narrator offers is “the enchanted spot where we camped most of the four years. It is here where we found the remnants of a vanishing race of noble men and women, the stalwart people of Maoriland.”



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Markey’s invocation of both the “vanishing race” and “Maoriland” within the same sentence crystallizes the conjunctural forces of imperial and colonial ideologies that, I have suggested, structure early film production in New Zealand and that make it more than simply a British and settler affair. Markey’s mention of the “vanishing race” places the film firmly within the orbit of the documentary mode of salvage ethnography. But the term “Maoriland” also connects the film to settler visions of Aotearoa that deployed this neologism to anachronistically depict Maˉori in a state of native grace before the “fatal impact” of the white man. Appearing first in the Australian magazine, The Bulletin, the term became a popular one to describe the literary culture of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury New Zealand. 24 As Blythe explains, Maoriland “appeared in the titles of innumerable books of poetry, short stories, and periodicals of the time; for example, Thomas Bracken’s Musings in Maoriland (1890) [and] Alfred A. Grace’s Maoriland Stories (1895)” and was ubiquitous “in the promotion of travel and tourism—on postcards, in photography and painting.”25 While Maoriland’s literary practitioners tended to be settlers, its cinematic version is found in the work of overseas filmmakers like Markey, the expatriate-French, American-based filmmaker Gaston Méliès (brother of the more famous George Méliès), and the Danish filmmaker Gustav Pauli. Méliès made three fiction films in New Zealand, including Loved by a Maori Chieftess, Hinemoa, and How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride (all 1913) as well as a number of short scenic films; none of these survives.26 Pauli made The Romance of Hine-Moa (1925), of which one reel survives, and Under the Southern Cross (1927), which is lost. With the exception of Southern Cross, all these films adopted the romanticizing tendencies of the Maoriland genre by articulating a vision of Maˉori that, like Markey’s, situates them captured in a timeless past. These films absent settlers from the diegesis and disavow all diegetic traces of colonization (and, of course, any self-reflexive acknowledgment of the filmmaker’s own presence within the colonial legacy). Their cinematic production of Maoriland, no matter the nationality of the director, became part of the landscape of cinema in the settler state. As a concept yoked to an incipient settler nationalism, then, Maoriland films repressed the realities of colonization in favor of a reified racial iconography of the primitive yet noble savage whose difference could be used to solidify the modernity of the settler. The representational terms of Maoriland are thus similar to those of the salvage ethnography mode, but in the New Zealand context




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The Transnationality of Early New Zealand Production The conjuncture of salvage ethnography and Maoriland imagery that is present in the films of Markey, Collins, Pauli, Méliès, and others illuminates the way that cinematic production in New Zealand in the silent period (which, in New Zealand, takes us as far as Markey’s Hei Tiki) was shaped by interwoven influences. Furthermore, the combined effect of those influences suggests that we should posit not a series of “foreign” or imperial impositions but a transnationality that operates in multiple directions across national categories: these productions were made by Americans, Danish-British, and French, and borrowed a discourse on the Maˉori that originated in another settler society, Australia. The distinctions between each director’s place of residence, origin, or the financial source of his expedition is, from the vantage point of this study, less important than the shared space of encounter and material production that resulted. In this way, the transnationality of early cinema in New Zealand was constitutive of, rather than paradoxical to, the development of a settler cinema. In fact, cinema was exactly the terrain where the complex transnationality of settler culture can be most clearly delineated. Australian productions, too, helped constitute the early cinematic landscape in New Zealand: Rawdon Blanford’s The Test (1916), Raymond Longford’s A Maori Maid’s Love (1916) and The Mutiny of the Bounty (1916), and Beaumont Smith’s The Betrayer (1921) and The Adventures of Algy (1925) together constituted almost a quarter of the production in New Zealand before 1935. Some of these films, like their American counterparts, included prominent scenes of Maˉori (Adventures of Algy), while others focused on interracial romances (A Maori Maid’s Love). Longford’s Mutiny, based on the historical events of the Bounty voyage, was not set in New Zealand but it utilized Rotorua and Maˉori actors to stand in for other Polynesian islands and people, respectively. In these instances, then, the films shared something of the generalized interest in New Zealand as a



they were made available for a settler discursivity that had a local frame. Maoriland was a way that a settler colonial discourse on culture could visually reference and romanticize the “long history” of Maˉori as a first people yet simultaneously disavow any potential threat from that history, by sealing Maˉori subjects in an anachronistic mise-en-scène. 27

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recently colonized site in which indigenous peoples and their interactions with settlers and imperialists were a novelty that might be exploited cinematically. If we isolate fiction films directed by New Zealand citizens (restricting to locally born New Zealanders would even eliminate Rudall Hayward, who was born in Britain) made in New Zealand before 1935, the year of Hei Tiki’s release, then we are left with just nine: George Tarr’s Hinemoa (1914), My Lady of the Cave (Rudall Hayward, 1922), The Romance of Sleepy Hollow (1923), Rewi’s Last Stand (Hayward, 1925), Carbine’s Heritage (Ted Coubray, 1927), The Te Kooti Trail (Hayward, 1927), The Bush Cinderella (Hayward, 1928), The Romance of Maoriland (Edward T. Brown, 1930), and Down on the Farm (Stewart Pitt, 1935). In other words, leaving aside documentaries, there are nine fictional films of varying lengths that were produced in New Zealand by New Zealanders from a total of twenty-three during the period leading up to 1935. 28 Film production before that year, then, was indisputably a terrain of shared activity in which the settler cultures of the United States and Australia participated in substantive measure—and more than Britain, which had only the Pauli films as official British productions. Looking only to the New Zealand productions in order to construct the beginnings of a national cinema history ignores the fact that cinema production during the period was not simply a matter of New Zealand versus “foreign” production, as if the foreign carries with it no particular saliency for a local industry. Rather, I argue that all production during this period displayed the intersecting forces characteristic of the settler cinematic cultures of Australia and New Zealand. Thus while Hei Tiki might present a problem for a history of “New Zealand cinema,” in that it fails to conform to some of the standard criteria by which national film histories and canons are formed, it is exemplary of the concept of a settler cinema, striated by transnational settler coloniality, as I have elucidated it here. The film illsuits a nationalist version of New Zealand film history that embodies a desire to locate a cinematic history within a larger narrative of national becoming. 29 Hayward, a settler director, fits such a narrative well, mostly because of his attempts to recreate key historical figures such as the Maˉori rebel, Te Kooti, and his engagement with historical texts such as James Cowan’s The New Zealand Wars in his screenplay for Rewi’s Last Stand. There is little about Hei Tiki, however, that a history of national cinema would want to remember, if that cinema should be measured in terms of engagement with actual histories of precolonial Maˉori life or by the development of stories





that fit the teleological narratives of national definition. For a criticism that typically focuses on narrative, on readings of the directoras-auteur, or that wants to understand either of those facets within constructions of national identity, Hei Tiki offers little with which to obtain a critical purchase. Yet there is much to say about this film, and taking it seriously compels us to both question the methodologies that have typically constituted national cinema analysis and to simultaneously step outside of the parochial confines of a settler national project. By maintaining a dual emphasis on production history and representation, most histories of New Zealand cinema have reinscribed divisions of the local versus the foreign and, in so doing, have unwittingly privileged a narrative of settler identity that discounts important aspects of indigenous and nonindigenous agency and systems of meaning. In the case of Hei Tiki, for example, production and textuality are certainly important in making sense of this film. But that production history must be expanded from a simplistic account of imperial exploitation, and must also take into account the seemingly minor narratives that are left over, like the kind collected in Steven’s Adventures in Maoriland and in other archives and collections. We must move beyond text and production, too, to address questions about the film’s archival status, its contemporary distribution, and its reception. Most importantly, the new protocols that have emerged around Hei Tiki concerning a kaitiaki role reshape the way that the film exists in the history of the settler state and in relation to film history and criticism. Thus the interventions I make here cannot be simply in the service of a better or more inclusive national cinema history. Instead, they point to ways of thinking about settler cinemas beyond the constraints of nation and, as a consequence, rethinking narratives of settler culture too. Before turning further to the contributions of Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa and the New Zealand Film Archive, I want to address the ways that we understand the settler culture of this early period of cinema in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Remapping Settler Culture in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The transnationality of settler cinema that I have traced thus far has been defined in terms of production and representation, with U.S., British, French, Australian, and New Zealand films all contributing to what was made and how it looked. But the history of cinema in the



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settler societies of Australia and New Zealand is a history in which exhibition, not production, dominates. Understanding the nature of that situation reveals much about settler cinema as an institution and about the nature of the wider settler culture in which it exists. As we saw in the case of Australia, cinema from Britain and the United States has always dominated New Zealand screens, but in the period 1914–1935, it was Hollywood, not Britain, whose films were most exhibited. 30 This fact has significant consequences for the way in which settler culture in New Zealand might be theorized during this period. While the dominant historiographical narrative of New Zealand has been that its culture during this period was shaped by Britain, the reality of the country’s film culture speaks otherwise and suggests that the wider settler culture, too, was not unproblematically British. As early as 1945, Gordon Mirams provocatively claimed, “If there is any such thing as a ‘New Zealand culture’ it is to a large extent the creation of Hollywood.”31 Mirams found in film exhibition and reception the makings of a culture that has disavowed the full extent of American influence while continuing to think of itself through the framework of the British empire. Since Mirams’s account, James Belich’s history of New Zealand has shown that from at least 1914 on, New Zealand began to experience an increased influence of American culture that began with film exhibition and continued with other commodities, and notes the role played by Australia and Canada whose most successful imports into New Zealand, cars and radio series, were themselves “based on American models.” However, rather than pursuing this point to its logical end, Belich asserts that Britain finally “did win the round on points.”32 Rather than choose a winner in the contest of imperial influence, however, we might propose a settler culture in which Britain was a foundational influence but not the only force. Fairburn, for example, argues that the period of 1920–1960 is characterized by a “pastiche” of American, British, and Australian culture that structures not only cinema but also many other forms of popular culture, politics, and material life.33 While the imperial act that founded the colony was Britain’s alone, the settler culture that developed there has been a product of multiple transnational forces including those of other settler societies such as Australia and the United States. As we have begun to see in previous chapters, this particular conjunction of settler societies is not coincidental but derives from their anglophone constitution, their shared British imperial histories, and their histories of encounter between colonist invaders, indigenes, land, and





landscape.34 These factors lend a transportability to their cultural forms that often made them more amenable to each other than to Britain, even if this fact may have surprised or perturbed viewers who still thought of themselves in relation to “the Old Country.” As Blythe suggests, “there must have been a certain ambivalence in watching Hollywood films (especially westerns) that better expressed the New Zealand settler experience than did the more class-bound British product of the time.”35 Neither Markey’s presence nor his film, then, were aberrations in an otherwise settled space of a British-inflected settler culture. Rather, Hei Tiki was an encounter, a set of practices, and eventually a text that helped constitute a settler culture that was more than simply British. Whatever disinclination we may feel to include Hei Tiki in a roster of New Zealand cinema on account of the “foreignness” of its director or his violation of Maˉori or Paˉkehaˉ protocols should be checked by the understanding that Markey, the film he made, and the practices he employed while making it are all connected to a complex history of production and exhibition that was inescapably transnational. While Markey didn’t stay in New Zealand and the film might not have the pedigree assumed for a New Zealand production, I have been arguing that despite these eccentricities it constitutes an important film event within a history of settler cinema. Not “about” settlement, its embeddedness within local networks of finance, government, labor, and Maˉori politics nevertheless situate it firmly within the shared space of a settler-dominated culture. Addressing it in this way demonstrates the distinctive character of settler culture and dislodges the teleological concerns of a history that wants for a stable and canonical national cinema. The “unsettling” that I have done to that narrative constitutes, I hope, an intervention of sorts into the debates around national cinema, ethnographic cinema, or postcolonial criticism, but it does so, surely, within conventional paradigms of film history: I have used histories of New Zealand production, then exhibition, to nudge the assumptions we might generally make about what constitutes New Zealand cinema and settler culture. By moving further into Hei Tiki’s production, its recirculation in the 1990s, and the contemporary relationships between Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa and the film, we can confront a different kind of intervention that is unsettling not only to the legal paradigms of a settler society, but to the way film historians or theorists within that society make our claims. Iwi-based practices concerning kaitiaki roles challenge not just the archive, but the writing of film history too.



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I have argued that Hei Tiki deserves more than a passing mention in discussions of early cinema in New Zealand, in part because the transnationality of early cinema and of settler culture was such that the film’s international generic affiliations make it typical, rather than aberrant, to such a history. I have also suggested that to simply assume the foreignness of the film on account of its American director is overly simplistic too, since that was similarly unexceptional in the period. While Markey was indeed an American, and while the narrative of his film had little or no connection to the culture of the hapu¯ or iwi who were represented in it, or to Maˉori more generally, the film was in many other senses a profoundly local production. That locality of production, the deeply ingrained ways in which its making was part of the fabric of local life, has not translated into “national” status for the film itself. This is surely a problem that concerns the privileging of textual readings within discussions of national cinemas and within postcolonial critique: the film as representation and narrative fails most tests of indigenous cultural authenticity, and its formulaic narrative quality (the “predictable” conflict of warring tribes or families united by romantic heterosexual love) rendered it less than appealing for many contemporary critics. As a textual object, it has been found wanting by its contemporary critics in the United States and New Zealand, as well as by those who have followed; even the publicity articles that accompanied the production and release of Geoff Steven’s documentary rehashed the standard view that it was a failure.36 Within New Zealand, much of that criticism is yoked to the circumstances of the film’s production and to the sense that the controversies of its making somehow confirm in advance its lack of value as a film. Ultimately, these reactions come back to Markey’s non–New Zealand credentials and to the fact that he absconded with Maˉori taonga, or treasures, at the end of the shoot. The history of the production of the film is thus easily overwritten as the history of a foreign event. Despite that assessment, the film was forged out of a series of local encounters and in recent years it has been further localized and indigenized by practices that go far beyond issues of production or text. Those practices thoroughly challenge and extend the ways that Hei Tiki might be understood and offer the chance to rethink questions of agency, affect, and archive as they concern films of colonial encounter. In the remainder of this chapter I will dig further into the



The Scandal of Hei Tiki


methods and meanings of that indigenizing process that have continuing implications for the ways in which we think about cinema and film historiography in settler cultures. Hei Tiki was a film financed wholly within New Zealand. After his departure from the production of The Devil’s Pit, Markey set about raising money for his new film by selling shares in a corporation he formed, Marky Films Limited. Selling shares at one pound each, he raised ten thousand pounds from investors around the country, including a manager at the prestigious Christchurch department stores, Ballantynes, and, later, from even his cast and crew members, such as Margaret Goulding, the cook for the production, who invested twenty pounds she never saw again.37 Reports vary on the extent to which Markey received active or tacit support from the New Zealand government. A letter from Judge Frank Acheson of the Maˉori Land Court to Puataata Alfred Grace, secretary of the Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa Trust Board, 38 urged Grace and other Tu¯wharetoa to assist Markey in his production: “The assistance that Mr. Marky is getting from the government is a clear indication of his credentials. He showed me his special pass from the government issued only to distinguished visitors from New Zealand.” Acheson continued, “to be quite candid I envy you the chance to do something really worthwhile, something outstanding for the tribe and the race. The success of the film will bring many advantages to the tribe, apart from the honour of representing the Maˉori race before the whole world.”39 Despite Acheson’s upbeat assessment (Acheson was Paˉkehaˉ but was a respected member of the Land Court and earned respect among iwi such as Tu¯wharetoa, Te Arawa, and Ngaˉ Puhi),40 other iwi members were more cautious, as Adventures in Maoriland makes clear. William Te Heuheu Grace, a cousin of Puataata Alfred Grace, also wrote to warn that the Native Minister, Sir Apirana Ngata, seemed to be watching Markey carefully; Te Heuheu Grace’s letter, however, concludes with some optimism that Markey will act with genuinely good intentions and that the project should thus be supported for the sake of Tu¯wharetoa. Eventually many more people than Tu¯wharetoa were involved. Markey’s plans called for a thousand extras and word began to go out to the areas surrounding Lake Taupoˉ, particularly in the regions of the Whanganui River and Urewera ranges. Thus was initiated a realm of contact and encounter that went far beyond a simple dichotomy of Maˉori and tauiwi (foreigner) or Maˉori and Paˉkehaˉ. There were sufficient whaˉnau (family) and hapu¯ affiliations in these districts to enable cooperation, as well as connections forged through the Ratana Church; but despite this, other histories between the various subtribes remained a



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source of potential discomfort. Some Whanganui people, for example, were recruited by Puataata Alfred Grace, who visited Ratana, near the town of Wanganui, to introduce Markey and Varney to two cousins in the area and gain their support. However, one of those involved in the film, Nepia Nikorima, expressed some reservation about the Whanganui involvement. Interviewed by Geoff Steven in the 1980s, he said: “Some would have enjoyed making it, there were others who didn’t. I remember my father, at some stage, was in total rejection of the whole idea. When I think back, I think he was right, because although we were invited by relations from the Tu¯wharetoa tribe to take part in the film I still think it wasn’t right for a tribe from the river to go up—it was tantamount to a trespass when I think of it now. I don’t know . . . the compromises that went on to allow them to do that.”41 Other cast members came from Rotorua and the Te Arawa iwi,42 such as then sixteen-year-old Ngawara Kereti, whose aunt, one of the Warbrick family of Rotorua, also accompanied her on location. Thus the relations that took shape around the production of this film complicate any assumptions that this was a simple encounter of Maˉori and non-Maˉori. Some of those complexities are hinted at in the interviews that remain from Steven’s documentary or in the letters left behind by participants in the film, while others are no doubt alive but accessible only through direct engagement with the descendants of those who were in the film.43 But to assume a simple Maˉori/non-Maˉori dichotomy does not serve the goal of understanding how this film was embedded in a local indigenous world as well as the world of settler culture. The term “Maˉori” operates as a strategically useful sign for both tangata whenua (literally, “people of the land”) and Paˉkeha within Aotearoa/New Zealand: the term has been productive for asserting rights, but has also been deployed by Paˉkehaˉ agencies to homogenize and create unity for purposes of government. It is a term that originally meant “ordinary” or typical and was used by tangata whenua to differentiate themselves from European newcomers during early colonial contact. However, for most Maˉori, lived experience remains tied to one’s identifications with hapu¯ or iwi. On this point, the Tu¯hoe leader, John Rangihau, famously speculated that there was no such thing as Maˉoritanga (Maˉori-ness or culture), only Tu¯hoetanga.44 Ultimately, then, the production of Hei Tiki involved many peoples, among whom Americans numbered only two, and Paˉkehaˉ just several. The Whanganui, Tu¯wharetoa, and other Maˉori who were involved in the film were employed to perform themselves, or rather, to perform a version of “Maˉoriness” or primitive culture that fit with the generic qualities of vanishing South Seas natives as established





through the genealogy of the travelogue or ethnographic documentary. In that sense they were surely exploited to perform a version of themselves that was quite out of step with their own realities. The circumstances of that performance and its solicitation and presentation in the finished film are complex, however. The historical record offers some hints that Markey, perhaps like Curtis and other ethnographic filmmakers before him, was interested in a faithful reconstruction of Maˉori practices or histories, however much that goal may be glaringly absent in some aspects of the finished film. Henry Hope-Cross, who worked as a camera assistant, was reportedly impressed at the steps Markey took to research the film and to make sure that everything was “correct in Maˉori fashion. I’ll give him top marks for that.” Hope-Cross said that it was Maˉori who built the paˉ (fortified villages) that Markey needed and that no one else was allowed to perform those tasks. (One paˉ was built at Omori, where most of the film was shot (see figure 4.1), the other at the site of an actual paˉ, Kaiawatea, on the slopes of the mountain Pıˉ hanga). Hope-Cross also related that it was Ben Biddle’s father who built the five canoes that were needed for the film (the canoes were sunk in the lake after the shoot). Biddle, Hope-Cross maintained, was responsible for a degree of fidelity in

Figure 4.1 The paˉ site built by Markey at Omori for the making of Hei Tiki. Photographer Henry Hope-Cross. Stills collection, New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Nga Taonga Whitiaˉhua.



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many aspects of the set and in cultural details: “Where it came to accuracy and what not, you couldn’t have bettered [Biddle], and you couldn’t have had a better man to help . . . than Biddle, in more ways than one.”45 Whatever attempts Markey might have made to develop a mise-enscène that was naturalistic and historically informed (and recall that this was not an issue of representing contemporary life in the area in the late 1920s, but of a nonspecific period in the past), such attempts have, over time, been discredited by some of the controversial actions and production decisions that Markey made. Markey borrowed numerous articles from the local Maˉori participants to use as properties and costumes in the film. These included taiaha and tewhatewha (long staffs), korowai or woven feather cloaks, taonga like the hei tiki pendant that Mara wears around her neck (which gives the film its name), mere (cleavers), kete (woven flax bags), mats, and even books.46 Many of these taonga are extremely prominent in the miseen-scène of the film and are occasionally rendered in superb detail and lighting by Bridgman’s cinematography. They came from a variety of sources, mostly now undocumented in written records (although oral histories of them are surely maintained among the descendants of those concerned), but a letter related by Snowy Christy in Adventures in Maoriland tells that Puataata Alfred Grace loaned, among other things, a hei tiki made of pounamu or greenstone, a mat, and other items. The reason that these particular items attracted mention in Steven’s documentary is that they were part of the many items that Markey took with him when production was suddenly halted. Grace telegrammed his cousin William Te Heuheu Grace in Wellington asking him to intervene with Markey at his hotel before departure, and received a telegram in reply that suggested that a law against removing Maˉori antiquities from the country might be deployed to stop him if necessary. As Adventures shows, Markey sent a letter of apology and a hei tiki that he said was the borrowed taonga, but which was instead a cheap imitation and quickly broke.47 The travesty of Markey’s theft of these objects has loomed large over the story of the film, and rightly so. In the press articles that emerged during the making of Adventures in Maoriland, it was almost always mentioned, and it dominated some of the initial correspondence between Markey’s niece, Triana Hill, and the New Zealand Film Archive, when she contacted them sixty years after Markey left the country. In other words, the thefts are part of the multiplicity of encounters around this film and are remembered both in the “official” narratives of film historians, local press,





and national archives, as well as the vibrant “unofficial” (because unwritten) culture of memory and narrative among Maˉori involved in the film and their descendants. Yet this is also a case where the official narrative threatens to negate all that falls outside it. Like the issue of the film’s value for readings of narrative, representation, or traditions of cinematic quality, the issue of the cultural theft threatens to obliterate and negate the other histories of encounter that are embedded in the film’s history and that are not simply reducible to a single issue. Markey himself may have been many things—by all accounts, he was certainly domineering, impatient, and rude at turns—but by considering a fuller picture of the adaptations and encounters initiated by both Maˉori and Paˉkehaˉ that accompanied Markey’s excesses, we can better situate this film within the local dynamics of a settler society and its indigenous and nonindigenous traditions.

Markey and Colonial Encounters at Omori Despite his two years spent living on location at Omori, Markey and his companion, Zoe Varney, never integrated well with those around them and were reportedly aloof and even disdainful of their cast and crew. While the cast members were all Maˉori, Markey’s key crew members were Paˉkehaˉ and interviews with them revealed a degree of skepticism and resentment toward the director. The reasons for their criticism were manifold. Markey recruited his crew gradually over 1929 and in December he brought Edwin (Ted) Coubray, who had developed his own system of motion picture sound called Coubraytone, to the area. Coubray stayed at least two months as he worked with Markey to record several screen tests, one of which featured Ben Biddle and is now held at the New Zealand Film Archive. Biddle faces the camera and performs a haka, or war dance, to the camera, then a spoken introduction, both of which are audible on the soundtrack. Markey, however, was ultimately not happy with the quality of the tests and fired Coubray from the production. However, he kept Coubray’s own camera with its nascent sound technology and, after the production was over, sold it to another early film sound technician named Jack Welsh who, with his brother, went on to perfect the technology for their sound feature Down on the Farm (1935).48 Adventures in Maoriland suggests that episode effectively ended Coubray’s film production career; he later became a still photographer before briefly



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working as an assistant camera-person on Rewi’s Last Stand (1940) and turning to film projection.49 A similar story grew around Markey’s treatment of Alfred Hill, the Australian-born composer who developed special interest in composing with Maˉori musical themes. Hill lived between New Zealand and Australia, moving back and forth over the years and from 1915 maintaining his base in Sydney.50 Markey commissioned him to visit the film location to write a musical score for the film; Adventures in Maoriland produces a photograph of him seated, surrounded by Maˉori. While Hill was already famous for his cantata, Hinemoa (based on the Maˉori legend) first performed in 1896, Ben Biddle points out that “Alfred Hill made a big mess over here because he’s a great Maˉori song composer, supposed to be, but he didn’t know a word of Maˉori” and that his idea of putting a musical accompaniment over the haka “Ka Mate, Ka Mate” was nonsensical for its rupture of the rhythm of the original: “Alfred Hill wants a beat . . . 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3.” While Markey discharged Hill from the production, Markey kept and used elements of his score.51 Markey’s actions with Coubray and Hill have appeared in most accounts as characteristic of his treatment of those around him, many of whom (with the exception of the short-lived Coubray and Hill, the cinematographer, Bert Bridgman, and his assistant, Henry HopeCross) were nonprofessionals; this was unsurprising given the scarcity of film production at the time. Margaret Goulding spent two years with the production as a personal assistant to Ngawara Kereti and cook to the production. She describes Markey as unfriendly to the workforce and “rather aloof, a clever man, and well educated, and I think we all thought that he knew his job but he didn’t get on with the Maoris for a long time . . . I think he treated them as a dark race and just as an inferior race . . . they didn’t like being treated as if they didn’t count.”52 Markey was reportedly easily angered and frequently threw down or trampled the megaphone he carried with him. The interviews with Coubray and Hope-Cross back up Goulding’s assertations that Markey did not think highly of his Maˉori workforce and that he insulted them when angered. These kinds of episodes were likely amplified by the way that Markey, apparently concerned for authenticity of some aspects of mise-en-scène, notably props and costumes, was practically hostile to Maˉori tikanga or cultural protocols when it came to staging actions for the narrative. The most dramatic example of such hostility is covered in Adventures in Maoriland: Markey directed a scene in which Mara, Ngawara Kereti’s character, walks across the feet and backs of a line of young men arrayed on the





ground. This action, involving a breach of personal tapu, was offensive to those on the shoot and Kereti performed it only reluctantly; HopeCross recounts “there was a lot of bad blood after that incidence.”53 Another of Steven’s informants, in an interview not included in the documentary, mentions another breach of tapu that was injurious to one of Markey’s actors, who was forced to apply flour to his hair in order to grey it; to mix food with the extremely tapu area of the head is to breach tapu rules. 54 Aside from his indifference toward tikanga, which surely would have been pointed out to him by the overwhelming majority of those present for the production, Markey’s financial troubles, especially during the latter part of the production, were the cause of conflict on his set. He would sometimes withhold wages from his cast and crew, which became the cause of much resentment. Yet it is in the reaction to the wage problems that we can begin to see the culture of resistance within the production relations of Hei Tiki. Biddle’s interviews for Adventures stress that he only became involved in Hei Tiki after Markey finally hit upon the right wage, having chased him “around and around till the wages come right,” but, by all accounts, Biddle also acted as something of a negotiator for the benefit of his entire cast and crew. When Markey stopped paying, or his insults became too intense, Biddle would confront him and refuse to work until the wages were reinstated or the insults ceased. Interviewed in Adventures at his marae, Korohe, Biddle said he would make good on these threats by disappearing further up into the nearby mountains where he would hunt wild pigs or deer, staying away between a day and several days; on one occasion, Biddle relates, he took a month away from the set to earn money planting trees in the nearby state forest. While Markey sent the police to retrieve him, Biddle remembers, without a signed contract, Markey could do little to get him back other than meet Biddle’s demands: “I told him if he’d pay up all these people the right way, I’d come back, and he did.” Henry Hope-Cross’s recollections in Adventures and in a separate interview confirm these accounts and further establish Biddle, not Markey, as central to the narrative of this film and, more importantly, to its production as well (figure 4.2). Other details of the production provide a window onto the negotiations that local people made with the film and its foreign director. Markey was further alienated from his cast and crew by living apart from them, in conditions that were demonstrably better than theirs. Many sources, in Adventures and archived interviews, mention that Markey and Varney had their own whares or huts and



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Figure 4.2 Director Alexander Markey attends to lead male actor Ben Biddle during the making of Hei Tiki. Photographer Henry Hope-Cross. Stills Collection, New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Nga Taonga Whitiaˉhua.

lived in relative luxury, “high living,” as Goulding called it; cast and crew members, on the other hand, were required to bring their own tents. Markey’s vegetarianism also made him something of an oddity and his rejection of both Goulding’s food and a haˉngi that his cast once prepared further distanced him from both Maˉori and Paˉkehaˉ around him. Markey’s diet, however, also provided the occasion for a refashioning that was emblematic of the adaptation and cultural practice that I have begun to trace, a practice that was shared among Maˉori and Paˉkehaˉ in different ways and that ultimately makes of the production an encounter that is irreducible to American exploitation of New Zealand naïfs. Markey, according to Goulding and Hope-Cross, ate an enormous amount of canned food, “all the foodstuffs that you buy in tins that are terribly expensive and so on,” said Goulding, and in Adventures Hope-Cross confirms that most of these were brought from the United States. Imported to the area, no doubt at great cost, the contents of the containers were consumed and the empty tins discarded. Temperatures in the area are cold in






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Figure 4.3 Henry Hope-Cross’s tent on location during the making of Hei Tiki. Photographer Henry Hope-Cross. Stills Collection, New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua.


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winter, and heating the tents became an issue, but was difficult with only rudimentary kerosene-burning stoves or cans that would potentially produce too much smoke for a tent. Working at this problem, Hope-Cross “collected all these tins and jammed one on top of the other and made a chimney for outside of my tent, and it worked out very well indeed” (figure 4.3). Hope-Cross’s experiment is familiar to anyone who has grown up in New Zealand as an example of “kiwi ingenuity,” the much-prized and proudly claimed ability to manufacture something useful out of the most rudimentary objects: car aerials from coat hangers, anything from “number 8” fencing wire. The ideological function of this example in Steven’s documentary is, for New Zealand viewers, to fondly embrace such a genius ability to tackle a problem by transforming the mundane, and actor Martyn Sanderson’s dry and flat delivery of the narration of this episode recapitulates the episode as a gesture of a frank and pragmatic settler masculinity. Steven’s documentary collects stories like this one in a way that brilliantly transforms seemingly tangential production details into a story of cultural encounters. The tin chimney is surely marginal to an official history of cinema in New Zealand—but perhaps its very embeddedness within settler cultural ethos gives a clue to how we might recalibrate film historical methodology in order to better frame cinema in settler societies. In affirming Steven’s deployment of such details, I wish to push even a little further. I argue that these pieces of evidence allow us to move beyond an assessment of the film as a one-way colonial encounter, a colonizing act by a “foreign” and American filmmaker who, in person, staged his intrusion on people and place, and whose film in turn left its intrusive imperial stamp on a nascent, struggling film culture within the settler society. Steven’s documentary itself is too balanced and respectful to set up such a reductive frame for the film, but with the documentary standing as the most extended piece of film historical work on this film and the frustrating lack of attention paid to Hei Tiki in other quarters, it has become too easy for the historiography of New Zealand cinema to tilt in the direction of dismissal. The intervention I wish to make here relies in part on these smaller production stories, these “leftovers,” as I have referred to them on another occasion, 55 for the reason that they ultimately tell us much about this film’s place within a settler society where settlers and tangata whenua, sometimes separately and sometimes cooperatively, set the terms of engagement.




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Hei Tiki was not released in New Zealand until 1939, with a premiere in Wellington and screenings in a few other cities and towns, including Tokaanu.56 It remained unseen and unavailable in New Zealand for many years. Because it was copyrighted as a U.S. film, the nitrate negative of the film eventually remained in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress; it had been donated by Markey’s brother, Harry Markey, in 1973. The only print within New Zealand arrived from the National Film Archive in London in the late 1960s and was housed at the National Film Library in Wellington; it was supposedly for preservation purposes only.57 Another 16mm print was purchased from Harry Markey in 1973.58 It was this print that allowed for two significant moments in its reception and recirculation. In 1979, an American anthropologist based at Massey University, James Baltaxe, became interested in the film and borrowed the circulating 16mm print from the National Film Library. Baltaxe had previously published on Rarotongan social organization59 and in 1979 took Hei Tiki to the annual meeting of the New Zealand Association of Social Anthropologists.60 After a positive reception from other anthropologists, Baltaxe became interested in further documenting the film. After visiting the Omori and Tokaanu areas, Baltaxe wrote to the manager at the National Film Library to report on his work for the film and to extend the loan period of the print. In this letter, Baltaxe mentions that he had located the sites of the production in Pukawa Bay and Omori and that he had also found Ben Biddle and shown the film to him and others. What is most striking about Baltaxe’s letter is its insistence on the power of the screened film to affect those who were in it, and their descendants, despite the problems on the set and the breaches of tikanga that were made during its production. I have found no other written record of what transpired of Baltaxe’s research, but a similar scenario to what Baltaxe described is visualized in the precredit sequence of Adventures in Maoriland. There, Steven’s camera follows a screening of the film at a school hall in the town of Bluff, in which Ngawara Bradshaw (née Kereti)’s daughters and friends watch their mother’s performance and speak about it afterward. Their postscreening comments suggest that the film generated a deeply felt connection to a parent that two of them barely knew (Bradshaw died when two of them were infants). The daughters’ recollections, both in the finished documentary and in transcripts of the full interview, reveal how the practice of film viewing becomes here an act of genealogical practice,



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not a recovery of the past but an appreciation of the departed one’s presence in the now. We might characterize that engagement in filmic terms as being not—or not only—with the narrative or textuality of the film, but with the profilmic and its photographic rendering. But such terms—like the film’s flat voiceover, which claims that Hei Tiki has become, for these daughters, film history “with an extra significance”—seem to entirely underplay the force of what occurs in screenings such as this. The implications of that force, especially for tangata whenua, and the recent potential for its institutionalization in archival practice, are what I wish to explore in the final section of this chapter. If Baltaxe’s research trips and Steven’s documentary production offered two distinct examples of Hei Tiki’s reception in the 1970s and 1980s, a constellation of circumstances in the 1990s has propelled the film into a new era of preservation, exhibition, and reception. This most recent turn of events began to take shape through the efforts of the New Zealand Film Archive, Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua, to recover and restore the nitrate negative material of Hei Tiki that was held at the Library of Congress. The archive had received a 16mm print from the American Film Institute in 1982 (to add to the two prints held by the National Film Library, a separate organization from the Archive until the latter’s founding in 1981) but by the 1980s was unable obtain the 35mm material since its donor, Harry Markey (Alexander Markey’s brother), could not then be traced. A new turn of events came in August 1992, however, when Markey’s niece, Triana Jackie Hill, wrote to the New Zealand Film Archive, announcing an imminent visit and requesting a copy of the film, which she herself had never seen, to show to “the Maori people,” encouraged, she said, by a Maˉori friend who was hosting her in New Zealand. Hill offered to buy the film if necessary or to borrow it for a couple of months, and ended her letter thus: “This is a spiritual mission for me. Alexander was an extraordinary man.”61 Hill’s letter is now kept in a file at the New Zealand Film Archive. Attached to it is a handwritten note where the staff member who received it attempted to begin the process of cultural negotiation that the film, and now Hill’s letter, had provoked. That note, a collection of thoughts toward a response, points out that Markey was not held in good esteem by Tu¯wharetoa; that there is a documentary she should see and an essay by Merata Mita she should read; lists practical concerns over how a print might be shown to her; and in its last line sums up the staff member’s potential misgivings about Hill’s visit with the frank statement: “Oblivious to local concerns.” The task of broaching





this gap in understanding fell to the Archive’s staff and especially, during Hill’s actual visit, to its Cultural Liaison Officer, Huia Kopua. Hill was told about the history of the film and the feelings about the loss of taonga; she referred to herself some weeks later as being “still in shock about” the revelations. Thus began a process in which Hill, as copyright holder in the wake of her uncles’ death, authorized the removal of the 35mm nitrate negatives from the Library of Congress back to New Zealand. In granting the Library of Congress permission to return the material to New Zealand, Hill expressed her strong feelings that it be preserved for future generations of Maˉori and that they should have easy access to it. Moreover, she stressed that any proceeds from the preserved film’s exhibition should go to “the Maori people,”62 her intention being to compensate those involved in the film’s production and losses—principally the Whanaganui people and Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa. Another letter in the file expresses “deep sorrow about what my uncle did” and Hill pledges to try to find and return whatever taonga he had taken sixty years previously.63 By late 1995 the film had arrived, and by February 1996 the Archive had completed its restoration. After replacing only about two hundred feet of missing or decomposed negative with positive material, the film was completely restored. What happened to the film next is an example of the unique way that the New Zealand Film Archive has approached its mission in relation to films with significant Maˉori content. Rather than present this film at some kind of gala premiere in the Archive’s home in Wellington, the capital city, the Archive took it on the road. Its restoration was hastened partly in time to meet the deadline of the Toi Maunga, Toi Moana, Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa arts festival, which was held in February 1996. The restored film had its first public screening during this festival, at the Starlight Twin Cinema in Taupoˉ. In the days immediately following, the Archive took the film to the Korohe marae, the home base of Ben Biddle’s Ngaˉti Hine hapu¯, then Hıˉrangi marae in Tu¯rangi (close to the Kaiawatea paˉ site that many locals referred to during and after the production as “Hollywood”), and Waihıˉ marae, at the small village where part of the film was shot.64 Other marae screenings followed in the Whanganui River area. These screenings were particular to Tu¯wharetoa and Hei Tiki in that the marae were carefully chosen in consultation with iwi representatives, but they were at the same time typical, even foundational, of the Archive’s recent practices. The Hei Tiki screenings marked the beginning of an ongoing program named Te Hokinga Mai o Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua, or the Return of Treasured Images, a partnership



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worked out between the Film Archive, the Museum of New Zealand/ Te Papa Tongarewa and iwi groups around the country. This project took shape gradually but its beginnings can be traced to the early years of the Archive, which was established in 1981, and the experience of its first director, Jonathan Dennis (1953–2002; he directed the Archive until 1990), with the films of the James McDonald Collection. McDonald was an ethnographic filmmaker who, just a few years before Markey’s visit, traveled around the North Island (from 1919 to 1923) and filmed many scenes of contemporary Maˉori life, capturing significant moments in the everyday lives of hapu¯ and iwi. The films, originally commissioned by the Dominion Museum in Wellington, New Zealand, were deposited to the Archive for preservation and Dennis and his staff began the process of trying to understand their images and contexts. Dennis, who was Paˉkehaˉ, recalled later, “it became obvious that these images were different—that as we uncovered them we were seeing things we were completely unfamiliar with and unprepared for. So a gradual process of consultation began and a small number of Maori people became involved.”65 The Archive began taking the films to the areas in which they were shot, showing them to family members, tribal elders, and other interested parties in a process of return whose implications led the way for the larger project of Te Hokinga Mai. Dennis’s recounting of this process testifies to the reverence in which these images were held and the way they constituted taonga for Maˉori whose family members or customs were presented: When all of these people, and hundreds of others, came to the public screening the reaction was astonishing: there was a terrific sense of excitement about being able to greet these images. It was as if a whole tribe and city’s home movies had returned, were now known about and accessible (even though through the Archive). The occasion was deeply felt by both Maori and European alike. Although I didn’t immediately recognize it then, the films were already beginning to change the Archive’s perceptions and methods of operating.66

The process by which the Archive, under Dennis’s leadership, came to operate thereafter is typical of the broader movement by which some public institutions in New Zealand have established new protocols and governance in accordance with the Treaty of Waitangi, sometimes voluntarily, mostly only by pressure or legislation from Maˉori claimants.67 In the case of the Archive, Dennis and those around him attempted to use the positive experiences around the McDonald films as the template for a new way of working with





Maˉori images. Speaking in 1990, Dennis related that “the Trust Deed which established the New Zealand Film Archive [in 1981] . . . was still carefully modeled on the aims and objectives for film archives in Europe, North America and Australia. It set out clearly enough what to do as a moving image archive—but not a moving image archive in Aotearoa/New Zealand, at the bottom of the South Pacific, near the end of the twentieth century.”68 In other words, there was no special recognition given to the status of indigenous images in the Archive or protocols for how to acknowledge and respect them, either as “indigenous intellectual property,” as some now describe it,69 or as taonga, the way in which they are thought of in te ao Maˉori or the Maˉori world. As Barclay succinctly puts it, the “distance between the aims and objects of a Northern Hemisphere archival tradition and how Maori experienced stored images” was problematic in the extreme.70 In addition to that, there was no established protocol for how the Archive itself might adjudicate matters relating to these images; as Barclay points out, the Archive achieved what it did through Dennis and a small but extraordinarily devoted group of staff “feeling their way” through the issues.71 Huia Kopua (now kaiwhakahaere of the Archive), began to take a more central role in coordinating the aspects of the Archive’s work that concerned Maˉori images and issues of guardianship, and eventually drew in a network of Maˉori artists, intellectuals, and activists, including Barclay, who began to work out a kaupapa or policy for the Archive to operate under a bicultural constitution; that kaupapa is publicly available and its intentions are reflected in the Archive’s bilingual title.72 It was through this process that principles of two kinds were established at the Archive so that it might move forward with a closer relationship to tikanga in relation to issues of preservation, ownership, and access. A new Taonga Maˉori Deposit Agreement was established for the donation to the Archive of moving image material with Maˉori content—taonga that would now become part of a Te Kohinga Taonga Maˉori or Taonga Maˉori Collection. In his book Mana Tuturu, which constitutes an extended consideration of issues of indigenous cultural rights, Barclay gives an extensive account of the processes of creating that agreement, including the adoption of mana tu¯turu as the phrase to best capture the kind of guardianship that was being invoked. Barclay’s book loosely translates this as “spiritual guardianship,” although to be clear his use of the term is as an imprecise English equivalent for something best expressed in te reo Maˉori or Maˉori language.73 Indeed, the Maˉori phrase was intended as, in his words, a critical “Maori marker-stone established in the



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English-language landscape, something which spoke up for another world.”74 As someone involved in the deliberations that led to the new deposit agreement, Barclay recounts with pleasure his ability to travel throughout the world waving “those two pages” as a model for indigenous activists, filmmakers, or archivists of what has been possible for an Archive working under the principles of mana tu¯turu and respect for indigenous life worlds. Under the Taonga Maˉori Deposit Agreement, copyright to the moving image material remains with the depositor, but mana tu¯turu rests with the kaitiaki named in an appendix to each agreement. Three parties, therefore, emerge from each deposit of moving image material: the depositor (perhaps a collector, a filmmaker, or in some cases simply a lay person with the film in their possession); the Archive itself, which acts as the conservator of the material and a broker for its use; and the named kaitiaki, generally an iwi trust board or hapu¯ group whose people are prominent in the material. In most cases, regular viewing access is made available through the Archive’s walk-in film library, but for any more extensive use of the material, such as footage for a documentary, the Archive will pass on the request to the kaitiaki for their approval and will help to foster any dialogue that may be needed between the parties. The second major outcome of the kaupapa was the development of a memorandum of understanding to aid in the preservation of material already held in the Archive. Crucial to the possibilities of such memoranda is the ongoing process of research undertaken by Archive staff to identify the relevant iwi and hapu¯ groups represented in the moving image material; this is the ongoing work that the McDonald films initiated. In the case of Hei Tiki, the screenings of Te Hokinga Mai enabled a larger process of consultation with iwi in order to find the most suitable way for the Archive and iwi groups to cooperate in the conservation and appropriate use of the material. The memorandum secures Tu¯wharetoa as kaitiaki with an active, decision-making role in the conservation of the film so that in years to come they do not find themselves, as Huia Kopua has put it, “in Mintie ads” but are rather able to control the ongoing lives of their images and lives contained within them.75 The process of creating such memoranda has continued since then. As the discussion paper attached to the Memorandum puts it, the objectives of Te Hokinga Mai are “to provide opportunities for Iwi/Maˉori to view these taonga [housed at the Archive] by conducting Iwi-specific appurtenant regional touring film programmes on marae and where appropriate, at schools and museums” and “to invite Iwi/Maˉori to assist the Film Archive





in the development and maintenance of culturally appropriate access procedures for reuse of these taonga.”76 The memorandum details precisely the processes by which consultation occurs, and over what kinds of issues—requests for off-site screenings of a film such as at film festivals, international requests, commercial access for the inclusion of material in new works, or for the stills used in this chapter— with detailed flow charts of how requests are handled by iwi and the Archive.

Unsettling Methodologies The consequences and implications of these practices are many and some will be addressed further in the next chapter. At this point, however, I wish to stress the ways in which standard film historical approaches to Hei Tiki, such as those I noted earlier in this chapter, are radically reshaped by the processes that have emerged through Te Hokinga Mai and the development of a kaitiaki role for Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa (and for other iwi with other material). These challenges have the potential to unsettle how film scholarship has usually thought about reception and, beyond that, they also pose larger challenges to how we think about settler constructions of history and their relationship to indigenous custom and sovereignty. In my discussion of Hei Tiki’s production, I suggest that there are many traces of resistance and adaptation within the stories told around this film; its production constituted a kind of colonial encounter that cannot be explained away simply in a language of exploitation or onedirectional power. I attempt to demonstrate how this film was “practiced” by many actors in ways that localized its supposedly foreign (for most critics) qualities and made it a production within a history of settler-transnational productions. Attending to the lived realities of its making shows the ways in which it was embedded within a settler society that has historically constituted itself in relationship to a first, indigenous culture and a global domain. But Hei Tiki’s screening in Te Hokinga Mai adds a different layer to our understanding of the film. Taking it out of theaters and back to marae transposes this film into Te Ao Maˉori, the Maˉori world, where its narrative or codes of representation, central to a Euro-American tradition of film studies (one dominant in settler societies), are placed at a distance, their value suddenly contingent or nonexistent. What I am proposing here goes beyond the contingency and variability that we might usually allow for within the domain of reception studies. As Eric Smoodin has



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argued, film studies as a discipline has for some time (as early as the 1920s) asked how audiences might matter to films, and how different interpretations might be produced by different individual spectators; that tradition of scholarship has been reinvigorated in recent years by work that has turned to film culture, the material artifacts of fan materials, newspapers, letters, advertising, and the like.77 Scholars such as Smoodin, Erb, and Staiger have thus used historical materials to construct a sense of how audiences and individual viewers might have constructed films at particular moments in time. Others, like Annette Kuhn, have used oral histories not just to establish what certain viewers thought of films when they saw them, but to examine the “tropes of cinema memory” that their present-day discourse on those films creates.78 Insightful as these studies are, they do not quite capture what has occurred with films in Te Hokinga Mai. While undoubtedly each individual Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa viewer will have had her own interpretations of the film, what is most radical about the work of the Film Archive here is in the screening of work not to individual Maˉori arranged as a collective audience, but within tikanga. That is, Te Hokinga Mai, by taking films to marae, embeds the work of the Archive firmly within a Maˉori world for a duration well beyond the running time of the film itself. As I will detail more fully in the next chapter, a marae “screening” involves, before a single frame is shown, a poˉhiri or formal welcoming of the Archive’s manuhiri or visitors into the protocol of each individual marae. This process is choreographed in highly complex ways for both host and visitor and can involve frank and challenging discussions of issues pertinent to the occasion.79 Once the taonga and its archivist keepers have been welcomed, they are part of a conversation embedded within tino rangatiratanga, or Maˉori sovereignty, in which the hapu¯’s relationship to the material is dominant: for that time, the film is part of a Maˉori life world in which the wairua (the soul, or spiritual energy) of the film can be acknowledged. Discussing the concept of sovereignty through the example of the Te Maˉori exhibition (a curated exhibition of taonga that traveled worldwide in the 1980s), Stephen Turner describes the dawn ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before the exhibition opened, a ceremony that “gave Maori sanction to the showing of precious objects” in that particular museum location. Turner writes that the Maˉori tohunga (priests) who performed the ceremony were “addressing or redressing the carved figures of Te Maori as living ancestors; these form an ongoing conversation for Maori between past and present, making the artwork an exhibition,





among other things, of the past-in-the-present, a social-historical reality, or peopled universe, of another order or dimension.” As Turner notes, “the animation of an otherwise absent past through exchange with the living was for excited observers as real as the effect was difficult to explain.”80 That evocation of what is “real” yet “difficult to explain” represents precisely the gap between a settler-colonizer law and the practices of film history and archiving assumed within it (of the kind Dennis referred to above, speaking of the Archive’s original Deed of Trust), and the real-but-different practices of tikanga settings that, I am arguing, produce films like Hei Tiki in a mode that exceeds any easy sense of “revival” or “recuperation.” That quality of exchange between present and past that is described here is further elaborated by historian Judith Binney: In Maori thought, the past (the deeds of the ancestors) is actively confronted by the living. The past is called “nga ra o mua,” the days in front: these are the times that encompass and direct the actions of the living. In Maori, the diacritic marker for “the past” and for the space that lies “in front of the viewer” is expressed by the same term in the language: “mua.” . . . In speeches on the marae, in prayers and in songs, ancestors of those present are spoken to directly. They are summoned from the realm of the dead for the particular occasion—the opening of a new meeting-house, the launching of a canoe, or the negotiation of trusteeship for taonga.81

It is this radical difference in the way that present and past are conceptualized within a Maˉori context, together with the particularity that comes from an iwi-specific setting, that renders the practices of “reception” substantively different in this situation than in those studied by most scholars of film reception in a non-Maˉori context. Though I cannot report on individual reactions to the Tu¯wharetoa screenings, we can gain a sense of them through the words of tangata whenua who have attempted to relate such events in non-Maˉori contexts. Merata Mita, speaking at the International Council of Archives in 1990, offered this description of a marae screening of historical footage: I greet the images of my ancestors verbally and speak to them as they come forth on the screen. For I know that while they have passed on, their images still live and are very much alive to me. They reply in many subtle and not so subtle ways; through the clothes they are wearing, the work they are doing, the ceremonies they are performing, the body language, facial expression, and elements of their style. They



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Mita’s account vividly describes the qualities of the past-in-the-present that Binney has glossed above. Another description is provided by Witarina Harris (1906–2007), the star of The Devil’s Pit, who traveled as a kaumaˉtua or elder for the New Zealand Film Archive for the last eleven years of her life. In that role, she supported the screenings of Te Hokinga Mai by bringing the organization and the films it curates onto marae all over the country. In a radio interview with the Archive’s former director Jonathan Dennis, Harris speaks of the power of these screenings within the Maˉori world I have described above: “it’s exciting because we’d be watching a film and somebody would see themselves in the film . . . in the dark [they’d say] ‘oh, that’s so and so, that’s my aunty, or that’s my grandfather’ . . . in the darkness, and just these voices coming through . . . and that, I think, was one of the important things that the archives had done for the people, taking them back so that they could really feel part of the film.” Harris notes that young people as much as their elders would see their old people come alive through the screenings: “So that’s why I feel that they’re very very precious to us and we must thank the archives for looking after them and bringing them back, bringing them back so that our descendants could enjoy them.”83 Elsewhere in her interview with Dennis, Witarina Harris expresses profound pleasure in the opportunities to collaborate with the Archive that resulted from Markey’s casting of her in his first New Zealand film. Written records do not tell us whether Harris may have also made harsh critiques of The Devil’s Pit; other oral stories in all-Maˉori contexts might. But even with that possibility, it is notable that those are not her concern here: there is no scorching critique of representation in the film, no chastising of the “foreign”; interestingly, that burden is taken up by Dennis himself in a postinterview commentary that was edited into the finished radio production, where he refers to the film Harris starred in as “a phony American romanticized folk drama that was taking advantage of an exotic locale.” Though Dennis’s catchy dismissal holds some truth, it does not exhaust the meanings and uses that films like The Devil’s Pit and Hei Tiki have generated. Nor should his comment be allowed to finally determine an easy opposition between the foreign and the local; as we have seen, these are produced together in the encounters around this film. The Archive’s work as I have begun to describe it here certainly shares something in common with other experiments in indigenous



have much to relate to me, and I and my children have much to learn still from them.82


film practice that have been addressed by anthropologists and film scholars.84 Writing mostly about an Aboriginal Australian context, Faye Ginsburg has referred to the process of indigenous groups “using the inscription of their screen memories in media to ‘talk back’ to structures of power and the state,” particularly with respect to land claims, in which ethnographic footage of the “vanishing race” genre has recently been repurposed in order to prove claims of continued cultural practice in a post-Mabo environment.85 Fatimah Tobing Rony uses the metaphor of a “third eye” to suggest that when indigenous groups watch ethnographic footage they are able to renegotiate the images in order to “bring the people who inhabit them out of their bondage of silence and into the present.”86 Alison Griffiths notes that “the reappropriation and ‘remediation’ of silent film footage by native peoples is part of a broader movement of self-determination” and that processes of restoration, when undertaken in collaboration, offer the chance for indigenous groups “to recuperate [films] as part of their history.”87 Barclay, too, notes the ways in which indigenous groups in other parts of the world are addressing issues of conservation, preservation, and use of cultural treasures through forums like the Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples, signed in Whakataˉne in 1993.88 Yet the examples of Te Hokinga Mai and the kaitiaki agreements undertaken by the New Zealand Film Archive offer instances of cultural renegotiation that are more specific and formalized than in the other examples I’ve just cited. The implications of these processes are inspiring for the way they continue to plot a path through the difficult past and present of films like Hei Tiki and they are also a reminder of the contradictions of contemporary settler societies that make them always “unsettled” places. While, as I have noted, the Archive now works from a bicultural kaupapa, it is also still bound within a framework of New Zealand settler law that, in particular, demands that the Archive respect copyright. In practice, this means that the Archive stands amidst a circle of people that includes the depositor of the material, the copyright holder (who may not be the depositor but a different person), the kaitiaki (who exert cultural rights as described in the memorandum but do not “own” or hold copyright to the material), and any clients (requestors) who may wish to reuse or circulate the material. In the case of a dispute over potential use of material (for example, where a copyright holder might wish to grant access without conditions but kaitiaki assert limits to the use) the Archive is bound by settler law to respect the wishes of copyright holders and is bound by the agreement it has made with kaitiaki to respect their



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“spiritual and moral connection to the material.” The memorandum provides that, in such a situation, the Archive must attempt to mediate the dispute as best it can, but with the proviso that, “in such discussions, the Film Archive will be mindful of its obligation to respect national copyright laws relating to personal property, and of its duty under this Agreement to accord named people and their descendants kaitiaki status over Taonga Maˉori.”89 It would be possible to read such a proviso, and indeed the circulation on marae of films that iwi do not finally or unproblematically control, as evidence of an intractable cultural and legal conflict between indigenous sovereignty and settler law, or between tikanga and the values of the dominant settler society.90 In keeping with its mission and kaupapa, however, the Archive prefers to see its role and its practices as creating the space for an intersection between these two worlds, in which both sides stand to gain from the transaction. This approach is stressed, too, by Mita, who rejects any leap to the language of “cultural impasse” to stress the transformative prospects for archives that choose to listen to the claims of indigenous peoples.91 Within the framework of this book, I wish to also suggest that such potential for both impasse and resolution, conflict and intersection, is what characterizes settler societies at this historical moment. The practices of the New Zealand Film Archive present a particularly thoroughgoing and carefully articulated attempt to mediate such pressing contradictions. My discussion of Hei Tiki’s many moments and contexts, especially its recent place within the work of the Archive and Tu¯wharetoa, reminds us that settler cinemas have never spoken with one voice and that the contemporary life of films like Hei Tiki exceeds the terms of many historical accounts thus far. With such questions in mind, I approach the last film and set of encounters of the book, those surrounding The Seekers.







Chapter Five

One evening in 2008, I found myself in the brightly lit foyer of the New World supermarket in the town of Whakataˉne, New Zealand, tasting wine and talking about film history. I’d gone there at the invitation of a friend I’d met that afternoon at a poˉhiri, the Maˉori welcome ceremony that brings visitors onto a marae, or meeting place. In this case, the poˉhiri preceded a screening of The Seekers that I helped organize at Te Whare o Toroa marae. The Seekers, released in 1954 by the British studio, J. Arthur Rank, was set in New Zealand in the 1820s and mostly shot at Pinewood Studios, near London, with a cast that included many Maˉori, most famously opera star Inia Te Wiata. A production unit visited New Zealand from December 1953 to March 1954 to do location shooting for several scenes in the movie, mostly in the Whakataˉne and Rotorua areas, and many local people took part. The marae we’d been on that day is at Wairaka, the original Maˉori settlement at the Whakataˉne River heads, just a kilometer or so from the supermarket. After the initial speeches and songs that are part of the poˉhiri, we manuhiri or visitors were greeted by the tangata whenua (specifically here the Ngaˉti Hokopu¯ hapu¯, our hosts on that marae). At the end of the poˉhiri, Colleen, whom I’d first met the year before, greeted me like an old friend and said: “Come to a wine tasting tonight at the New World, 5:30 p.m!” I didn’t need much convincing and, besides, she was my host, so I did. After the supermarket’s wine buyer had praised the local wines, and a rep from a small nearby cheese factory introduced her products, the manager announced that one of his customers had a “VIP” guest she wanted to introduce. As Colleen stood and began to speak, her voice shaking a bit, I realized the “mysterious” VIP was me. She began, “Today something amazing happened for us at our marae, at Wairaka. This man here brought us back this film, The Seekers,” and she then proceeded to talk about what happened when we screened the film in the wharenui or meeting house—the center for debate, discussion, and the honoring of ancestors among the hapu¯. The New Zealand Film Archive staff had set up a temporary screen, sound



Unsettled Histories: The Seekers (1954)


system, and digital projector there, and had shown a copy of the film to an audience that ranged from elders of the Ngati Hokopu¯ hapu¯, some of whom appeared in the film, to their mokopuna or grandchildren, who sat cross-legged next to their old people as the film played. Colleen described seeing her own koroua, or old relatives, up on the screen, and hearing the voices around her saying “that’s my dad!” or “that’s koro!” (grand-dad). Such an eager and active engagement with the film, recounted passionately to the wine-tasters, offers one clue to the density of this film’s localness, against the assumption that it was simply British, foreign, or not worthy of inclusion within discussions of cinema in New Zealand. The Seekers is a melodrama of colonial encounters: unlike Hei Tiki, which purported to portray precolonial Maˉori life, The Seekers is about first contact between Maˉori and British, and the colonization that followed. This chapter will show that, beyond its melodramatic narrative, the film’s very production created its own series of colonial encounters between British producers and those they worked with in the studio and on location, and will argue that such encounters between film, people, and place are unfinished. Fifty years later in the “New World,” I found myself in another moment of proximity with the legacies of settler colonialism and film history. Beneath us, the supermarket’s foundations were laid in the toxic fill that was used to claim the river and wetlands of the Whakataˉne River, the very source for Ngaˉti Awa’s constitution as a people: their ancestors, arriving from eastern Polynesia, landed at Wairaka on the Maˉtaatua waka or canoe, and the events of the landing gave Whakataˉne its name.1 Most of those gathered for the wine tasting were Paˉkehaˉ, and could have been the descendants of the settlers arriving on the beach in the movie’s final shot, filmed just over the hill at Otarawairere Bay. In describing the day’s events, however, my friend unabashedly spoke of the cultural importance of the marae screenings, her tribute filled with Maˉori words, without any hint that venue or audience were incongruous. If perhaps some of the Paˉkehaˉ there were indifferent to or puzzled by the intensity of her story, it seemed not to worry Colleen. Reflecting on that encounter in the New World, and the experience of taking this film back to Whakataˉne (and, a few days later, the Rotorua area) with the Archive, it would be easy to make sense of the complex histories that emerged there by distinguishing a space of imperial power, Britain, from its former colony, New Zealand, or by positing wholly separate Paˉkehaˉ and Maˉori worlds whose interpretations and encounters with the film were completely opposed. In keeping with the rest of my book, the present chapter argues that the



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space of settler cinema is one in which such rigid distinctions cannot hold, on account of the realities of settler coloniality and the relations of complicity and ambivalence that affect all who live there. In the previous chapter, I showed how the New Zealand Film Archive’s marae screenings and iwi guardianship have enabled colonial films to move into tikanga or Maˉori cultural protocol. However, just as there is no single Maˉori world (despite efforts within the nation-state to create one for the purposes of bicultural management), neither should we think of Maˉori or Paˉkehaˉ encounters with these films, past or present, as having a singular typicality. For one thing, in the case of The Seekers, such an approach would overlook the multiple iwi and hapu¯ affiliations of those involved with the film, surely irreducible to a singular identity like “Maˉori.” Similarly, it would ignore the complex relations of complicity and difference between settler subjects and the “mother country” to which they traced their ancestry and with which they engaged as they met stars, helped with props, or watched the film. Instead, I will argue that the particular circumstances of The Seekers created complex entanglements between differently situated peoples, resulting in uneven reciprocities and multiple, simultaneous interpretations of the film and the encounters surrounding it; such encounters continue to this day. In Whakataˉne, where this production first “landed” in 1953, and where my own encounters with the film’s history began anew in 2007, the entanglement of Paˉkehaˉ within the world of Ngaˉti Awa, and vice versa, produces an ongoing sense of an unsettled history. That history is represented in the narrative, and experienced in the production, distribution, and even the reexhibition of The Seekers. The circumstances of the film’s making in the 1950s and its reappearance another fifty years later, partly as the result of this research, require us to look beyond the text alone for meaning. The encounters that we thus find illuminate the densely woven fabric of a settler society that is shared but experienced in different ways by indigenous and settler subjects. Despite the unlikely surroundings, then, the New World supermarket turned out to be just the right place to reflect on such things. This chapter will attempt to recreate the “thickness” of encounter in and around this film through many moments and in many places. I begin with the return of the film to marae at Wairaka and Tapuaeharuru, and to commercial theaters in Whakataˉne and Rotorua, in 2008. Screening The Seekers alongside home movies of its production, also held in the New Zealand Film Archive’s collection, created new contexts for interpretation and for better historicizing the film. Those screenings were one outcome of the research for



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this chapter that began in 2007. Consequently, I show how the writing of film history, rather than taking shape at a temporal or spatial remove from its object, can be experienced from within its unfinished histories, placing the researcher in the midst of the other actors who continue to make the film in the present. Moving to 1953, I then examine the context for this film’s emergence and its place within the stables of Rank and its New Zealand distributor, R.J. Kerridge. As casting for the film proceeded, it drew upon a highly mobile group of Maˉori individuals whose presence in England and New Zealand complicates any easy assumptions about the arrival of a global film production on a static local community. Continuing to explore the entanglements of the film in Maˉori, Paˉkehaˉ, and British worlds, I turn in more detail to the events around the film’s location shooting in Whakataˉne and the Rotorua area, and I study the many traces of those encounters in oral histories, ephemeral texts, photographs, and home movies. These materials are central to the chapter for the way they resist a simplistic narrative of imperial exploitation in which a foreign cinema colonizes a local space. They speak to the ways that the film was, from the beginning, pulled into the stuff of local culture and into the very fabric of a settler cinema. Finally, in returning to the 2008 screenings and my own work with the film, I assess what might remain in the unfinished histories of this film.

Colonial Encounters Visually, The Seekers adheres to iconic conventions that characterized many imperial visions of New Zealand, and it would not be difficult to read the arrival of Rank’s unit in Whakataˉne as coextensive with a British imperial exploitation that began for tangata whenua in the previous century. Yet to do so would distort the ways that those involved with the film made sense of their involvement and would discount the complexity of networks that the film and its agents were part of. The apparently straightforward colonial encounters represented in the narrative of The Seekers (in which a small group of British settlers makes a home in the midst of two rival hapu¯) threaten to divert attention from the more complex encounters beyond its frame. The interactions between empire, settlers, indigenous subjects, and colonial space that make the film part of a settler cinema are embedded in networks that are at once local and global, producing relations that are far from programmatic or one-directional. No matter how ideologically transparent the film’s pedestrian narrative and stilted



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representation of Maˉori and Paˉkehaˉ might seem to some contemporary New Zealand viewers, or how easily it has been discounted by many film historians, 2 such observations do not exhaust the film’s meanings or uses. The encounters that the film engendered then through its production, and that it continues to generate now in the realms of exhibition, reception, and even in the research for this project, tell a story of a more complex world made by multiple agents whose affiliations and locations are multiple. In what follows I draw on other work, some of it outside the field of film studies, that has tried to make sense of such complexities and of the role of differently situated individuals who meet within and across the thresholds of colonial worlds. For example, Ann Laura Stoler has revealed the ways that colonialism has never operated solely at the level of “abstract force, as a structure imposed on local practice.”3 Rather, it is characterized by competing agendas, contradiction, and differing types of agency. The circuits of knowledge and power that imperialism created, she argues, “were peopled with those who moved, changed identities, were captivated by alien cultural forms that they borrowed to reinvent their own. Actual people dismantled some aspects of colonial cultures, but many more did not.”4 Even more importantly for the present study, however, Stoler shows that attending to the people making those worlds through their everyday lives “has redirected historians to new readings of familiar archives and to new genres of documentation. It has also changed how we read—for discrepant tone, tacit knowledge, stray emotions, extravagant details, ‘minor’ events.” Here and in her other work, Stoler offers a methodology for understanding intimacy and affect within accounts of colonial worlds, 5 a methodology that proves vital for the relations that we find surrounding a film like The Seekers. Studying such intimate encounters does not mean that we will always find successful resistance to colonial practices; it does, however, mean we have to train ourselves to look beyond abstractions of colonial power, and that we cannot simply read off the imperial and onto the field of the local and the everyday. Extending the implications of such work, Lieba Faier uses the concept of the “intimate encounter” to argue that some groups do more than just “negotiate, accommodate, or resist . . . transnational formations of power,” so that we must pay attention instead to “interactions between different formations of desire and power . . . among people . . . who bring discrepant and unequally situated dreams and agendas to their daily meetings.”6 Faier thus identifies the ways that “intimate everyday interactions” might also engage and



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remake national and transnational forms of culture rather than simply respond to their terms.7 Other work by writers like Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and James Clifford also elucidates the messiness and unpredictability of colonial and transnational encounters across difference, paying attention to the field of research as its own space of encounter.8 Such nuanced writing enables an understanding of how colonial histories and transnational pasts and presents do not always leave in place predictable and unchanging colonial structures but rather contact spaces, “produced . . . by local, national, and transnational forces of which . . . research travel is a part.”9 The history and ongoing life of The Seekers exists in a contact space such as this. I argue that it does not suffice to condemn the film’s visual discourse as typical of an imperial vision, and its production as evidence of continued colonial exploitation, in order to remove it from the terrain of the local. Instead, the interactions and encounters that made and continue to make this film are evidence of its deep embeddedness within the cinema and culture of a settler-dominated society.

Bringing Back The Seekers Based on a novel by a New Zealander, John Guthrie,10 The Seekers is set in the 1820s, when whalers and missionaries were frequent visitors to New Zealand, but before full-scale colonization had begun.11 Philip Wayne (Jack Hawkins) and Paddy Clark (Noel Purcell), mate and bosun for a trading vessel anchored off the coast, row ashore to explore the terrain and subsequently violate the tapu of a burial cave. Captured by Maˉori warriors, they are taken to a chief, Hongi Tepe (played by famous Maˉori opera singer and carver, Inia Te Wiata). After winning his approval in a swimming race, Wayne is befriended by Hongi Tepe and offered a piece of land. That night, the chief’s attractive young wife, Moana (Laya Raki), performs a provocative dance before the village. After Wayne’s captain falsely implicates him in the importing of mokomokai, or preserved Maˉori heads, Wayne is arrested, tried, and fined. He sets out for New Zealand for a new life with his fiancée, Marion (Glynis Johns), and, marrying en route, they settle on the land that Wayne has been given. Marion has a baby and, while Wayne surveys and farms their land, Marion schools Hongi Tepe in Christianity. After Wayne has an affair with Moana, and another settler later provokes the anger of a rival tribe, the settlers’ home is attacked and Philip



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and Marion are killed. Their baby boy, however, whom Marion has hidden underground, is rescued by Hongi Tepe, who carries him off into the bush; the final shot in the film shows a new wave of settlers arriving on the beach. In 2008 I was privileged to watch this film in four different venues in the areas where the New Zealand location shooting was performed. The free screenings were organized by the New Zealand Film Archive and were modeled on two of their programs: Te Hokinga Mai, described in the previous chapter, which brings taonga Maˉori films back to the iwi whose people are represented, and the Archive’s general outreach program, which also screens films in venues around the country, responding to local interest or specific occasions.12 These screenings were an unusual confluence of events in that they answered a much earlier request from the Ngaˉti Pikiao hapu¯ who had hosted the film crew in 1954, were also prompted by the research I’d done in Whakataˉne in 2007, and were made possible by the Archive’s recent acquisition of a color print of The Seekers, which had not been shown in New Zealand for fifty years. My involvement began in a series of conversations and e-mails with archive staff and ended in the back of a very uncomfortable van as we took the necessary equipment and cans of film between marae and theaters, setting up a new screening in each place. As a researcher, I was able to see the texture of experiences that were built around this film as I stuck pictures I’d scanned from private photo albums on poster-boards, then watched as their owners and friends filed past to see who else they could identify in the collage of production stills and amateur snapshots. The Film Archive also holds a remarkable collection of home movies of the Seekers shoot; since the location shooting happened around the Christmas holidays, many local and traveling holidaymakers were there with cameras to watch. These home movies, converted from 8mm to DVD, also played in theater foyers and on the marae, and offered an idiosyncratic “making of” that was built around small moments of encounter with extras, crew, and location. For some viewers, these visual ephemera, like my introductions before the screenings, may have been incidental to the main attraction of the film. For others, however, the home movies and photographs became the catalyst for responses that repositioned the film, taking it beyond a diegetic world of colonial encounter and into a nondiegetic and profilmic setting that still resonated with colonial histories. The small town multiplexes and marae where we screened The Seekers certainly had different cultural protocols



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embedded in them.13 However, this particular film’s genealogy and the nature of people’s involvement with it meant that the world of the marae and the world of the theater seemed not completely disconnected. Many from the marae in Wairaka returned for the screening in town the next day, and the Rotorua screening also had a large Maˉori presence. As a result, I had the feeling that elements of the marae protocols seemed to carry over into the theaters on those days, where some tangata whenua responded to the film as vigorously as on the marae. One kuia or female elder I met at the Rotorua theater screening said afterward: “Honestly, I really didn’t think much of that film. It’s only I was glad to see all those people who had passed on. And when you come out and then you see your little DVD outside, well that’s wonderful. And you see a lot more of them out there, and that’s good for a lot of us who have our families on that DVD.”14 This interweaving of marae and theater contexts was furthered by the film’s use of language. One unusual aspect of The Seekers for its time is that it features the frequent use of te reo or Maˉori language. Early on, Paddy Clark explains to Wayne that he made frequent visits to New Zealand as a whaler and knows how to speak the language; this little detail motivates his frequent translation of spoken Maˉori to Wayne, and allows the film to maintain a semblance of authenticity while remaining comprehensible for non-Maˉori speakers.15 More interestingly, at other times te reo is left untranslated, and while many native speakers told me the quality of the dialogue was not always good, the presence of untranslated language does offer a place in the film where Maˉori viewers can connect in particular ways. Indeed, in every screening I attended, whether in marae or a theater, Maˉori in the audience were vocal in “talking back to” or perhaps “talking with” the film in te reo: this was sometimes a brief comment like “he aha?” (what?) either along with the characters or as a question posed to the film (I heard both), but for one kaumaˉtua in the Rotorua multiplex, it extended to a long discourse that was eventually “shushed” by those around him. Others would identify people by name—“Pene!” shouted one, as Takirau Pene, one of the local extras, appeared on screen. The use of te reo in the film provides another aspect of the interplay between text and audience that is important in assessing the ways that the film is viewed today. As Huia Kopua from the Film Archive put it to me, The Seekers has various points of “buy in” and “come out,” or what we might also call investment and disidentification, for Maˉori viewers. The “buy in” she suggests is the extensive



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use of te reo, essentially pulling a Maˉori viewer into the narrative. The “come out,” however, is what many people simply referred to as “that dance,” the scene in which Laya Raki’s character, Moana, performs a highly eroticized dance before the entire paˉ. The dance, as I explain later, bears no resemblance to Maˉori traditions and exists entirely as a spectacular moment of the female body on display. Many people continue to find it shocking for its visual breach of protocol (in costume, staging, and music). But, Kopua argues, when that disinvestment in the narrative takes place, the film rushes back as a historical object, available for new uses but not as a true or authentic record of a culture. Kopua likens the disidentification effect to the moment in Hei Tiki when Ngawara Kereti walks across the backs of men arrayed on the ground: the scene is so egregiously wrong within tikanga Maˉori that it allows the opportunity, she argues, for a Maˉori audience to disinvest themselves from the representational cohesion of the film and instead continue to read it in other ways.16 Such a commentary is surely descriptive, not prescriptive: some audience members I spoke to continued to find the dance extremely troubling, while others chalked it up to the distortions of a time when both British culture and local settler culture were less sensitive to or conversant with Maˉori custom. Such malleability in the film’s reception continued to surprise me at times, especially on the marae. Here, more so than in the theater, the extensive contextualization provided by the materials we brought to the venue, the tikanga of the place, and the active recollection of elders who were present for the filming, seemed to allow a greater range of response, annulling at least some of the discomfort for some spectators. I found myself having to check my own desire to frame the film within an ideological reading. For example, I’ve always found the film’s final two shots to be a transparent justification for colonialism and thus hard to appreciate emotionally or aesthetically. As Hongi Tepe retrieves the infant Wayne from his hiding place amidst the smoking ruins of his family’s home, there is a close-up shot of Tepe holding the boy and placing a gold crucifix on his chest before carrying him into the bush. To me (and other critics),17 the scene constructs a familiar trope by which a settler becomes indigenized due to the generous stewardship of a Maˉori, as the boy is carried into a future that will be shared with the settlers who follow him. The film appears to create a “settled” ending from the film’s narrative closure, justifying further invasion and colonization to follow (figure 5.1). Yet in every screening, I found people responding emotionally to the scene, vocally resisting my easy dismissal of it.18



Unsettled Histories


Figure 5.1 The inevitability of settlement: new colonists cross the beach at Otarawairere Bay in the last shot of The Seekers. (Frame enlargement.)

I can’t speak more precisely to the emotional range of responses to the film: as a Paˉkehaˉ and a manuhiri at the marae screenings, and as a sole researcher with a notebook after the theater screenings, it was impossible to have access to or adequately interpret the full range of responses that viewers were having to this film.19 But immersed in this particular research, on this particular film, I was (and am) convinced that oral history and anecdotal responses matter; as Stoler argues, understanding such affective experiences and responses as part of the stuff of colonial encounter and history, and taking them seriously as one of many aspects of exchange, is a necessary corrective to the abstract theorizing of the kind I found myself prone to as I first approached the film. 20 In an essay on the return of taonga to the Ngaˉti Awa people, Jade Tangiaˉhua Baker writes of the initially incongruous responses she received from her own hapu¯ group when researching the context around particular objects (mostly carved items that included weapons and other “curios,” as they were known to their collectors), taken from the area during the raupatu, or confiscation, of Ngaˉti Awa’s



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land in the nineteenth century. Baker found that, while the taonga were held in museums elsewhere, what remained dominant in the memories of her elders was not the taonga themselves but the memories of soldier/collector Gilbert Mair’s behavior in their removal, and of the aggressive land confiscation that made it possible. However, when opportunities were given for hapu¯ to contextualize those taonga through oral genealogies and other kinds of shared knowledge, the connecting tissue between ancestors and objects was restored. Their eventual return went further in diminishing hurt and despondency, while not eliminating them entirely due to the ways in which they were woven into genealogies and histories. Baker likens that process of contextualizing and return to one of casting a new net, he kupenga, which might draw together objects that are themselves actors in the resultant exchange.21 Such a process of recontextualizing was clearly in evidence around the events of these screenings, and it is not unreasonable to think of it as a new process of casting out a net like the one that Baker describes. At Tapuaeharuru marae, elders told stories about the actors and events in the film. One kaumaˉtua, Horowai Hohepa, related that the pig that motivates all the subsequent action—chasing it through the bush, Wayne stumbles on the burial cave—belonged to his kuia, Matahera Waretini, and his job on the film was to hide in the bushes, shake branches, and herd the reluctant pig into frame at just the right moment. Having heard his story, the audience later responded to this fleeting scene in the film with uproarious laughter and talking. Earlier in the day, members of the hapu¯ had organized a driving and boat tour for the Archive’s outreach director and myself, taking us into the forest, out onto Rotoiti, the lake on which several scenes in the film were shot, and showing us around several bays where filming took place. We saw the spot where kuia Matahera’s pig ran into its shot, found the bay where Laya Raki dives from a rock, and later heard stories from those who had thrown in the live fish that she spears in that scene. None of this material exists in any written documentation; it was provided there, in person, on the lake, or on the marae. Drawn together into this new net were tribal stories and “contact” stories: about the lake, the arrival of the hapu¯, aspects of tribal history both ancient and recent, and land claims being adjudicated by the state. The return of this film was thus fostering multidirectional exchanges of knowledge that had begun many years before and, not for the first time in this research, I felt myself to be one minor player in an ongoing encounter with past, present, and future.



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In 2007, while doing research on Hei Tiki and The Seekers at the New Zealand Film Archive, I prepared for my first trip to Whakataˉne to try to see the materials in the district museum, which I knew contained a collection begun by the late secretary of the Whakataˉne and District Historical Society, Mr. H.D. (Jack) London. At the suggestion of the museum’s documentation librarian, I placed an advertisement in the local Whakataˉne paper, thinking that I might find other local people who’d been around in 1954 and might have information about the film. The morning the ad ran, I was still in Wellington, finishing up at the Archive before driving to Whakataˉne; soon my phone was ringing nonstop. I first spoke to a gentleman who, as a fourteen-year-old during the production, opened gates for the buses that transported cast and crew to their location. I learned how another man bulldozed a track through the bush so that the filmmakers’ equipment could be brought to the beach. I heard from a local reporter who’d seen my ad in his paper, and wanted to do a story on my research (“Seeking The Seekers,” he called it, and it brought even more calls). As my list of people to meet grew ever longer, I became increasingly aware that my project was escalating beyond the bounds of the chapter I’d had in my head. I had (naively, it turns out) imagined that, in Whakataˉne, I’d find some more archival material, meet some people with interesting stories to tell, and learn of the film’s impact on the local community in the 1950s. I’d already hunched that locals had connected with the production in interesting ways, but I wasn’t prepared for the “grip of encounter,” to use Tsing’s phrase, that produced this particular film event and into which I, too, would be pushed and pulled by those I met. 22 I remember the exact genealogy of personal encounters by which this research thickened for me, but it’s not important to recount those details here; one introduction led to another introduction, more conversation, and so on. There were many cups of tea and I had to be ready to throw my schedule away. What strikes me in recollection, however, is how the worlds and experiences of the hapu¯ who took part in this film, and the Paˉkehaˉ from the area who were also involved, were discrepant and yet always implicated in each other. At the time of production, as now, histories of land confiscation, differential access to resources and built environments, and the dismantling of iwi sovereignty within the settler state all seemed to



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influence stories of the production and the way the film might be received now. 23 Along with more upbeat conversations with Paˉkehaˉ about how well they got along with Noel Purcell, or their impressions of the production process, I also began to hear stories from tangata whenua that evidenced deep hurt at the casting of Laya Raki as a Maˉori woman. On my last night in town, I was privileged to meet a kuia who spoke with sharp disdain of the casting decision (surely, she asked, the production could have found someone with some Scots, some Irish, even just a little Maˉori in them), but also talked with fondness about British costume manager Julie Harris and her interactions with her; in the elder’s account, Harris stood out as different from the other production personnel, who didn’t really interact with her. As she recounted these stories, I found myself tuning in not just to the words spoken but also to the affect that surrounded them. I realized I was hearing a story told through what was not said directly to me, but was relayed through suggestive gaps and silences. Eventually something of this suggestion was expressed in words: that the production was really not so interested in the lives or culture of the actual Maˉori who populated the film’s location and who were employed to play “themselves” in 1820. Despite the uneven reciprocity in these production encounters, however, she and others around her still felt drawn to be involved. The following year, in Rotorua, one kaumaˉtua I spoke with explained how he had willingly embraced the production (he helped organize the Maˉori extras who appeared in the scenes around the geysers at Tikitere): “It was something we felt was going to take us further afield, you know, we had that excitement about . . . something Maˉori going to the whole world. We thought it was probably just to the English world because of the name of the firm [Rank] . . . but we always thought at least England, our mother country, would be interested.” Transcribed thus, Mr. Daniels’s last comment fails to register the good-humored but heavily ironic tone with which he referred to “our mother country,” nor the infectious laughter that came with it. The Rank unit arrived as representatives of “the mother country” within a world of settlers and tangata whenua whose affiliations to empire were vexed: for settlers, deep connection was mixed with settler nationalism that distinguished itself from a British heritage; for Maˉori, colonialism had not ended with dominion or nation status for this new settler society but was rather an ongoing concern. A British film unit arriving to make a narrative about colonization of the country, using extras who were descended from those colonizers and colonized, was undoubtedly entering an unsettled space. I arrived into this



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deep network of dense and conflicting affiliations, as present now as in the moment of the film’s making, as a Pakeˉhaˉ who’d left New Zealand over a decade earlier and now returned under the affiliation of an American university on the other edge of the Pacific. Connected to my own insider/outsider status was another irony: I became the researcher with the laptop computer and the copy of the film, discussing scenes with people whose relatives were represented but who hadn’t seen the images in fifty years—or, in some cases, ever. This disparity of access became troubling. Paˉkehaˉ, as much or more than Maˉori, had pressed the issue of exhibition too: many phone calls I got were simply to ask why the film hadn’t screened in fifty years, where it was, and whether I could help to get it screened again. As I left town, then, the elements of my project began to multiply. One immediate outcome was to help initiate and support further Maˉori research into iwi and hapu¯ connections with the film, 24 another was to approach the Film Archive with an idea: what about a screening?

Rank, Kerridge, and Extending the Empire. To understand the ways that people responded to this film in 2008, we need to get to its origins. The Seekers was shot in Eastmancolor and was the first color film to be made in New Zealand. In producing the film in color, George H. Brown and the J. Arthur Rank Organisation adhered to the same principle that Merian Cooper and John Ford attempted to adopt in their planned Technicolor productions in former British colonies. In many scenes, the film emphasizes the visual spectacle of landscape and the “exotic-ness” of Maˉori bodies and material culture. From the outset, moreover, the film adheres to the techniques Cooper developed in The Four Feathers, cutting together location shooting from New Zealand with scenes and shots conducted in Rank’s Pinewood Studios, in England. An opening credit sequence, for example, uses a scenic montage shot during a lengthy tour of New Zealand after the other location shooting was finished, but quickly moves back to the soundstage to introduce Hongi Tepe to the viewer. From there, the cutting between location and studio is fairly constant between and even within scenes. Brown’s initial location scouting is described in a lengthy article he wrote for a popular magazine; the copy I consulted had no identifying information, but is contained in a scrapbook kept by a Whakataˉne resident. In it, Brown creates a colorful description of his own travel



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to prepare for the film and, through his rhetoric, we find ourselves back in the terrain of Cooper and Schoedsack’s intrepid travels, or Markey’s opening montage sequence, or any number of other colonial films and narratives that offer colorful descriptions of intrepid journeys through spectacular foreign landscapes. 25 Eventually it is an aerial perspective, later mimicked in the film’s own scenic tour, that allows Brown to find his special location—one that appears as a secluded bay never-before-seen by white men, but which (by dint of New Zealand’s settler colonial history) was in fact located right next to an existing “little township on which a [film] Unit could be based and serviced.”26 In Brown’s description, the settler society exists as settled and available for the practical needs of a film shoot, providing a cultural and material infrastructure modeled on Britain’s that could sustain a visiting English company, while also offering sufficient “wildness” to ensure its visibility within an imperial register of exotic landscape. The former colony’s doubleness—at once the exotic, wild, dramatic landscape of discovery and the settled landscape of a “Better Britain”—is exploited in the production and mise-en-scène of this film. The Seekers was consistent with Rank’s general emphasis in the 1950s and early 1960s on color films in exotic, foreign locations. Having crawled its way back to profitability after a disastrous end to the 1940s, the Rank Organisation found its films achieving good box office returns by 1954, the year of The Seekers. By that time, according to Geoffrey Macnab, “Rank’s pictures were doing better abroad than ever before. Over half their overall receipts were coming from foreign markets” and much of the world was “warming to Pinewood fare.”27 While “investing in the ‘exotic,’ in international epics,” Rank also found itself “attempting to emulate Korda’s success of the mid-1930s with adventures set in the British colonies,” often using Eastmancolor and imperial history and themes. 28 While The Seekers thus exemplified Arthur Rank’s desire for overseas production, his company was also dedicated to distribution; for example, Rank’s Eagle Lion company distributed Ealing’s Australian films in the United Kingdom and Watt and Balcon’s plans for an Australian production center in part relied upon the prospect of continued Eagle Lion/Rank distribution. At the time of The Seekers, then, Rank shared Balcon’s optimism for exploiting the empire market. Though Rank did not attempt a New Zealand or Australian production base in the same organized way as Ealing, his studio did use its distribution contacts in New Zealand and Britain’s imperial connections to the country to further its production aims, drawing on cooperation



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from the New Zealand government, the department of Maˉori Affairs, and the N.Z. High Commission. Rank had already acquired a financial interest in the Kerridge theaters, owned by New Zealand’s only cinema mogul, R. J. Kerridge, and had bought into theater chains in Canada, Australia, Cairo, South Africa, and the West Indies. 29 Thus Rank was firmly entwined with imperial interests and locations, even in a period in which the dominions had nominal independence. Rank’s interest in empire was more than financial; it was articulated as an inspirational theme in the publicity material for The Seekers. A souvenir program from the film’s New Zealand premiere contains forewords from Rank and Kerridge that disclose some of the ideological stakes of the film’s project. Rank writes, “The British Commonwealth of Nations is one of the greatest human achievements in history. It has always been my wish to bring to the screen stories of the high courage and purpose which lie behind that achievement. The spirit which inspired the growth of the great Dominions, which transformed vast wildernesses into rich territories, demands stories as bold as those pioneers who left their native lands more than a century ago.” Rank even goes so far as to explicitly link his production crew to the British settlers who preceded them: “In a sense, they were pioneers too, for this is the first feature film in colour ever to have been made on New Zealand soil.”30 Kerridge joined in the fanfare of the film’s release by declaring “the filming of John Guthrie’s novel of pre-Colonisation days . . . [to be] an event of unique significance for this Dominion.” The use of the term “dominion” here simultaneously expresses a modicum of national independence while also yoking the country back into empire. In this foreword Kerridge emphasizes not the possibility of a home-grown film industry, but rather of the continued accessibility of the country for overseas productions that might “realise the magnificent material available here.” At the same time, however, he praises the film’s concern for authenticity and the positive effects of its reliance on the government and its agencies. Certainly Kerridge, as an exhibitor, found himself in the situation of other exhibitors in Australia and New Zealand; they seemed less committed to a thriving local film industry than to maintaining their potential to show the most popular productions from Hollywood or, if they could compete, Britain. But the ambivalence built into his foreword—as he expresses a nationalist pride in geography and culture along with an active identification with Rank as “the first to realise our unrivalled potential in story material and scenic grandeur”—is expressive of the contradictions of a cinematic settler coloniality, split between affiliation with British



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imperial interests, a rhetoric of national particularity, the knowledge of its continuing colonial control over tangata whenua, and the reality of Hollywood and U.S. interests looming everywhere. Such imperial intentions and colonial contradictions are readily visible in the film’s narrative and mise-en-scène. After the opening sequences of spectacular landscape already mentioned, the film continues to utilize other dramatic settings too. Wayne and Clark scramble up a bank as they first arrive on shore, and we cut to a shot of them approaching a gigantic tree whose girth and height overwhelms the two men. Later we cut away from the studio-shot scene of their cabin and its environs to a shot of open pasture with white peaks in the background. (Audiences who saw the film in 2008 invariably laughed at these sequences. The first shows the famed kauri tree Taˉne Maˉhuta, named for a Maˉori god of the forest, located several hundred kilometers north of the previous shot’s location. The other shows the scenery of the alpine foothills of the South Island, even further from the film’s Bay of Plenty [North Island] location shooting.) The geysers and mudpools of Tikitere and the Rotorua area are also successfully exploited in several action sequences, as well as the rapids at Aratiatia, between Taupo and Rotorua. Scenic beauty thus reminds the viewer of the grand possibilities that invited imperial vision; the wild “fury” of the geography hints at the radical otherness of its native “people of the land”; shots of fenced pasture or of Wayne plowing the land suggest the transformations attainable by settler labor. Kerridge affirmed all these possibilities in his foreword, and also invoked “the merging of the Maori and European people into one democracy with equal political rights, mutual understanding and similar opportunity.” It is exactly this sentiment that is expressed in the film’s final shots, as Hongi Tepe adopts the young settler boy and carries him into the bush, and as the film’s narrative closure is rendered as a further colonization by more and more settlers, with Maˉori standing to the side of the frame, passively watching them arrive. As the shot continues, the Maˉori men disappear completely from the frame, as if to further clinch the certainty of “The End.” It is easy to see why most criticism of the film within a New Zealand context (and there has been relatively little) dwells on its representational qualities, including its deployment of landscape and its equation of a geothermal geography with an indigenous and primeval life that colonialism was to correct. 31 In an early scene, once the men have been taken to Hongi Tepe’s village, they are introduced to the chief’s ailing father (played by Maharaia Winiata), who declares that the two Paˉkehaˉ with their “stranger’s knowledge” will bring peace to



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the warring tribes. Thus the film lends itself to a relatively straightforward reading as an apology for colonialism, an expression of pride for British imperial history combined with a paternalistic view of a Maˉori culture as proud and noble yet able to be modernized and pacified. 32 But, as my earlier stories about the 2008 screenings suggest, I want to argue that it is possible to approach this film differently, in a way that respects its textuality along with its frustrating distortions and liberties. As Simmons argues, there is room to see cracks in the film’s textual surface, places where its colonial rhetoric seems to be challenged by other aspects of its discourse. 33 Yet when we move away from a perspective that rests only with representation and narrative, we may productively see other things that embed the film more firmly in a local context while simultaneously revealing its placement within a transnational, not just a binaristically imperial, mode. In part, such an approach will destabilize the directionality of flows that is assumed when we discuss the film as a “British production,” an “offshore production,” or a “foreign vision” of New Zealand. Such simplistic categories do not respect the complex transnationality of settler culture; they cannot account for a film like The Seekers and its place in local worlds. But in thinking more widely about the film, “looking past the screen” as Lewis and Smoodin put it, 34 we may be better placed to understand this film in the context of New Zealand in the 1950s, at its moment and place of production, and to think of its roles and uses now, in another present.

Traveling Cultures: Casting The Seekers George Brown’s initial preparations for the film took place in Britain and then New Zealand, working to secure locations and principal actors and extras before shooting began. In New Zealand, he received the cooperation of the New Zealand Film Unit in setting up screen tests, the department of Maˉori Affairs in reading his script, and had a representative visit local teachers’ training colleges to look for Maˉori actors for the key roles. This recruitment yielded Patrick Warbrick, Eddie Baker, and Tony Erstich, who all went to Britain to join the rest of the cast assembled there at Pinewood Studios. Meeting them was Maharaia Winiata, who is credited as “technical advisor” on the film (his role was, in effect, a cultural advisor) and also had a small acting role as Hongi Tepe’s father. Two key figures, however, proved more difficult to find: a Maˉori man for the part of Hongi Tepe, and



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a young Maˉori woman to play his wife, Moana. Newspaper clippings and promotional material from the time stress that Brown looked far and wide while in New Zealand to find someone for the part of Moana, “the temptress whom the white settler cannot resist,”35 who was to perform an erotic dance and later seduce Jack Hawkins’s character. Brown suggested that it was the “extreme modesty and reticence of Maˉori women, an admirable quality in private life” that caused their reluctance. Certainly many I spoke to in the Whakataˉne area confirmed that assessment, saying that no Maˉori woman would have taken the role as scripted. Brown, therefore, looked to Britain for some of his actors and, in the process, his production engaged with the translocal cultures of Maˉori who were already making their own relationship to empire, away from the site of first contact. That is, the encounter between Rank/Brown and Maˉori culture did not simply set a metropolitan, imperial, and mobilized British force in relation to a static, “traditional,” and bounded culture located only within Aotearoa/New Zealand. Within the film’s diegesis, the Maˉori world appears as some kind of fantastic and static culture of rituals and objects, producing strange mystical tohunga, sultry maidens, preserved heads, and ornate carvings. Maˉori are homogeneous and utterly located and defined by place, whereas the English are seen to be mobile, modern, and eminently adaptable to their new surroundings. In reality, however, Brown was engaging a culture that was already expert in traveling; whose narratives, genealogies, and histories were shaped in more complex ways than his film ever suggested; and whose lived reality in the 1950s was not static. The actor whom Brown eventually found for the part of Hongi Tepe was Inia Te Wiata, affiliated to Ngaˉti Raukawa and raised in Otaki, who was a member of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London. In New Zealand, Te Wiata had been a teenage chorister and toured New Zealand and Australia with a Methodist Maori Mission choir in the 1930s. He then became a carver, but left for London in 1947 to attend Trinity College, and then went on to have a long and successful opera career, touring widely especially in the dominions, and remaining based in London until his death in 1971. 36 Others who took part came from “Ngati Raˉnana,” then a collective colloquialism for the Maˉori who resided in “Raˉnana” or London. 37 A photograph of the assembled London cast appeared in the New Zealand Maˉori magazine, Te Ao Hou, in 1954, and shows a group of about twenty-five Maˉori men and women grouped in front of a Maˉori meeting house constructed for the film. The caption, which lists names, home towns, or districts



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in New Zealand and iwi affiliations, also explains: “the Maori and other New Zealanders in the group were engaged while following other occupations during their stay in Great Britain. Most of the women are either teaching or nursing, while the men are studying or teaching and holidaying in England. The period spent in Britain so far is from a few months to over two years. All the members of the group have also spent varying periods on the Continent.”38 Included among this cosmopolitan cluster of figures is Maharaia Winiata, by then completing his dissertation at the University of Edinburgh to become the first Maˉori to obtain a PhD from overseas. Winiata was an honored and accomplished teacher, educational administrator, Methodist minister, broadcaster, and author who, after completing his PhD, was active in Maˉori community affairs in New Zealand and who also, in the words of his biographers, “travelled to America, The Philippines and China to visit universities, communes and child care centers, and to the Tibetan orders to find societies comparable to that of the Maori.”39 Also in the same photograph appear Te Waari (Joe) Ward-Holmes, from Takaka, Makarini (Mac) Hata, of ˉ poˉtiki, and Te Manu (Pat) Rawiri, from Ruatahuna; together with O Henare Gilbert the men were part of “The Maˉori Quartet,” the first Maˉori entertainers to travel overseas, according to Te Ao Hou, which profiled them in 1963. In addition to their work in The Seekers, the group performed at a Royal Command Performance, toured Europe, and after splitting up there, furthered individual careers in West and East Germany and in the United States; the article makes special note of Gilbert’s German wife and Ward-Holmes’s Danish fiancée.40 The Seekers at Pinewood Studios, then, was not simply an exercise in colonial exploitation of a static and homogeneous race. Rank was certainly able to exploit the fact that there was an existent colonial relationship with New Zealand that would ensure that London remained a familiar stopping off point for New Zealanders of all ethnicities and iwi affiliations pursuing an “O.E.” (just as it was the destination for other colonials deciding to try life in “the center”).41 But aside from the London-New Zealand axis as a historical fact (one that, after all, also gave the story material for the film) what is more striking is the mobility of those Maˉori who the film employed, their dynamic presence as a “traveling culture,” to use Clifford’s phrase.42 Clifford has suggested that Western ethnography, in developing its ideas of fieldwork, has often mistakenly written of cultures as if they were bounded entities to which the ethnographer could travel and in which she or he could then “dwell” as participant observer, before returning to somewhere named “home.” Such a model, which Clifford



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argues has come under pressure from multiple directions, is something like a model of location shooting for a producer like Rank: production team travels from imperial metropolis to the colony, shoots its film about and amongst the “natives,” and returns home to edit its findings. Except here those “natives” were already in transit, already part of the fabric of the metropolitan center that the Empire’s subjects were transforming in the 1950s. Clifford points out that such mobilities do not exist in some kind of deterriotorialized fantasy world; “this is not nomadology,” he cautions, and his writing is attendant to the ways that travel, transplantation, displacement, and movement occur for varieties of reasons both chosen and forced.43 But his argument is instructive for the ways that it reminds us that out of such movements are fostered “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”: modalities of culture, travel, and belonging that are discrepant for being differently placed. Such an understanding, he argues, shows that “in such a perspective, the notion that certain classes of people are cosmopolitan (travelers) while the rest are local (natives) appears as the ideology of one (very powerful) traveling culture [the West or, here, Britain].”44 If the film did not engage a single homogenous “Maˉori” population in Britain, nor did it do so when it moved to location shooting in New Zealand. By moving between locations and finding extras in each place, the film brought into its fictional world a range of iwi and hapu¯ affiliations.

“That Raki Woman” While the recruitment of Laya Raki, a German-Javanese dancer, further internationalized the production, it alienated many Maˉori. Along with Jack Hawkins and Noel Purcell, Laya Raki (real name Brunhilde Jörns) traveled to New Zealand for the location shooting and spent about ten days living in the Whakataˉne Hotel, before departing with the rest of the cast and crew for Rotorua. Her casting was the single most jarring feature of the film for most New Zealanders, especially but not exclusively Maˉori, and negative reactions continue to this day among those who I have met and interviewed in the course of this research. For many Maˉori, such negativity seems to have been experienced not just as distaste but as an insult or form of hurt.45 Opinions about Laya Raki are multifaceted and respond to many different aspects of the film event: its production decisions (casting a foreign woman instead of a Maˉori), her conduct around the set as an actress (which caused both consternation and excitement), and her



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performance in the film (a highly eroticized dance before her village and the two British visitors). The dance is central to many negative opinions of the film and especially to those that express concern about its representation of Maˉori life and culture. Paradoxically, as I argue above, the dance scene has also functioned as a mechanism to enable some New Zealand viewers (both Maˉori and Paˉkehaˉ) to disengage from the diegesis, resituating their own viewing position and making the film anew as a cultural and social object. It is worth considering the dance scene in some detail so as to better understand contemporary responses to the film and its production, and to better assess the legacy of Laya Raki for this film’s present-day exhibition. Laya Raki’s dance occupies a scene approximately sixteen minutes into the film. After Wayne and Clark have been introduced to Hongi Tepe and his father, they are seated outside with the tribe arranged around them, along with a group of cloaked figures who are purportedly prisoners from the rival Apiti tribe (we discover later these are mokomokai on poles, made up to look like prisoners).46 Hongi Tepe’s men begin singing and chanting as Moana (Laya Raki) appears, clad in a piupiu—a type of skirt with a woven waistband and pencil-thin lengths of suspended, dried flax—and a feathered, strapless, and backless brassiere. Moana’s dance then begins and continues for about two minutes, during which she runs around the perimeter of warrior men, waving her arms, shaking her upper body, and often falling to the ground to gyrate before the men. The camera usually holds her in long shot (consistent with showing her bare legs, exposed by the movements of the piupiu) although she often lunges toward it, especially as the pace of the music picks up and the dance becomes more overtly erotic; she shakes her hair and breasts in medium shot framing. Despite the way that the dance is motivated within the narrative, as a traditional practice to insult an enemy (“it’s one of their customs,” explains Paddy Clark), neither the choreography nor its musical accompaniment offers anything related to Maˉori cultural practice, with the exception of some brief hand movements before the dance proper begins.47 While there is substantial evidence to show that many other aspects of the film were motivated by a desire for authenticity,48 it is equally clear that this particular facet of the film was not. Rather, the dance and a later scene in which Moana dives naked into a lake, spears a fish, and emerges from the water with her breasts bared, were included for their erotic appeal.49 While the spearfishing scene is devoid of any visible signs of Maˉori material culture within the frame, Moana’s earlier dance sequence is embedded within a scene



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of paˉ life with an abundance of Maˉori cultural signifiers: the elaborately carved whares or houses, paˉtaka or food storage houses in the distance, korowai or feather cloaks placed on the mokomokai “prisoners,” and other props and aspects of setting create the illusion of a densely Maˉori world. It is this scene, not the naked swimming, which remains most remarked upon in New Zealand. Within the codes of mainstream cinema as Mulvey analyzes them, erotic performances such as Moana’s dance typically result in an unbroken suture between viewer and spectacle, offering moments of scopophilic pleasure in which the body is on display for the presumptive heterosexual male viewer.50 But in this scene, as opposed to the earlier one that focalizes the viewer’s desire for her through the protagonist’s look, Laya Raki often addresses the camera directly, seemingly staring straight at the viewer as she rushes into the frame. This direct look to the camera decisively breaks the illusion of a self-contained diegetic world that Hollywood-style cinema generally strives to maintain. One consequence of that fracture, I argue, is a suggestion that the film does not or cannot coherently represent a Maˉori world; Raki effectively winks at the audience to signal that the dance is an artifice, disrupting narrative cohesion and credibility. Simmons perceives similar fractures elsewhere in the film, such as the sequence where Wayne ventures out on a surveying expedition and becomes himself the object of a female gaze, as Moana stalks him.51 Yet whatever textual instability we might identify in this film (that is itself about a geography cracked and fissured, with geysers and boiling mudpools threatening to swallow up its characters), its textual discourse becomes more fully destabilized by the activity of actual viewers. Whether on account of Maˉori cultural knowledge or simply an understanding of local geography, a situated and culturally informed viewing position makes the colonial politics of this film easily visible and, for many, opens the film up to resistance, ridicule, or revision. Reviewers in the 1950s were generally astute at recognizing its politics; along with positive reviews, the film received criticism. One review of the film’s Wellington premiere noted both sides of the coin, saying that “Prominent Maori leaders, among them Guide Rangi, of Rotorua, were critical of some of the scenes in the film, and praised others,” but the dance was singled out for its “foreign, gesticulating” qualities.52 Then, as now, some viewers have perceived it as indicative of imperial attitudes and a willful lack of respect for Maˉori culture. Moving from the dance, however, to historical material on the film’s production in local areas, we can realize a fuller sense of how the film



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Laya’s Legacy I have begun to argue that Laya Raki’s address to the camera in the dance scene must be read in tandem with the wider discourse of materials that the film’s production generated. Taking account of the wealth of material around the actress—some of it published, some of it ephemeral, some of it oral history—more clearly identifies the causes of the hurt that accompanied her casting, her behavior off the set, and her performance. Laya Raki was well known to Bay of Plenty and New Zealand viewers by the time of the film’s release, thanks to her appearances in newspapers and popular magazines. Whakataˉne stories during the production period focused on her looks and scanty costume on set, her heavily accented English, and occasionally on the frustration felt by her costars, on account of her behavior. One newspaper reported that “her manner was friendly with everyone on the beach, and she quickly became a ‘pet’ with the crowds.”53 She also became a “pet” for many readers with her pin-up image (in magazines like New Zealand Pictorial, Australia’s People, and Picturegoer) collected by many readers in New Zealand. People ran a three-page profile story on Raki titled, “A Siren With No Boyfriend,” which referred to her as “a sultry dish”54 and included a picture of Raki seated on a log, wearing the costume from her infamous dance (a piupiu that falls away to reveal the entire length of her legs, and the feather brassiere), one leg propped up and grinning at the camera.55 A New Zealand Pictorial spread included eight pictures of Raki, four of them in Seekers dance costume, and described “her 36-23-36 nearlynaked figure . . . [and] sultry, broken English.”56 Many articles also seemed to bow to public standards of morality by mentioning her staid habits after she finished on the set and her lack of a boyfriend. The People story referred to above (which helpfully provides guidance as to the pronunciation of her name—“it rhymes with ‘buy a car key’ ”) suggests that “her day-to-day pattern of living is in contrast to her seductive appearance, a chaste and kittenish contradiction of the sensuous image her public knows.”57 While articles like these helped construct her for a public, her own behavior on and off set still prompts immediate conversation fifty



takes shape as an example of a settler cinema, placed within the imperial circuits initiated by its British producers but embedded, too, in a more complex landscape in which tangata whenua and settlers alike made, and continue to make, discrepant meanings.

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years on. Cherry King (née Merritt), who was Glynis John’s stand-in for the New Zealand shooting, was the first of many people to tell me that Laya Raki, while staying at the Whakataˉne Hotel, “gave a little free show every day . . . she used to stand up at the window with nothing on, and of course all the chaps would be lined up watching her!”58 One gentleman recalled that as teenagers, he and his friends used to refer to Laya Raki as “Lie-awake-y” on account of her effect on them; this nickname was evidently wider than just his peer group, since I heard it from others too. One resident mentioned that city council trucks would regularly make a stop outside the hotel in case she came to the window, and another described Raki sunbathing on the roof of the hotel (visible from some of the higher vantage points of the town, such as the large hill behind the main business area), or walking out to the front of the hotel to greet her male admirers. Despite the enthusiastic embrace of her flirtatious behavior by male residents of Whakataˉne, there was an equally strong negative reaction to her presence, since everyone knew her purpose there was to play a Maˉori woman in the film. Importantly, at the time of the location shooting in January 1954, no one in the town had seen the dance that was to appear in the finished film and which had already been shot at Pinewood; there is no reporting of it around those dates in local papers, and any knowledge of it would have been passed on as hearsay or by the producers. Thus the negative opinions expressed fifty years later about her presence, while they may have been amplified later by knowledge of the dance, were primarily impressions gained by her actions on and off set in Whakataˉne. Many expressed that Laya Raki’s behavior was not appropriate, that she did not represent Maˉori well, even that her presence was destructive, as one man put it during the Whakataˉne screenings. Cherry King told me, “I thought it was wrong, I really did . . . . She didn’t behave like a Maori at all, not at all [either in character, or as an actor on the set] . . . I didn’t think she portrayed Maori at all as they should have been.” At the same time, Cherry also deferred any anger about this, saying, “but it wasn’t my business” and others I have spoken with offered similar comments, along the lines of “you didn’t make a fuss in those days, you just got involved.” For many Maˉori at that time, there seemed not to be a space into which to offer a critique. The Laya Raki episode is instructive for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the way that a set of production relations, a performance, and an instance of textual form can together create friction in the traffic between an imperial power and its former colony, now



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a settler society that is itself structured by uneven relations between white settler subjects and indigenous Maˉori. As we have seen, this combination of forces, in the form of specific filmic encounters, contains the potential for significant hurt that continues to this day and that has come to define the film for some, whether or not they have seen it. Yet I also suggested above that the dance itself, in its rupture of the narrative and its clearly gratuitous nature, has provided space for different outcomes too, as spectators renegotiate its importance to the film. These encounters around film, star, and production together constitute a site of “friction” in the sense that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has developed the word, using it to signal the potential for “the messy and surprising features of . . . encounters across difference” to reveal the “unexpected and unstable aspects of global interaction.”59 The Laya Raki affair generated texts, objects, and memories that share something of the unpredictability evinced in Tsing’s phrase. Some of these texts take us well beyond the predictability of the film’s colonial politics and suggest other ways that the film became part of a world of settlers and tangata whenua. It is not necessary to celebrate such encounters or read them as always subversive in order to appreciate the manner in which they brought this supposedly foreign production into a settler cinematic terrain. Laya Raki’s casting, performance, and physical presence was only one cluster of encounters among many in the film, and the leftovers of these encounters—both in the realm of affective relations and the realm of physical objects—form a domain of analysis that is crucial in assessing the film’s place in the settler colonial cultural context of Aotearoa/New Zealand in the 1950s and today.

Intimate Traces When the Seekers’s advance unit came to Whakataˉne in December 1953, Cherry Merritt was eighteen years old. She had had some acting experience in a local theater company, and when the call went out for extras, props, and assistance for the film, her father, James Te Mautaranui Merritt, who worked for the Department of Maˉori Affairs, suggested that she volunteer to play Glynis Johns’s double. Our first meeting and conversation about the film took place in 2007 over an album of photographs that Cherry kept of the production. These were mostly small, wallet-sized prints and covered a range of subjects and locations. Most of them were taken by amateurs, something made clear in the canted framings and hasty



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Figure 5.2 Launching a waka at Wairaka during production of The Seekers. Courtesy of Mrs. Cherry King and Te Iwi o Ngaˉti Awa.

composition of the images. Figure 5.2, for example, shows a waka being launched into the Whakataˉne River, near the old Army Hall that used to stand at the waterfront at Wairaka. As a group of men handles the waka, more stand on the wharf to watch. Another is taken from halfway up a bank at Otarawairere Bay, the rocks at the eastern end of the bay and the horizon lying at a 45-degree angle to the edge of the frame. A group of people in everyday clothing arrays the bank, everyone’s eyeline pointing to the two male stars, Hawkins and Purcell, who stand near a flax bush waiting for their call. The picture is one of many that offer the traces of what became a familiar scene; New Zealanders on holiday at the popular beach ˉ hope, around the headland from Otarawairere Bay, arriving in at O droves to look at the film production taking place. Early January was a time when almost all local businesses and schools were closed for Christmas holidays. The weather was hot (although changeable; it was the rainiest summer in many years) and people came out to see the stars and take pictures. These snaps turned up all over the area—as I conducted my research in 2007 and 2008 I often came across the same photos in different personal collections. A former photographer’s assistant I met admitted she used to print extra copies of any shots she fancied when they came into her shop, friends shared photos and forgot where they came from, and these multiplying images went far and wide.



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While many of the photos that local people still have in their possession do contain pictures of identifiable figures, the owners of the photos did not always know who they were; many of these pictures are, in this sense, orphaned and few that I saw contained images of, or by, the owner. Cherry’s photos, however, are different because although she does not always recall the photographer, many of the pictures do contain her image. One, for example, shows her alone and in costume waiting in the local army hall (which became a dressing room during the shooting), another with Jack Hawkins and Noel Purcell, Hawkins with his arm on her shoulder; another with Tony Erstich and an unidentified Maˉori extra who plays a chief; and, in two of the best photos of her album, sitting with Laya Raki. These last two images are not only two of the best framed, exposed, or preserved prints, they are also two of the most interesting pieces of ephemera that the “friction” of the film’s production produced. The photos are the only extant images from the production that show Laya Raki out of costume; here her casual strapless top, medium-length skirt, and heeled sandals are the clothes of a fashionable twenty-something in the 1950s, completely different from the costume that drew the promotional photographers and inspired the scores of amateur on-location snaps (many of which exist as a common denominator in the albums of Whakataˉne residents and collectors). One of the two pictures shows Laya Raki looking down, unaware of the photographer, as Cherry faces the camera and smiles somewhat self-consciously, looking every bit a teenager on an adventure. The other (figure 5.3) shows both women laughing and looking out of frame to the left. Cherry’s dress is pushed up to her knees, matching the line of Laya Raki’s skirt, her grin is as radiant as the star’s, and she looks comfortable and at home. The image is striking for the way it shows an awkward but parallel set of possibilities. Cherry, a fair-skinned Maˉori, had to have her hair bleached so that she could be the double for Glynis Johns, the white English actress. Here she sits to the right of the film’s female star, a GermanJavanese woman who was playing a Maˉori. In the film, each passes for someone she is not, but here the mise-en-scène of the picture seems to tell a different story. The photograph documents a meeting that produced an intimacy of encounter, where the tauiwi or foreigner is brought into contact with the young woman who is Ngaˉti Awa, local to the very place in which they are sitting (and even named for a small grove of cherry trees found just meters from where the photo is taken).60 Her poised, comfortable look, radiant



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Figure 5.3 Laya Raki and Cherry King (née Merritt) on location at Otarawairere Bay during production of The Seekers. Courtesy of Mrs. Cherry King and Te Iwi o Ngaˉti Awa.

smile, and bare feet, which seem appropriate to the foreshore setting, make Cherry, not Laya Raki, the center of this image. In her photo album, the picture is surrounded by others that record relatives or people local to the area; Jack Hawkins and Noel Purcell appear in one photo, but the other four document local people. This album of photos, then, produced in the friction of contact that the



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film provoked, records the encounter with the infamous star and her film, but changes the terms.

Other documents also make narratives of encounter that signify beyond their ostensible contents, revealing the affective dimensions of the Seekers experience. The Whakataˉne and District Historical Society played a central role in the production, largely on account of its founding secretary, Jack London, a local historian with an encyclopedic knowledge of area history and the respect to recruit volunteers. London kept a scrapbook relating to The Seekers, mostly documenting the unit’s time in Whakataˉne and the Bay of Plenty area, but also including reviews of the film, correspondence with the cast and crew after they returned to England, and a short obituary for Jack Hawkins, who died in 1973. London’s scrapbook is now held in the Whakataˉne District Museum. It offers us two distinct uses: first, it is a container of information invaluable to any historian of The Seekers or life in Whakataˉne, detailing many aspects of the production. For example, an early clipping pasted into it, from the local daily the Bay of Plenty Beacon in December 1953, relates the arrival of the advance production unit who were to prepare the sets for the later arrival of camera crew and stars. “Two Harassed Men Want Your Help” recounts a meeting between London, other local figures, and two Rank staff members: Frank S. Green, production manager, and Maurice G. Carter, the art director for the film, who were requesting immediate assistance in locating props and extras for the production. The article clearly suggests the novelty of the event for the town, explaining the filmmaking process and its hitherto unknown nomenclature and procedures: Mr. Green told them that shooting started in England on October 16, and he passed around “stills” of certain scenes to give an idea of the “properties” required to be found locally, because those in the stills must be faithfully reproduced in the shooting at Otarawairere Bay . . . . And, of course, the colours must be right, because they must be replicas of colours in the original articles photographed in colour at the English studios two months ago. A nice, easy business, this film business, isn’t it?61

In addition to suggesting something about the gap in practical knowledge that had to be overcome, news articles like this serve as a clue to



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a myriad of other small encounters, giving key dates, locations, and personnel. Others, for example, list the many props that eventually were secured: three waka, or Maˉori canoes, one of them the replica of the Maˉtaatua waka that had brought Ngaˉti Awa ancestors to the area; sails that were woven from flax by Dr. Miria Simpson, beer kegs (which were sourced from the local hotel and still bore its initials as they were rolled into one shot),62 as well as cloaks and other items. Yet to read these articles in London’s scrapbook is a different matter than finding them in the newspapers’ archives. The story quoted above exists within its own mise-en-scène, as a clipping pasted onto a page with handwritten capitals neatly printed above it, saying, “the start of it all!!” London’s marginalia prompts us to see the scrapbook in a different perspective, then. No longer a simple container for factual information, it is more than a transparent medium for the display of news stories. Following Amelie Hastie’s discussion of Colleen Moore’s scrapbooks, we might better understand London’s scrapbook to be its own act of collection and recollection, creating a text that deserves analysis in its own right. In London’s case, one might find it unsurprising if the book’s future reader was assumed to be an archivist or historian, and if its marginal notes were thus information or editorial in nature. But London’s marginal comments and inclusions suggest otherwise—they are personal, intimate, and expressive, telling of relationships forged with stars and production personnel and of longings for future contact and reciprocity. His comments, even the selection and arrangement of his clippings, make of his book an object “invested with affect and history,” as Hastie writes of Moore’s scrapbooks, “designed for rediscovery either by the subject herself or by a future reader.”63 London’s notes often take the form of a kind of imagined dialogue, either inserting the narrator/writer into the events of the page, or creating dialogue for one of the “characters” thus created in the scrapbook drama. For example, several clippings relate to the way the male stars, Hawkins and Purcell, often took to fishing when they were not employed on set. One news story, covering the shooting of swimming scenes at Aratiatia rapids, has a photograph of Patrick Warbrick and Noel Purcell, each sitting on a rock with water all around them; Purcell looks tired and dejected. Next to the picture is written: “Q. What’s the matter, Noel? Fishing no good? A. Naa. It’s that blasted Raki woman again!!” Another news clipping from the same location shows Maurice Carter, the art director, squatting in the water, clad only in shorts, as Hawkins and Erstich swim toward them in a shot from the film. Next to Carter’s picture is written, “Poor old Maurice Carter. What a cold he had for days after!!” Later, in a section of the scrapbook devoted to



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reviews of the film, is a heading “Now for the Critics!” and, when a negative review is pasted, the annotation, “His wife must have served him a cold dinner! It isn’t Whakataˉne’s opinion.” Further on, however, we discover that there is a very particular set of readers intended for the scrapbook—the producers and crew of the film at Pinewood Studios. It is likely that not all the marginalia were necessarily intended for this audience, and it seems unreasonable to think that the scrapbook was even compiled with them in mind; after all, London’s note to the producers asks for them to return the book when they have read it. But these three pages in the Seekers scrapbook beautifully reveal its multifaceted function as an aide-memoire and as something with affective significance. The first page has its own title, “Memory Holds the Door,” an approximation of the title of British politician and writer John Buchan’s memoir, Memory Hold-the-Door (in the United States, Pilgrim’s Way). The page is addressed, “Dear Julie [Harris, costume director] Frank [Green, production manager], Maurice [Carter, art director] and all ‘the Gang’ at Pinewood Studios: This is my scrap book of a memorable occasion. I hope you will all enjoy perusing its pages before returning it to me for deposit amongst the records of the Historical Society. Yours sincerely—Jack London.” The page seems to have been taken from an autograph book, and uses boxes on the left to contain London’s comments to individual crew members, and boxes for their replies to the right. London has penned personal notes to several of the staff, recalling a Christmas Eve spent shopping for coat-hangers with Julie Harris, eating a Christmas lunch of cheese and pickled onions on the wharf with Frank Green and Maurice Carter, or ribbing the latter about a flirtation he seems to have had with “a certain lady [who] keeps asking after you.” Others have added their comments too, including one person who writes: “The enterprise of your Company, per medium of The Seekers, has done more for Whakatane than Whakatane was able to do for you, we thank you all.” Jack London’s scrapbook was not the only affective text to be generated from this production. His autographed copy of Guthrie’s novel also offers a sense of the relationships forged through the film production and of the ways in which encounters were sustained. London’s copy of the book, currently held by a local book collector, includes fond inscriptions from the key cast and crew, and even a drawing of a waka like one of those used in the film. Another copy of the novel, owned by a different collector, is inscribed with the name of its former owner, Joy Parker, and the comments there not only reveal her role in the production (she was evidently a costume and laundry



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assistant) but also offer traces of the intimacy developed between visitors and locals: “Happy laundry memories!” writes Julie Harris, “I could never have managed without all your help, Joy Dear.” Jack Hawkins wrote, “Thank you Joy, dear!” Laya Raki signed her name, and even the New Zealand cast and crew added thanks. “Kia ora tonu koe,” wrote Tony Erstich, in Maˉori, and camera operator, Peter Manly, added “Jolly good luck, Joy!” It will be clear by now that we need to take these items seriously as texts in their own right and as evidence of the affective and corporeal labor performed by different agents in the encounters that made The Seekers. Some might see in these endeavors either a naive fandom, or simply the fawning of white settler colonials over attention granted by the mother country. Coming on the heels of a royal tour in which Queen Elizabeth II was welcomed by thousands of New Zealanders shortly after her coronation, it would be rash to suggest that there were not affinities generated through the very British-ness of the Seekers production; some of these are surely registered in the pages of London’s scrapbook and the enthusiasm with which he and others greeted the production. In this sense, they offer us evidence of how colonial histories and allegiances were made and remade through such private, affective, and quotidian acts as compiling a scrapbook or writing a letter. But the proliferation of texts and documents that came with this production have another effect: whatever imperial affiliations may be registered here are, nonetheless, grounded and practiced in the locality of the former colony, the space of settlers and migrants and tangata whenua. For settlers, such intimacies of encounter, as recorded in and by London’s book, express not the longing and the desire for somewhere else, but the recognition of all the ambivalence of “home,” a place with its foundations in the land and long history of a first people, but with all the trappings of the colonizer.

Settler Cinemas in the New World. I began this chapter in an unlikely place, recalling from inside the built environment of settler colonization an indigenous forum arranged for The Seekers, in 2008. Events and reactions at that marae screening, and the one at Tapuaeharuru a few days later, demonstrate how the film continues to have a life in the present and, especially, how in one of its places of address, the marae, the film can be fully contextualized within the lifeworld of the relevant iwi and hapu¯. Similarly, I showed how the other screenings that took place around the same



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time engaged wider audiences, outside of tikanga Maˉori, but still brought the film into proximity with local audiences again. In the range of responses in each place, we can see evidence of the unsettled history of colonial encounter that preceded, accompanied, and followed this film’s production and original exhibition in 1954: laughter, anger, respect, disdain, affective connection, disengagement, and multiple interpretations of every kind. I argue that the full extent of material histories and the proliferating film culture around this production event, and since, exposes a multidimensionality that the film text itself does not capture. In this way, then, what some have dismissed as a foreign production that had little to with a New Zealand cinema, or a New Zealand history, turns out to be something rather different: a film whose purchase on the local is in fact extensive and extends across its production, distribution, exhibition, reception, narrative, and extratextual domains. I make this claim not to recuperate The Seekers as a good object, nor to celebrate it as a new entry into an expanded frame of national cinema. Recuperation is hardly an adequate or useful position from which to approach a film like this one, whose affective pleasures coexist—even for the same viewers, at times—with feelings of hurt, skepticism, or even just boredom; reconciling such differences is not my intention here. Nor is it my goal to celebrate the film as an example of a redefined national cinema, with the suggestion that the film was “one of ours” all along. Instead we should think of it within the terms of settler cinemas that I have elaborated throughout this book—as a film with multiple conflicting relationships to histories of empire, settler coloniality, and ideas of nation, crossed by production relations that engage multiple spaces, interacting with ongoing facets of settler culture and its relationship to indigenous histories. The unevenness of those relationships in the case of this film is representative of the complexities and friction that underpinned relations between New Zealand, Britain, and the United States as nations, and between settlers and iwi (addressed, however, as a singular group of Maˉori) in the 1950s. Despite current state projects of national cohesion within New Zealand, such differences have never been worked out. That is, while some official discourses have begun to utilize a rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism in which everyone is a settler of some kind, and anyone born in or committed to New Zealand is indigenous, I prefer to join with other recent critics who see in such shifts a further colonization of what counts as “Maˉori” for the benefit of the settler state, and an emptying out of real historical differences between settlers, natives, and migrants.64



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As part of the everyday culture of a settler society, then, The Seekers has mattered because of the multiple encounters it has generated beyond its narrative of colonial history and nation-making. Just as those encounters were uncontainable in the 1950s—sparking debates about authenticity, national identity, genre, and more—they are equally unfinished today. Rather than see the ongoing messiness of the film’s relationship to nation, historical realism, or cultural authenticity as a problem that could be easily “sorted out,” as Picturegoer magazine, quoted in my introduction, tried to do, I instead wish to offer such messiness as an example of the “unsettled” nature of the settler cinemas and societies I have addressed here. This book has shown that the British imperialism that formed new colonies and laid the grounds for settler societies continued to help make settler cinemas during the period covered in this book, and that those settler cinemas shaped each other. But more importantly, I have also argued that the debates and tensions that emerge through these encounters have been constitutive of the very fabric of settler societies in their unfinished relations with colonialism, settler nationalism, and indigenous life. Rather than return to these historical films in order to compare them to a better or more enlightened moment, or to tell a transcendent history in which we have surpassed them, I wish to show that they are inextricably part of our present. Instead of assuming their irrelevance to a new time in which we might expect a better and more authentic national cinema for each place, I have argued that our continued encounters with these films are essential, not tangential, to making viable futures within settler societies. In part one, I demonstrated how the texts and travels Cooper and Schoedsack made while creating The Four Feathers were based on performative identities of empire within a settler frame. Two decades later, Cooper’s enthusiasm for imperial production and relations with British producers shaped Argosy’s postwar plans to make imperial epics alongside its westerns. But in both cases I showed how these affinities with empire were brought back into settler colonial spaces and expressed through settler discourses of landscape, gender, and nation. In part two of this book, I showed how the contradictions between empire and settler nationalism in postwar Australia were framed by long debates about the role of British and American cinema within the nation-state and were often expressed in the languages of genre and national cinema. And in part three, I further complicated histories of production and colonial encounter in conversation with practices of indigenous guardianship, archiving, and public exhibition. Throughout the book I have argued that the writing of film history



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itself is part of the ongoing encounter of these films, as they and their settler contexts refuse to remain finite in meaning or address. In that spirit, then, rather than call optimistically for a postsettler cinema, one that might coherently embody and represent the recent histories of native-settler-migrant encounters within nationally specific frames, I will call for more encounters with the past in the present—more attention to the leftovers of unfinished film histories, to the unsettled histories of colonization, settlement, and resistance, and to the voices of those who continue to make histories across worlds not reducible to nation.



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Introduction 1. The U.S. title of The Seekers was Land of Fury, released in 1955. 2. Queen Elizabeth II visited New Zealand from December 23, 1953 to January 30, 1954, which coincided almost exactly with the visit of the Seekers unit. Her visit was hugely popular with local people and generated many official films and home movies, some of which are archived at the New Zealand Film Archive. See http://www.filmarchive.org.nz/trackingshots/flashbacks/royal-summer.htm (Accessed August 30, 2009). 3. “Sorting Out The Seekers,” Picturegoer, September 4, 1954. In a scrapbook compiled by Colin Deed, Whakataˉne, New Zealand. Boys’ Own Paper was a British periodical directed toward young boys, with most of its content espousing imperial ideals. See Dunae, “New Grub Street.” 4. Here I am indebted to Amelie Hastie’s groundbreaking work, Cupboards of Curiosity, which treats scrapbooks and other ephemera seriously as part of the writing of film history. 5. In a related vein, Leonard Bell’s essay “Auckland’s Centrepiece” carefully analyzes the encounters around a physical memorial to a New Zealand settler-colonist, arguing that such objects and artifacts are productive, not simply reflective, of social relations in settler societies. Bell shows that the cultural negotiations about how to “make” history around such a site are as essential to the futures of settler societies as they are fraught with conflicting interpretations. See Bell, “Auckland’s Centrepiece: Unsettled Identities, Unstable Monuments.” 6. The Maˉori name for the Archive, used alongside its English name, can be translated as “The Guardians of the Treasured Images of Light” (Barclay, Mana Tuturu, 103) and reflects its bicultural constitution and kaupapa, or policy. See http://www.filmarchive.org.nz/about/about.html (Accessed March 12, 2010) and chapter four. 7. O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, 317. 8. O’Regan, Australian Television Culture, 19; qtd. in O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, 318. 9. O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, 96–106. See also Tulloch, Australian Cinema, who develops a theory of “competing imperialisms” of British and American influence. This issue is explored further in chapter three. 10. Aotearoa is the Maˉori name for the island group that forms New Zealand. The term “Aotearoa/New Zealand,” while not yet official, is now increasingly used to designate the ongoing sovereignty of Maˉori while marking, with a slash, a continuing tension with the settler state.



Notes

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

Notes Pratt, Imperial Eyes. See Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 100–101. Thomas, Cook, xxxiii. There were, and are, other settler colonies connected to other empires and colonizing states: a recent journal issue on contemporary problems of settler colonialism, for example, addresses Israel/Palestine, Argentina, and South Africa as well as the United States. See Goldstein and Lubin, “Settler Colonialism.” Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back, 2. See, for example, Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura,” McClintock, Imperial Leather, 12–13. Burton, After the Imperial Turn, 11. Notable exceptions to this rule are Nicholas Thomas’s book, Colonialism’s Culture, with a chapter on some American and Australian films, and Jon Stratton, “The Beast of the Apocalypse.” Other work on settler colonial cultures includes Trigger and Griffiths, Disputed Territories; Coombes, Rethinking Settler Colonialism; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back, 18–19. See also Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire,” 102–6, and two important essays by Alan Lawson: “A Cultural Paradigm,” and “Postcolonial Theory.” This is not to suggest that film criticism has entirely overlooked issues relating to settler colonial histories. In the Australasian context, see, for example, Dyson, “The Return of the Repressed”; Gibson, South of the West; Jutel, “Lord of the Rings”; Routt, “The Fairest Child,” “More Australian,” and “Me Cobber, Ginger Mick”; Simmons, “Distance Looks Our Way.” However, work that takes the development of postcolonial theory as its explicit aim has tended to focus on literature and, where it has concerned itself with cinema, has generally overlooked settler colonies. In the examples and debates I cite here, the relatively benign-sounding term “settler” is contestable and contingent: it can deceptively cover over the violence of land wars, forced displacements, and the destructive effects of colonization on those being colonized and the environment that sustained them. For that reason, some writers have chosen “settler-invader” or “invader-settler” to speak more bluntly of the historical conditions that took shape there (see Brydon, “Introduction;” Gittings, Canadian National Cinema). Throughout this study, I will most often adopt the term “settler” without prefix or suffix because I think it renders better the complexity, complicity, and ambivalence that are all part of the white settler’s condition. British and other European colonists felt that what they were doing was indeed “settling,” not violating, the land: populating it and taming it into a “settled state” in which they hoped for a stability and continuity of colonial life. While “invader-settler” or its inverse certainly throws attention on the violence and intrusion of that encounter, it can also blind us to other less unidirectional transactions of power that the term “invader” does not always accurately describe. Similarly, it can tend to fix a prior moment of actual invasion into an ossified concept



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21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

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that obscures the complex maneuvers of the descendants of those early invaders, now declaring (however problematically) their own deeply felt bonds to land, place, and indigeneity (on this kind of maneuver, see Turner, “Make-Over Culture,” and “Settlement as Forgetting”). So when I wish to specifically signal invasion, as I have above, I will use the terms invasion or invader; at other times I will use local words for settler-invaders that better characterize their relationship to indigenous cultures (such as the Maˉori tauiwi, for foreigner or non-Maˉori, or Paˉkehaˉ for European-descendant settler); and in other places I will retain the slippery, ambiguous, and deceptively benign term “settler” with its various semiotic possibilities. Lawson, “Comparative Studies,” 157. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, “General Introduction,” in Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 3; Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire.” See, for example, Mishra and Hodge, “What Is Post(-)Colonialism?”; Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’ ”; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Hall, “When Was the Post-Colonial?” Hall, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’?” 254. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back, 2. See Turner, “Sovereignty,” 77. Calder, “From Post-colonialism to Settlement Studies,” 132. Turner, “Sovereignty, or The Art of Being Native,” 77. Lawson, “Comparative Studies.” A longer history of comparison would include Alexander, Moving Frontiers; Allen, Bush and Backwoods; and Hartz, The Founding of New Societies. See also Darian-Smith, Gunner, and Nuttall, Text, Theory, Space. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots; Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific; Wilson and Dirlik, Asia/Pacific as a Space of Cultural Production; Connery, “The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary.” Instead, for national histories see Maingard, South African National Cinema, and Tomaselli, The Cinema of Apartheid. See, for example, Gittings, Canadian National Cinema; Leach, Film in Canada; White, The Cinema of Canada. Jaikumar, Cinema at the End, 1. O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, 4. An iwi is a social grouping of Maˉori who claim common affiliation across a relatively large territory or space and who historically acted as independent nations; iwi are also political entities that in recent years have engaged the Crown on matters concerning sovereignty and the Treaty of Waitangi. See Mead, Tikanga Maˉori, 220–30. For this reason, many Maˉori resist the notion of a single, pan-Maˉori identity. See chapters four and five. For some challenges to the simplicity of such models, see Tapsell, “Taonga, marae, whenua—Negotiating Custodianship”; Barclay, Mana Tuturu, Turner, “Inclusive Exclusion.” Williams, Australian Post-war Documentary Film, 18. For a concise account of how vertical integration worked to organize production, distribution, and exhibition within the United States, see



Notes

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

Notes Schatz, “Hollywood: The Triumph of the Studio System.” For equally concise accounts of its effects elsewhere, see other essays in the same volume, such as Lant, “Britain at the End of Empire,” 361–74. Longer treatments of the relationship of Hollywood to other national cinemas are cited throughout the chapters. Extensive accounts of these debates within Australia are found in Tulloch, Australian Cinema and Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema. While the historical individuals are very different in each case, my approach here shares something with recent scholarship on the figure of Captain James Cook in a colonial context. For example, see Thomas, Cook, and Salmond, Trial of the Cannibal Dog. See also Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language. Vaz, Living Dangerously. For example, see Bernstein and Studlar, Visions of the East; Foster, Captive Bodies; Gibson, South of the West; Holmlund, “Displacing Limits of Difference”; Jayamanne, Toward Cinema; Shohat and Stam, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media; Stam and Spence, “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation.” In addition to Hastie’s monograph, see her edited special issue of Journal of Visual Culture, titled “Detritus and the Moving Image” (some material from chapter four is included there as my short essay “The Flotsam and Jetsam of Film History”). Here my methodology is in dialogue with a wider group of scholars approaching film historical work through ephemera and other contextual material. For another recent example, see the collection of essays contained in Lewis and Smoodin, Looking Beyond the Screen. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge; Faier, Intimate Encounters; Caton, Lawrence of Arabia; Tsing, Friction.

Chapter One Playing Empire: Settler Masculinities, Adventure, and The Four Feathers (1929) 1. In fact, on the African shoot that is described below, Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth Rose Schoedsack, accompanied them. 2. Mason, The Four Feathers. 3. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back, 135. 4. Stratton, “Beast of the Apocalypse” in King, Postcolonial America, 21–64. 5. For example, on imperialism and popular culture generally, see MacKenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture; and Richards, Visions of Yesterday. 6. Taves, Romance of Adventure, 14. 7. The term “Fuzzy Wuzzy” originated with Rudyard Kipling. Cooper suggests it refers to the Amarar, one of the Sudanese “Red Sea Hills” peoples and, in an article about the Sudan discussed further below, quotes four relevant lines from Kipling’s poem that refer to their “ ‘ayrick ‘ead of ‘air” and the famous battle in which they “broke a British square!” The British square



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8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

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was the defensive formation used by the British army in Africa; its rupture in battles with the Sudanese is the subject of Kipling’s satire and The Four Feathers’ climactic scenes. Merian C. Cooper, “Two Fighting Tribes of the Sudan,” National Geographic Magazine 56, no. 4 (1929): 484. There is much to be said about the figure of Schoedsack in relation to constructions of masculinity in this film and others. As David Mould and Gerry Veeder show in a fascinating article on the “photographeradventurer” (see also Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 268–70), Schoedsack was one in a line of figures, including Donald Thompson, Merl LaVoy, and Norton C. “Doc” Travis, whose photographic exploits gave them “minor cult status until the mid-1930s” (118). Just as Mould and Veeder’s essay is slanted more toward Schoedsack as adventurerphotographer, the current chapter concentrates more on Cooper, for his public construction was even more visible and extensive than Schoedsack’s and, as we shall see in the next chapter, continued to have implications through World War II and beyond. In addition, see Erb, Tracking King Kong, especially 70–76 on “camera adventure.” Behlmer, “Adventures of Merian C. Cooper,” 2. Ibid., 2–3. Vaz, Living Dangerously, 11–13. Ibid., 11. Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life. Roosevelt, quoted in Studlar, This Mad Masquerade, 26. Harrison, There’s Always Tomorrow, 572; qtd. in Vaz, Living Dangerously, 109. The 1939 version of the film has Feversham’s father pronouncing the memorable line: “the boy’s become too soft, we need to lick him into shape and make him hard again.” The evidence for his effeminacy is in part the boy’s taste for poetry. Studlar, This Mad Masquerade, 51–52. See also Studlar’s later essay, “Wider Horizons,” on Fairbanks westerns. See, for example, Phillips, A Man’s Country?; Morell, From Boys to Gentlemen. Butts, “Biggles—Hero of the Air,” 138. Johns himself could have been a model for Cooper: a former soldier, Johns joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 and flew bombers over Germany until he was shot down in 1918. Like Cooper, he spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp. The Boer War (1899–1902) was fought between British troops (which then included troops from the dominion settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand) and the Boer territories of South Africa that were Afrikaaner-dominated. Phillips, A Man’s Country?, 152–53. Ibid., 156. Vaz, Living Dangerously, 63. Ibid., 14.



Notes

Notes

26. Stookie Allen, Cartoon, “Above the Crowd,” [New York] Daily Mirror, n.d. MSS2008, Box 7, Folder 9, Merian C. Cooper Papers. See Limbrick, “Playing Empire,” in which the cartoon is reproduced. 27. Thomas, Lowell. “The Adventurous Road to The Most Dangerous Game [No publication information], 32, MSS2008, Box 7, Folder 14, Cooper Papers. 28. Vaz, Living Dangerously, 83–84. 29. The article by Merian C. Cooper, “From King Solomon to Ras Tafari,” Asia 23, no. 10 (1923): 707 includes the invitation. See also, “Guardians of the Lion of Judah,” Asia 23, no. 11 (1923); “As in Solomon’s Day,” 23, no. 12 (1923). 30. Cooper, “Guardians of the Lion of Judah,” 836. 31. Ibid., 866 32. Ibid., 105; Kevin Brownlow, Program Notes for Cooper-Schoedsack and Friends, a festival curated for La Cineteca del Friuli, n.d., http:// www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/ed_precedenti/edizione2003/Cooper_ Schoedsack.html (Accessed April 29, 2009). 33. Vaz, Living Dangerously, 83. 34. Ibid., 89–106. 35. See Hodge and Mishra, Dark Side. On the particular situation of the United States with regard to a complex settler and imperial formation, see King, Postcolonial America; and Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back. See also Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism. 36. MSS2008, Box 7, Folder 1, Cooper Papers; also, see Vaz, Living Dangerously, 106. 37. See Griffiths, Wondrous Difference. 38. In addition to Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, see Rony, The Third Eye and Ruoff, Virtual Voyages. 39. See Erb, who shows how Cooper and Schoedsack’s expeditionary films became “larger multimedia affairs.” Tracking King Kong, 75–77. 40. Hamid Naficy, “Lured by the East,” 133. For another text produced around this film, see Cooper, Grass, his travel account of the production, and Harrison’s later memoir, There’s Always Tomorrow. 41. Ibid., 123–24. 42. Vaz, Living Dangerously, 63. 43. Behlmer, “Adventures of Merian C. Cooper,” 4. 44. Naficy, “Lured by the East,” 122–23. 45. Ibid., 128 46. Ibid., 121. 47. Ibid., 129–30. 48. Ibid., 132–33. Both Naficy and Erb show that in fact Harrison played a significant role in the film, which my concentration here on masculinity and adventure tends to occlude. Erb notes that Harrison’s “unruly presence” was important in establishing the figure of “the adventurous woman,” like King Kong’s Ann Darrow, and of helping create the



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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75.

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conditions for the representations of “the feminine and the exotic” in that film (Erb, Tracking King Kong, 77). Rony, The Third Eye, 133. Vaz, Living Dangerously, 7. Benelli, “Hollywood and the Attractions of the Travelogue,” 184. Sedgwick, Between Men, 25–26. Staples, “Safari Adventure,” 393. Merian C. Cooper, “Two Fighting Tribes of the Sudan,” National Geographic Magazine 56, no. 4 (1929): 465–86. Ibid., 479. Ibid., 469. Ibid., 472. Ibid., 473. Ibid., 465–66. Later in the same essay, Cooper refers to their “pleasant recollections” of the entire trip, adding “certainly we remember it as the best-administered territory in which we have ever traveled” (486). Ibid., 485. Ibid., 478. Merian C. Cooper, letter to W. Douglas Burden, June 22, 1964, 2, MSS 2008, Box 8, Folder 6, Cooper Papers. Ibid., 3. Vaz, Living Dangerously, 166. Paramount Press Book for The Four Feathers (1929), Microfiche, British Film Institute Library. See Limbrick, “Playing Empire,” for a reproduction of one page of this book. Ibid. Cooper to Burden, 3. Merian C. Cooper, interview with Rudy Behlmer, 19, MSS 2024, Folder 3, Cooper Papers. Brownlow, Program Notes for Cooper Schoedsack and Friends, under The Four Feathers. Vaz quotes Schoedsack giving a similar account and also referring to the extras as “the boys from Central Avenue.” Living Dangerously, 173. Central Avenue, which runs from just west of downtown through the area now named South Central Los Angeles, was in the 1920s the cultural and commercial hub for a large black community and was famously the site of a thriving jazz scene. For many white Los Angeles residents the only point of connection to this area was Central Avenue’s fame as a jazz district. The interviews in Bryant, Central Avenue Sounds, give a vivid portrait of the social and cultural makeup of the area from the 1920s on. On the urban geography of Los Angeles see Davis, City of Quartz. Salisbury and Cooper, The Sea Gypsy, 51. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 111–12. Thomas, “Introduction,” in Thomas and Losche, Double Vision, 7.



Notes

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Notes

1. Samuel Moon relates the story of the Goulding’s house and the building that eventually replaced it, the multiunit tourist destination, Goulding’s Lodge. Tourism in the area arrived in large part because of Ford’s films. See Moon, Tall Sheep. 2. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, for example, read the western as a paradigmatic example of imperialism in cinema: see the section, “The Imperial Imaginary,” in Unthinking Eurocentrism, 114–21. Robert Sklar’s essay “Red River: Empire to the West” is an early and thoughtful contribution to understanding gender and colonial expansion in the western. 3. Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” in Haunted by Empire, 17. 4. Since the writing on Ford is voluminous, I cite only a few examples from book-length studies: auteurist and Americanist readings (which often overlap) are found in Gallagher, John Ford; Stowell, John Ford; Kitses, Horizons West; or Cowie, John Ford and the American West; work that is more explicitly critical from a multicultural approach includes Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race; Friar and Friar, The Only Good Indian. 5. The term “classic western” was probably Ford’s own, since at the time “western” was reserved for low-budget serial films of a lower order, as Edward Buscombe points out in Stagecoach, 15. 6. Behlmer, “Adventures of Merian C. Cooper,” 17. Selznick, no doubt thinking of the success of the Hollywood colonial melodrama Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), had wanted Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich as stars. 7. Ibid., 19. 8. Ibid., 15. Buscombe does not mean to suggest that there were no westerns before Stagecoach that aspired to a tradition of quality, and nor do I. As he points out in the introduction to his BFI Companion, for example, epic westerns from the silent period like The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923) attempted to maintain action while appealing to grand historical themes (BFI Companion, 43). In the early sound period, Cimarron (William Le Baron, 1930) won an Academy Award for Best Picture. The point is that Cooper and Ford saw their collaboration as attempting to further the possibility of an appealing western with high production values that could successfully combine the western’s roots in popular series formats and the studio sound picture’s prestige. 9. Argosy Pictures Corporation, for whom these films were made, was in fact the second company that Ford and Cooper created. The first was Argosy Corporation, created in 1939. It was dormant during the war, and in 1945 Ford and Cooper incorporated a second company, Argosy Pictures Corporation. It was the latter company that emerged as the crucial vehicle for Cooper and Ford’s projects, intended to give them latitude to produce work away from the major studios. See D’Arc, Register to the Argosy Pictures.



Chapter Two Imperial Production, Settler Colonialism, and the Argosy Westerns

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10. Ford biographer Scott Eyman refers to both Stagecoach and The Searchers as Argosy pictures “in all but name.” Print the Legend, 308, 452. Cooper’s wife corroborated this assessment; see Dorothy Jordan, letter to Rudy Behlmer, August 26, 1976, MS2008, Box 8, Merian C. Cooper Papers, 11. See Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 5–34, and Smith, European Vision. 12. The film is also a remake of Ford’s earlier Marked Men (1919); it was remade three further times before Argosy’s version; see Gallagher, John Ford, 532. On eschatology as a feature of U.S. settler colonialism, see Stratton, “Beast in the Apocalypse.” See also Doug Williams, “Pilgrims and the Promised Land,” which discusses Wagon Master in relation to puritan ideologies of religion and settlement. 13. See Street, Transatlantic Crossings. 14. The term has been used to describe various forms of Anglo-American cooperation, often military, since the 1940s, and Street uses it to describe the attempts at production distribution arrangements in that decade (see Street, Transatlantic Crossings, 91–118). 15. The American press books for the Korda trilogy openly deploy the language of empire, sometimes even melding it with American terms; for example, one page of the campaign for The Drum [U.S. title Drums] (1938) carried the tag line “A Mighty Saga of Frontier Adventure as the Tide of Empire Sweeps On!” 16. The plans are mentioned only in passing in Mark Cotta Vaz’s extensive biography of Cooper, Living Dangerously, and do not feature at all in the major critical biographies of Ford such as Gallagher, John Ford; Eyman, Print the Legend; or McBride, Searching for John Ford. 17. Cooper to Katherine Spaatz, July 12, 1946, Box 1, Folder 2, Argosy Pictures Collection (hereafter cited as Argosy Collection). 18. Cooper to Prof. Stanley D. Porteus, University of Hawaii, June 9, 1947, Box 1, Folder 3, Argosy Collection. 19. Ibid. 20. Dewar to Cooper, February 20, 1947, Box 1, Folder 5, Argosy Collection. 21. Alan J. Miller to Cooper, n.d, Box 1, Folder 4, Argosy Collection. McBride notes that Argosy had an option on The African Queen before World War II; see Searching for John Ford, 338. 22. See memos enclosed in Box 2, Folder 2, Argosy Collection. 23. “Notes for Discussion with Mr. Rank,” unsigned, undated memo, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. While the memo itself is unsigned, it seems clear from its context that these notes were prepared for Harrison’s use. 24. Cooper to Harrison, September 6, 1946, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. 25. Cooper to Harrison, September 18, 1947, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. 26. Cooper to Pagnamenta, September 19, 1947, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection.



Notes

Notes

27. Cooper to Kay Harrison, August 5, 1946, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. 28. Harrison to Cooper, telegram, August 6, 1946, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. 29. Jaikumar, Cinema at the End, 42. 30. Ibid., 50. 31. See Street, British National Cinema, 11. 32. Harrison to Cooper, August 14, 1947, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. 33. For a concise discussion of the tax and its effects, see Street, British National Cinema, 14–16. 34. See Jaikumar, Cinema at the End, especially 41–64, for fuller analysis of the shifting terms of imperial markets and Britain. 35. Cooper to Harrison, August 2, 1947, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. 36. Cooper, memorandum to Kay Harrison, April 6, 1948, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. 37. Cooper to Harrison, September 6, 1948, MSS 1849, Box 10, Folder 1, Argosy Collection. Cooper here suggested obtaining the advice of Wilfred Kline, who was cinematographer for Alexander Markey’s ill-fated New Zealand film with Universal, The Devil’s Pit. Universal removed Markey from the project after cost overruns; see chapter four. 38. Cooper to Donald Dewar, Argosy Pictures, January 21, 1947. Box 1, Folder 3, Argosy Pictures Collection. 39. Cooper to Harrison, April 6, 1948. 40. The Fugitive was Argosy’s first feature and was shot in Mexico by renowned Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa with Ford as director. Despite the presence of Henry Fonda and Mexican film star Dolores del Rio, the film did poorly at the box office and Argosy struggled thereafter. Cooper felt that the failure of the film was in part due to R.K.O.’s handling of its distribution; see D’Arc, Register to the Argosy Collection. While the British production idea was pursued between 1946 and 1948, Argosy went on to make Fort Apache, the first of Ford’s “cavalry trilogy,” which was, by contrast, a great success; made for $2.8 million, it grossed $4.9 million. Immediately after Fort Apache, Argosy made 3 Godfathers with a small budget and hopes for similar success. It, too, helped to stem the losses that Argosy suffered with The Fugitive. Some of the explicit interest in the British imperial films appeared in another of Argosy’s postwar films, Mighty Joe Young (1949), the story of a gorilla brought to the United States from Africa, the woman who adopts it, and the cowboy she hires to wrangle it. 41. See Wood, “Shall We Gather,” 23–41 and Maland, “From Aesthete to Pappy,” 220–52. 42. John Ford, Notes on Massacre by James Warner Bellah, MSS 1849, Box 24, Folder 6, Argosy Pictures Collection. 43. Cited in Gallagher, John Ford, 246. 44. See Lawson, “Comparative Studies,” 157.



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51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

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Gibson, Seven Versions, 15. On the origins of the term see 13–14. See Buscombe, “Painting the Legend,” 154–68. Ramirez Berg, “Margin as Center,” 87–88. See Dagle’s detailed analysis of that sequence in “Linear Patterns and Ethnic Encounters,” 114–16. Heath, “Narrative Space,” 45. It functions to create suspense within the horror genre, too. My point here is not to deny a generic function for such a use of offscreen space but rather to point to its ideological effects here and how they also offer a reminder of a continually repressed but always present indigenous world. Bunn, “ ‘Our Wattled Cot’: Mercantile and Domestic Space,” 129. See Nolley, who recognizes a similar incommensurability based on community, rather than spatial understanding: “And since [Thursday] cannot understand community he cannot understand another community either.” “Printing the Legend,” 84. In this way, the film stages a similar masculine conflict as exists in The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which Stewart (Sam Neill), a New Zealand settler, becomes a figure of contempt in the film for his imperializing attitude toward his wife and toward the indigenous Maˉori who surround him. His rival, Baines (Harvey Keitel), is a latter-day version of York’s “man who knows Indians,” and occupies a similar position with respect to the possibility of a colonial future in the country. While each film is quick to suggest the unsustainable violence of its Thursday/ Stewart figures, the manner in which each film offers a more indigenized and gentle settler-figure who is reconciled with space camouflages the extent to which the settler colonial project, no matter how much it might disavow its more violent excesses and privilege a different kind of settler, is nonetheless still a project of colonialism. Ford’s original notes on the story are illuminating here. Ford wrote that York “knows the country. He knows the Indians. York has a sense of humor. He loves and is perfectly satisfied with frontier life . . . Kirby is a great admirer of the plains Indian . . . as a soldier and as a man. He believes they have been badly treated [and he] has a great and particular respect for the Apache. Like most men constantly at warfare, with one enemy, he unconsciously has taken on some of the fighting attributes and characteristics of the Indian warrior.” John Ford, “Notes on Massacre by James Warner Bellah,” MSS 1849, Box 24, Folder 6, Argosy Pictures Collection. Dagle, “Linear Patterns,” 119. Gibson, Seven Versions, 110. Gallagher, John Ford, 253. For other readings of the ending, see Place, The Western Films, 91; Poague, “ ‘All I Can See,’ ” 24; and Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 342. Gibson, Seven Versions, 110. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 117.



Notes

Notes

60. Ford had already used Monument Valley in Stagecoach and returned there for other films too, including My Darling Clementine (1949), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). 61. Buscombe, Stagecoach, 45–46. 62. Goulding’s account of how he pitched the location to United Artists for Stagecoach seems definitive; however, as Buscombe and Davis each points out, Ford and his actors also took credit in various ways, not all of which are incompatible with Goulding’s story. See Davis, John Ford, 150–51; Buscombe, Stagecoach, 40. 63. For example, Maltby argues: “Ford’s Indians, then, are to be understood in terms of one or other White historical paradigm, but whoever these characters are supposed to be, it is evident that they make no attempt adequately to represent the tribal nations whose names they appropriate.” “A Better Sense of History,” 35. 64. Moon, Tall Sheep, 155. Moon also recounts how Tso was able to produce weather “on order” from Ford, and that the director came to trust his ability to create dramatic clouds, a snow storm, or more with apparent ease. 65. U.S. Department of Labor Employment Standards Administration, http:// www.dol.gov/ESA/minwage/chart.htm (Accessed March 1, 2009). 66. Davis, John Ford, 100. 67. One writer in a travel magazine enthusiastically endorsed Ford’s role in this, recalling that “military planes dropped food and hay to stranded Navajos and livestock in ‘Operation Hay Lift’ and thanks to Ford and the payroll he had brought into the Valley there was food in the hogans, many tragedies were averted, many Navajo lives were saved.” Allen C. Reed, “John Ford Makes Another Movie Classic in Monument Valley,” Arizona Highways, April, 1956. 68. Davis, John Ford, 228. 69. Goulding, qtd. in Moon, Tall Sheep, 161–63. 70. Moon, Tall Sheep, 161 71. Allen, “John Ford Makes Another.” 72. Moon, Tall Sheep, 11. 73. Ibid., 37–40. 74. According to Moon, Goulding benefited from the history of a turn-ofthe-century white trader named Wetherill who, after initial resistance from Navajo, was tolerated in the area close to the valley. Ibid., 29–30. 75. Ibid., 36 76. Ibid., 144–50; Davis, John Ford, 93–94. 77. Such situations are indeed emblematic of settler-native encounters: many of the most complex negotiations between Maˉori and the Crown in Aotearoa/New Zealand have concerned those tracts of land that were legally, though unjustly, alienated from indigenous ownership. 78. The interviews that Moon includes testify that, from their earliest years in the valley, the couple began to learn the Navajo language and accounts of their relations with the Navajo suggest an increasing sense of affinity for the



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79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87.

88.

89. 90.

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culture of those with whom they traded. Moon tells that when Goulding was approached to be the subject of his book, Goulding “agreed on the condition that it be at least half about the Navajos” (xiv) and affirms that his years in the valley meant that “he quietly accepted many Navajo ways as his own” (xvii). White, The Middle Ground. See Place, Western Films of John Ford, 28; Bogdanovich, John Ford, 34. Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 136–37. See Buscombe, “Painting the Legend.” Stratton, “Beast of the Apocalypse.” Stratton discusses apocalyptic mythology as the accompanying discourse to the commonly held “myths of the frontier, the promised land, and the road” (23). Stratton’s essay, like the current work, argues that the United States should be understood as a “settler society” that must “deal with the same problems of displacement, identity, and the experience of living in an Other’s land that are a part of the histories of other English-speaking settler societies” (51). See also Mitchell, “Holy Landscape,” 261–90. Ramirez Berg, “Margin as Center,” 82. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 183. One of Thomas’s examples is the film Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990). Lynda Dyson, also drawing on Thomas’s work, has addressed the same tendency in the The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993); see “Return of the Repressed?” 267–76. See Farmer, Zion’s Mount for a detailed history of Mormon/Indian encounters in Utah. Mitchell, “Holy Landscape,” 277. See also Turner, “Make-Over Culture.” Turner writes that “the place of settlement is always projected into the future” (83). For an analysis of the importance of families in westerns, see Wright Wexman, “Family on the Land,” 129–69. The dichotomy between harsh desert and agrarian utopia was active in other settler colonies, too, especially Australia, where the English did not know whether to envisage “a fearsome desolate prison for transported convicts, or an attractive pastoral prospect for colonial settlers.” Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 19. On forgetting as a symptom of settler psychology, see Turner, “Settlement as Forgetting,” 20–38. Turner, “Make-Over Culture,” 82. Other historians have approached this problem too: as well as Farmer, Zion’s Mount, see Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora, which considers four settler societies (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand).

Chapter Three Ealing’s Australian Westerns 1. Bazin, “The Western, or the American Film par excellence,” 141–42. Further references to this essay are cited in the text.



Notes

Notes

2. See in particular Frayling’s chapter, “ ‘The Cultural Roots’ Controversy,” Spaghetti Westerns, 121–37. Frayling cites the first edition of Kitses, Horizons West, 57. 3. Schneider, “Finding a New Heimat,” 145. 4. Bloom, “Beyond the Western Frontier.” 5. Walker, “Introduction,” Westerns: Films through History, 22. For another example, see Doug Williams, who declares in the first paragraph of an essay that even if “the Western is more than horses, guns, Indians, and Monument Valley [,] the core that underlies the surface is important to understand, in that the Western is the American Epic.” Williams, “Pilgrims in the Promised Land,” 93. 6. On the frontier as an aspect of settler societies, see Alexander, Moving Frontiers; Allen, Bush and Backwoods; Beinart and Coates, Environment and History; and Russell, Colonial Frontiers. 7. For a gloss on “cattle duffer” and its uses, see Routt, “More Australian” under “Joining the Cattle Duffers.” 8. For more on the earlier outback films, see Routt, “More Australian”; Tulloch, Legends on the Screen; Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema; and Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977. 9. Cunningham, “Disaggregating Landscape,” 63. See also Cunningham, Featuring Australia. Even before his more famous Sons of Matthew (1949), Chauvel was involved in another Australian western, Rangle River (Clarence Badger, 1936), which was based on a story by American western author Zane Grey and was adapted by Chauvel and his wife, Elsa. Shirley and Adams compare this film to Greenhide in Australian Cinema, 138–39. 10. It is unclear, in fact, whether the adjective “weak” modifies Greenhide as a specific instance of the “kangaroo Western,” or the “kangaroo Western” more generally as a form of hybridization. Either way, the use of “weak” suggests that such a transposition is characteristic of Australian cinema’s dependency on a U.S. model, in this case. 11. The notion of hybridity, for example, underpins Tom O’Regan’s study, Australian National Cinema. There, O’Regan further develops the term “cultural transfers” to characterize such negotiated relations between imported and local cultures, negotiations that produce texts whose hybridity, he argues, is definitive of Australian national cinema: “Any claims we may make about the space of the distinctiveness of Australian cinema must turn on the participation, negotiation, adaptation, and hybridization following on from unequal cultural transfers” (231). Like O’Regan and the other critics whose work addresses this kind of hybridity (Routt and Cunningham, cited above, are two that he cites), I regard the various modes of such transfers as key to the historical forms that Australian cinema has taken. In this chapter, however, I wish to further historicize and complicate a particularly knotty example of this process in more detail than O’Regan’s book develops and to develop its colonial specificities. For O’Regan’s brief discussion of the Ealing westerns, see Australian National Cinema, 56–57 and 94–95; on cultural transfers, see 213–31.



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12. Routt, “More Australian,” under “Joining the Cattle Duffers.” 13. Cf. Simon Ryan: “The antipodality of Australia joins with its construction as a tabula rasa to produce the continent as an inverted, empty space desperately requiring rectification and occupation.” “Inscribing the Emptiness,” 116. 14. Here I am invoking de Certeau’s sense of space as a “practiced place,” as elaborated in Practice of Everyday Life, 117. For another discussion of the United States as a settler colonial space, and of the role of films in constructing that space, see Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, especially 170–95. 15. See, for example, Bloom, “Beyond the Western Frontier,” 197–216, which analyzes a Franco-Algerian Arab reworking of a French “camembert western,” Dynamite Jack (Jean Bastia, 1961). Bloom argues that Dynamite “Moh” (Mohamed Fellag, 1996) is notable precisely for the way in which its postcolonial Arab refashioning of the French “original” results in the production of a locally specific text that exceeds the national frames of its U.S. or French precedents. 16. Routt comments on this vexed relation between national specificity and imperial continuity in another context in “Me Cobber, Ginger Mick,” 24. The peculiar function of settler colonial nationalism is also recognized by Chris Prentice, who suggests that the nationalist projects of settler colonies should be understood as “doubly implicated” within imperial discourse, rather than in strict opposition to it. “Some Problems in Response,” 45. 17. While Routt does not use the term “settler colonial” in this context, his point about the economics of land and its transformation into landscape in U.S. and Australian films is foundational to one aspect of my argument here. Routt, “More Australian,” under “The bushranger film in the context of Australian culture.” 18. See, for example, Nash Smith, Virgin Land; and, for a discussion of this opposition in John Ford westerns, see Wollen, Signs and Meaning. 19. Unsigned review of The Overlanders, Kinematograph Weekly, September 26, 1946, 21. 20. Vesselo, “British Films,” 155. 21. “London Critics Lukewarm in Praise of Eureka,” unattributed review of Eureka Stockade, file 0332957, National Film and Sound Archive (hereafter cited as NFSA); “A.W.,” review of Massacre Hill [U.S. title of Eureka Stockade], New York Times, December 14, 1950. 22. Tom Canning, review of Bitter Springs, Motion Picture Herald, August 15, 1951, 990. 23. These included films addressed to British audiences “at home” and in the colonies. On British feature film and the war, see Aldgate and Richards, Best of British,” 57–76; on Ealing’s role see Barr, Ealing Studios, 22, and Kardish, “Michael Balcon and the Idea,” 43–73. On the Colonial Film Unit’s wartime propaganda films, see Smyth, “Movies and Mandarins,” 129–43. 24. Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema, 168–69. On the role of the Australian National Films Council and the National Film Board in their attempts to cover the war and the Commonwealth, and (relatedly)



Notes

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

Notes on John Grierson’s 1940 visit to Australia on behalf of the (British) Imperial Relations Trust, see Hawes, “Grierson in Australia,” 79–84, and Williams, Australian Post-war Documentary. The Australasian Exhibitor, “Not Father Christmas Says Major Baker,” February 19, 1948. Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), February 15, 1948. Baker’s perspective was even received positively (at least in public) by some Australian industry representatives whose financial interests at the time were more aligned toward the distribution of American films. A speaker at the same luncheon reportedly assured Baker that “Australia was very much alive to Britain’s plight and need for overseas trade. The Australian film industry had a special obligation to help and could be depended upon to do everything within its power to honour its obligations to Britain” (Australasian Exhibitor, “Not Father Christmas”). The contradiction between such appeals to imperial relations and the economic allegiance of the industry to the United States is in part the subject of this chapter. This sentiment was recognized in both Britain and the former settler colonies. A Sydney editorial opined: “Long sighted Englishmen realise that the future of England now lies in the great undeveloped lands of the Empire. . . . An overall Government plan is needed which will strengthen the home country by siphoning off overcrowded industry and surplus population, and strengthen the Dominions by developing and populating great empty spaces.” “Brave New World Awaits,” Sunday Sun (Sydney, Australia), January 11, 1948. Harry Watt, “Report on Australia,” January 9, 1946, file G/2a, Aileen and Michael Balcon Collection (hereafter cited as Balcon Collection). Cf. Bernard Smith: “The European control of the world required a landscape practice that could first survey and describe, then evoke in new settlers an emotional engagement with the land that they had alienated from its aboriginal inhabitants,” European Vision, ix. Watt, “The Overlanders,” Picture Post, May 18, 1946, 12, qtd. in Philip Kemp, “On the Slide,” 150. Other public commentators agreed that the former colonies held great hope for Britain: in a story titled “Films will Boost Empire Prestige,” a London correspondent for The Age quotes a British newspaper editor as saying that “Britons still knew little about the Empire” and that filmmakers could rectify that, since “the Empire and the colonies were Britain’s ‘last bet’ . . . ,” Age (Melbourne), January 8, 1948. Watt, “Report.” Ibid. This was the case with Osmond Borradaile, the cinematographer on The Overlanders whom Watt requested from England. Publicity material for the film stressed Borradaile’s links with empire films and locations, including his work on Zoltan Korda’s films The Drum (1938) and The Four Feathers and other projects in Africa and the Middle East. See “Shooting a Big Picture—In a Big Country,” and “The Men Who are Making The Overlanders,” Overlanders Supplement, Film Weekly, September 13, 1945, 29, 32.



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34. Watt, “Report.” 35. Routt, “The Fairest Child,” 57. 36. “Presentation of Australian Film Award to Mr. Harry Watt,” Notes and News, newsletter of The Royal Empire Society, Victorian State Branch, May-June 1947, 21, file G/16, Balcon Collection. 37. The poster is reproduced in my earlier essay on the Ealing films. See Limbrick, “The Australian Western,” 78. 38. According to Cryle and Johansen, Carroll, who owned a circuit of theaters with his brother “E.J.,” favored Australian film quotas but not British, and was typical of many exhibitors in that he regarded a steady supply of Hollywood films as the key to profitable showmanship (Cryle and Johansen, “Exploiting the Regional Queensland Audience,” 339). In this way he was also typical of the conflicted interests of Australian exhibitors, as I will further describe them below. 39. Ibid. 40. For a useful and detailed account of the Ealing production as told through that correspondence, see Kemp, “On the Slide.” 41. On Balcon’s role at Ealing, see Barr, Ealing Studios, 22; and Fluegel, Michael Balcon, 38. 42. See Thomas and Eves, Bad Colonists; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and “Tense and Tender Ties,” 23–67. 43. The term “outdoor picture” was almost synonymous with “western” in both the United States and Britain during this period. Consider Watt’s used of the term in publicity for Eureka Stockade: “I made Eureka Stockade primarily because it was an ideal framework for an outdoor action picture. Australia has been hardly seen on the screen at all and after the reception of The Overlanders Ealing Studios decided to continue making films there. We needed a story that could use the wonderful scenery available and be made out of doors. We wanted action, because it is in Australia we can rival what has been America’s prerogative for so long.” The prerogative to which Watt refers is without doubt the western. “Why—and How—We Made Eureka Stockade,” undated press release, file G/16, Balcon Collection. 44. Watt to Balcon, February 11, 1948, file G/1, Balcon Collection. 45. Williams to Hal Mason, February 2, 1948, file G/1, Balcon Collection. 46. Williams to Balcon, February 3, 1948, file G/1, Balcon Collection. 47. Balcon to Williams, February 12, 1948, file G/1, Balcon Collection. 48. Williams to Balcon, July 10, 1948, file G/1, Balcon Collection. 49. Tom Gurr, “Why Didn’t an Australian Make Eureka Stockade?” Sunday Sun (Sydney, Australia), February 6, 1949, quoted in Wynne to Balcon, March 1, 1949, file G/4, Balcon Collection. 50. Letter to the Editor. Sunday Sun (Sydney, Australia), April 23, 1949, file G/4, Balcon Collection. In reporting these matters to Balcon, Wynne suggested conspiratorially that “one need not be accused of exaggeration in saying that some part at least of the present anti-British line is inspired by the Americans” (Wynne to Balcon, March 1, 1949, file G/4, Balcon Collection).



Notes

Notes

51. Hall to Balcon, March 18, 1949, file G/4, Balcon Collection. Hall, despite his self-assessment as an impartial observer, was in fact deeply enmeshed in the contradictory national allegiances of the time. Though narratives like The Squatter’s Daughter (1933) relied on the history of the imperially driven wool trade, Tulloch notes that Hall’s films were also “unashamedly American. . . . The most successful Australian film-maker [of the 1920s and 1930s] was the one who borrowed the studio specialization and star system of Hollywood.” Tulloch, Australian Cinema, 30. 52. Balcon to Hall, April 20, 1949, file G/4, Balcon Collection. 53. Davidson, “The De-Dominionisation of Australia,” 139. 54. Rydge succeeded Stuart C. Doyle, whose relationship to U.S. studios and distribution interests was similarly entrenched. For more on the monopolistic position of Greater Union, its relationship to Hoyts, and their merger as the General Theatres Corporation, see Tulloch, Australian Cinema; Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years. 55. Reginald Baker, interview by Graham Shirley, February 6, 1980, file 0375200, NFSA. 56. There are signs that Baker was aware from early on that it may have been difficult to win over Rydge or other trade representatives. He said in an interview in 1948, “I think the people want us . . . . I have talked to the Government and I know they want us. I want to be convinced that the trade wants us.” “Ealing Production Awaits UK Say-So,” Film Weekly, March 25, 1948, 1. 57. Baker, interview by Shirley, NFSA. 58. Shirley and Adams argue that the shift was extensive from the 1950s; see Australian Cinema, 185. 59. Here Warren F. Kimball’s collected correspondence between Churchill, Roosevelt, and their administrations is illuminating. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, especially 2: 609. U.S. plans for Pacific military and economic strategy are also discussed in Reynolds, From World War, especially 55–60. 60. On this point, see Kimball, 2:360, 3:237, 3:626. 61. See Callaghan, Great Power Complex, 85–87. 62. Reynolds, From World War, 85. 63. John Charmley notes skeptical reactions to “Americanism” in Churchill’s Grand Alliance, 51–52. 64. Despite their different emphases, most historians of the postwar period reach this conclusion. See Reynolds, From World War; Callaghan, Great Power Complex; Hathaway, Great Britain and the United States; Ovendale, English-Speaking Alliance. 65. Macmillan, “Isosceles Triangle,” 20. 66. Tulloch, Australian Cinema, 34. 67. Ibid., 40 68. On this period, see Cunningham, “Decades of Survival,” 53–74 and Featuring Australia. 69. Tulloch, Australian Cinema, 76. 70. Williams, Australian Post-war Documentary, 142. 71. Ibid., 152.



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72. Ibid., 150. 73. See “30,000 Miles in Search of a Story,” Overlanders Supplement, Film Weekly, September 13, 1948, 24. 74. Even so, an editorial in Film Weekly in 1948 (shortly after Watt’s return to England and while all indications were that Ealing would continue) thought that more still should have been done in the wake of The Overlanders’ success. “It is a wretched shame . . . that no single man of all the seven governments in Australia said goodbye or thanks to Harry Watt when he departed. No message said ‘Good-oh’ to Watt’s announcement that Ealing would continue production here. . . . But if Ealing were to pull up stakes and move to another Empire country the howl of disappointment would be skyrending.” “£25,000 is not Peanuts,” Film Weekly, September 9, 1948, 3. 75. See Williams, Australian Post-war Documentary, 98–100. 76. Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema, 181. 77. “Film Cattle Cost £4000, but . . . ,” Age (Melbourne), February 11, 1948. 78. Williams to Balcon, August 9, 1948, file G/1, Balcon collection. 79. Williams to Balcon, telegram, November 25, 1948, file G/1, Balcon collection. 80. This was not the only example of a nonfeature film planned in consultation with the Australian government. Balcon’s archives also record a planned film in the “Know Your Commonwealth” series, which was to have been produced by Harry Watt for the British Central Office of Information. See files G/1, G/51, Balcon Collection. 81. Memorandum, “Eureka Stockade Credits No. 2 Issue (Final),” October 25, 1948, file G/16, Balcon Collection. 82. “Big Press Breaks for S.A. Springs Debut,” Film Weekly, May 11, 1950, 5. The extent to which Australian authorities and Ealing both recognized the project within the context of empire relations was evident two years earlier. The Adelaide Advertiser reported that when Baker arrived in Adelaide in 1948, “the Lord Mayor, welcoming the visitor, said Adelaide was one of the strongholds of the British Empire.” Baker, reported the paper, “said to his wife ‘We are a long way from home.’ She promptly replied, ‘I think we are home,’ and he agreed.” Report of Baker’s arrival, Adelaide Advertiser, March 2, 1948. 83. On assimilation in particular, see Verhoeven, Sheep, 226–71 84. Ibid., 234–35. 85. “Bitter Press Breaks as Springs Starts,” Film Weekly, May 26, 1949, 5. 86. See Verhoeven, Sheep, especially 230–54. 87. Ibid., 183–225. 88. On the alternation of angles throughout the film, see Verhoeven, Sheep, 205. That scene, in which the settlers’ log cabin is attacked, is repeated in The Seekers (1954), as we shall see in the next chapter, as well as, more famously, in The Searchers. In all three cases, a point of view is adopted from within the darkness of a settler home as it defends itself from the “invasion” of indigenous figures.



Notes

Notes

89. Verhoeven suggests, as do Shirley and Adams, that Smart’s original script stipulated the more violent ending. Verhoeven, Sheep, 191–93; Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema, 183. 90. Bitter Springs pressbook. 91. Verhoeven, Sheep, 188–212. 92. Ibid., 212. 93. For example, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) involves no Indians but concentrates on the conflicts between various groups of whites and is explicitly about control of the demarcated space “south of the Picketwire.” 94. “An Open Letter,” advertisement for Leon S. Snider, Overlanders Supplement, Film Weekly, September 13, 1945, 41. Such language is in keeping with the “White Australia” immigration policy that was active in Australia until the 1960s. 95. After watching the close-up of white hands wrenching the koala off the mother’s back in order for it to be adopted by the white teacher and children, it’s hard not to see this sequence as narrating the fate of the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families into white homes in a policy that stood through much of the twentieth century. 96. Wexman, “Family on the Land,” 129–69.

Chapter Four Hei Tiki (1935): Film Histories Past and Present 1. I translate kaitiaki here as “guardians,” in keeping with the translation used by the New Zealand Film Archive (both in its own Maˉori title, and in the documents it uses for kaitiaki agreements; these are also discussed by Barclay in Mana Tuturu). Jonathan Dennis also defines kaitiaki as guardians in “Uncovering and Releasing Images,” 62. Barclay discusses the strategic pitfalls of translating words like kaitiaki and mana tu¯turu (“Maori spiritual guardianship,” described further below) in public policy contexts in Barclay, Mana Tuturu, 113–14. 2. See Huia Kopua, “Te Hokinga Mai,” published as the proceedings of the International Indigenous Librarians’ Forum. Kopua, as kaiwhakahaere or Deputy Chief Executive of the Archive, also presented on this aspect of its work at the FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) Congress in 2005. For earlier discussions, see Dennis, “Uncovering and Releasing the Images,” and Mita, “The Preserved Image Speaks Out.” Barclay also discusses his role in such protocols in Mana Tuturu, 93–136. 3. Babington, A History, 39–41. 4. On Hayward, for example, see Edwards and Murray, “A Rough Island Story”; see also Laurence Simmons, “John O’Shea: A Poetics of Documentary,” in the same volume.



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5. Blythe, Naming the Other, 29–33. 6. Mita, “The Soul and the Image,” 41–42. Markey began the earlier film with the working title of Taranga, but it was first screened in Britain and New Zealand in 1929 as Under the Southern Cross. When it was released in the United States later that year, a soundtrack was added and it was registered as “The Devil’s Pit, a.k.a Under the Southern Cross” (see Martin and Edwards, New Zealand Film, 42). The copy of the film that now exists in the New Zealand Film Archive came from Canada, where the film was released as The Dragon’s Pit; its title frame uses this alternate name. Gustav Pauli also made a film called Under the Southern Cross in 1927, of which there is no extant footage (see Martin and Edwards, New Zealand Film, 39). I refer to Collins and Markey’s film with its U.S. title so as to avoid potential confusion with Pauli’s. 7. Simmons, “Distance Looks Our Way.” 8. Originally screened on New Zealand television and never released theatrically, the documentary is now available online through NZ On Screen, a nationally funded Web project to digitize and present online locally made television productions. Though broken into “clips,” the entire documentary is presented in excellent quality at http://www.nzonscreen. com/title/adventures-in-maoriland-1985/overview. 9. See Broks, “Science, the Press, and Empire.” Markey’s name was spelled “Marky” during this time. His name appears two different ways depending on publication; I have used the “Markey” spelling most commonly employed in documents from his New Zealand travels. 10. For descriptions of the controversy from a medical standpoint, see two editorials: “The Electronic Reactions of Abrams,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 187, no. 7 (1922): 268–70; and “Enter Dr. Abrams,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 187, no. 16 (1922): 581–82. Under Markey’s editorship, Pearson’s Magazine, in its June, July, and August issues, 1922, included favorable articles on Abrams’s techniques and technologies. 11. Austin C. Lescarboura, “Our Abrams Verdict: The Electronic Reactions of Abrams and Electronic Medicine in General Found Utterly Worthless,” Scientific American 131, no. 3 (1924): 158–59. 12. Medical students at University of Otago medical school in Dunedin “let off stink bombs and heckled him continuously” during his talk there. See “Strange Story of Feature Film,” Wanganui Herald, March 11, 1983. 13. “Romance and Reality: Hollywood Comes to New Zealand. Universal and Alexander Marky,” New Zealand Sporting and Dramatic Review, March 8, 1928, 40. 14. Promotional book, “Alexander Markey,” Harold R. Peat management (New York: n.d.), p 2, Hei Tiki Documentation, New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki O Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua (hereafter abbreviated as NZFA). 15. Rony, The Third Eye, 78. 16. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 238. 17. Rony, The Third Eye, 93. 18. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 239.



Notes

Notes

19. According to Grace, occasional visits were made by missionaries before 1843, when Bishop Selwyn visited the area. Grace, Tuwharetoa, 383. 20. Ibid., 525 21. Grace’s whakapapa (genealogy) through his mother’s line is given in Tuwharetoa, 539; the voyage of Te Arawa waka is described on 29–57. 22. Rony, The Third Eye, 85. 23. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 238. 24. Stafford and Williams, “Fashioned Intimacies.” 25. Blythe, Naming the Other, 16. 26. Babington, A History, 32–33. 27. Stephen Turner productively develops a differentiation between long and short histories within settler societies in “ ‘Inclusive Exclusion’: Managing Identity for the Nation’s Sake.” 28. See Martin and Edwards, New Zealand Film, 16. I have used their details of feature-length films, excepting documentaries, to arrive at this count. 29. The title of a recent book on New Zealand cinema, A Coming of Age: 30 Years of New Zealand Film, by Petrie and Stuart, explicitly relies on this logic. 30. Fairburn compiles exhibition figures that show Hollywood films far outnumbered British and Australian during this period and beyond. Fairburn, “Is There a Good Case,” 155, 262n47. 31. Mirams, Speaking Candidly, 5. 32. Belich, Paradise Reforged, 254. 33. Fairburn, “Is There a Good Case,” 147–48. In the same volume, Ballantyne and Molougney study the nineteenth century and find that, there too, a reductive vision of a bicultural past fails to capture the complexity of coloniality during that period. Ballantyne and Molougney, “Asia in Murihiku,” 65. 34. Here I mean to stress the ways that such engagements were with land as an economic resource but just as importantly were with landscape as a cultural construction of colonial vision. See Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” Smith, European Vision, or Bush, “Landscape.” 35. Blythe, Naming the Other, 19. 36. See, for example, Pauline Ray, “The Charmer of Te Kana,” New Zealand Listener, March 12, 1983, 14, which describes Hei Tiki as “one of the worst films in New Zealand history.” The article presents the line as a quotation, but does not attribute it. 37. Margaret Goulding, Interview with Geoff Steven and Julienne Stretton, Mans. 0034, NZFA. 38. On the establishment and role of the Trust Board in the area, see the iwi Web site at http://tuwharetoa.co.nz/trustboard/TB-history.htm (Accessed March 13, 2010) and Grace, Tuwharetoa. 39. Transcript of Interview with Snowy Christy, conducted for documentary Adventures in Maoriland: Alexander Markey and the Making of Hei Tiki (Phase Three Productions, 1985), Production Files, Ref. A&D 1989, NZFA. Acheson’s letter was read aloud by Snowy Christy,



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41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

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Grace’s daughter, in this interview, recorded on camera for Adventures in Maoriland. Not all of the material from Acheson’s letter quoted here was included in the finished film; my quotation is from the transcript. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, “Acheson: Frank Oswald Victor” (by John Acheson and Richard Boast), http://www.dnzb.govt.nz (Accessed August 24, 2009). Interview with Geoff Steven for Adventures in Maoriland, A&D 1989, NZFA. Most of this quoted material appears in the documentary; the last part of his sentence is in the interview transcript only. Further complicating my point about the numerous affiliations involved in the film is that Tu¯wharetoa also trace their genealogy to the Te Arawa waka, one of the many vessels that brought people to Aotearoa from Polynesia. While Te Arawa is often used to refer to the iwi of the Rotorua area, in other contexts it can invoke the waka itself and the many who traveled in it. For the history of Tu¯wharetoa in relation to the Te Arawa waka, see Grace, Tuwharetoa, especially 29–57. Henry Hope-Cross recalled that there were fights among some of the participants in the film, which Ben Biddle used to break up. “Built like a battleship, that bloke.” Henry Hope-Cross, Interview with Clive Sowry. See Barclay’s discussion of this in Mana Tuturu, 126; and Stephen Turner’s invocation of the same statements in “Sovereignty,” 85; 98, n. 24. Mead discusses in detail the formations of iwi, hapu¯, and whaˉnau in Tikanga Maˉori, 209–31. Hope-Cross, Interview with Clive Sowry. The translations of “taiaha,” “tewhatewha,” and “mere” that I give here differ from the more familiar translations of “spears” and “clubs.” The translations I use are from Te Awekotuku, who argues that the older translations distort the uses and significance of these weapons. See Te Awekotuku, “Who Called This a Club?” Aside from Adventures in Maoriland, see transcript of interview with Snowy Christy, A&D 1989, NZFA. Sam Edwards, “Restored 1930s NZ Movie Back on Screen,” Waikato Times, February 9, 1996. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, “Coubray, Edwin” (Diane Pivac), http://www.dnzb.govt.nz (Accessed August 24, 2009). Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, “Hill, Alfred Francis” (John Mansfield Thomson), http://www.dnzb.govt.nz (Accessed August 24, 2009). Musical credit in the finished version goes to an American composer, Oscar Potoker. Martin and Edwards, New Zealand Film, 46. Interview with Geoff Steven for Adventures in Maoriland, A&D 1989, NZFA. For a discussion of tapu in relation to the body, see Mead, Tikanga Maˉori, 47–48; Mead’s entire book is an extensive introduction, in English, to the concept of tikanga more generally.



Notes

Notes

54. Interview with “Peggy,” Geoff Steven for Adventures in Maoriland, A&D 1989, NZFA. 55. Limbrick, “The Flotsam and Jetsam.” 56. A newspaper article on the film’s return in the 1990s mentions that Ranginui Biddle, Ben Biddle’s son, saw it in 1933 at the old Ngaˉti Tu¯wharetoa Trust Board buildings at Tokaanu, although this was two years prior to the film’s U.S. release and I have not been able to verify whether that date is a misprint, or if an early cut of the film traveled back to Tokaanu; if so, it was without Markey. Petrina Hargrave, “Historical Film Features at Festival,” Taupo Times, January 30, 1996. 57. “Strange Story of Feature Film,” Wanganui Herald. 58. The National Film Library file at the New Zealand Film Archive details the negotiations over the British print and the one purchased from Harry Markey, which was later used by James Baltaxe and Geoff Steven. National Film Library file, “Hei Tiki,” A&D 0478, NZFA. 59. Baltaxe, “The Transformation of the Rangatira.” 60. James Baltaxe, letter to G. Peart, May 24, 1979. National Film Library File, “Hei Tiki,” A&D0478, NZFA. 61. Triana Hill to Cheryl Linge, August 24, 1992, Library of Congress file, Mans 0038, NZFA. 62. Hill to Cooper C. Graham, Library of Congress, November 14, 1995, Library of Congress file, Mans 0038, NZFA. 63. Hill to Bronwyn Taylor, New Zealand Film Archive, September 15, 1992. Library of Congress file, Mans 0038, NZFA. 64. Hargrave, “Historical Film Features at Festival.” See also, Edwards, “Restored 1930s NZ Movie Back on Screen.” 65. Dennis, “Uncovering and Releasing the Images,” 61. 66. Ibid., 61. For an understanding of this reverence from a Maˉori perspective, see Merata Mita, “Soul and Image,” and “The Preserved Image Speaks Out.” Mita also recounts the history of the Archive’s marae screenings in “The Soul and the Image,” 50–51. Dennis’s full account of the process of those changes is arresting for the way it shows the intensity of his and others’ feelings about this realignment. 67. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 by representatives of the Crown and some Maˉori tribes. Notable differences exist between the English and Maˉori versions, and the treaty has been subject to various interpretations since its signing. In recent decades, and especially since the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, it has been taken as the guiding or founding document by which Maˉori are guaranteed some measure of sovereignty over their resources at the time of colonization and the Crown is guaranteed rights of governance; the relationship between these two aspects of the treaty is at the heart of ongoing dispute and negotiation. For a short history, see Belich, Making Peoples, 193–96; for a longer study see Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi. 68. Dennis, “Uncovering and Releasing the Images,” 60.



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69. See Barclay, Mana Tuturu, especially 61–90. Barclay historicizes and critiques this increasingly common nomenclature of “property” rights, which now has become further institutionalized internationally to the detriment, he argues, of actual indigenous ways of thinking about land and culture. 70. Barclay, Mana Tuturu, 104. 71. Ibid., 105. Dennis’s fuller account is moving for this very reason; it tracks a personal process of discovery as much as a process of institutional change: “The generosity of my reception in places around the country never eased the vulnerability or the hurts and rejection that seem to be part of the painful process of disempowering oneself” (“Uncovering and Releasing the Images,” 65). 72. The kaupapa document is available at http://www.filmarchive.org.nz/ images/Site_PDF/nzfa_kaupapa.pdf (Accessed October 1, 2009). 73. In a generally sympathetic review of the book, one reviewer nevertheless executes a kind of “bait and switch” on the phrase, suggesting that Barclay (whose book makes clear the incommensurability of many Maˉori concepts in relation to settler law) is using a colonially inflected notion of “spiritual guardianship” that fundamentally misrepresents “organically Maori” concepts, shoehorning Western ones into the picture instead. Barclay’s reply, and especially Stephen Turner’s frank rejoinder, makes clear the absurdity of that suggestion in relation to Barclay’s use of mana tu¯turu. See David Elgado Shorter, Review of Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights, Museum Anthropology Review Weblog, http:// museumanthropology.net/2007/04/03/mar2007–1-12/ (Accessed July 27, 2009). 74. Barclay, Mana Tuturu, 113. 75. Huia Kopua, Interview with Te Taite Cooper and Thomas Tawhiri, 1996, Audio tape A0385, NZFA. Minties are a popular peppermint candy or sweet. 76. “Memorandum of Understanding between the New Zealand Film Archive Ngaˉ Kaitiaki O Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua and [Iwi nominated Representative Group] on Behalf of [Iwi], March 2007,” Document courtesy of NZFA, 2. 77. Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra, 3–4. 78. Erb, Tracking King Kong; Staiger, Interpreting Films; Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger, 9. 79. For a detailed description of the rituals of the poˉhiri, see Mead, Tikanga Maˉori, 117–32. 80. Turner, “Sovereignty,” 83. 81. Binney, “Songlines from Aotearoa,” 219. 82. Mita, “The Preserved Image Speaks Out,” 73. 83. Dennis, Interview with Witarina Harris. The Film Archive has a short tribute to Harris on its Web site, along with a clip from the film. See http:// www.filmarchive.org.nz/tracking-shots/cast-and-crew/witarina-harris. html (Accessed October 3, 2009).



Notes

Notes

84. Mita notes, however, that on this issue, it is the New Zealand Film Archive that has been the model for others. Mita, “The Soul and the Image,” 51. 85. The “Mabo decision,” so named for an Aboriginal claimant, Eddie Mabo, acknowledged preexisting native title in Australia before the British declaration of “terra nullius.” See Ginsburg, “Screen Memories,” 92. 86. Rony, The Third Eye, 13. 87. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 322–23. See also Russell, “Playing Primitive,” 69–73. 88. Barclay, Mana Tuturu, 62. See also Maui Solomon, “Intellectual Property Rights and Indigenous Peoples [sic] Rights and Obligations,” Motion Magazine, April 22, 2001, http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/ ra01/ms2.html (Accessed July 28, 2009). The declaration was signed in Whakataˉne, within the Ngaˉti Awa rohe or area, a key locale in the filming of The Seekers. 89. “Memorandum of Understanding,” 15. If a dispute were to be unresolveable, the Archive’s policy suggests that since it would not be able to ethically meet its obligations to the law and to its kaupapa, it would retain the option to return material to the depositor. 90. Not only that, but a further complication is that material with kaitiaki guardianship might also be held in other local or international archives where, the memorandum reminds us, only copyright law and the relevant institutional policies pertain. Such a scenario would thereby provide a potential “workaround” that kaitiaki could not control, allowing nonindigenous law to further “trump” their cultural rights to the material. 91. Mita, “The Preserved Image Speaks Out,” 74–75.

Chapter Five Unsettled Histories: The Seekers (1954) 1. After the Maˉtaatua waka had landed (many date the arrival as occurring around 1350, although some historians, notably Steedman, have argued it is later, around 1500CE; see his Mataatua), its chief, Toroa, and his men began to explore the shore, leaving the women in the canoe. As the tide rose, the waka began to drift out to sea again with only its women on board. While women would not typically have paddled a waka, Wairaka, Toroa’s daughter, stood up to declare “E! Kia whakataˉne ake au i ahau!” (Let me act the part of a man!) and successfully brought the waka back safely. The present-day town is named for her declaration, and a memorial to Wairaka is raised on a rock at the head of the estuary. For my knowledge of this story and to many issues local to the area, I am indebted to Clark Jaram, who introduced me to Wairaka on a memorable and impromptu walking tour in 2007. Grace also recounts the Wairaka story in Tuwharetoa, 95. See Matthews and Matthews, and



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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

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the Whakataˉne District Council Web site, for brief descriptions of Ngaˉti Awa and area history, and the Waitangi Tribunal, Ngati Awa Raupatu Report for more detail on the history of the Whakataˉne area before and after Maˉtaatua’s arrival. Much of the current town center is built on reclamation or landfill that has taken place since the 1920s; in recent years much of that fill was tainted with toxic waste from a mill in the area. This has resulted in the pollution of kaimoana or seafood (which was a large part of the local diet) and health problems for residents; in 2009 a hui or conference was held to attempt to find ways to remediate such areas. For example, Babington: “These late arrivers [referring to The Seekers and to other films with New Zealand settings not filmed there] lacked the force of firstness, and played to later local audiences which, if half flattered by filmic attention, were critical of their almost surreal inauthenticities” (A History, 31). Such a statement collapses many disparate films together and oversimplifies the rich history of The Seekers beyond its critical reviews. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 23. Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 6. Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 7. See also “Tense and Tender Ties,” and Carnal Knowledge. Faier, Intimate Encounters, 5. Ibid., 14. See Tsing, Friction and Clifford, Routes. Clifford, Routes, 68. Guthrie was his pen name; his real name was Brodie. See Bartle, “John Brodie.” Guthrie talks about writing The Seekers and about the film in “Interview with John Brodie.” For a timeline of early contact, see Belich, Making Peoples, 127–39. ˉ poˉtiki holds a silent Not far from Whakataˉne, for example, the town of O film festival every year and the Archive has usually presented several films as part of the festival. The issue of protocol and place extended in a technical way to screening format: while the free theater screenings were in 35mm, these multiplex venues no longer possessed lenses capable of projecting the film in its original 1.33:1 “Academy” aspect ratio. Instead the film was projected in the now-standard 1.85:1 widescreen ratio, which resulted in some cropped heads and odd framings. On the marae, the Archive’s DVD (made from a Beta master of the 35mm print) handled aspect ratio correctly. Monty Daniels and Katerina Daniels, interview with Peter Limbrick, September 12, 2008, A1157, NZFA. This attempt at authenticity only extends to a point containable within the conventions of narrative action; Clark’s translations sometimes offer much more plot information for the English-speaking viewer than is given in the Maˉori dialogue that he translates. Personal conversation, September 15, 2008.



Notes

Notes

17. See, for example, McDonnell, “ ‘All Virgin Soil,’ ” 25. 18. All the same, people would continue to joke and talk back to other scenes. As Glynis Johns faints from morning sickness, and is carried by her husband into the house, one marae viewer yelled “throw her away!” to laughter. The venue of the wharenui, as is customary, easily supported such a range of opinions. 19. With respect to the question of what is told and to whom in the context of settler-indigenous interactions, see Johnson, “Honest Acts and Dangerous Supplements.” 20. Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 7. 21. Baker, “Te Kupenga,” 112–13. 22. Tsing, Friction, 1. 23. The Waitangi Tribunal’s Ngati Awa Raupatu Report details the process of land confiscation that occurred in 1865, when most of the land inhabited by Ngaˉti Awa was taken by the Crown. The tribunal’s report responds to the claim made by the iwi to the Waitangi Tribunal for compensation and resolution of wrongs. After the report’s release, which followed years of ongoing negotiations, Ngaˉti Awa reached a settlement with the Crown in 2003, which restored ownership of some lands and provided for other conditions of resolution; legislation enacted the settlement in 2005. For more information on the deed of settlement and legislation see Te Ru-nanga o Ngaˉti Awa Web site. For a moving description of the ceremonies that marked the Ngaˉti Awa settlement, see Baker, “Te Kupenga.” 24. Along with a Maˉori colleague I met during that first trip, I helped mentor a Maˉori student who received a grant to interview relatives and others about their involvement with the film; her research paper was published in 2008. See Wells, “The Seekers.” 25. On these cinematic opening travel sequences more generally, including such tropes as the hand tracing a map or the spinning globe, see Shohat, “Imaging Terra Incognita.” 26. Ibid., 28. 27. Macnab, J. Arthur Rank, 219. 28. Ibid., 224–25. 29. Murphy, “Rank’s Attempt on the American Market,” 170. 30. The Seekers, Souvenir program, New Zealand Film Archive Manuscript Collection. 31. The film’s American title was Land of Fury, which captures this aspect of the film rather better than “The Seekers.” The British and New Zealand title, however, gestures further toward the vision of settlement and the “new world” that colonists sought. 32. See McDonnell, “ ‘All Virgin Soil.’ ” 33. Simmons, “Distance Looks Our Way,” 46–47. 34. Lewis and Smoodin, Looking Past the Screen. 35. Brown, “The Story Behind the Filming of The Seekers,” 26–36. Magazine article found in Deed’s “Scrapbook of The Seekers.”



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36. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, “Te Wiata, Inia Morehu Tauhia Watene Iarahai Waihurihia” (Beryl Te Wiata), http://www.dnzb.govt.nz (Accessed August 24, 2009). 37. Raˉnana is a derivation from the English word London. “Ngaˉti Raˉnana” has since been adopted as the name of a Maˉori cultural group based in London. 38. “Maoris in The Seekers,” Te Ao Hou 7 (Summer 1954), 40, http://teaohou. natlib.govt.nz/journals/teaohou /issue/Mao07 TeA /c26.html#n40 (Accessed March 12, 2010). 39. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, “Winiata, Maharaia” (Frances Winiata and Piripi Winiata), http://www.dnzb.govt.nz (Accessed August 24, 2009) 40. “First Maori Entertainers to Go Overseas,” Te Ao Hou 43 (June 1963), 11, http://teaohou.natlib.govt.nz/journals/teaohou /issue/Mao43TeA / c7.html (Accessed March 12, 2010). My thanks to Mr. Bevan Schwass of Whakataˉne for offering this information after a screening of The Seekers. 41. “O.E.” is Overseas Experience, slang for a rite of passage undertaken by some New Zealanders to backpack around the world. British visa regulations have often made it possible for New Zealanders to conduct “working holidays” in Britain that, for many, turn into a stay of months or years. On the passage of colonized peoples to the imperial center, see Hall: “There is a tremendous paradox here which I cannot help relishing myself; that in the very moment when finally Britain convinced itself it had to decolonize, it had to get rid of them, we all came back home . . . They had always said that this was really home, the streets were paved with gold and, bloody hell, we just came to check out whether that was so or not.” “The Local and the Global,” 24. 42. Clifford, “Traveling Cultures.” 43. Ibid., 36. 44. Ibid., 36. 45. Turner has recently explored “hurt” as a specific kind of cultural injury within an ongoing legacy of colonialism; see “Living Law,” especially 136ff. 46. On the representation of the mokomokai in this film, see Hardy, “From mokomokai to upoko tuhi.” 47. The producers seemed to have recognized this quite explicitly. Ken Annakin, interviewed after location shooting had just wrapped up, said, “There are three faults that I know exist. I am not going to tell everybody what they are; they can find them, and they may draw criticism from the persnickety. But dramatically, it suited us to do things the way we have, and the rest of the world will accept it.” New Zealand Herald, February 23, 1954, in “Seekers Film—Whakatane,” 24. It is not clear whether Annakin is referring to the dance as one of the three; he may equally have been thinking of the film’s depiction of taiaha as throwing spears, the odd placement of Taˉne Maˉhuta, or other details. However, his



Notes

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Notes remark gives a clue as to the subordination of cultural authenticity to the demands of narrative. For example, Maharaia Winiata’s input, or the reported consultations with museums on carving styles and paˉ scenes; see “Real Attempt to Show the Maori As He Was,” New Zealand Herald, n.d., “Seekers Film—Whakatane,” 35. The spearfishing scene is not present in the VHS release Land of Fury, the U.S. version of the film available from Nostalgia Family Video; the scene was cut from the film by U.S. censors in 1954. See Slide, “Banned in the USA,” 177. The film was also banned in South Africa, presumably because of the interracial nature of Wayne and Moana’s affair. “ ‘The Seekers’ Banned in S. Africa,” in “Seekers Film—Whakatane.” 53. The spear-fishing scene is present in the New Zealand Film Archive’s print of the film, screened in 2008, and in the recent Spanish DVD release, El Valle de los Maories. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Simmons, “Distance Looks Our Way,” 46. “World Premiere of ‘The Seekers,’ ” Auckland Star, n.d., “Seekers Film— Whakatane,” 31. “In Lieu of Wages, Glamour.” New Zealand Truth, “Seekers Film— Whakatane,” 6. “A Siren with No Boyfriend,” People, August 25, 1954, 17. In Deeds, Scrapbook of The Seekers. Ibid., 19. “Laya Raki Kidnapped?” New Zealand Pictorial, 6. “A Siren with No Boyfriend,” People, 19. One is reminded here of Richard Dyer’s analysis of Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) in which he discusses Rita Hayworth’s famous striptease number in the film, “Put the Blame on Mame.” Dyer argues, against a reading of Gilda as a femme fatale, that a heroine who dances can never truly be a femme fatale and that the movement and evident self-enjoyment Gilda takes in her dance, when read together with the public construction of Rita Hayworth as a mother and wife outside the text, allows the film to settle male anxieties with the line “Gilda never did any of those things you accused her of.” See Dyer, “Resistance as Charisma.” Interview with the author, August 19, 2007. Tsing, Friction, 3. Her story of the cherry grove is itself part of a longer family narrative that concerns the interactions of different iwi in the area. “Two Harassed Men Want Your Help,” in “Seekers Film—Whakataˉne,” 3. A Whakataˉne resident who used to work at the pub pointed this out to me. Hastie, Cupboards of Curiosity, 32–33. See Smith, “Postcultural Hospitality,” Turner, “ ‘Inclusive Exclusion,’ ” and Maaka and Fleras, The Politics of Indigeneity.



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Manuscript Collections and Archives Aileen and Michael Balcon Collection, British Film Institute, London. Argosy Pictures Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Merian C. Cooper Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra and Mitchell, ACT, Australia. New Zealand Film Archive/Ngaˉ Kaitiaki o Ngaˉ Taonga Whitiaˉhua, Wellington, New Zealand. Radio New Zealand Sound Archives/Ngaˉ Taonga Koˉrero, Wellington and Christchurch, New Zealand. Scrapbook of The Seekers. Compiled by Colin Deed. Personal collection, Whakataˉne, New Zealand. “Seekers Film–Whakatane,” Scrapbook compiled by H.D. (Jack) London. Whakataˉne District Museum, MS 326. Whakataˉne District Museum, Whakataˉne, New Zealand.

Books, Articles, and Other Materials Aldgate, Anthony, and Jeffrey Richards. Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Alexander, Fred. Moving Frontiers: An American Theme and Its Application to Australian History. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1947. Allen, Chadwick. Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Allen, H.C. Bush and Backwoods: A Comparison of the Frontier in Australia and the United States. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1959. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. ———, eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006. Babington, Bruce. A History of the New Zealand Fiction Feature Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.



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The key films from the book are available in the following formats. Chapter One: The Four Feathers (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1929) is available on DVD and VHS from various online distributors. Chapter Two: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950) are all readily available on DVD. Wagon Master (1950) is available on Region 2 DVD as Le Convoi des braves, distributed and sold by Editions Montparnasse. http://www.editionsmontparnasse.fr/ (Accessed April 3, 2010). Chapter Three: Bitter Springs is available on Region 2 DVD as part of the box set, The Tommy Trinder Collection, and The Overlanders is available as a single Region 2 DVD; both are released by Optimum Releasing Ltd http://www. optimumreleasing.com/ (accessed April 3, 2010) and are available from online retailers. Eureka Stockade is available on VHS from Nostalgia Family Video, http://www.nostalgiafamilyvideo.com (Accessed March 26, 2010). Chapter Four: Hei Tiki (1935) may be viewed at the New Zealand Film Archive/NgaKaitiaki o Nga- Taonga Whitia-hua. Many clips of the film are included in the documentary Adventures in Maoriland (1985) which is available online at NZ On Screen http://www.nzonscreen.com/ (Accessed March 26, 2010). Chapter Five: The Seekers (1954) is released as a Region 2 DVD by Filmax, a Spanish distributor, with the original English language soundtrack (and optional Spanish subtitles); the release title is El Valle de los Maories [sic]. It is available from online retailers.



Availability of Films




Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aboriginal Australians, 91, 102, 105, 122–27, 168, 226n95, 232n85 Abyssinia, 40–44, 57 Acheson, Frank, 148, 228–29n39 adventure empire, 4, 32, 33, 52–53, 55–58, 222n33 ethnography and, 19, 32, 41, 43–46, 49–50, 210–11n7 as film genre, 4, 33, 40, 66, 67, 70, 185, 215n15 masculine, 2, 3, 29–31 masculine adventure genre and, 19–20, 30, 38 the Other/otherness and, 46 production and, 29–30, 33, 48–49, 51, 53, 66 U.S. frontier tradition of, 31, 38, 46 see also expeditionary films Adventures in Maoriland (Steven, 1985) archive print of Hei Tiki and, 230n58 as documentary, 19, 134, 227n8 film reception narrative in, 159 narrative of, 147, 149 production of Hei Tiki recounted in, 148–55, 229n42 reexhibition narrative in, 158–59 textuality and, 19, 134, 144, 149, 157, 227n8, 228–29n39 see also Hei Tiki (Markey, 1935) affect film reception and, 26, 196 production and, 22, 26, 100, 107, 112–16, 119, 180, 196, 200–204 publicity and, 7 settler colonialism and, 22, 112, 119, 180, 204 Africa Abyssinia in, 40–44, 57 Amarar tribe in, 49, 51, 51, 54, 210–11n7 Boer War in, 38, 211n21 expeditionary films in, 19, 20, 48–55, 51, 212n39

“Fuzzy Wuzzies” and, 34, 40, 47, 47, 51, 51–52, 54, 210–11n7 labor by Africans in, 54, 55 location sites, and editing between Cathedral City and, 29–30, 31, 48–49, 56–58 racialized colonial encounters in, 19, 50, 53, 56–58 see also The Four Feathers (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1929) African Americans, and labor, 56–57, 213nn70, 71 agency Ma-ori and, 23, 132, 144, 147, 175 Native Americans and, 80, 83–84 racialized colonial encounters and, 52, 70, 83–84, 144, 147 settler cinemas and, 5, 52 alienation of land from ownership by Aboriginal Australians, 168, 232n85 by Ma-ori, 6, 180–81, 182–83, 218n77, 222n29, 234n23 by Native Americans, 87, 88, 218n77 Allen, Stookie, 40 Amarar tribe, 49, 51, 51, 54, 210–11n7 American West Argosy Pictures and, 61, 63–64, 70–77, 81–85, 88–92 as colonial landscape, 74–76, 83, 87–88 filmic space and, 59–60, 60, 62–65, 70, 74, 83–84, 103, 172, 221n14 settler coloniality and, 59–65, 60, 70–77, 81–85, 88–92, 103, 172, 221n14 settler-indigenous encounters in, 64, 71, 75, 77–81, 78, 79, 86, 89–91, 217nn52–54 Annakin, Ken, 207n1, 234n31, 235n47, 236n49 see also The Seekers (Annakin, 1954) Aotearoa/New Zealand, 207n10 see also New Zealand (NZ)



Index

Index

Argosy Pictures distribution and, 46 filmic space and, 6, 16, 62, 64–65, 70–71, 88–93 gender and, 70, 71, 77 historical context and, 16, 18, 62–63, 214n9 imperialism and, 6, 16, 61, 63–64, 65–71 labor and, 53, 59, 85–86, 218n63 landscape and, 6, 16, 62, 64–65, 70–71, 74–76, 83, 87–88 localization and, 63, 70–71, 84, 93 masculinity and, 64, 77, 80, 217n54 Pacific region and, 68–70 racialized colonial encounters in films of, 53, 62–64, 77, 126 settler coloniality and, 61, 63–64, 70, 71, 74, 81–85, 88–92 settler-indigenous encounters and, 71, 75, 77–80, 78, 79 settler masculinity and, 65, 80–81 settler negotiations with space and, 71, 74–76, 93 Technicolor production plans at, 24, 62–63, 66–70, 72, 76 textuality and, 21, 24, 65–66 transatlantic cooperation in production and, 62, 65–71, 215nn14–16, 216n40 transnationality and, 67–70, 216n37 visual styles used by, 78–80, 79, 89, 123, 125, 217n50 see also Cooper, Merian C.; Ford, John; Hollywood; western genre; specific films Arthur, Jean, 47, 47–48, 58 Ashcroft, Bill, 8, 10 Australia Aboriginal Australians in, 91, 102, 105, 122–27, 168, 226n95, 232n85 Britain’s relationship with, 6, 17, 19, 99–102, 107–8, 222nn26, 27, 222nn29, 30, 222n33, 225n82 British imperialism and, 99–102 colonial landscape and, 89, 97, 99, 102–5, 121, 127, 219n88, 221n17 documentary production in, 119–20 exhibition conflicts and, 24–25, 111, 117–19, 127, 223n38 government support from, 120–23, 225n74, 225n82 historical context for settler cinemas in, 6, 15–16, 19, 222nn26, 27, 222nn29, 30, 222n33, 225n82

“Mabo decision,” and alienation of land in, 168, 232n85 national cinema and, 13–15, 119–20 racialized colonial encounters in, 103, 122–27, 226nn94, 95 settler coloniality and, 83 settler colonial space and, 103, 221nn13, 14 settler-indigenous encounters in, 122–23, 125, 226n89 settler nationalism in, 6, 25, 99–100, 107, 109–11, 118, 121, 222n29 as settler society, 33, 104 transnationality and, 4–5, 100, 117–19, 127–28, 221n17 see also Ealing Studios Australian westerns Aboriginal space and, 122–27, 226n95 distribution and, 98–99, 105, 108, 111, 116, 119 film historiography of, 101–5, 220nn9–11 film reception and, 98–99, 101, 105, 223n43 international parallels and, 120 labor and, 113–14 national cinema and, 14, 97–99, 104, 108, 114–17, 127–28, 223n50, 224n56 production of, 119–28 racialized colonial encounters in, 122–27 settler coloniality and, 99, 100, 104–5, 127–28 see also Ealing Studios; specific directors; specific films; western genre Babington, Bruce, 133, 233n2 Baker, Eddie, 188 Baker, Jade Tangia-hua, 180 Baker, Reginald, 24, 106, 107, 116–17, 222n26, 224n56 Balcon, Michael, 21, 22, 25, 100, 106, 113–16, 121–22 Baltaxe, James, 158, 230n58 Barclay, Barry, 162–63, 168, 226n1, 231nn69, 73 Bazin, André, 97, 98–99, 100, 102, 103, 121 Belich, James, 145 Benelli, Dana, 46 bicultural policy, 14, 162, 168, 173, 207n6 Biddle, Ben, 137, 150–54, 155, 158, 160, 229n43



256

Binney, Judith, 166, 167 Bird, Christopher, 34 Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950) Australian government support and, 122–23, 225n82 director of, 14, 97, 226n89 Ealing imperial ambitions and, 100 national cinema and, 14 offscreen sound and, 124 publicity for, 122 racialized colonial encounters and, 122–27 settler-indigenous encounters and, 122–23, 125, 226n89 settler nationalism and, 25 visual style in, 25, 79–80, 97, 124, 124, 217n50, 225n88 western genre and, 105 Bloom, Peter, 98, 221n15 Blythe, Martin, 133, 141, 146 Bradshaw, Ngawara (Ngawara Kereti), 137, 149, 153–54, 158, 179 Brown, George H., 1, 18, 19, 184–85, 188–89 Brownlow, Kevin, 24, 34, 36, 42, 56 Bunn, David, 80 Burton, Antoinette, 9 Buscombe, Edward, 63, 84, 214nn5, 8, 218n62 Butts, Dennis, 38 Calder, Alex, 11 Campion, Jane, 16, 217n56, 219n85 canoe (waka), 139, 150, 166, 172, 197, 201, 229n42, 232–33n1 Caroll, Dan, 111, 223n38 Carter, Maurice G., 200–202 Carter, Paul, 89 cavalry trilogy. See Argosy Pictures; Fort Apache (Ford, 1948); Rio Grande (Ford, 1950); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949) Chang (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1925), 40, 44–46, 67 Chauvel, Charles, 102, 107, 109, 119, 220nn9, 10 Christy, Snowy, 151, 229–30n39 Cinema at the End of the Empire (Jaikumar), 13 cinemas, settler, 1–7, 15–20, 205–6, 210n40 see also distribution; ephemera; film historiography; film reception;

257

films; labor; landscape; production; textuality;transnationality; visual style Cinematograph Films Acts, 67–69 class, 38, 57, 71, 73 Clifford, James, 176, 190–91 Collins, Lew, 133, 135, 136, 227n6 confiscation of Nga-ti Awa land (raupatu), 180–81, 234n23 Cooper, Merian C. on admiration of and complicity with British colonial rule, 50–52, 51, 54, 55, 56–58, 213n59 adventure films and, 40, 67, 70 biographical information about, 17–18, 30, 35–43, 47, 51 Chang (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1925) and, 40, 44–47, 67 as director, 5, 16, 18 distribution and, 46 ethnography and, 19, 32, 41, 43–46, 49–50, 210–11n7 expeditionary films in Africa and, 48–53, 51, 212n39 Ford, and production relationship with, 18, 24, 62–65, 214n9 Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1925), 41, 44–49 imperial travel discourses and, 18, 19–20, 22–23, 40 King Kong, 18, 56, 212–13n48 labor and, 53 masculinity and, 20, 29, 33–40, 43, 46–48, 47, 211n8 military heroes and, 29, 35–38 as producer, 18 The Sea Gypsy, 42, 49, 57 settler colonial contradictions and, 31, 58 settler masculinity and, 29, 35, 37, 38, 39, 55, 65 Technicolor production plans and, 62–63 textuality, and papers of, 21, 24, 44, 53, 56, 65–66 transatlantic cooperation in production and, 65–71, 215nn14–16, 215n21, 216n40 travel writings by, 41–42, 44, 49–52, 55, 57, 210–11n7 see also Argosy Pictures; The Four Feathers (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1929)



Index

Index

Coubray, Edwin (Ted), 152–53 Crofts, Stephen, 14 cultural rights of indigenous peoples, 149, 162, 168–69, 230n67, 231n69, 231n73, 232n85, 232nn88–90 Cunningham, Stuart, 102–3, 118 Curtis, Edward S., 137, 138–39, 140, 150 Dagle, Joan, 77, 82 Daniels, Katerina, 178 Daniels, Montgomery, 183 D’Arc, James V., 37–38 Davidson, Jim, 116 de Certeau, Michel, 83–84, 221n14 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 12 Dennis, Jonathan, 161–62, 166, 167, 226n1, 230n66, 231n71 The Devil’s Pit (Markey, 1929), 20, 133, 135–37, 148, 167, 216n37, 227n6 distribution Australian westerns and, 98–99, 105, 108, 111, 116, 119 in NZ, 1, 16, 67, 108, 172–74, 183–87, 190–91, 204 of The Seekers, 1, 16, 67, 108, 172–74, 183–87, 190–91, 204 in settler societies, 3–8, 14, 16–18 documentaries in Australia, 119–20 ephemera and, 156, 157 ethnographic films, 32, 40–41, 43–49, 67, 137–39, 161 in NZ, 1, 207n2 settler cinemas and, 49–50, 120 see also Adventures in Maoriland (Steven, 1985) The Drum [U.S. title Drums] (Zoltan Korda, 1938), 55, 215n15, 222n33 Du Chaillu, Paul, 39, 49 Ealing Studios Australian government support for, 120–23, 225n82 Australian western story material and, 97 Baker and, 24, 106, 116–17, 222n26, 224n56 distribution and, 24 exhibition conflicts and, 24–25, 111, 117–19, 127, 223n38 film reception and, 98–99, 101, 105, 223n43 historical context and, 16, 19, 105–11, 106, 221n23, 222nn26, 27

imperial ambitions of, 99–100, 106–16, 120–22, 220n30, 222nn26, 27, 222nn29, 30, 222n33, 223n50, 225n82 localization and, 102, 111, 120 nonfeature films by, 115n80, 122 production tension and contradictions and, 24, 25, 107–9, 111–14, 127, 223n50 publicity from, 105, 110, 111, 122, 222n33, 223n43 racialized colonial encounters and, 113–14, 122–27 settler coloniality and, 99, 100 settler-indigenous encounters and, 122–23, 125, 226n89 settler nationalism and, 25, 99–100, 109–11 textuality, and papers of, 21, 22, 25, 100, 107, 112–16 visual style and, 99, 101–2, 104 see also Australia; Australian westerns; Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950); Eureka Stockade (Watt, 1949); The Overlanders (Watt, 1946) Eastmancolor, 184, 185 England. See Great Britain ephemera documentaries and, 156, 157 scrapbooks and, 1, 22, 26, 182, 200–203, 207n4, 210n43 textuality and, 134, 174, 177, 194, 198, 210n43 see also film historiography Erb, Cynthia, 165, 212n39, 212–13n48 Ericksen, Hilary, 11 Erstich, Tony, 188, 198, 201, 203 ethnicity, 12, 41, 75, 76, 90, 92, 126 ethnography adventure and, 19, 32, 41, 43–46, 49–50, 210–11n7 fictionalization of, 137, 138–42, 149–50 films and, 32, 41, 43–46, 137–39, 161 the Other/otherness and, 44 “salvage ethnography,” 137–42 Eureka Stockade (Watt, 1949) Australian government support and, 121 director of, 97, 121 Ealing imperial ambitions and, 112, 114–15 publicity for, 223n43 racialized colonial encounters and, 125–26, 127



258

reviews of, 114 settler nationalism and, 121 visual style and, 25, 97, 105, 223n43 western genre and, 105, 112, 223n43 European-descendant settler (Pa-keha-). See Pa-keha- (European-descendant settler) Eves, Richard, 112 exceptionalism, and U.S., 32–33, 45 exhibition Australia, and conflicts over, 24–25, 111, 117–19, 127, 223n38 Australia and, 111, 223n38 commercial theater, 26, 164, 173–74, 177, 178, 186 of Hei Tiki, 19, 20, 146, 158, 228n30, 230n56 home movies and, 173–74, 177, 207n4 NZ, and conflicts in, 119, 204 of taonga Ma-ori, 165–66, 179–81, 203 see also reexhibition exoticism, 48, 49, 55, 65, 140, 167, 184, 185 expeditionary films in Africa, 19, 48–53, 51, 54–55, 212n39 in Asia, 40, 41, 44–47, 45, 46, 48, 49, 67 in Monument Valley, 19, 20 in NZ, 19, 136 see also adventure; Argosy Pictures; Cooper, Merian C.; Ealing Studios; Hei Tiki (Markey, 1935); Markey, Alexander; Schoedsack, Ernest B.; The Seekers (Annakin, 1954) exploitation, 54–55 Faier, Lieba, 26, 175–76 film historiography about, 2, 22, 26, 147–48 Australian westerns and, 101–5, 220nn9–11 Hei Tiki and, 134–35, 144–45, 156, 157, 164–69, 210n43 Markey and, 18 national cinema and, 103, 104, 144, 145, 157, 164–69, 210n43 NZ and, 143–45, 157 textuality and, 26 transnationality and, 13 filmic space American West and, 59–60, 60, 62–65, 70, 74, 83–84, 103, 172, 221n14 Argosy Pictures and, 6, 16, 62, 64–65, 70–71, 88–93 The Four Feathers and, 52–53, 55–58

259

western genre and, 64, 71, 77–79, 79, 81, 91, 122–27, 226nn93, 95 film reception affect and, 26, 196 influences on, 12, 16–18, 21 NZ and, 25–26 reexhibition at marae and, 178–81, 203, 234n18 settler cinemas and, 2, 3 textuality and, 22 see also Ealing Studios; oral histories; scrapbooks; specific films films ethnographic, 32, 41, 43–46, 137–39, 161 festivals for, 160, 164, 233n12 investment and disidentification for viewers of, 178–79 restoration of, 160, 168 see also distribution; ephemera; exhibition; film historiography; filmic space; film reception; labor; landscape; national cinema; production; settler cinemas; sound; textuality; transnationality; visual style Ford, John on Argosy westerns, 73 Cooper, and production relationship with, 18, 24, 62–65, 214n9 as director, 16 expeditionary film in Monument Valley, 19, 20 The Fugitive, 70, 216n40 historic context and, 17–20 labor and, 59, 85–86, 218n63 on masculinity in western genre , 217n54 Native American encounters and, 85–86, 90–91, 218nn63, 67 public persona of, 17–18 racialized colonial encounters and, 85, 218n63 The Searchers, 63–64, 74, 79, 84–85, 88, 215n10, 225n88 Stagecoach, 59, 63, 85, 87–88, 214n8, 215n10, 218n60, 218n62 Technicolor production plans and, 24, 63, 184 3 Godfathers, 64, 90, 216n40 see also Argosy Pictures; Rio Grande (Ford, 1950); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949); Wagon Master (Ford, 1950)



Index

Index

foreigner (tauiwi), 148, 198–99, 199, 208–9n20 Fort Apache (Ford, 1948) ethnicity and, 75, 76, 92 film reception of, 216n40 gender and, 77 imperialism and, 24, 63 labor and, 59 masculinity in, 64, 77, 80, 217n54 multicultural space and, 76–77 narrative of, 71–72 Native American space and, 75, 77, 78, 80, 217nn52–54 racialized colonial encounters and, 63–64, 77, 126 settler coloniality and, 24, 63–64, 73–77, 81–83 settler negotiations with space and, 59–60, 60, 74–76, 81, 89–90, 92, 93 visual style in, 73, 75, 82–83, 126 The Four Feathers (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1929) Amarar tribe and, 49, 51, 51, 54, 210–11n7 colonial encounters and, 51 directors of, 5 empire adventure and, 32, 33, 52–53, 55–58 ethnography and, 49–50, 210–11n7 exceptionalism and, 32–33, 45 exoticism and, 48, 49, 55, 65 exploitation and, 54–55 filmic space and, 52–53, 55–58 film reception of, 45, 46, 61–62 “Fuzzy Wuzzies” in, 34, 40, 47, 47, 51, 51–52, 54, 210–11n7 gender and, 29, 34–35, 36–37, 42, 46–48, 47, 212–13n48 historical context for, 5, 15 homosociality in, 47–48, 55 imperialism in, 18, 31, 46–53, 210–11n7 labor and, 53, 54, 59 localization of, 57, 58 location sites, and editing techniques in, 29–30, 31, 48–49, 56–58 masculine adventure dramas and, 19, 29–31, 30, 33, 36–44, 46–49, 48–55, 58 masculinity and, 15, 33–40, 47 narrative of, 23, 30, 31, 34, 46–53, 210–11n7 production of, 48–49, 52–53, 55–58, 108–9

publicity for, 29–30, 30, 39–40, 46–47, 47, 54–55, 111 quota legislation and, 68–69 racialized colonial encounters in, 19, 50, 53, 56–58, 213nn70, 71 settler coloniality in, 18, 29–33, 35, 52–53, 56–58, 126, 213nn70, 71 sound and, 15, 32 transnationality and, 16, 24–25, 32–33, 117–19, 127–28, 221n17 visual style, 32, 42, 44, 50, 56 see also Cooper, Merian C.; Ford, John; Schoedsack, Ernest B. The Four Feathers (Zoltan Korda, 1939), 23, 48, 61, 65, 211n16 Frayling, Christopher, 98 The Fugitive (Ford, 1947), 70, 216n40 “Fuzzy Wuzzies,” 34, 40, 47, 47, 51, 51–52, 54, 210–11n7 gender Argosy Pictures and, 70, 71, 77 colonial narratives and, 25, 29, 70, 71 The Four Feathers and, 29, 34–35, 36–37, 42, 46–48, 212–13n48 see also masculinity Gibson, Ross, 75–76, 82, 83 Gilbert, Henare, 190 Gilroy, Paul, 12 Ginsburg, Faye, 168 Goulding, Harry, 59, 85–88, 91, 214n1, 218–19n78 Goulding, Leone “Mike,” 59, 86–87 Goulding, Margaret, 148, 153, 155 Goulding’s Trading Post, 59, 60, 86, 214n1 Grace, John Te H., 139, 228nn19, 21 Grace, Puataata Alfred, 148, 149, 151 Grace, William Te Heuheu, 148, 151 Grass (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1925), 41, 44–49 Great Britain Australia, and relationship with, 6, 17, 19, 99–102, 107–8, 222nn26, 27, 222nn29, 30, 222n33, 225n82 film reception, and influences of, 16, 17, 21 historical context and, 15–17 imperialism of, 5–6, 12–13, 17, 60–61, 117–18, 224nn59, 64 imperial landscape and, 6, 219n88 international distribution and, 24–25, 117–19, 127, 204, 223n50 Ma-ori people in, 189–90, 235n37



260

masculine adventure genre and, 19–20, 30, 38 NZ, and relationship with, 6, 134–35, 143–46, 172, 174, 175, 183–88, 190, 205, 228n30, 235n41 quota legislation and, 67–69 settler coloniality and, 6, 16, 18, 24, 58, 60–68, 70–71, 99–100, 214n9 transnationality and, 5, 16, 24–25, 32–33, 66–68, 117–19, 127–28, 171, 221n17 U.S., and relationship with, 30–34, 40–45, 50–52, 54, 61–62, 65–71, 204, 215nn14–16, 215n21, 216n40 see also Argosy Pictures; Ealing Studios; Hei Tiki (Markey, 1935); The Seekers (Annakin, 1954) Green, Frank S., 200, 202 Greenhide (Chauvel, 1929), 102, 220n10 Griffiths, Alison, 44, 138, 140, 168 Griffiths, Gareth, 8, 10, 140 guardians (kaitiaki), 132, 144, 146, 163–64, 168–69, 226n1, 232nn89, 90 “guardianship, spiritual” (mana tu-turu), 162–63, 226n1, 231n73 see also kaitiaki (guardians) Guthrie, John, The Seekers, 176, 186, 202, 233n10 Hall, Ken G., 115, 224n51 hapuethnographic films and, 161 Hei Tiki, and encounters with, 147–49, 160–61, 163 identification with, 149, 173 NZFA and, 132–33, 163–64, 165, 173 The Seekers, and encounters with, 171–75, 180–84, 191, 203–4, 234n24 see also iwi; Ma-ori; specific hapuHarris, Julie, 183, 202–3 Harrison, Kay, 67, 69, 70, 215n23 Harrison, Marguerite, 37, 44–46, 48, 212–13n48 Harris, Witarina, 167, 231n83 Hastie, Amelie, 22, 201, 207n4 Hata, Makarini (Mac), 190 Hawkins, Jack, 176, 189, 191, 197–201, 203 Hayward, Rudall, 133, 143 Hei Tiki (Markey, 1935) archival practices and, 26, 132–33, 144, 158, 159, 163–64, 230n58 casting, 131, 132, 139, 148–49, 157, 159, 166–67

261 criticism of, 132, 134, 146, 147, 150, 150–55, 167, 228n36 ethnographic fictionalization in, 137, 138–42, 149–50 exhibition of, 158, 230n56 expeditionary films and, 136 film historiography and, 134, 144, 147–48, 156, 157, 159–60, 164–69, 210n43 film reception of, 25–26, 132, 144, 158–59, 164–66 hapu- encounters and, 147–49, 160–61, 163 Hope-Cross and, 150, 153–57, 156, 229n43 iwi encounters and, 25–26, 132–33, 147–49, 159, 160, 163–65, 173 kaitiaki of, 163, 231n75 labor and, 25–26, 146, 148 localization of, 131, 142, 144, 146–51, 159–60 location sites of, 131, 139, 150, 150, 152, 158, 160 Ma-ori cultural protocols and, 19, 146, 153–54, 179 Ma-ori culture, and narrative of, 25, 137–42, 149–51 musical score for, 153, 229n51 narrative of, 131, 137–38 national cinema and, 132–35, 143–44, 146, 157, 228n29 non-NZ credentials of director of, 132, 133, 134, 146, 147–48 NZ government assistance and, 148 Pa-keha- and, 132, 146, 148–49, 152, 155 production crew’s conditions during filming, 155, 156, 157 production of, 131, 134, 144, 148–55, 150, 155, 158, 160, 229n42 property loans of Ma-ori in production of, 151–52, 229n46 publicity for, 135–36, 147 restoration of, 160 settler nationalism and, 141–42 synchronized and, 138 textuality and, 131, 134, 144, 148, 151–52, 158–60, 165, 167 transnationality and, 131, 143 travel montage in, 139–40 unsettled history of, 133, 164–69 Varney and, 135, 138, 149, 152, 154–55 visual style and, 139, 142, 158



Index

Index

Hei Tiki (Markey, 1935)—Contiued voiceovers and, 140, 159 wages and, 154 see also Adventures in Maoriland (Steven, 1985); Markey, Alexander Hill, Alfred, 153 Hill, Triana Jackie, 151, 159–60 Hirangi marae, 160 see also marae historiography, film. See film historiography Hodge, Bob, 42 Hohepa, Horowai (Horace), 181 Hollywood exhibition dominance of, 19, 20, 145, 228n30 racialized colonial encounters and, 19, 50, 53, 56–58, 213nn70, 71 transnationality and, 5, 16, 24–25, 32–33, 117–19, 127–28, 221n17 U.S. imperial policies realized in, 4–6, 5–6, 13, 16, 20, 23, 61–63, 71 see also The Four Feathers (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1929) home movies, 173–74, 177, 207n2 homosociality, 47–48, 55 Hope-Cross, Henry, 150, 153–57, 156, 229n43 I’m King Kong (Bird and Brownlow, 2005), 34, 36 imperialism adventure and, 2, 3, 29–31 Argosy Pictures production and, 6, 16, 61, 63–64, 65–71 Australian relationship to British, 99–102 British, 5–6, 12–13, 17, 60–61, 117–18, 224nn59, 64 Ealing Studios, and British, 100, 106–16, 120–22, 222nn26, 27, 222nn29, 30, 222n33, 223n50, 225n82 narratives of, 18, 31, 46–53, 210–11n7 NZ relationship to British, 134–35, 143–46, 172, 174, 175, 183–88, 205 settler coloniality and, 6, 16, 18, 20, 24, 58, 60–68, 70–71, 99–100, 214n9 settler nationalism and, 3, 6, 8 travel discourses and, 18, 19–20, 22–23, 40, 184–87 U.S., 3, 6, 12–13, 17–19, 24–25, 42–43, 60–61, 101, 117–18, 224n59

U.S. relationship to British, 30–34, 40–45, 50–52, 54, 61–62, 65–71, 204, 215nn14–16, 215n21, 216n40 indigenization, 10, 80, 91–92, 110, 111, 147–48, 179, 187, 217nn53, 54 indigenous peoples archival practices and, 132–33, 163–64 filmic space in western genre and, 64, 71, 77–79, 79, 81, 91, 122–27, 126, 226nn93, 95 film reception, and participation of, 12 property rights of, 149, 162, 168, 230n67, 231nn69, 73, 232nn85, 88, 232n90 sound, and presence of, 81 “traveling cultures” and, 190–91 wages for, 85, 123, 154 see also Aboriginal Australians; alienation of land from ownership; hapu-; iwi; Ma-ori; Native Americans; settler-indigenous encounters; specific hapu-; specific iwi In the Land of the Head Hunters (Curtis, 1914), 138, 139 iwi ethnographic films and, 161 Hei Tiki, and encounters with, 132, 139, 146–49, 160–61, 163–64, 166 identification with, 14, 173, 209n35 as kaitiaki for NZFA, 163–64, 231n75 Memorandum of Understanding between NZFA and, 25, 163–64, 168–69, 232nn89, 90 NZFA , and role of, 25–26, 163–64, 168–69, 173, 231n75, 232n84 The Seekers, and encounters with, 173, 177, 182–83, 184, 189–91, 203–4 Te Hokinga Mai o Nga- Taonga Whitiahua project and, 160–61, 163–65, 167–68, 177 see also hapu-; Ma-ori; specific iwi Jaikumar, Priya, 13, 68 Johns, Glynis, 176, 196, 198, 234n18 John, W. E., 38, 211n20 Kaiawatea pa- site, 150, 160 kaitiaki (guardians), 132, 144, 146, 163–64, 168–69, 226n1, 232nn89, 90 kaupapa (policy), 162–63, 168, 169, 207n6, 232n89 Kereti, Ngawara (Ngawara Bradshaw), 137, 149, 153–54, 158, 179 Kerridge, R. J., 174, 186, 187



262

263

King, Cherry (Cherry Merritt), 195, 196–200, 199, 236n60 King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933), 18, 56, 212–13n48 Kipling, Rudyard, 38, 40, 52, 54, 210–11n7 Kitses, Jim, 98 Kopua, Huia, 160, 162, 163, 178–79, 226n2, 231n75 Korda, Alexander, 61, 65, 67, 70, 215n15 Korda, Zoltan, 23, 48, 55, 61, 65, 65, 185, 211n16, 215n15, 222n33 Korohe marae, 154, 160 see also marae

Lewis, Jon, 188 Living Dangerously (Vaz), 34, 56, 213n70 localization Argosy Pictures and, 63, 70–71, 84, 93 Ealing Studios and, 102, 111, 120 The Four Feathers and, 57, 58 Hei Tiki and, 131, 142, 144, 146–51, 159–60 The Seekers and, 26, 171, 174–79, 188, 191, 193–95, 197, 198–203 London, H. D. (Jack), 22, 182, 200–203 Losche, Diane, 11

labor Aboriginal Australians and, 105, 122–27 African Americans and, 56–57, 213nn70, 71 Africans and, 54, 55 Argosy Pictures and, 53, 59, 85–86, 218n63 Australian westerns and, 113–14 Ma-ori and, 2, 22–26, 146, 148, 174, 178, 182–83, 186–87, 194, 196, 203 Native Americans and, 56, 85–86, 218n63 Pa-keha- and, 23, 26, 132, 146, 148–49, 152, 155, 172–75, 182–84, 187–88, 192 settler cinemas and, 3 textuality and, 2, 22 wages for, 85, 123, 154 see also agency; Ma-ori; oral histories; racialized colonial encounters; scrapbooks Lamb, Jonathan, 11 Land of Fury [U.S. title for The Seekers] (Annakin, 1954), 207n1, 234n31, 236n49 see also The Seekers (Annakin, 1954) landscape American West as colonial, 74–76, 83, 87–88 Australia, and colonial, 89, 97, 99, 102–5, 121, 127, 219n88, 221n17 imperial, 6, 219n88 NZ, and colonial, 16, 137, 140–42, 144–46, 184–87, 194, 228n34 The Seekers and, 184–85, 187 U.S., and colonial, 31–33, 52–53, 57–58, 88–89, 91–93, 219n88, 221n17 see also Monument Valley; space Lawson, Alan, 9–10, 11, 20, 73 Leone, Sergio, 98

“Mabo decision,” 168, 232n85 Macnab, Geoffrey, 185 Maltby, Richard, 218n63 Mana Tuturu (Barclay), 162, 207n6, 226n1, 231n69 mana tu-turu (“spiritual guardianship”), 162–63, 226n1, 231n73 see also kaitiaki (guardians) Maoriland, 133, 140–42 Ma-ori agency and, 23, 132, 144, 147, 175 alienation of land from ownership by, 6, 180–81, 182–83, 218n77, 222n29, 234n23 in Britain, 189–90, 235n37 cultural hurt to, 183, 191, 194–96, 235n45 cultural rights of, 149, 162, 168, 230n67, 231nn69, 73, 232nn88, 90 foreigners (tauiwi), and encounters with, 198–99, 199, 201–3 as identity, 14, 148, 149, 173, 183, 191, 204, 209n35 NZFA and, 162–63, 165, 168, 169, 207n6, 232n89 properties stolen from, 151–52, 160 racialized colonial encounters with, 19–20, 23, 198–99, 199, 201–3 sovereignty and, 11, 164–65, 169, 207–8n10, 209n35, 230n67 temporality and, 166–67 transnationality and, 174, 183 Treaty of Waitangi and, 161, 209n35, 230n67 see also hapu-; Hei Tiki (Markey, 1935); iwi; Ma-ori cultural protocols (tikanga); Ma-ori language (te reo); The Seekers (Annakin, 1954); specific hapu-; specific iwi; specific Ma-ori terms



Index

Index

Ma-ori cultural protocols (tikanga) Hei Tiki production and, 19, 146, 153–54, 179 marae and, 26, 165–67, 171, 177–78, 233n13 NZFA and, 26, 132, 144, 146, 162, 165–66, 173, 177–78 The Seekers production and, 179 Ma-ori language (te reo), 162, 178–79, 231n73, 233n15 marae home movies and, 177 Ma-ori cultural protocols and, 26, 165–67, 171, 177–78, 233n13 reception, and reexhibition at, 178–81, 203, 234n18 regional touring film programs and, 163 Te Hokinga Mai and, 160, 163–65 as venue for reexhibition, 26, 160, 165–67, 171–73, 177–81, 203, 233n13, 234n18 see also wharenui (meeting houses) Markey, Alexander biographical information about, 18, 19, 135, 151–55 The Devil’s Pit, 20, 133, 136–37, 148, 167, 216n37, 227n6 as director, 18, 19 exoticism in narratives and, 140, 167 expeditionary films in NZ, 19, 136 Hollywood dominance and, 19, 20 imperial travel discourses and, 18, 19, 20 Ma-ori cultural protocols and, 146, 153–54 non-NZ credentials issues and, 132, 133, 134, 146, 147–48 NZ government support for, 148 production and, 152–55, 155 properties of Ma-ori stolen by, 151–52, 160 Varney and, 135, 138, 149, 152, 154–55 see also Hei Tiki (Markey, 1935) masculine adventure dramas, 19–20, 29–31, 33, 36–44, 45–46, 48–55, 58, 211n16 masculinity adventure and, 2, 3, 29–31 Cooper and, 20, 29, 33–40, 43, 46–48, 47, 211n8 The Four Feathers and, 15, 33–40, 47 homosociality and, 47–48, 55 indigenization and, 10, 80, 91–92, 217nn53, 54

military heroes and, 19, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35–40, 46–49 Pa-keha- and, 38 in western genre, 64, 70, 71, 77, 80, 217nn53, 54 see also settler masculinity Mason, A. E. W., 34, 39, 48, 54, 61, 66 Ma-taatua waka, 172, 201, 232–33n1 McDonald, James, 161–62, 163 meeting houses (wharenui), 166, 171, 189, 234n18 Memorandum of Understanding, between iwi and NZFA, 25, 163–64, 168–69, 232nn89, 90 Merritt, Cherry (Cherry King), 195, 196–200, 199, 236n60 Merritt, James Te Mautaranui, 196 methodologies of film history, 144, 157, 164–69, 210n43 see also film historiography Mirams, Gordon, 145 Mishra, Vijay, 42 Mita, Merata, 133, 159, 166–67, 169, 230n66, 232n84 Monopack Technicolor process, 24, 62–63, 66–70, 72, 76, 184 Monument Valley colonialism, and landscape in, 74–76, 83, 87–88 expeditionary films in, 19, 20 imperial narratives and, 19, 20, 64 landscape of, 59 Navajos in, 20, 59, 85–92, 218nn67, 74, 218–19n78 settler coloniality and, 19, 83, 84 space and, 77–78, 91 see also American West; Ford, John; Native Americans Moon, Samuel, 86, 88, 214n1, 218n64, 218–19n78 Moore, Colleen, 22, 201 Mormon settlers, 64, 86, 88–92 musical scores, 153, 179, 192, 229n51 Naficy, Hamid, 44, 45, 212–13n48 national cinema Australia and, 13–15, 119–20 Australian westerns and, 104, 108, 114–17, 127–28, 223n50, 224n56 film historiography and, 103, 104, 144, 145, 157, 164–69, 210n43 Hei Tiki and, 132–35, 143–44, 146, 156, 157, 228n29



264

NZ and, 13–14 The Overlanders and, 14, 120–21 The Seekers and, 172, 186, 204, 205 settler cinemas and, 5, 13–15 National Film Library in NZ, 158, 230n58 Native Americans agency, 80, 83–84 alienation of land from ownership by, 87, 88, 218n77 labor and, 59, 85–86, 218n63 Navajos in Monument Valley and, 20, 59, 85–92, 218nn67, 74, 218–19n78 racialized colonial encounters and, 62–64, 77, 126 “salvage ethnography” and, 138–39 settler colonialism and, 30–31, 85, 218n63 settler encounters with, 64, 85–86, 89, 90–91, 218nn63, 67 settler negotiations with space of, 75, 77–81, 78, 79, 91, 217nn52–54 wages for, 85 see also Monument Valley Neumann, Klaus, 11 New Zealand (NZ) bicultural policy and, 14, 162, 168, 173, 207n6 Boer War and, 38, 211n21 Britain’s relationship with, 6, 134–35, 143–46, 172, 174, 175, 183–88, 190, 205, 228n30, 235n41 British imperialism and, 134–35, 143–46, 172, 174, 175, 183–88, 205 colonial landscape and, 16, 137, 140–42, 144–46, 184–85, 184–87, 194, 228n34 distribution in, 1, 16, 67, 108, 172–74, 183–87, 190–91, 204 documentaries and, 1, 207n2 ethnographic films and, 161 expeditionary film in, 19, 136 film festivals in, 160, 164, 233n12 film reception and, 25–26 government support for production from, 148 historical context for settler cinemas in, 6, 15–16, 19 Hollywood, and exhibition dominance in, 19, 20, 145, 228n30 imperial travel discourses and, 19, 20, 185–87 localization in, 26, 191, 203 name for, 207n10

265

national cinema and, 13–14 racialized colonial encounters in, 19–20, 23, 198–99, 199, 201–3 settler nationalism in, 6, 109, 183–84 as settler society, 33, 144–46, 157, 172, 207n5, 228nn30, 33 transnationality and, 25, 131, 142–44, 174, 183, 188–91 Treaty of Waitangi and, 161, 209n35, 230n67 Waitangi Tribunal, 230n67, 234n23 see also hapu-; Hei Tiki (Markey, 1935); iwi; Ma-ori; New Zealand Film Archive/Nga- Kaitiaki o Nga- Taonga Whitia-hua (NZFA); The Seekers (Annakin, 1954); tangata whenua (“people of the land”) New Zealand Film Archive/Nga- Kaitiaki o Nga- Taonga Whitia-hua (NZFA) about, 4, 132, 159, 207n6, 226n1 archival practices and, 26, 160–61 Dennis and, 161, 162, 166, 167, 226n1, 230n66, 231n71 Deposit Agreement and, 25, 162–64, 168–69 ethnographic films at, 161 hapu- and, 132–33, 163–64, 165, 173 home movies in, 173–74, 177, 207n2 iwi archival practices and, 25–26, 132–33, 163–64, 168–69, 173, 231n75, 232n84 kaitiaki and, 26, 132, 144, 146, 163–64, 168–69, 173, 226n1, 232nn89, 90 kaupapa of, 162–63, 168, 169, 207n6, 232n89 Kopua and, 160, 162, 163, 178–79, 226n2, 231n75 Ma-ori cultural protocols and, 26, 132, 144, 146, 162, 165–66, 173, 177–78 Memorandum of Understanding between iwi and, 25, 163–64, 168–69, 232nn89, 90 reexhibition and, 25, 26, 132, 144, 159, 171–74, 177, 230n58, 233n12 restoration of films and, 160, 168 settler law and, 168–69, 232nn89, 90 “spiritual guardianship” and, 162–63, 226n1, 231n73 taonga Ma-ori at, 161–66, 169, 177, 230n66, 232nn89, 90 Te Hokinga Mai o Nga- Taonga Whitiahua project and, 25, 160–61, 163–65, 167–68, 177



Index

Index

Nga- Puhi, 148 Nga-ti Awa, 173, 180–81, 182–83, 201, 232n88, 234n23 Nga-ti Awa settlement, 234n23 Nga-ti Hine, 160 Nga-ti Hokopu- hapu-, 171–72 Nga-ti Pikiao, 177 “Nga-ti Ra-nana,” 189–90, 235n37 Nga-ti Raukawa, 189 Nga-ti Tu-wharetoa Hei Tiki and, 25–26, 132, 139, 148, 149, 159, 160, 229n42 as kaitiaki for Hei Tiki, 163, 231n75 settlers, encounters with, 139, 228n19 Nga-ti Tu-wharetoa Trust Board, 148, 230n56 Nikorima, Nepia, 149 offscreen filmic space, 78–80, 79, 89, 123–25, 124, 217n50 Ohiwa, 136, 137 Omori pa- site, 150, 150, 152, 158 oral histories, 18–19, 21–23, 134, 151, 165, 167, 174, 179–83, 194 O’Regan, Tom, 4–5, 14, 207n9, 220n11 O’Reilly, Patrick, 140 Orientalism, 40, 41, 45 Orr, Bridget, 11 O’Shea, John, 16, 133 Otarawairere Bay, 172, 180, 197, 199, 200 the Other/otherness, 31, 44, 46, 80, 83–84, 93, 187, 219n83 “outdoor picture,” 112, 223n43 see also western genre The Overlanders (Watt, 1946) Australian government support and, 120–21, 225n74 director of, 120 documentaries and, 120 Ealing imperial ambitions and, 100, 111, 112, 122, 220n30, 222n33, 225n82 film reception of, 107, 109, 223n43, 225n74 national cinema and, 14, 120–21 production of, 100, 107–9, 120–21 publicity for, 109–11, 110, 222n33 racialized colonial encounters and, 125–27 settler nationalism and, 25, 109–10, 125 visual style in, 25, 97, 126, 126–27 voiceovers and, 127 western genre and, 25, 97, 102, 104–5

Pacific region, 12–13, 17, 24–25, 42, 68–70, 101, 117–18, 224nn59, 64 Pa-keha- (European-descendant settler) author as, 180, 184 Hei Tiki and, 132, 146, 148–49, 152, 155 as identity, 148, 208–9n20, 209n35 labor and, 23, 26, 132, 146, 148–49, 152, 155, 172–75, 182–84, 187–88, 192 masculinity and, 38 The Seekers and, 172–75, 182–84, 187–88, 192 see also settler pa- sites (fortified villages), 150, 150, 152, 158, 160 Pene, Takirau, 178 “people of the land” (tangata whenua). see tangata whenua (“people of the land”) Phillips, Jock, 38 The Piano (Campion, 1993), 16, 217n56, 219n85 Pihanga (mountain), 150 postcolonial theory, 8–11, 208n19, 208–9n20 Pratt, Mary Louise, 7 Prentice, Chris, 221n16 production adventure and, 29–30, 33, 48–49, 51, 53, 66 affect and, 22, 26, 100, 107, 112–13, 119, 180, 196, 200–204 color film and, 24, 62–63, 66–70, 72, 76, 184, 185 government support for, 120–23, 148, 225nn74, 82 location sites, and editing techniques, 29–30, 31, 48–49, 56–58 in settler societies, 3–6, 18–20 tension and contradiction in, 18, 31, 107–9, 127, 186–87, 195–96, 204–5 transatlantic cooperation in, 17, 62, 65–71, 101, 215nn14–16, 216n40 unsettled history of, 3, 12, 133, 146, 164–69, 172–74, 183–84, 204–5 see also agency; Argosy Pictures; Ealing Studios; specific films property rights of indigenous peoples, 149, 162, 168–69, 230n67, 231nn69, 73, 232n85, 232nn88–90 protocols. See Ma-ori cultural protocols (tikanga) publicity affect and, 7



266

from Ealing Studios, 105, 110, 111, 122, 222n33, 223n43 for The Four Feathers, 29–30, 39–40, 46–47, 54–55, 111 for Hei Tiki, 135–36, 147 for The Overlanders, 109–11, 222n33 for The Seekers, 1, 186, 189, 194 Purcell, Noel, 176, 183, 191, 197–201 quota legislation, 67–69 race, 36–37, 38, 40–41, 57–58, 70–71, 78–81, 92–93, 127, 136–42, 153, 226n94 see also racialized colonial encounters; whiteness racialized colonial encounters African Americans and, 56–57, 213nn70, 71 Africans and, 50, 53, 56–58 agency and, 52, 70, 83–84, 144, 147 Argosy Pictures and, 53, 62–64, 77, 126 Australia and, 88, 103, 113–14, 226nn94, 95 “Fuzzy Wuzzies” and, 34, 40, 47, 47, 51, 51–52, 54, 210–11n7 Native Americans and, 30–31, 53, 57–58, 62–64, 71, 77, 126 in NZ, 19–20, 23, 198–99, 199, 201–3 settler cinemas and, 8 in western genre, 58, 62, 71, 74, 77, 85, 103, 122–27, 218n63 see also labor; race; whiteness Raki, Laya cultural hurt, and casting of, 183, 191, 194–96, 235n45 dance performed by, 1, 176, 179, 192–93, 196, 235n47 foreigner-Ma-ori encounters and, 198–99, 199 legacy of, 194–96, 236n57 nude scene and, 181, 192, 236n49 Ramirez Berg, Charles, 90–91 Rank, J. Arthur, 1, 16, 67, 108, 172, 174, 183–87, 190–91 Ratana Church, 148–49 Ratana town, 149 raupatu (confiscation of Nga-ti Awa land), 180–81, 234n23 Rawiri, Te Manu (Pat), 190 reception, film. See film reception reexhibition of Hei Tiki, 4, 144, 158–64, 166–67

267

marae as venue for, 26, 160, 165–67, 171–73, 177–81, 203, 233n13, 234n18 NZFA and, 25, 26, 132, 144, 159, 171–74, 177, 230n58, 233n12 of The Seekers, 171–73, 177–78, 203–4, 233n13, 234n18 see also exhibition Return of Treasured Images (Te Hokinga Mai o Nga- Taonga Whitia-hua), 26, 160–61, 163–65, 167–68, 177 Rio Grande (Ford, 1950) imperialism and, 63–64 narrative of, 72–73, 76–78, 81–82 offscreen sound and, 78 production and, 63–64 settler coloniality and, 63, 74, 76, 82 settler-indigenous encounters in, 78, 81 sound and, 78, 81 The Road to Botany Bay (Carter), 89 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 46, 137, 138, 140, 168 Rotoiti lake, 181 Rotorua, 135–37, 142, 149, 171–74, 178 Routt, Bill, 103–4, 109, 221nn16, 17 Rydge, Norman, 116, 224nn54, 56 safari films, 48–53, 51, 136 see also Cooper, Merian C.; Markey, Alexander; Schoedsack, Ernest B. “salvage ethnography,” 137–42, 140–42 Sanders of the River (Zoltan Korda 1935), 65 Schneider, Tassilo, 46, 98 Schoedsack, Ernest B. Chang (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1925) and, 40, 44–47, 67 as director, 5 ethnographic films of, 32, 41, 43–46 expeditionary films in Africa and, 19, 48–55, 51, 212n39 Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1925), 41, 44–49 imperial travel discourses and, 19, 22–23, 40 King Kong, 18, 56, 212–13n48 masculinity and, 29, 46–48, 47, 211n8 photograph of, 30 public persona of, 18 see also The Four Feathers (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1929)



Index

Index

Schoedsack, Ruth Rose, 48, 210n1 scrapbooks, 1, 22, 26, 182, 200–203, 207n4, 210n43 screenings. See exhibition The Sea Gypsy (Cooper), 42, 49, 57 The Searchers (Ford, 1956), 63–64, 74, 79, 84–85, 88, 215n10, 225n88 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 47–48 The Seekers (Guthrie), 176, 186, 202, 233n10 The Seekers [U.S. title Land of Fury] (Annakin, 1954) affect and, 180, 196, 200–204 Annakin as director of, 207n1, 234n31, 235n47, 236n49 Brown as producer of, 1, 18, 19, 184–85, 188–89 casting, 174, 182–83, 187–91 colonial encounters and, 4, 172, 174–76, 183–84, 185–86, 190, 203 color production using Eastmancolor for, 184, 185 commercial theater exhibition of, 26, 164, 173–74, 177, 178, 186 contradictions and tensions during production of, 186–87, 195–96, 204–5 criticism of, 1, 174–75, 183, 187, 207n3, 233n2 cultural hurt and, 183, 191, 194–96, 235n45 distribution of, 1, 16, 67, 108, 172–74, 183–87, 190–91, 204 exoticism and, 184, 185 film reception of, 25, 26, 175, 179, 204 foreigner-Ma-ori encounters and, 198–99, 199, 201–3 hapu- encounters and, 171–75, 180–84, 191, 203–4, 234n24 Hawkins and, 176, 189, 191, 197–201, 203 historical context and, 3–4, 16, 174 home movies and, 173–74, 177, 207n2 imperial travel discourses and, 4, 20, 184–87 indigenization and, 187 iwi encounters and, 173, 177, 182–83, 184, 189–91, 203–4, 234n24 labor and, 2, 22–23, 26, 174, 178, 182–83, 186–87, 194, 196, 203 landscape and, 184–85, 187 localization of, 26, 171, 174–79, 188, 191, 193–95, 197, 198–203

location sites, and editing techniques for, 184 location sites for, 1, 136, 171–74, 177, 181, 183–84, 202 Ma-ori cultural protocols and, 179 Ma-ori culture, and narrative of, 172–75, 178–79, 189, 235n47 Ma-ori language in, 178–79, 233n15 musical score in, 179, 192 narrative of, 172, 174–79, 180, 187–88, 233n15, 234nn18, 31, 235n47 national cinema and, 172, 186, 204, 205 NZFA exhibition of, 173–74 production of, 174, 179–81, 182–83, 194, 197, 200–203 publicity for, 1, 186, 189, 194, 198 Purcell and, 176, 183, 191, 197–201 reexhibition of, 171–73, 177–78, 203–4, 233n13, 234n18 settler colonialism and, 187, 234n31 singing and chanting and, 192 tension and contradictions in production and, 186–87, 195–96 textuality and, 1, 21–23, 26, 174, 179–83, 188, 193–203 transnationality and, 25, 174, 183, 188–91 unsettled history of, 172–74, 183–84 visual style and, 79, 174, 176, 177, 179, 184, 217n50, 225n88 see also Raki, Laya settle, defined, 83–84 settler cinemas, 1–7, 15–20, 205–6, 210n40 see also distribution; ephemera; film historiography; film reception; films; labor; landscape; national cinema; production; textuality; transnationality; visual style settler colonialism affect and, 22, 112, 119, 180, 204 defined, 8 indigenous peoples and, 30–32 literature on, 11, 209n29 local colonial histories and, 6–7, 33 narratives of, 18–19, 21 in Pacific region, 11–13 The Seekers and, 187, 234n31 tension and, 6, 42, 73, 91, 107, 127 transnationality and, 7, 11–15 U.S. and, 23, 71, 74–75, 76, 83, 85, 87–88, 218n63 western genre and, 100, 127



268

see also distribution; imperialism; labor; landscape; production; race; textuality; visual style settler coloniality in American West, 59–65, 60, 70–77, 81–85, 88–92, 103, 172, 221n14 Argosy Pictures and, 61, 63–64, 70–77, 81–85, 88–92 in Australia, 83 Australian westerns and, 99, 100, 104–5, 127–28 contradictions in U.S., 29–33, 35, 50–53, 56–58, 73, 81, 213nn70, 71 indigenous peoples and, 20 settler cinemas and, 6–7, 7–8 sites for, 20 space and, 59–60, 60, 62–65, 68–70, 74, 83–84, 103, 172, 221n14 space in Australia and, 103, 221nn13, 14 in U.S., 6, 9, 18, 33, 60–61, 90, 126 settler cultures. See settler societies settler-indigenous encounters in American West, 64, 71, 75, 77–81, 78, 79, 86, 89–91, 90–91, 217nn52–54 in Australia, 122–23, 125, 226n89 contact spaces and, 7, 26 landscape and, 6, 91–92 in NZ, 19–20, 23, 139, 198–99, 199, 201–3, 228n19 postcolonial theory and, 10 settler cinemas and, 1, 3, 4, 5 settler societies and, 195–96 transnationality and, 8, 12 see also specific films “settler-invader,” 9, 208–9n20 settler law vs. property rights of indigenous peoples, 149, 162, 168–69, 230n67, 231nn69, 73, 232n85, 232nn88–90 settler masculinity Argosy Pictures and, 65, 80–81 Cooper and, 29, 35, 37, 38, 39, 55, 65 space and, 104 see also indigenization; masculinity; Pa-keha-; race; whiteness settler nationalism in Australia, 6, 25, 99–100, 107, 109–11, 118, 121, 222n29 film historiography and, 144, 157, 164–69, 210n43 imperialism and, 3, 6, 8 in NZ, 6, 109, 183–84

269

The Overlanders and, 25, 109–10, 125 western genre and, 103–4, 221n16 settler societies Australia as, 33, 104 contradictions and tensions in, 84, 133, 168, 186–87, 195–96, 204–5 distribution in, 3–8, 14, 16–18 historicity, and future of, 3, 181, 205–6 indigenization and, 91, 110, 111, 148 NZ as, 33, 144–46, 157, 172, 207n5, 228n30, 228n33 the Other/otherness and, 31 postcolonial theory and, 8–11, 208n19, 208–9n20 production and, 3–6, 18–20 settler-indigenous encounters and, 195–96 space shared between imperial and colonial histories in, 16, 18, 24, 42, 62–68, 70–71, 99–100 tangata whenua and, 183, 187 transnationality in, 4–5, 13–15, 142–43, 188 U.S. as, 24, 31, 57, 70, 90, 104, 219n83 settler, use of term, 9, 208–9n20 see also Pa-keha-; whiteness Sheep and the Australian Cinema (Verhoeven), 14 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949) in, 78–79, 79, 81, 82 imperialism and, 63–64 narrative of, 72 offscreen sound in, 78–79, 79 production and, 63–64 settler coloniality and, 63, 74, 76, 82, 90 settler negotiations with space and, 77–79, 79, 81, 89, 90, 126 visual style in, 78–80, 79, 126, 217n50 voiceovers and, 82 Simmons, Laurence, 133, 188, 193 Simpson, Dr. Miria, 201 Smart, Ralph, 14, 97, 120, 226n89 see also Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950) Smith, Bernard, 222n29 Smoodin, Eric, 164–65, 188 sound Coubray-tone, 152 indigenous presence and, 81 musical scores and, 153, 179, 192, 229n51 offscreen, 78–79, 79, 124 period, 32, 102 silent films and, 15, 102



Index

Index

sound—Continued singing and chanting and, 192 songs in soundtrack and, 90 synchronized, 15, 138 voiceovers and, 82, 127, 140, 59 sovereignty, and Ma-ori, 11, 164–65, 169, 207–8n10, 209n35, 230n67 space Aboriginal Australian, 104, 122–27, 226n95 Australia and, 103, 221nn13, 14 contact, 7, 26 imperial and colonial histories, and shared, 16, 18, 24, 42, 62–68, 70–71, 99–100 multicultural, 76–77 Native American, 75, 77–81, 78, 79, 91, 217nn52–54 settler coloniality and, 59–60, 60, 62–65, 68–70, 74, 83–84, 103, 172, 221nn13, 14 settler negotiations with indigenous peoples and, 79, 81, 88–93, 104, 122–27, 126, 226n95 see also landscape “spiritual guardianship” (mana tu-turu), 162–63, 226n1, 231n73 see also kaitiaki (guardians) Stagecoach (Ford, 1939), 59, 63, 85, 87–88, 214n8, 215n10, 218nn60, 62 Staples, Amy, 49 Steven, Geoff. See Adventures in Maoriland (Steven, 1985) Stoler, Ann Laura, 26, 61, 62, 112, 175, 180 Stratton, Jon, 31, 90, 219n83 Stretton, Julienne, 134 Strohmaier, David, 36 Studlar, Gaylyn, 37 tangata whenua (“people of the land”) casting and, 149, 157, 159 as identity, 149 reexhibition of Hei Tiki and, 166–67 The Seekers, and encounters with, 171, 174, 178–79, 194, 196, 203, 234n18 in settler society, 183, 187 see also Ma-ori Taonga Maori Collection, 162, 169, 177, 232nn89, 90 Taonga Maori Deposit Agreement, 162–64, 168–69, 232nn89, 90

taonga (treasures), 147, 151, 160–66, 169, 177, 180–81, 230n66, 232nn89, 90, 234n23 Tapuaeharuru marae, 173, 181, 203 see also marae Taranga, 135–36, 227n6 see also The Devil’s Pit (Markey, 1929) tauiwi (foreigner), 148, 198–99, 199, 208–9n20 Taupo-lake, 148 Taupo- town, 160 Taves, Brian, 33 Te Arawa iwi, 148, 149, 229n42 Te Arawa waka, 139, 229n42 Technicolor, 24, 62–63, 66–70, 72, 76, 184 Te Hokinga Mai o Nga- Taonga Whitia-hua (Return of Treasured Images), 26, 160–61, 163–65, 167–68, 177 temporality, 166–67 te reo (Ma-ori language), 162, 178–79, 231n73, 233n15 Te Whare o Toroa marae, 171–72 Te Wiata, Inia, 171, 176, 189 textuality Argosy Pictures and, 21, 24, 65–66 contextual material and, 20, 22, 179–81, 203, 210n43 Cooper’s papers and, 21, 24, 65–66 Ealing Studios papers and, 21, 22, 25, 100, 107, 109, 112–16 home movies and, 173–74, 177, 207n2 oral histories and, 18–19, 21–23, 134, 151, 165, 167, 174, 179–83, 194 scrapbooks and, 1, 22, 26, 182, 200–203, 207n4, 210n43 settler cinemas and, 2, 5, 8, 20–23, 24 see also ephemera; specific films Thomas, Lowell, 40–41 Thomas, Nicholas, 8, 11, 58, 91, 112, 208n18, 219n85 3 Godfathers (Ford, 1948), 64, 90, 216n40 Tiffin, Helen, 8, 10 tikanga. See Ma-ori cultural protocols (tikanga) Tokaanu town, 158, 230n56 transnationality Australia and, 4–5, 100, 117–19, 127–28, 221n17 Ma-ori and, 174, 183 NZ and, 25, 131, 142–44, 174, 183, 188–91 settler-indigenous encounters and, 8, 12



270

in settler societies, 4–5, 13–15, 142–43, 188 U.S. and, 61–62 of western genre, 98, 101, 103–4 see also specific films travel Cooper’s writings about, 41–42, 44, 49–52, 55, 57, 210–11n7 ethnography and, 19, 32, 41, 43–46, 49–50, 210–11n7 imperial travel discourses and, 18, 19–20, 22–23, 40, 184–87 see also adventure “traveling culture,” 190–91 travelogues, 15, 40, 45, 46, 48–53, 51, 136, 140 see also adventure treasures (taonga), 147, 151, 160–66, 169, 177, 180–81, 230n66, 232nn89, 90, 234n23 Treaty of Waitangi, 161, 209n35, 230n67 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 26, 176, 182, 196 Tulloch, John, 118, 119, 207n9, 224n51 Tu-rangi town, 160 Turner, Stephen, 11, 93, 165–66, 219n87, 228n27, 231n73, 235n45 Tu-wharetoa iwi. See Nga-ti Tu-wharetoa “Two Fighting Tribes of the Sudan” (Cooper), 49–52, 210–11n7 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United States African American labor and, 56–57 Britain’s relationship with, 30–34, 40–45, 50–52, 54, 61–62, 65–71, 204, 215nn14–16, 215n21, 216n40 Cathedral City as location site in, 29–30, 31, 48–49, 56–58 colonial landscape and, 31–33, 52–53, 57–58, 88–89, 91–93 exceptionalism and, 32–33, 45, 51 film reception, and influence of, 16, 17, 21 frontier tradition in, 31, 38, 46 historical context and, 15–17 imperialism of, 3, 6, 12–13, 17–19, 24–25, 42–43, 60–61, 101, 117–18, 224n59 international distribution and, 117–19, 127, 204 national and cultural identity in, 24, 62, 70

271 settler colonial contradictions in, 29–33, 35, 50–53, 56–58, 73, 81 settler colonialism and, 23, 71, 74–75, 76, 83, 85, 87–88, 218n63 settler coloniality and, 6, 9, 18, 33, 60–61, 90, 126 settler nationalism and, 6, 103–4, 221n16 as settler society, 24, 31, 57, 70, 90, 104, 219n83 transnationality and, 61–62 western genre Americanness and, 97, 100–102, 220n5 see also American West; Hollywood; Monument Valley; western genre

Varney, Zoe, 135, 138, 149, 152, 154–55 Vaz, Marc Cotta, 34, 35–36, 38–39, 42, 56, 213n70, 215n16 Verhoeven, Deb, 14, 122–25, 226n89 visual style, and offscreen filmic space, 78–80, 79, 89, 123–25, 124, 217n50 see also specific films wages, 85, 123, 154 Wagon Master (Ford, 1950) cultural equivalency in, 90–91, 93–94 ethnicity and, 90 filmic space and, 88–93 imperialism and, 24, 63 indigenization and, 91 narrative of, 64, 86, 88–92, 215n12 Native American encounters and, 85, 86 settler coloniality and, 24, 63, 74, 76, 84, 88–93, 92, 93 sound and, 90 visual style in, 79, 90, 217n50 Waihi marae, 160 see also marae Wairaka marae, 171, 173, 178, 232–33n1 see also marae Wairaka settlement, 171, 172, 197, 197 Waitangi Tribunal, 230n67, 234n23 waka (canoe), 139, 150, 166, 172, 197, 201, 229n42, 232–33n1 Walker, Janet, 98 Warbrick, Patiti (Patrick), 188, 201 Ward-Holmes, Te Waari (Joe), 190 Waretini, Matahera, 181 Watt, Harry as director, 14, 25, 97, 121 Ealing production and, 19, 106, 107–8, 222n33, 225n74



Index

Index

Watt, Harry—Continued filmography of, 106 “Report on Australia” to Ealing by, 107–8 on settler nationalism, 109–10 tension and contradictions in production and, 24, 25, 112, 114 textuality, and papers of, 100 see also Eureka Stockade (Watt, 1949); The Overlanders (Watt, 1946) western genre Americanness of, 97, 100–102, 220n5 “classic western,” use of term, 63, 214n5 described, 99 ethnicity and, 75, 76, 92, 126 filmic space, and indigenous peoples in, 64, 71, 77–79, 79, 81, 91, 122–27, 226nn93, 95 history of, 63, 214n8 imperialism and, 104 “international westerns” and, 97–98 masculinity in, 64, 70, 71, 77, 80, 217nn53, 54 “outdoor picture,” use of term, 112, 223n43 racialized colonial encounters in, 58, 62, 64, 70–71, 74, 77, 80, 85, 103, 126–27, 218n63 settler colonialism and, 100, 127 settler nationalism and, 103–4, 221n16 transnationality of, 98, 101, 103–4 see also Argosy Pictures; Australian westerns; Hollywood; specific films

Whakata-ne history and geography of, 171–74, 232–33n1 as location site for The Seekers, 1, 136, 171–74, 177, 202 Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of indigenous peoples signed in, 168, 232n88 research in, 171–72, 173–74, 177–78, 182, 184–85, 189 textuality and, 1, 22, 26, 200, 201, 207n4 toxic fill and, 172, 232–33n1 Whakata-ne District Museum, 22, 182, 200 Whakata-ne River, 171, 172, 174, 174 wha-nau, 148 Whanganui iwi, 132, 149, 160 Whanganui river, 148, 160 Whanganui town, 149 wharenui (meeting houses), 166, 171, 189, 234n18 see also marae White, Richard, 88 whiteness, 25, 36, 45, 50, 52, 57–58, 71, 77, 92–93, 127, 226n94 see also Pa-keha-; race; racialized colonial encounters; settler colonialism Williams, Deane, 115, 119–20 Williams, Doug, 220n5 Williams, Hal, 18, 19, 24, 25, 100, 112–13, 121–22 Winiata, Maharaia, 187–88, 190, 236n48 Wynne, Sydney, 114–15, 223n50



272

Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand

Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand

Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity

Does History Matter? : Making And Debating Citizenship, Immigration And Refugee Policy In Australia And New Zealand

Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific : An Environmental History

Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific: An Environmental History

Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States

Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States

New Zealand and Oceania

New Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Film

NEW FIRM CREATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters

Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?

The Wonder Country: Making New Zealand Tourism

Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand

My First Britannica Volume 07 - Asia, Australia and New Zealand

Human Rights in the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism: Commonwealth Approaches: The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand

The United States and Iran

Landscape and Race in the United States

The United States and Britain in Prophecy

New Zealand

Politics in New Zealand

New Zealand

States Against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States

Religion and Politics in the United States (Religion & Politics in the United States)

United States Navy and United States Marine Corps Over Korea

Deleuze, Altered States and Film

Deleuze, Altered States and Film

New Zealand

Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Capitalism in Colonial Australia

The United States in Asia

Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand

Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand

Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity

Does History Matter? : Making And Debating Citizenship, Immigration And Refugee Policy In Australia And New Zealand

Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific : An Environmental History

Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific: An Environmental History

Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States

Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States

New Zealand and Oceania

New Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Film

NEW FIRM CREATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters

Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?

The Wonder Country: Making New Zealand Tourism

Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand

My First Britannica Volume 07 - Asia, Australia and New Zealand

Human Rights in the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism: Commonwealth Approaches: The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand

The United States and Iran

Landscape and Race in the United States

The United States and Britain in Prophecy

New Zealand

Politics in New Zealand

New Zealand

States Against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States

Religion and Politics in the United States (Religion & Politics in the United States)

United States Navy and United States Marine Corps Over Korea

Deleuze, Altered States and Film

Deleuze, Altered States and Film

New Zealand

Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Capitalism in Colonial Australia

The United States in Asia

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