The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 13-19
Itam Hakim, Hopiit (1984)
Directed by Victor Masayevsa, Jr.
In 1680, Hopi tribe members in the region of Santa Fe rose up against their Spanish colonizers, killing over four hundred and driving around two thousand more away, in a revolt known today as the Pueblo Rebellion. Masayevsa (a Hopi filmmaker and photographer based on an Arizona reservation) commemorated its 1980 anniversary, known as the Hopi Tricentennial, with this hourlong experimental documentary commissioned by the German television broadcasting company ZDF. The film (whose title translates into “We, someone, the Hopi”) focuses on the elderly storyteller Ross Macaya, who narrates without interruption the history of his people in his native Hopi tongue. As his words take us from the creation of the world through the Pueblo Rebellion up to a present-day ceremony amongst his Bow Clan, a host of color and black-and-white images dissolve through one another impressionistically, both illustrating his story and creating an expanded sense of time. Itam Hakim, Hopiit will screen at Anthology Film Archives together with Navajo Talking Picture, a 1985 documentary made by Arlene Bowman, a filmmaker of First Nation descent who shows herself painfully trying to convince her reservation-based grandmother (whose language she does not speak) to be interviewed on camera. Aaron Cutler (January 17, 8:30pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Through Indian Eyes: Native American Cinema”)