#777) Navajo Film Themselves (1966)

#777) Navajo Film Themselves (1966)

Directed by Mike Anderson, Susie Benally, Al Clah, Alta Kahn, John Nelson, and Maxine & Mary J. Tsosie.

Class of 2002

While not currently available for streaming, “Navajo Film Themselves” is available for purchase on DVD through the Penn Museum website. All profits from the DVD sales go to the filmmakers and their families.

My immense thanks to the Internet Archive for preserving the Penn Museum’s original “Navajo Film Themselves” website, where most of my information about these films comes from.

The Plot: In the summer of 1966, professors Sol Worth and John Adair traveled to Pine Springs, Arizona with a grant from the National Science Foundation for an anthropological project: Teaching local Navajo residents how to make films. Over the course of two months, Worth and Adair taught six students of varying age and experience the fundamentals of filmmaking, and asked them to each make a film about something important to them. The result is a collection of seven films focusing on Navajo customs and traditions: from rug weaving to a medicine man ceremony to a local silversmith to…more weaving.

Why It Matters: Not a lot of superlatives in the NFR write-up for “Navajo”, just some historical context, which we’ll delve into throughout this post.

But Does It Really?: “Navajo Film Themselves” is certainly the kind of unique filmmaking I’ve come to expect from the NFR. Not only do we get a specific glimpse into an Indigenous culture, we get that glimpse courtesy of the culture itself. The individual films are interesting on their own, but the historical context I found in my research definitely enhances the experience. I’m glad “Navajo Film Themselves” has made the NFR, and equally glad that the film is once again available for individual purchase.

Everybody Gets One: Sol Worth was a communications professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania; John Adair was an anthropology professor at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University, my alma mater!). Richard Chalfen was a former student of Worth’s who joined the two in Arizona and would go on to be a successful Visual Anthropologist in his own right. “Navajo Film Themselves” came to be as an experiment in a new type of anthropology Worth dubbed a “bio-documentary”: filmmaking by the subject to get a better sense of how they see the world. The Navajo were chosen for this experiment for a number of reasons, but primarily as an exercise in giving the oft-studied community free agency to film what they deemed important or significant without any outside influences.

Title Track: In 1972, Worth, Adair, and Chalfen published a book about their experience with the Navajo called “Through Navajo Eyes”. Since then, the book’s title has been used interchangeably with “Navajo Film Themselves” as the film series’ title.

Other notes

The NFR should include more “give someone a camera and see what happens” movies. As best I can tell it’s just this and “The Jungle”, with an honorable mention to “Uksuum Cauyai: The Drums of Winter”.
Each student was financially compensated for their participation in “Navajo Film Themselves” at the rate of $1.25 an hour (About $12.50 an hour in today’s money).
As great as it is that these films exist, I go back and forth on whether this filmmaking project is empowering or condescending to the Navajo. There is a lot more nuance to this whole experience I can’t get into here, but the aforementioned archived pages from the Penn Museum website are a good place to start, as is the book “Through Navajo Eyes”.

Intrepid Shadows by Alfred “Al” Clah

Al Clah (19) was a student at the American Indian School of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was the only filmmaker not from Pine Springs, hailing from the nearish Indian Wells. He also seemed to be the only one of the students who had studied filmmaking prior to this experience.
Given Clah’s background, it is no surprise that “Intrepid Shadows” is the only one of the seven films that attempts a narrative. It’s also the only one of the films with any sound, in this case Clah himself reciting a poem he had written about motion, time, and of course, shadows.
In addition to its use of shadows and a metal hoop to illustrate the opening poem, “Intrepid Shadows” also utilizes a Yeibichai mask to comment on Navajo tradition. The Yeibichai mask resembles the ones used in a Navajo healing ceremony, and is impressively articulate, complete with moving eyes! I don’t think I’m supposed to see the stick holding it up, but what are you gonna do?

A Navajo Weaver by Susie Benally

Susie Benally (26) had been helping her mother Alta Kahn weave since she was eight years old, and her film is a detailed documentation of her mother weaving a rug. Adair and Worth later noted that while Benally was the shyest of their students, she was also the best filmmaker.
I guess I’ve never given much thought to how exactly a rug is weaved together, so I found this one fascinating. You really get a sense of how much work and attention to detail goes into making a single Navajo rug, especially when you’re making the whole thing by hand!
That’s Susie’s little brother Alfred on his horse taking care of the sheep.
The credits for this film are weaved into the rug. Very cute.

Second Weaver by Alta Kahn

At first I found it odd that two of these films are about weaving, until I learned the story behind this second film. Alta Kahn was not a student in this program, but was taught filmmaking from her daughter Susie while she was making “A Navajo Weaver”, and Kahn turned the tables by filming her daughter weaving a belt. I’m sure Worth & Adair were thrilled when they got a bonus movie out of their project, especially if they didn’t have to pay Alta.
Given the similarities to “Navajo Weaver”, there’s not much else to say about “Second Weaver”. Same process, same location, basically same movie. Next!

Spirit of Navajos by Maxine and Mary Jane Tsosie

The initial group of students consisted of Anderson, Bennally, Clah, and Nelson, but Worth and Adair were encouraged by the students to recruit more female participants, leading to the inclusion of the Tsosie sisters: Mary Jane (21) and Maxine (17). Mary Jane was less interested in getting paid for this experience as she was getting school credit (which I’m still not sure she got).
The Tsosie sisters focus their film on Sam Yazzie, their grandfather and a renowned local medicine man. The film is primarily Yazzie gathering roots and herbs, later using them in a ceremony.
That is assistant Richard Chalfen as Yazzie’s “patient” (The Tsosies did not want to film an actual ceremony as they considered it sacrilegious). Chalfen is very aware of the camera, making more eye contact than Jim Halpert.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is the subsequent controversy regarding its depiction of the sand painting ceremony. In the lead-up to the series’ DVD release, it was determined that the ceremony in “Spirit of Navajos” was inauthentic and therefore potentially offensive to the Navajo community. The Navajo Nation Museum opted to delete these moments from “Spirit of Navajo”. These cuts are brief and unnoticeable, and the Museum has made it clear that the uncut version is still preserved by the Library of Congress.

Shallow Well Project by John Nelson

John Nelson (33) had known Adair from his previous anthropologist work with the Navajo in the 1950s. Nelson was involved in many local political activities, and used his connections to help Adair find students for this project.
Nelson had been asked to supervise the construction of a shallow well in the community, and while he originally turned down the offer due to the filmmaking classes, he soon realized this could be his film.
There’s not much here beyond the construction of the well, but I appreciate how many of these films have some sort of structure (and how many of them deal with natural resources). We also get a return to irrigation as a plot point in an NFR film, following “Our Daily Bread” and “Lost Horizon”.
One of the bonus features on the “Navajo Film Themselves” DVD is the mini-documentary “Pine Springs: Then and Now”. Many of the locations in these films are revisited, including the shallow well. Although the well ran dry sometime in the 1970s, the well itself was still standing as of 2011.

The Navajo Silversmith by John Nelson

Nelson is the only filmmaker who made two movies for this project, though I’m uncertain as to how that came about or which one was made first. Like many of these films, Nelson chose a silversmith as his topic because he wanted “the outside world” to see and learn more about Navajo culture.
Much like the “Weaver” films, I found the metal-forging process interesting, from collecting silver nuggets in the rocks of a nearby silver mine, to melting them down to complete the filing on a Yeibichai figurine.
In later interviews, Nelson stated that he had recorded audio tracks for both of his films, but those seem to have disappeared over time.

Old Antelope Lake by Mike Anderson

This one has the least amount of information regarding its filmmaker and the film itself. We know that Mike Anderson (24) was a Pine Springs native, returning for the summer after three years in San Francisco, and that he wanted to use the money from this project to go to barber’s school. So little is known about this film that I don’t even know what lake that is; there’s no lake officially known as Old Antelope Lake in the Pine Springs area. Any leads?
If nothing else “Old Antelope Lake” is another entry in the NFR’s “Staring at Water” collection. And thanks to a few extended shots of the lake with nothing else happening, I think we can count Old Antelope as the 14th lake.

Legacy

The first two completed films — “Intrepid Shadows” and “A Navajo Weaver” — were screened at the Flaherty Seminar in New York in August 1966, with the remaining films being screened upon their completion at a number of colleges and film festivals throughout 1967. Each of the filmmakers received a copy of their film, screening them at many a public lecture and family function.
Upon completion, the original negatives of “Navajo Film Themselves” were stored in the Annenberg 16mm film archives. After the archives’ closure in 1991, the negatives were moved to the Penn Museum, who donated them to the Library of Congress in 2007.
While the individual “Navajo” films receive a screening every now and then, all seven were shown at a 2011 screening at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona. It was the first screening of “Navajo Film Themselves” in the Navajo Nation since their creation 45 years earlier. Susie Benally and John Nelson were in attendance, as were the surviving family members of the other filmmakers.

Listen to This: The National Recording Registry also includes documentation of Navajo traditions, with ethnomusicologist David McAllester’s 1957-1958 recordings of a Navajo Shootingway ceremony, the nine day event that often uses Yeibichai masks like the one from “Intrepid Shadows”. Anthropology professor Charlotte Frisbie pens a very detailed essay about the recordings, and you can listen to a brief excerpt on the NRR website.

Further Reading: The companion book “Through Navajo Eyes” is a treasure trove of information regarding this project. If any of this interests you I can’t recommend this book enough. Read it for free on Internet Archive!