CHOOSING & USING  INDIGENOUS FILM

For economic gain, Hollywood has long utilized a four-quadrant model of audience demographic that film scripts cater to. The goal is to ensure all four groups or quadrants of audiences (male/female, over 25 years of age and under 25 years of age) will be convinced to watch the film through film trailers and subsequently entertained for the duration of the movie. This model of filmmaking produces films with: themes that aim to hook across generations, actors/characters aged in all quadrants, celebrities, distinct heroes and villians, “high-concept” premises that can be summarized in a couple sentences (Tidball, 2013).

Beyond the glaring absence of consideration made to blended, non-binary, marginalized worldviews such as those of transgendered, LGBTQ+, many of these elements set a standard that films that tell nuanced stories for specific audiences are less accessible and less interesting to wider audiences. This rationale has been indirectly fed to us through general commercial cinema (GCC) as well through GCC’s depictions of marginalized people including Indigenous Peoples.

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The beginnings of film creation in the 1870s modestly depicted everyday motions such as an equestrian riding a horse (Muybridge, circa 1878) but soon after came the Georges Méliès film Voyage dans la lune. From early on and to the development of film as its own industry, movie-makers sought to take audiences out of the real world and into some form of aggrandized reality full of binaries, dichotomies and bad guys. These villains were imagined in the minds of a select group of individuals: those with access to film equipment and access to funding such as from the German National Socialist Party. A case in point being the influential filming methods discovered by Leni Riefenstahl while making Triumph des Willens  and Olympia. It is no surprise then, that depicting and distributing Indigenous peoples’ worldviews and stories, let alone Indigenous youth and women’s realities, would remain a cinematic feat.

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This site considers the history of film to showcase why film and cinéma have often contributed to stereotypes of marginalized people. Teachers aware of this can play a role in undoing the negative effects of media on learners.

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