Red Earth Resistance – Remembering Geronimo: An… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Red Earth Resis­tance – Remem­ber­ing Geron­i­mo: An Amer­i­can Legend

11 Aug 2018

Words by James Clarke

A person with long dark hair holding a rifle, standing in a rocky, mountainous landscape.
A person with long dark hair holding a rifle, standing in a rocky, mountainous landscape.
Wal­ter Hill’s under-appre­ci­at­ed his­tor­i­cal dra­ma reminds us how pow­er­ful Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma can be.

While the big-screen west­ern is now an inter­mit­tent treat, there is still plen­ty to be said for the pow­er­ful and potent ways in which the genre con­tends with the dark­er heart of the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence. In tele­vi­sion, the genre con­tin­ues to find a wel­come place and it’s fas­ci­nat­ing to chart. Per­haps West­world, and the recent series God­less and Yel­low­stone, will fuel an ongo­ing smallscreen west­ern renais­sance. There’s still so much that the genre can handle.

Released in 1993, Wal­ter Hill’s Geron­i­mo depicts the litany of acts of vio­lence and aggres­sion that con­sti­tut­ed the geno­cide of the native- Amer­i­can cul­ture. Intrigu­ing­ly, Hill’s film arrived just a few weeks before anoth­er Amer­i­can stu­dio film chron­i­cling a his­tor­i­cal geno­cide, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.

Geron­i­mo , based on a screen­play by John Mil­ius and Lar­ry Gross, and devel­oped from Mil­ius’ screen-sto­ry, recre­ates aspects of the US military’s mis­sion to cap­ture Geron­i­mo and his Apache tribe between 1885 – 86 as part of the US pol­i­cy of reset­tling native peo­ples on the reser­va­tions. Five thou­sand troops were com­mit­ted to the task of bring­ing Geron­i­mo in as white polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary pow­er went about deeply unset­tling the west.

Like Schindler’s List, Geron­i­mo explores the hate­ful expres­sion of racial­ly-moti­vat­ed vio­lence. Where the lat­ter takes ear­li­er Hol­ly­wood west­erns, as well as the 19th cen­tu­ry pho­to­graph­ic record of the West, as its visu­al cue, Schindler’s List draws from Ital­ian neo­re­al­ism and the pho­to­graph­ic record of the Holo­caust. Both films present us with a dis­tinct cul­ture and the destruc­tion of the places and tra­di­tions held most dear by them.

A num­ber of ini­tial reviews of Geron­i­mo not­ed that the film was a lit­tle plod­ding. Is it not fair­er to say that it is hard to watch because of the real­i­ty that it seeks to present? The film’s clos­ing voiceover, spo­ken by Matt Damon’s char­ac­ter, the young sol­dier Brit­ton Davis, terse­ly describes the geno­cide that the film has depict­ed: A way of life that endured over a thou­sand years was gone.”

While Mil­ius was frus­trat­ed by the even­tu­al form that Geron­i­mo took, his atavis­tic impuls­es shine through in the film, as does his affin­i­ty for the fig­ure liv­ing out­side of, and resist­ing, the bounds of so-called civil­i­sa­tion’. In a key scene, Wes Studi’s epony­mous Apache pro­tag­o­nist states, No guns, no bul­lets could ever kill me. That was my power.”

Group of people on horseback riding through a grassy field.

At the heart of the film’s sec­ond act is a moment that crys­tallis­es the pre­car­i­ous exis­tence of Native Amer­i­can cul­ture in the wake of the white unset­tling of the West. The film details Geronimo’s com­mit­ment to uphold­ing his cul­ture. Schindler’s List too evokes the impor­tance of cul­tur­al mem­o­ry and iden­ti­ty for its belea­guered pro­tag­o­nists – the very first scene in Spielberg’s film shows a Jew­ish fam­i­ly at Shab­bat, and lat­er on, when Stern tells Schindler that the list is an absolute good”, the doc­u­ment is pre­sent­ed in such a way as to assume an almost-ancient and sacred pow­er. That same sense of ancient and sacred pow­er is key to under­stand­ing the Apache people’s rela­tion­ship with the land.

With­in the demands of its genre mechan­ics, Hill saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty for Geron­i­mo to be, Implic­it­ly crit­i­cal of all pre­vi­ous depic­tions of white-Native Amer­i­can rela­tions.” His film is marked by a vivid sense of mount­ing melan­choly and tragedy, both per­son­al­ly and nation­al­ly. Around the time of the film’s release, Wes Stu­di, in all his anger and sad­ness, addressed the ten­sion between Native Amer­i­cans and their white set­tler oppres­sors: I’m a Chero­kee first and an Amer­i­can later.”

Of course, the destruc­tive col­li­sion of white Amer­i­can cul­ture with native, non-white com­mu­ni­ties con­tin­ues to this day. Indeed, 16 years lat­er Stu­di por­trayed a Na’vi trib­al leader in James Cameron’s Avatar. That film, like the his­tor­i­cal dra­mas men­tioned here, reframes var­i­ous attempts to erad­i­cate dif­fer­ent cul­tures with­in a futur­is­tic fan­ta­sy set­ting. The past is always alive in the present. We for­get this at our peril.

Geron­i­mo was even­tu­al­ly released in the UK in Octo­ber 1994. More specif­i­cal­ly, it was released in Lon­don. In one cin­e­ma. More than two decades lat­er, it’s time to redis­cov­er this large­ly for­got­ten film, and con­sid­er its sta­tus as a pro­gres­sive west­ern that open­ly con­fronts a nation­al trauma.

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