{"id":1369,"date":"2016-02-29T14:27:49","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T14:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/?p=1369"},"modified":"2016-05-16T21:19:49","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T21:19:49","slug":"dolores-tierney-on-the-revenant-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/2016\/02\/29\/dolores-tierney-on-the-revenant-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"DOLORES TIERNEY ON THE REVENANT (ALEJANDRO GONZ\u00c1LEZ I\u0147\u00c1RRITU, 2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Following last night&#8217;s\u00a0Academy Awards ceremony, <\/em>Medi\u00e1tico<em> co-editor\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/profiles\/157871\/research\">Dolores Tierney<\/a><em>\u00a0assesses \u00a0Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s<\/em> The Revenant in light of\u00a0its<em>\u00a0historic wins for Best Director<\/em>, <em>Best Actor\u00a0<\/em><em>and Best Cinematography and concerns over the racism of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences<\/em><em>. The University of Sussex will be hosting a <a href=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/2016\/02\/29\/alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-a-one-day-symposium\/\">one day symposium<\/a> on I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u00a0in May\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_56dnQF4NNI?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>This year during the run up to the Oscars I had a strong sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. Like last year, a film (<em>The Revenant<\/em>) by a director I\u2019m working on (I\u0148\u00e1rritu) was nominated for a slew of Oscars -twelve in fact, the most nominations for a single film. Like last year, I\u2019ve been pondering what both <em>The Revenant <\/em>itself and its Oscar nominations and now success means for the auteurist summation I had <a href=\"\/\/www.academia.edu\/1065538\/Alejandro_Gonzalez_Inarritu_Director_without_Borders\">previously made<\/a> of I\u0148\u00e1rritu\u2019s work. But unlike last year, where I\u0148\u00e1rritu\u2019s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/2015\/02\/23\/birdman-or-the-unexpected-virtue-of-ignorance-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-2014\/\">Birdman<\/a><\/em>\u00a0was concerned, this year with <em>The Revenant<\/em>, it has been what has been going on outside of I\u0148\u00e1rritu\u2019s film, that has been dominating how I and many others are reading it. Now that the ceremony is over and the film has won three of the most important awards (for\u00a0Best Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography), I\u2019m still left wondering where this film fits into\u00a0I\u0148\u00e1rritu\u2019s oeuvre and into the U.S. film industry.<\/p>\n<p>In 2016, as in 2015, the Academy has been called out for the lack of diversity in its award nominations for talent both in front of and behind the camera. In January and February the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite[1.Coined by Broadway Black managing editor April Reign in 2015 to bring attention to the Academy\u2019s overlooking performances and achievements by non-white actors, directors, screenwriters, and beyond] trended\u00a0amongst commentators and industry personnel to signal dismay at the lack of nominations received by actors of colour despite the strong performances (and, in many cases, nods from other awarding industry bodies) for: Idris Elba in <em>Beasts of No Nation <\/em>(Cary Joji Fukunaga), Will Smith in <em>Concussion <\/em>(Peter Landesman), Michael B. Jordan and Tessa White (<em>Creed<\/em>) and Benicio Del Toro in <em>Sicario <\/em>(Denis Villeneuve) amongst others. In the midst of #OscarsSoWhite, I\u0148\u00e1rritu was\u00a0held up by <em>Rolling Stone<\/em>, <em>Vanity Fair <\/em>and other publications as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/movies\/features\/alejandro-g-inarritu-hollywoods-king-of-pain-20160217\">\u201cthe only person of colour to be nominated in any of the major categories.<\/a>\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2016\/01\/spike-lee-oscarssowhite-oscars-rampling-caine.html\">Spike Lee<\/a> has called I\u0148\u00e1rritu out for not speaking to the issue of representation in the industry previously (suggesting that because <em>he<\/em> himself was nominated in both 2015 and 2016 he wasn\u2019t bothered about representation of diversities). I\u0148\u00e1rritu himself has (like others) suggested that the problem lies not just in the nomination process but in the structural racism of an industry (and an Academy) that is overwhelmingly white. I\u0148\u00e1rritu has also (in his DGA award <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wHP4NSt4HUM\">acceptance speech<\/a> and his <a href=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=s4Z7gO30eys\">BAFTA acceptance speech<\/a>) asserted his own and the film\u2019s diversity credentials: aligning himself and his award with his fellow (hardworking) Mexicans and Latin Americans and against <a href=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/2016\/01\/27\/donald-trump-vs-jorge-ramos\/\">Trump\u2019s stereotypes<\/a> and emphasizing his film as the story of a father and his mixed race son. Accepting the\u00a0history-making Oscar for Best Director (joining <span class=\"Apple-style-span\">Joseph L. Mankiewicz and John Ford the last two directors to win consecutive Best Director Oscars in consecutive years)<\/span>\u00a0 I\u0148\u00e1rritu quoted a line from his film,\u00a0one of Glass&#8217;s comments to his\u00a0mixed race son:\u00a0<span class=\"Apple-style-span\">\u00a0\u201cThey don\u2019t listen to you. They just see the color of your skin.\u201d I\u0148\u00e1rritu went on to say (defying the orchestra that was trying to speed his departure off stage)<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">So what a great opportunity to our generation, to really liberate ourself from all prejudice and this tribal thinking and make sure for once and forever that the color of the skin become as irrelevant as the length of our hair.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I\u0148\u00e1rritu\u2019s epic is based on the life of Hugh Glass (Leonardo Di Caprio) a nineteenth\u00a0century fur trapper. Mauled by a bear and then left to die\u00a0by\u00a0Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) the fellow trapper charged with\u00a0caring for him, Glass\u00a0fights his way back to life and civilization so that he might get revenge on Fitzgerald for the murder of his son. Despite the fuss made of I\u0148\u00e1rritu\u2019s nationality and ethnicity, it has been suggested (by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2016\/feb\/22\/the-revenant-oscar-nominated-film-america\">Ato Quayson<\/a>) that the film unproblematically supports a narrative of white settler colonialism in the American North West, privileging the abilities of one white man to survive the harsh winter and a near death experience. Such readings, which posit that the film might have been more critical of white settler colonialism \u201cwith more diverse voices in Hollywood\u201d disavow not just I\u0148\u00e1rritu\u2019s own position as a Mexican director (and his co-scriptwriter credit for the film), but also a body of work which has often criticised\u00a0the racism (<em>Babel<\/em>) and certainties (<em>21 Grams<\/em>) of U.S. modernity, its border controls, its foreign policy and its ideology.<\/p>\n<p>Such perspectives also disavow the way the film makes clear Glass\u2019s rugged ability to survive and be &#8220;reborn&#8221;, come not from a\u00a0superiority that is inherently white, but from the care given to him by Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud) the Pawnee man he meets. It is Hikuc who\u00a0generously tends to the\u00a0wounds from Glass&#8217;s\u00a0bear attack\u00a0and\u00a0is the only reason Glass survives, making his subsequent murder by a group of (it has to be noted) much less sympathetically characterised\u00a0French fur trappers all the more condemnable. The film also\u00a0suggests that Glass\u2019s abilities to track and then survive after Hikuc are not intrinsic to his whiteness but learned through his time living in the Pawnee village with his wife and child Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) which we see largely in flashback.<\/p>\n<p><em>The<\/em> <em>Revenant<\/em> <em>is<\/em> nevertheless a departure for I\u0148\u00e1rritu in several ways. Whereas his previous English language films (<em>21 Grams<\/em>, <em>Babel, <\/em>and <em>Birdman<\/em>) were \u201cindependent\u201d films made by speciality houses (New Regency, Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, Paramount Vantage) belonging to the studios,\u00a0<em>The Revenant <\/em>is his first with a major studio\u00a0(20th Century Fox).\u00a0<em>The<\/em> <em>Revenant<\/em> is also a genre film which takes its shape and conventions from the Western, a genre\u00a0classically understood to support and foster a\u00a0narrative of American whiteness.\u00a0Although, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/3747476\/Latino_Acting_on_Screen_Pedro_Armendariz_Performs_Mexicanness_in_Three_John_Ford_Movies\">as I&#8217;ve noted o<\/a>f\u00a0Ford&#8217;s later films \u00a0(and this is another point of contact between I\u0148\u00e1rritu and the Irish-American director) not all representations of &#8220;others&#8221; within the Western necessarily adhere completely to this dominant ideology<\/p>\n<p><em>The Revenant<\/em> also adheres to several themes and techniques that have been constants in I\u0148\u00e1rritu\u2019s aesthetic armoury. Firstly,\u00a0it continues with\u00a0the position taken by\u00a0<em>Birdman<\/em>\u00a0in advocating authenticity in filmcraft. As the (third consecutive) Oscar\u00a0for Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki recognises, <em>The Revenant<\/em>&#8216;s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/2016\/jan\/17\/the-revenant-review-leonardo-dicaprio-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-tom-hardy-domhnall-gleeson\">punishing shoo<\/a>t\u00a0involved the use of\u00a0only available light and other realist techniques (long takes, location shooting in sub zero temperatures) and, in many instances the overt shunning of any facilitating film technology such as computer generated imagery (other than for the bear attack, the stampeding bison and a number of other key moments)that would compromise\u00a0that authenticity\u00a0or fabricate its spectacle. \u00a0DiCaprio\u2019s performance as Glass in which\u00a0he eats a raw bison liver and a raw fish, plunges into icy water, and crawls into a dead horse to keep warm, (as his award for Best Actor also attests) is equally part of the film&#8217;s authenticity credentials.<\/p>\n<p>Additionally,\u00a0Glass is not the first revenant to appear in an I\u0148\u00e1rritu film. In <em>Amores perros<\/em>\u00a0(2000)<em>\u00a0<\/em> El Chivo, (Emilio Echeverr\u00eda) the ex University Lecturer turned guerilla fighter and now contract killer becomes a revenant of sorts returning (awkwardly) to his daughter and to society and acting as a kind of ghost and conscience of Mexico\u2019s violent\u00a0past.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1372 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/files\/2016\/02\/El-Chivo-203x300.jpg\" alt=\"El Chivo\" width=\"255\" height=\"377\" srcset=\"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/files\/2016\/02\/El-Chivo-203x300.jpg 203w, https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/files\/2016\/02\/El-Chivo.jpg 214w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 255px) 100vw, 255px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And also, lest we are tempted to envelope the film entirely within the representational norms of the U.S. industry,\u00a0<em>The Revenant<\/em>\u00a0also has something in common with another film from a Latin American director, <em>Juaja <\/em>(Lisandro Alonso, Argentina, 2015). <em>Juaja<\/em>, also dealing with the history of European colonialism, is a kind of <em>Revenant<\/em>-lite. But instead of it being about a father who lost his son (and attempts to get revenge on his killer) <em>Juaja <\/em>is about a father (Viggo Mortensen) who has lost his daughter (like two of Alonso\u2019s other films <em>Los muertos<\/em> and <em>Liverpool<\/em>) and wanders seemingly aimlessly over Patagonia to find her.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1374\" src=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/files\/2016\/02\/jauja3-300x211.jpg\" alt=\"jauja3\" width=\"300\" height=\"211\" srcset=\"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/files\/2016\/02\/jauja3-300x211.jpg 300w, https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/files\/2016\/02\/jauja3.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following last night&#8217;s\u00a0Academy Awards ceremony, Medi\u00e1tico co-editor\u00a0Dolores Tierney\u00a0assesses \u00a0Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s The Revenant in light of\u00a0its\u00a0historic wins for Best Director,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":1370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[161,129,130],"class_list":["post-1369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-oscarssowhite","tag-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu","tag-oscars"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/files\/2016\/02\/leo-xlarge.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p49QSj-m5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1369"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1477,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions\/1477"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}