Program Notes: An Evening with Sky Hopinka
Playing at the Northwest Film Forum May 15th!
As part of this year’s edition of SIFF, the Seattle Film Critics Society will be presenting its annual John Hartl Pacific Northwest Spotlight Award to filmmaker, poet, and photographer Sky Hopinka, whose latest feature Powwow People, will be having its Seattle Premiere at the festival on May 16th and 17th. Born in Ferndale, Sky has emerged as a major figure within a cohort of prominent Indigenous experimental filmmakers, including Adam Piron, Adam and Zack Khalil, Fox Maxy and many more who are reshaping our understanding of Indigenous Cinema. In addition to the Sundance, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals, Sky’s moving-image work has played at everywhere from the Whitney Biennial to Seattle’s very own Frye Art Museum. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Grant, a Guggenheim Fellow, and is an Associate Professor at Harvard University’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.
I first came across Sky’s work during my time at Pomona. I vividly remember first reading about and then watching Jaaji Approx. and Fainting Spells in my college’s music library, being struck by Sky’s lustrous treatment of landscape, his use of cross-medium collage, and his heartfelt consideration of individual and collective history. To me, Sky’s films touch on the metaphysics of situation, within time, community, tradition, landscape, and violent colonial histories. They’re mysterious, generous, and intimate. Over the years, they’ve meant a great deal to me.
I’m very honored to present the Hartl Award to Sky on the May 17th screening of Powwow People and lead the post-screening Q&A. In addition, SFCS is organizing a program of Sky’s short-form work, curated by yours truly, which will screen with Sky in attendance on May 15th at the Northwest Film Forum. The program offers a survey of Sky’s vital filmography, showcasing the range of his craft, his love for the Pacific Northwest, and will hopefully act as a fitting companion for Powwow People. If you’re in the Seattle Area, it’ll be a fantastic show and I’d love to see you there!
An unintuitive but fitting entry point to Hopinka’s work is 2019’s Lore. A play on Hollis Frampton’s classic (nostalgia), Lore sees Hopinka layering images of landscapes and friends underneath an overhead projector. Where Frampton’s film, conceptualized around the incineration of personal photographs on a hot plate, immortalized transience onto celluloid, Hopinka treats these histories as an imprint, a foundation upon which the increasingly abstract present is constructed. Though it may be Hopinka’s most contained film, it illuminates the intimate craftsmanship in his treatment of landscape.
The intimacy is underscored both by Hopinka’s recitation of his first-person poem Perfidia and his friends’ performance of Bo Diddley’s Heart O Matic Love. One can draw a line to (nostalgia), in which Michael Snow recites Frampton’s first-person remembrances, but here Hopinka recites the poem himself. When Hopinka regularly cuts to near-abstracted images of the musicians, he rhymes their musicianship with his seemingly self-contained practice, turning them into an integral component of his image-making. Operating not unlike an ensemble, the disparate elements of Lore harmonize to find the lyrical in the personal.
With its mythical title, Lore has a rather natural connection to Fainting Spells, the film that initially made me fall in love with Hopinka. Fainting Spells constructs a contemporary myth around Xąwįska, a plant traditionally used by the Ho-Chunk to revive the unconscious. Much of the film consists of scrolling, iridescent landscapes accompanied by handwritten epistolary texts written to Xąwįska. Occasionally, shrouded figures populate the screen, giving us a glimpse at the spirit world. Viewed in conjunction with Lore, the fragmented, exultant imagery becomes a part of Fainting Spells’ personal myth-making.
When Hopinka returns to more recognizable but no less expressionist landscapes, he makes impressive, contrapuntal use of the scrolling text such that the dual image-tracks weave in and out of sync. Often running multiple lines of text in parallel on opposing sides of the screen, Hopinka uses language both figuratively and literally, depicting the landscape as beyond comprehension.
The natural imagery is bounded by scenes from a bedroom, where images from the film and of Xąwįska play on a mini-TV set, a recurring Hopinka metaphor for dislocation. In Fainting Spells’ haunting final sequence, humans walking along a river bed are dragged into a shimmering blue and gray spirit world to the tune of the Indigenous folk song, Go My Son.
While discussing Fainting Spells in 2019, Hopinka described his creation of new myths as a “reactivation”, a way to create investments in one culture. One way to read Hopinka’s project is through this lens of reactivation, taking topics that might traditionally be the subject of ethnography (Indigenous artistic traditions, languages, histories) and making them feel personal, communal, and immediate through idiosyncratic formal intervention.
In Dislocation Blues, Hopinka applies this method to recent history, featuring a pair of accounts from Standing Rock. Talking to Hopinka through a video conference, Shaawan Francis Keahna and Terry Running Wild describe their experience at the protests, particularly the collectivism they felt on the campgrounds and their difficulty returning to “normal” life. In a subtle blend of personal archives, Shaawan and Terry’s stories are set to Hopinka’s own footage from Standing Rock, images whose stylization (the saturated color-grading, spurts of pixelation, maximalist shadow-work) reflects the testimony’s mythic subjectivity.
Where Dislocation Blues is one of Hopinka’s most grounded films, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason is one of his most purely poetic. A four-minute landscape collage commissioned by ICA Miami, Mnemonics is notable for its dynamic range of natural imagery and its intense disorientation. In addition to somewhat uncommon desert imagery and underwater footage, Mnemonics is made with multi-directional overlays, intense color saturation, and a rather novel (for Hopinka) use of blurred vertical and horizontal lines. The snippet of onscreen text decries a “humid world”, providing an ecological thematic thread for a piece that’s both premonitory and post-apocalyptic.
Mnemonics of Shape and Reason derives its title from a conversation between Hopinka and his grandmother which forms the centerpiece of Kicking the Clouds. One of the many distinctive qualities about Hopinka’s work within the auteurist realm of experimental/artists-made cinema is his how frequently they incorporate subjectivities beyond Hopinka’s own. Kicking the Clouds is based around two audio recordings from about Hopinka’s family. In the first, recorded in the mid-20th century, Hopinka’s grandmother recalls her experience as a child learning the Pechanga language. In the second, occasioned by the passing down of the prior audiotape, Hopinka interviews his mother about their family history in a conversation that spans reminiscence about his grandmother, his mother’s evolving relationship with her heritage, and the family’s shifting economic fortunes. These ruminations on cultural and personal inheritance accompany verdant imagery of the family’s residence of Whatcom County.
One of Hopinka’s densest, most beautiful films, I’ll Remember You As You Were, Not as What You’ll Become could be read as a reincarnation narrative. The film is dedicated to the Ho-Chunk poet Diane Burns, who appears in one of the film’s most striking passages. In this intricately layered sequence, the late poet speaks into a microphone against a constructed backdrop, a volcanic stage of nocturnal forests and flaming crosses. An incantatory elegy for Burns, the film consecrates her and her work into digital video.
I’ll Remember You as You Were is particularly notable for its use of time-lapse, creating stark contrasts between human and natural timescales, as well as its mystical treatment of Powwow imagery. Here, dancers participating in Portland’s annual Naimuma Powwow are awash in a fantastical glow, the communal spirit of the dance in the present day accessing primordial spiritualities. There’s a connection there with Hopinka’s treatment of Burns’ work, not just in the footage of her speech, but also in his reshaping of her poetry into the form of Ho-Chunk effigy mounds. It’s at once a testament to how dear Burns’ work is for Hopinka and another act of myth-making.
The porous relation between life and death also animates the final film in the program, Sunflower Siege Engine. Not without its moments of somber reflection (at one point, a voice from the ether bellows the words “get them out”), Sunflower Siege Engine is one of Hopinka’s most galvanizing, upbeat films, focusing on historical flashpoints of Indigenous resistance. From the jump, there’s a doubling at work in Hopinka’s voice, slightly offset in pitch and tempo, drifting in and out of the soundscape as he presents a confessional first-person poem. This is accompanied by some of Hopinka’s most diaristic 16mm footage, largely unedited imagery of wandering through the occupied landscape with friends. These passages occasionally drift into scenes from a desk, where pieces of archival footage, including some from the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz, are displayed on a laptop before being dragged to the present via handheld zoom.
All of the film’s threads - on the reservation system and incarceration, the inspiration of resistance, the exploratory pleasures of community, are condensed into a needle drop set to Room Thirteen’s psychedelic rock song Tidal Wave. These are Hopinka’s dancing images at their most expressive, the composite landscapes exploding with unforeseen pop-art colors, layers of yellows and reds flashing like screen prints. The central image is of an outstretched hand reaching towards the shimmering landscape, at once striving and longing. Hopinka augments the jubilation by creating a karaoke effect with the lyrics which briefly split into two lines of text, slightly offset. The doubles are clarified by Hopinka’s stirring final sentiment: “There’s no more time for death songs, we don’t remember them anymore anyhow”.
An Evening with Sky Hopinka plays on May 15th at the Northwest Film Forum.