Page 74 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

64 Michael J. Shapiro

and sound track articulates the films primary trope of history as enter-
tainment. With the telephoto effect, which situates the viewers as outside
spectators, Altman's Buffalo Bill is constructed as a show, a metacommen-
tary on the kind of West that Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show produced—
the West as entertainment. As one treatment of Buffalo Bill puts it, "In
this film, the subjects are merged in the word 'show/ which represents
both The Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill and the movie show about Buf-
31
falo Bill," The sequence of events in the film is more or less homologous
with the performance sequence in a Wild West show, especially in the
way the key characters appear in sequence: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, and
President Grover Cleveland.
How then does the subtitle Or Sitting Bull's History Lesson play into
the show-framing of the film? Once again, the answer is supplied by the
form of the film. Despite acknowledging that his "Wild West" is a show,
Buffalo Bill, his publicist, John Burk, and his emcee, Nate Salisbury, rep-
resent their reproductions as accurate portrayals of history. As a voice-over
announcement at the outset of the show states, "What you are about to
experience is not a show for entertainment; it is a review of the down-
to-earth events that made the American frontier." And to enhance that
history—conveyed as the heroic victory of settlers over blood-thirsty sav-
ages—they decide to enlist a historical "Indian" character and fit him
into the most violent scenario that white America had been willing to
acknowledge, the defeat of General Custer at Little Big Horn. Accord-
ingly, Sitting Bull is represented (fraudulently) as the killer by the emcee,
Nate Salisbury, who, at the beginning of the show, introduces Sitting Bull
as "the wicked warrior of the western plains, the cold-blooded killer of
Custer . . the untamed scavenger whose chilling and cowardly, deeds cre-
.
ated nightmares throughout the West and made him the most feared, the
most murderous, the most colorful redskin alive . . . the battling chief of
the Hunkpapa Sioux . . . Sitting Bull."
Yet a silent Sitting Bull's body undermines Salisbury's introduction,
just as he had undermined earlier expectations when he first appeared. If
we heed the "cinematographic body," 32 realized in Buffalo Bill with the
shots of Sitting Bull's bodily comportment, we see a different relationship
between narrative and body from its familiar portrayal in classic cinema.
Vincent Amiel notes that the tendency in classical cinema was "d'utiliser
le corps comme simple vecteur du récit, abandonnait son épaisseur au
profit exclusif de sa fonctionnalité" (to utilize the body as a simple vec-