Page 76 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

66 MichaelJ. Shapiro

in another scene is imposed. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that
Sitting Bull was willing to subject himself to the indignity of false repre-
sentations because he had hoped to meet President Cleveland in order to
air his people's grievances. When, however, President Cleveland visits Buf-
falo Bill's Wild West Show and appears at an evening gathering, he refuses
to speak with Sitting Bull.
While the "Sitting Bull" expected by the Wild West production com-
pany is a product of the fraudulent media publicity that emerged from
Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn, Buffalo Bill himself is also a constructed
identity, shown in part through the many scenes in which his look is a
function of the wig, makeup, and buckskin he puts on to appear in the
show. But well before his Wild West show, the historical Buffalo Bill was
an invention of Ned Buntline's stories in dime novels, which turned a
minor scout into a frontier hero. And the mythologizing that constructed
"the West" is emphasized by the nature of the main personae involved in
making Buffalo Bill a media creation, first in the dime novels and then
in his role in the narratives dramatized in his traveling show. There is a
producer, a publicist, a journalist, an interpreter, and an old soldier who
verbalizes false legends. And as is the case with Altmans McCabe, much of
the mythology is simply overheard in peripheral conversations. For exam-
ple, there is one early in the film when someone off-camera can be heard
saying that "Sitting Bull is famous for scalping folks in their beds."
As was the case with his McCabe, in Buffalo Bill Altman makes use
of attendants, in this case of characters who have no relationship with
the main narrative about the show—its exploitation of Sitting Bull, its
fraudulent version of the Battle of Little Big Horn, and its failed attempt
to separate image from fact (there is a last encounter between Buffalo Bill
and a postmortem appearance of Sitting Bull as an apparition who, says
Buffalo Bill, "isn't even the right image"). In Buffalo Bill one of the atten-
dants is an old soldier who delivers nothing but clichés about Buffalo Bill's
heroism and a bartender who articulates the myths surrounding both Sit-
ting Bull and Buffalo Bill, thereby serving as a vehicle for the primary
facticity that the film delivers: the Western hero as invention.
In an early scene, as Sitting Bull's party appears, the bartender
states that Sitting Bull is seven feet tall. And subsequently, when Buffalo
Bill forms a posse that fails to track and apprehend Sitting Bull's party,
under the mistaken assumption that they were fleeing (but had in fact
left temporarily to perform a ritual celebration of the first moon in the