Medawar/Oeler/Strike

Today I finished Mardi Oakley Medawar’s Murder at Medicine Lodge. Tay-bodal succeeds in discovering the identity of the real murderers (after an extremely complicated explanation worthy of Hercule Poirot!) and thus exonerates both White Bear and the Buffalo soldier Little Jonas. In some respects, however, the resolution of the mystery takes a second place to the event that provides the background for the novel as a whole, namely, the Medicine Lodge treaty meetings of 1867. Medawar is unambiguous in accusing the representatives of the US government (whom she names at the end of the novel) of negotiating in bad faith and she applauds the decision of the Kiowa not to sign any treaties with the Americans. Granted, her depiction of the events on which her novel is based (not to mention her portrayal of White Bear) is not entirely accurate (for more details on this see here) but Medawar’s overall point is both clear and indisputable: despite the fact that solving an individual murder is the focus of this novel, that murder pales into insignificance next to the annihilation of an entire civilization.

I also began reading Karla Oeler’s fascinating 2009 book A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. The focus of the book is an explanation why representations of murder are so central to the genre of film, and Oeler summarizes her argument as follows: “Murder is such a foundational scene in the history of cinema because the obliteration of life that it revolves around dramatizes the way that cinematic representation—which shows the photographic trace of a now absent object—always is poised between conveying the reality of the object and conveying the loss of reality, or disembodiment, intrinsic to representation itself.” A formalist argument, then, but one also attuned to historical detail. For example, Oeler moves on to an examination of the use of the close-up and montage in the work of early Soviet filmmakers such as Pudovkin and Eisenstein in order to show how “cinema’s distilled formal categories are charged with sociohistorical necessity.” Close readings of individual films are balanced by a larger account of the genre’s history and the ways its representations of violence have both changed and remained the same over time.

As one of the first films Oeler mentions in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece Strike, I thought this would be a good opportunity to watch it again. Perhaps naively, bearing in mind the fact that the last of its six parts is called ‘Extermination,’ I had forgotten just how difficult it is to watch this film. Eisenstein’s vivid depiction of the breaking up of a strike and the massacre of the workers is as powerful as ever. Even though you know what’s coming long before it actually happens, you still feel shocked and appalled by what you witness. Seeing it again after such a long time, what stood out for me this time was how well Eisenstein prepares his viewer for the (in)famous sequence at the end of the film where the murder of the workers is crosscut with explicit footage of the slaughter of a cow. Animals are not only present throughout the film, but that final shared image of death is just one example of the relationship of objective correlativity that Eisenstein establishes between humans and animals. This association happens in expected ways (we understand that these humans are treated like animals) and in less expected ways (humans borrow some of the animals’ dignity and beauty, which makes their (the humans’ and the animals’) deaths even more appalling). How many other films from this period retain so much of their power?