małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (Sky Hopinka, 2020) (Patreon)

Sky Hopinka is a fascinating filmmaker for a number of reasons. Not only is he one of the most prominent experimental filmmakers of the moment; he is also probably the highest-profile Indigenous media artist currently working in the United States. There is a long history of radical Indigenous film and videomaking that has yet to be written. A key moment in this history would be the work of Navajo filmmaker Al Clah, whose 1966 film Intrepid Shadows is a Deren-like trance film that found a highly individual artist subverting the task given to him by two anthropologists, Sol Worth and John Adair, who wanted much more conventional auto-ethnographies from the Navajo people.

Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk nation, and his lyrical, painterly films engage with questions of personal and cultural memory, particularly as relates to First Peoples living in contemporary society. While this makes his work very unique in avant-garde circles, it also helps to explain why his work fits so well within the current landscape of experimental media. Like many of his peers, Hopinka is focused on history as a material process, a set of actions bound to the land and inscribed on the body. Whereas various philosophical discourses have struggled to overcome the dead-ends of mind / body dualism and German Idealism, many Indigenous cosmologies, not surprisingly had long ago established the connections that others had been so diligently seeking.

Małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore is Hopinka's first feature-length film. It is a bold step for him because, if one knows his work well, it can be disorienting at first to watch Małni and have to stay with it to figure out where it's headed. For a time, it seems unclear exactly which direction Hopinka is taking his film. The opening moments, with a long shot of crashing waves, followed by a tracking shot through a color-enhanced autumnal forest, place us squarely within the realm of the artist's experimental shorts, especially Fainting Spells and Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary. 

But before long, Małni begins to take the shape of a somewhat conventional documentary about two members of the Chinook nation, as they describe their current relationship to their Native heritage. The two subjects of the film, Jordan Mercier and Sweetwater Sahme, are both compelling in their own specific ways. Jordan (who speaks only Chinook wawa in the film) is a family man looking to actively reconnect with his Indigenous roots. Sweetwater (who speaks English) is spiritual, but somewhat ambivalent about her family past. Hopinka contrasts the two figures very subtly, never forcing connections, allowing the resonances to simply vibrate throughout the film.

As małni begins to fully come together, its overall objective becomes clear. It is a free-flowing combinatory film, working between the genres of personal documentary and poetic / experimental film. Hopinka includes numerous interludes of land- and seascape, including a repeated use of a camera obscura shot of the waves, implying temporal as well as spatial distance. But even the more factual sequences, like the Native gathering, with arrival by canoe and collective song, tend to start out "objective" and then veer off into distraction, following Hopinka's own interests, or the shifting moods of Jordan, in particular.

So more than any other Hopinka film, małni actually resembles his 2017 short Dislocation Blues. Composed of reflections following the protests at Standing Rock, Dislocation combines reportage, interviews, and the force of memory, a fragmented, nonlinear approach to nonfiction that zeroes in not on the moment itself, but on the ramifications of the moment, its reverberations across time. Małni is Hopinka's most ambitious work to date, and I hope it will open entirely new audiences to his singular vision.