Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Director Raoul Peck

Ernest Cole gravesite

ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND                    B+                                                           France  (105 mi)  2024  d: Raoul Peck

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus, November 2, 1883, bronze plaque inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

Raoul Peck is the maker of The Man On the Shore (L’Homme sur les quais) (1993), LUMUMBA (2000), SOMETIMES IN APRIL (2005), MOLOCH TROPICAL (2009), and 2017 Top Ten List #3 I Am Not Your Negro (2016), each one substantially different than the next.  Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which has a proud history of being one of the three major revolutions of the 19th century at a time when there were no other free black republics, his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship in 1991, finding asylum and a new life working for the United Nations in the Republic of Congo, which became their second home for nearly twenty-five years, raised in the Congo, United States, France, and Germany, where Peck earned an economic-engineering Master’s degree at the University of Berlin and then studied film at the Academy of Cinema and Television in Berlin (DFFB).  After the restoration of democratic rule, he served as Haiti’s Minister of Culture from 1996 to 1997, while also spending two years as a professor for screenwriting and directing at NYU Tish School of the Arts graduate program, and is also an artist-in-residence at the New School, a Greenwich Village private research university in New York City.  In 2010 he was appointed Chairman of La Fémis in Paris, the prestigious French national film school, a position that he retains as he continues to live in Paris, New York, and Haiti.  He is known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events, pointing his camera where others prefer not to look, at racism, colonialism, genocide, but also resistance, where he has a unique ability to seamlessly blend art and politics, turning to people like James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois and other writers and intellectuals because he could see in their work that they not only had artistic visions about themselves as writers, but also as thinkers and activists, people who were parts of larger revolutionary struggles and movements.  Having already made films about Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba, and James Baldwin, for Peck, the demythologizing of white supremacy and colonial ideologies has been a lifelong project, as genocide is an unspeakable word for some people.  Black Lives Matter is an unspeakable phrase for some people.  Trans rights are unspeakable for some people, yet these issues are crucial and transformative in the world of today, where there is a special urgency in the continuing struggle for human empathy, as we seem to have lost our moral vision and the ideals that helped define this country as a bastion of freedom.

Most have probably never heard of the featured artist before seeing this film, awarded the Golden Eye Best Documentary award at Cannes, where Peck has resurrected the career of a relatively obscure yet seminal artist of the 20th century, South African photographer Ernest Cole, the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to a world audience, and in doing so accentuate the stark realities of colonial oppression.  Born and raised in an all-black township near Pretoria, one of the traumatic events that shaped his life was witnessing the demolition of his neighborhood to make way for whites, bulldozed completely to the ground, leaving nothing but rubble in order to guarantee no one could possible return, a pattern that persisted throughout many black neighborhoods, typically given only a few hours notice, accompanied by a strong police presence, as this was an urban renewal project driven by an ideology of white supremacy.  Ten percent of all South Africans, the majority white, owned more than 90% of national wealth, as some 80% of the population, overwhelmingly black, owned nothing at all.  The core of apartheid policy and power revolved around land, beginning in 1948, as black South Africans were stripped of their land and relocated to racially segregated townships far outside the city, where home ownership was practically impossible.  Black townships became extremely overcrowded and unsanitary, as they were distinctly cut off from infrastructure and urban utilities, living under tin roofs without services such as water and electricity, leaving people to fend for themselves.  From 1960 to 1983, the apartheid government policy of Forced Removals moved 3.5 million black South Africans in one of the largest mass removals of people in modern history.  Other incidents like the Sharpeville massacre left deep scars, as nearly 100 people were shot, many in the back fleeing police, including children, while over 200 were wounded.  Amidst this climate of fear and oppression, Cole discovered photography, capturing raw moments through his lens, which was his way to process the insanity happening all around him, where collecting evidence was a matter of survival, impressing the editors at Drum magazine, loosely modeled on America’s Life magazine, one of the few publications giving a platform to black voices, where in 1958 at the age of 18 he worked as an assistant to Jürgen Schadeberg, the magazine’s chief photographer and picture editor, capturing images on the streets of Pretoria, exposing unvarnished truths that others tried to hide.  Peck includes excerpts of interviews with Cole from Jürgen Schadeberg’s 2006 documentary about the artist, the only known interview of Cole on camera.  Working as a photographer at Bantu World, the black daily newspaper of Johannesburg, he photographed the daily indignities black people endured, risking his life every day, learning how to shoot at eye level while hiding his camera as he walked inconspicuously down the street and blended into crowds, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found | Exclusive Clip | LaKeith Stanfield YouTube (1:23).  Cole also began to mingle with other talented young black South Africans, including journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement, so it helped radicalize his viewpoint to counter the official erasure of black history, as his anger only increased at the silence or complicity of the West in the face of the horrors of apartheid, where a jazzy score by Alexei Aigui and the music of Duke Ellington are beautifully integrated into the images of interconnecting worlds, Fleurette Africaine (African Flower) (Remastered) YouTube (3:36). 

Ernest Cole is the first black freelance photographer in South Africa, and the first photojournalist, whose early pictures were shocking at the time of their first publication, as viewers of this film can see, perhaps for the first time, some of the decades-long compilation of work that formed his 1967 book House of Bondage, the only volume of Cole’s work to appear during his lifetime, comprised of 183 photographs accompanied by scattered texts, which was subsequently banned in South Africa.  In the book, Cole writes, “Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa have placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem, and surrounded us with hate.”  These searing photographs shone a light on issues the world could no longer ignore, and practically overnight he became renowned, though it came at great personal cost.  Arrested by the South African police because of his activities, declared a threat by the apartheid government, Cole had no choice but to seek asylum in America, managing to outwit the Race Classification Board, which classified people into one of three groups, native, coloured, or white (Racial Classification Under Apartheid), though Asians were later added as a separate group, when he was re-classified as “coloured” by changing his name from Kole to Cole.  This gave him more freedom of movement privileges and he was soon able to leave South Africa in 1966, smuggling negatives with the help of Joseph Lelyveld (and intelligence officers from the U.S. embassy), then the New York Times’ South African correspondent, who also began to hire him for assignments.  While the featured photographs are riveting, they are accompanied by a first-person commentary written by Peck, adapted from letters and testimonies of family, friends, and those who knew him that are read in voiceover by actor LaKeith Stanfield from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) as a stand-in for Cole, providing the detail of his life in his “own” words, elevating Cole to a full-fledged co-writer of the film, becoming a de facto narrator, providing existential insight into the artist himself, allowing his words and images to speak for themselves, which recalls similar commentary by Samuel L. Jackson appropriating the magisterial quality of James Baldwin in 2017 Top Ten List #3 I Am Not Your Negro.  But unlike the eloquence of Jackson, this dry, off-putting reading is emotionally deflating, feeling overly detached, creating a distinct separation between viewers and the content, where he continues to narrate even from beyond the grave, a point of view that can feel confusing at times, which is the biggest hurdle for this film to overcome, and it’s not entirely successful, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found - Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:45).  The photographs, however, are a different story, bringing with them an unending barrage of searing intensity, taking viewers back to a different time, reminding us that the hate and racial restrictions of apartheid have never really left us, as they have returned with a vengeance to a contemporary world that has no use for immigrants or minorities, who continue to be blamed for all the world’s ills, just as they were in the last century.  Giving voice to a feeling that many marginalized people happen to experience, the essential question is what progress has really been made?  Has it only been a façade?  Has the appearance of tolerance and a quest for social justice only been a cover for deeper, crueler intentions that are rearing their ugly head today?  This film quietly, and intently, answers those questions with a noxious force, as some lives are simply viewed as disposable, where we’ve lost the capacity to feel empathy for the plight of others.  This past year, for instance, has been one of the deadliest in recent memory for journalists and photographers covering state-sanctioned violence, particularly in Gaza.  But these pictures say it all, as they are agonizingly raw and unpretentiously honest, a towering achievement capturing the essence of humanity in some of our darkest moments.      

At least initially, Cole was brimming with optimism about a new world that awaited him, filled with hopes and dreams of a world without prejudice, without the maddening fear, without the endless persecution and nullification of all identity, where there’s a gorgeous injection of music that is cleverly ironic, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found | Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:17), featuring the Manhattan Brothers, a popular South African singing group during the apartheid era with a harmony style that drew on American R&B Doo-wop music, and a very young Miriam Makeba, South Africa’s own (also exiled), still in her early 20’s, Lovely Lies - Manhattan Brothers And Miriam Makeba (1956) YouTube (2:50).  One thing that surprised him was the presence of happy interracial couples and queer couples kissing and holding hands in public, as that was something he never saw in South Africa, with Peck creating a montage of photos, many of which have not been seen by the public before, where it was unprecedented to work with an archive of this massive size.  Arguably the best sequence of the film is the artist analyzing one of his own photographs, detail by detail, where he’s able to see things that others overlook, evaluating the looks on people’s faces, either passive curiosity, or anxiety tinged with fear, or downright panic, watching the police go about their business of routinely stopping a young black boy on the street, as blacks were not allowed to circulate in white neighborhoods without a specific pass, described as a policy of “good neighborliness” by Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, where the demeaning and dehumanizing treatment the boy is subjected to is simply incomprehensible to imagine for whites, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found - Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:25).  As improbable as it sounds, just the taking of that photo was considered a crime, as documentary photography was illegal by a government that feared photography so much that they also banned foreign journalists.  Cole had a hard time adjusting to a new life in exile, feeling that he was pigeonholed into becoming a chronicler of misery, the only assignments magazines wanted to offer him, never allowed to expand into other areas of photography like his white counterparts, but he refused to subject himself to a life of unending personal trauma, having reached a creative and professional dead end that left him psychologically burdened, where he can be heard in exasperation, “exile is destroying us one by one,” where he was particularly troubled when his request for a passport to return home was denied.  A recurring phrase heard throughout the film is Cole’s belief that “one day South Africa will be free,” which bears a resemblance to a controversial chant associated with Palestinian liberation, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”  The depth of his American photographs of New York City and the Jim Crow South carry the same weight, but were largely ignored, dismissed by his white editors as “having no edge,” so he never submitted them, but 275 photographs are the subject of a belated book release in 2024, Ernest Cole: The True America, with Peck writing in the preface, “On the contrary, it seems that most damaging for him, was the discovery that even in the most cosmopolitan city in the world, in a country that prides itself on being the bedrock of democracy and does not shy away from lecturing the rest of the world, there was misery, racism, ignorance, and solitude, regardless of one’s success or fame.” 

Drawing unmistakable parallels between South African apartheid and the racism of the Jim Crow South, Cole came to the startling realization that in South Africa he was afraid of being arrested, while in the American South he was afraid of being shot, a reality that is particularly chilling for black men, who were still being lynched in the 1960's, Ernest Cole Lost and Found Movie - video Dailymotion YouTube (2:00).  Think about that and allow that to marinate for a minute, as it creates a visceral reaction, suggesting that being black in America poses a much greater danger than the horrifying atrocities experienced during apartheid, which this country whole-heartedly deplored (James Baldwin reached the same conclusion, which is why he left America in 1948 to live in France), where this dichotomy caused Cole no end of grief, feeling homesick, falling into a spiral of depression and isolation, rarely finding stability or steady income, ending his life mired in poverty, homelessness, and anonymity, where he died a lonely death from untreated pancreatic cancer at the early age of 49 in 1990.  Just days after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and one year before apartheid was dismantled, Cole died believing the bulk of his life’s work had simply disappeared off the face of the earth without a trace, as his book fell out of print for decades while his body of work was considered lost for over forty years.  Cole made repeated trips to Sweden during the late 60’s and early 70’s, only for a collection of 60,000 35mm film negatives to inexplicably resurface in a bank vault in Stockholm in 2017, with most returned to his family, but 500 archival prints from House of Bondage are still a matter of dispute between his heirs, who founded the Ernest Cole Family Trust, headed by his nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, who provided full archival access for this film, and the Hasselblad Foundation, a not-for-profit Swedish foundation dedicated to promoting Nordic photographers, which organized the Ernest Cole Photographer exhibition that toured South Africa in 2010-11 and was later shown in the United States, featuring 113 rare black-and-white silver gelatin prints from Cole’s archive, yet stubbornly, or selfishly, refuse to relinquish control.  The film never addresses the source of this dispute, or explain the secret of the missing items, or even the late disappearance of Cole, dropping completely out of sight, remaining an exile disconnected from his roots, all of which remains clouded under an unexplained mystery, leaving unanswered questions at the end of the film that simply linger in our thoughts, unable to fathom what really happened, but the value of these photographs today is inestimable.  South Africa publicly displayed his photographs for the first time in 2001 with the opening of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, where a permanent part of the museum is his collection entitled Life under Apartheid, forming a kind of elegiac collective memory, with so many artists failing to be recognized for their contributions until after their deaths, yet the fact that we are still discussing these works today speaks to Cole’s impact. 

Postscript

While a dispute over ownership rights with other agencies continues, as documented here, Ernest Cole's photographs are finally coming home, but ..., the Hasselblad controversy has ended, as on May 7, 2024, just prior to the Cannes Film Festival premiere, the Hasselblad Foundation handed over 496 vintage Ernest Cole prints to Leslie Matlaisane, chairman of the Ernest Cole Family Trust (Hasselblad Foundation | We're pleased to announce a ...).  Claiming they were “entrusted to us by image agency Tiofoto and its co-founder Rune Hassner, they’ve been safeguarded and maintained in optimal condition,” this puts an end to at least part of the contentious struggle to exercise control over the remarkable legacy of Ernest Cole, marking this as part of a recent pattern of European nations repatriating invaluable African artworks to their rightful owners, as depicted in the recent Mati Diop film DAHOMEY (2024), where 26 plundered royal artifacts from the African kingdom of Dahomey that had been exhibited in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris for more than 100 years were finally returned to Benin.  

Director Raoul Peck Shares Thoughts on Ernest Cole Lost ... Curvy Critic (Carla Renata) interview with Raoul Peck, November 24, 2024 on YouTube (10:02)

Aljazeera— Studio B: Unscripted A filmed conversation between filmmaker Raoul Peck and Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, May 27, 2024 on YouTube (48:37)

Photographer, who inspired a generation of anti-apartheid ... Ernest Cole (2006) documentary by Jürgen Schadeberg on YouTube (53:41)

Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Director Martin Scorsese

Scorsese with Lily Gladstone

Scorsese with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio

Scorsese with Lily Gladstone

William King Hale

Mollie Burkhart

Mollie with sisters Anna and Minnie

Ernest Burkhart

Scorsese with Chief Standing Bear, Chief of Osage Nation

Author David Grann

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON                     B                                                                    USA  (209 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: Martin Scorsese

Anna Kyle Brown. Osage.                                                                                                        1896-1921. Fairfax, Oklahoma.

Because she died where the ravine falls into water.                                                                Because they dragged her down to the creek.                                                                                 In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt.                                                                              Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.                                          Because I turned the log with my foot.                                                                                           Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.                                                                             Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.

Because she lived without our mother.                                                                                   Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land.                                                 She was carrying his offspring.                                                                                                  The sheriff disguised her death as whiskey poisoning.                                                       Because, when he carved her body up, he saw the bullet hole in her skull.

Because, when she was murdered, the leg clutchers bloomed.                                                     But then froze under the weight of frost.                                                                                     During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon.                                                I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver.                                                 I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.

Wi'-gi-e by Elise Paschen  Osage poet, 2009, spoken by Mollie Burkhart, whose sister, Anna Kyle Brown, was murdered during the Osage Reign of Terror

The kind of thing they never taught you in the finest schools of the country, yet Native American genocide is reflective of the very soul of the nation, founded on the pillars of greed and racism, as American history is largely taught as an extension of European history, and while there is some argument that African American slavery is central to the making of America, Native American history has largely been omitted, perhaps due to the massive extent of the atrocities committed which have largely been swept under the rug, something the majority of the country would just as soon forget.  This is American history as we’ve never seen it, one of the darkest chapters come to light, so this film will likely have a polarizing effect on viewers who are already positioned to think what they want, irrespective of what actually happened in American history.  For those searching for the truth, this film only tells part of the story, given free reign under poetic license, but it tells enough to suggest a staggering crime with profound implications that still reverberates today, where it’s hard to imagine that this kind of thing could actually happen, but Scorsese gets underneath the psychological mindset of the perpetrators, where the epic scale recalls Erich von Stroheim’s silent American classic Greed (1924), an off-the-rails yet blistering critique of the American Dream.  This film isn’t really for everyone, as it requires a great amount of patience, an eye for detail, and an ability to feel empathy, standing in sharp contrast to the Marvel superhero films that dominate American theaters these days, seen featured in the coming attractions prior to the start of the film.  Of unique interest, in a short video Scorsese briefly welcomes the audience to the theater to see his film, which is a personal touch, yet sets the stage for what follows, as this is a deeply personal project for the 81-year old director, along with his longtime 83-year old editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every film made by this director since RAGING BULL (1980), with Scorsese making a cameo appearance near the end of this $200 million dollar film, premiering out of competition at Cannes, where it received a 9-minute standing ovation (Scorsese films had been absent from the festival for 37 years since a 1986 screening of AFTER HOURS, with Scorsese winning the Best Director award).  At the Cannes press conference afterwards, Robert De Niro referred to this film as “the banality of evil,” where it’s hard to fathom the sheer hopelessness that exists on Indian reservations.  Adapted by Scorsese and Eric Roth from the 2017 Pulitzer-Prize nominated non-fiction book by David Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, the story is set primarily in Osage County, Oklahoma in the 1920’s, as Scorsese worked with Osage experts in order to accurately reflect their culture and traditions.  Originally from the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, the Osage people had been pushed to Missouri and Kansas by white settlers, along with the forcible removal of about 100,000 American Indians from their eastern homelands to western reservations, eventually forced to relocate to a reservation in Oklahoma about the size of Delaware in the middle of nowhere, given the worst piece of barren and undesirable land imaginable, viewed as worthless at the time, only to later discover the tribal land was sitting on some of the largest oil deposits in the United States, quickly striking it rich, making the Osage Nation residents among the wealthiest people in America.  Their shares were known as “headrights,” with the tribe distributing royalties equally among its few thousand enrolled members, collectively earning more than $30 million dollars in royalties (equivalent to more than $400 million today) in 1923 alone. 

Despite their wealth, the racial bias against Native Americans was only exasperated by white society’s jealousy of the Osage people’s wealth and lavish lifestyle, as in the public’s eye, as depicted by the press, they were still wild Indians, mocked for their extravagance while still living in a primitive style, wrapped in colorful blankets, described as “the laziest people on earth,” claiming they were “slow to civilize,” expressing contempt at seeing whites slavishly performing menial labor for conspicuously wealthy Indians, which was viewed as an abominable role reversal.  That massive wealth drew the attention of the white neighbors, who murderously conspired to get their piece of it, using marriage, guardianship, and devious legal maneuvers to steal the Osage oil money, where this sprawling three hours plus movie documents just some of what is now referred to as the Reign of Terror, From the archives: The Osage murders and "Killers of the Flower Moon"  David Grann on CBS Sunday Morning (8:18), as an estimated 5% (or roughly 150 people) of the Osage tribe were poisoned, murdered, or died under suspicious circumstances in Osage County, Oklahoma from 1921 to 1926, most of which were never even investigated.  In the state of Oklahoma, killing an Indian was simply of no consequence, and those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered, while evidence was routinely tampered with or destroyed, with oil rights transferred to the whites who were likely their murderers.  In 1921, the federal government passed a law requiring Osage members to prove “competency” with money or else be assigned a (white) financial guardian, as most tribe members were considered incapable of handling such large sums of money, for no other reason except for the fact they were considered ignorant Indians, described in the film as “incompetent.”  One Osage tribe member named John Goodskin was a college graduate and a WWI veteran, yet the Bureau of Indian Affairs mandated a white guardian be assigned control over his financial affairs.  The origins of this racial bias came from the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1832, claiming the relationship of Native Americans to the U.S. was “that of a ward to his guardian,” so the use of these same terms 90 years later on the Osage Reservation is not a coincidence, as the government still viewed themselves as primarily protecting the interests of their supposedly incompetent wards, opening the floodgates for grifters and fortune hunters, with lawyers pouring into the region to get their hands on this unique opportunity, with judges handing out Indian guardianships to faithful friends as rewards for favorable political contributions, as laws allowed mismanagement and corruption to thrive, where the entire white community became incentivized to participate in this system of greed (the guardianship system was not overturned until 1978).  A 1924 study by the Indian Rights Association, a policy and advocacy group founded by non-Indians, estimated that guardians had stolen at least $8 million directly from the restricted accounts of their Osage wards, calling it an “orgy of graft and exploitation.”  When Osage guardians funneled Osage money into their own pockets and the case went before a local judge, it would routinely be ignored, despite the grisly fact that many guardians ended up with multiple dead wards.  For this reason many Osage women married whites, so their guardian overseer was their own spouse, presumably a reliable and trustworthy ally. 

No one makes crimes stories like Scorsese, the maker of gangster films like Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), The Departed (2006), and The Irishman (2019), describing this film as “a sober look at who we are as a culture.”  There are visual and thematic similarities with Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), both featuring megalomaniacal lead characters, both crafted by the same production designer Jack Fisk, yet what makes this different is Scorsese’s first attempt at making a western, shot out in open country, where typical of westerns, the story pits civilization and the rule of law against frontier outlaws who exploit the system.  Police investigations, if they happened at all, often blamed the victims, as deliberate poisonings were chalked up to drinking bad liquor or what was described as a peculiar wasting illness, shootings got labeled as suicides, autopsies were often skipped, burials rushed, and death certificates falsified.  Grann’s book is meticulously researched while diligently providing the context for these shocking acts, becoming a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long, turning late in the book to firsthand experiences with the families and communities that continue to be affected by the murders.  Scorsese omits that late transition, which makes all the difference, so this film takes a different perspective, centering upon the story of Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage, acknowledging in an interview earlier this month, “Nobody is going to hand an Osage filmmaker $200 million”), an Osage woman who marries a white man, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio in his sixth Scorsese film), an easily manipulated foil heavily influenced by his domineering uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro working with Scorsese for the tenth time), to personally carry out or be complicit in the murders of most of her family.  Hale’s psychopathic hatred towards Indians draws an apt comparison to John Wayne’s archetypal Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956), while it was impossible not to think of De Niro’s overwrought maliciousness as Max Cady in Scorsese’s CAPE FEAR (1991), yet at the time of his trial for orchestrating a string of murders, the press, still enthralled with the myth of the American West, romantically referred to him as an “old-time cowboy.”  While Mollie and her family are the targeted victims, the storyline closely follows Ernest Burkhart in his transition from the budding romance of a returning war hero to a deceitful and treacherous husband who carries out despicable crimes, where the film is largely seen through his point of view.  Unlike Grann, who follows the arc of the investigation, within the first ten or fifteen minutes Scorsese makes the intentions of Hale and Burkhart known well before the story starts, diffusing the film of any underlying tension, yet the deteriorating trust in the marital relationship becomes closer in spirit to Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), focusing instead on an unraveling character study as he attempts to get at the heart of what feels like a void in humanity.  Hale was a cattle rancher who amassed a fortune through insurance fraud and unfair trade with the Osage people, proclaiming himself “King of the Osage,” owning a controlling interest of the Fairfax bank, part interest in the town’s general store and funeral home, while also serving as a reserve deputy sheriff, giving him access to local criminals to do his bidding.  While taking us into frontier settlements called Gray Horse, Hominy, Pawhuska, Fairfax, and an illicit gambling outpost called Whizbang, this captivating murder mystery may be viewed as a journalistic exposé, but it lacks the electrifying suspense and emotional complexity of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967). 

“I’d never been out to the prairie,” said Scorsese in an interview with The New Yorker, “When I got out there, we were driving for so long on one road, and I wondered why we were going so slowly, and I looked at the — it was, like, 45 minutes — I looked at this speedometer, we’re doing 75, and I realized this place never ends.”  In both the book and Scorsese’s film, the full brunt of the emotional devastation falls upon the shoulders of Mollie, who narrates a description of the dry grasslands, as every April millions of tiny flowers spread over the hills and vast prairies as Johnny jump ups (wild pansies), spring beauties, and bluets blossom over the Osage land.  In May, however, taller plants like black-eyed susans and spiderworts begin to grow, overtaking the smaller blooms, stealing their sunshine and rainwater.  As the smaller flowers try to reach for the sun, their necks break and their petals fall, buried beneath the taller plants.  The Osage refer to this period as “the time of flower-killing moon,” becoming a metaphor for the way the white men came and brutally killed the Osage people.  In something of a strange twist, the Osage petitioned to President Coolidge and the federal government for help, a plea that was initially ignored, as there was a tremendous amount of corruption in Osage County, where lawmen were either complicit in the murders or bought off, turning a blind eye to justice.  Even the Governor of Oklahoma, Jack C. Walton, was impeached out of office in 1923 for accepting under-the-table oil bribes after serving less than a year.  In this murky landscape, whites were emboldened to commit cold-blooded crimes, thinking of themselves as untouchable, as it’s questionable whether a jury of twelve white men would ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian, where one lawman can be heard saying, “You got a better chance of convicting a guy for kicking a dog than killing an Indian.”  Seeking a high-profile success to erase the bureau’s stained reputation for its role in another oil corruption scheme, the Teapot Dome scandal, newly appointed director J. Edgar Hoover sent investigators to Oklahoma in the new Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which would later be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935, but only after the death toll rose to more than twenty-four.  With a culture of killing and complicity, the FBI investigated only a fraction of the killings, as Hoover was in a hurry to close the case, never looking deeper into the darker conspiracy implications, turning the case over to Tom White (Jesse Plemons), a former Texas Ranger and an experienced investigator who lived in the saddle, putting together an undercover team that included a Native American agent, John Wren (Tatanka Means), actually charging the Osage $20,000 for their services, as they had to pay for justice, which is simply unheard of, yet the headlines generated by this case gave birth to a more professional, modern era FBI.  However, even after the Bureau of Investigation closed the case, according to Yancey Red Corn: Actor, Osage Native American, “the killings just kept going on.”  While the oil ran dry and the Depression depleted their wealth, one important consideration here is that even though the Osage tribe were the targeted victims, something they never forget, they don’t live their lives as victims, as the Osage Nation has not just survived, but is thriving, making attempts to reacquire the stolen lands (including Ted Turner’s expansive 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch) while adopting new ways to ensure its future.  Having once owned nearly 1.5 million acres in the early 1900’s, before this 2016 acquisition the Osage Nation owned only 5% of that.

While the story itself has profound implications, the film is very sluggish and feels like an overlong death march, with vicious murders accumulating before our eyes, one after another in a succession of endless brutality, growing darkly unsettling and relentlessly grim throughout, where you wonder where the hell was Thelma Schoonmaker’s reputedly outstanding editing, as it definitely needed some help.  This never lives up to the best of Scorsese, feeling instead like an elderly version where you try to say too much, and don’t want to leave out anything, but makes it more rambling while attempting to chronicle such a dark and nearly forgotten aspect of American history that resembles the grisly maliciousness of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  The opening sequence is the best thing in the entire film, as that Robbie Robertson music just grabs you by the throat, Killers of the Flower Moon Soundtrack | Osage Oil Boom - Robbie Robertson | Original Score | YouTube (2:51), while Scorsese’s gravity-defying crane shots lure you in.  Malevolence is everywhere in this film, as the loss of life feels unstoppable, most of it masterminded behind the scenes by Hale, who spent years ingratiating himself into the good graces of the Osage community so no one would suspect him.  He proclaims himself a merciful friend, speaking their language, making benevolent donations for schools and the local hospital in the Native community, where he’s allowed a privileged position to sit at tribal meetings and at funerals that he orchestrated, but his benevolence is a ploy to disguise his evil intent, drawing a parallel to the billionaire pharmaceutical Sackler family, famous for their philanthropy, positioning themselves as bastions of morality, building a reputation as generous patrons of the arts while pushing the highly addictive OxyContin on the general public, where more than half a million have died from the damage caused by the opioid epidemic, so brilliantly revealed in Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022).  Scorsese exposes the murderous intent of Hale, but he did not act in a vacuum, and many more Osage went missing than were ever accounted for.  Left out of the film is the unmistakable reality of federal Indian policy, which, from the 1880’s through the 1940’s, fostered a legal strategy through which Native peoples would lose their land and resources more and more easily, which is an underlying cause of why this happened, as it wasn’t just Hale, but the government’s intent as well, yet instead of murdering Indians they simply stole land and wealth through legal channels, as the federal government has seized hundreds of millions of acres of land from Native nations in over 300 treaties.  It was the official government policy of assimilation which saw Osage children forced into boarding schools, with attempts to eradicate Osage language and culture (both survived).  Even in the 20th century, the federal government collected billions of dollars from sales or leases of natural resources like timber, oil, and gas on Indian lands, which it was supposed to disburse to the land’s owners, but it failed to account for these trust funds for decades, let alone pay Indians what they were due, so this film is just one chapter in a much larger story, one that affirms the U.S. was built on stolen lands and wealth. 

Despite Scorsese’s best efforts to tell the story of the Osage murders in the most respectful manner, working closely with the Osage people in Oklahoma, Native Americans are relegated to the background in a larger story predominately featuring white male protagonists, as Hale enlists the aid of ranch hands, doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, law enforcement officials, and relatives to carry out his relentless schemes and cover-ups.  Perhaps due to the commercial appeal of De Niro and DiCaprio, they are onscreen for the majority of the time, where much of this is seen through their eyes, perhaps focusing too much on Ernest Burkhart, giving him a conscience, while taking away the pain of Mollie and her family, where the Osage community are largely given a distant ceremonial presence, remaining passive bystanders as one by one they are picked off in the most heinous manner by a racist and utterly vile plot against them.  For most viewers, they will remain outsiders, silently playing the tragic victims, perhaps mirroring Scorsese’s delicate position as an outsider himself, where little time is spent attempting to understand their culture.  Even when speaking among themselves in their own language, there are no subtitled translations, so viewers have little opportunity to become emotionally invested or gain needed insight.  Scorsese simply accentuates the wrong perspective, shifting the emphasis to those carrying out the crimes, giving too much screen time to the villains instead of expanding an indigenous narrative, as David Grann does with his book.  Compare that to Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (2022), for instance, where there are a stream of revelations from the point of view of those who are targets of a crime, while those that carry out the crimes are largely unseen.  As a sign of the times, it was no accident that these events happened simultaneously to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where wealthy blacks in Oklahoma were terrorized by a two-day long mob attack from white supremacists, literally destroying the homes and businesses of a well-established black community, where hundreds of lives were lost and up to 10,000 black residents were left homeless, leaving a thriving community utterly decimated.  These incidents do not reflect upon black or Native American history, but instead reveal the historically racist mindset of whites (the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920’s had a nationwide membership in the millions), instilling widespread community fear by devaluing people of color to such a degree that they readily resort to murder to stop minority economic advancement from happening in America, where the laws and political institutions have been complicit in either covering up these crimes or conspiring against those who were plotted against.  Unlike Grann’s book that exposes how the murders and ethnic violence against the Osage Nation affect its people to this day, with families still haunted by the atrocities, Scorsese’s tale is one of an extensive criminal conspiracy, still largely undocumented, where one group plots against another with complete impunity.  This kind of mindset has not disappeared, reflecting the complicity of white supremacy, as a Pandora’s Box of toxic race hatred has infected the present as well, with hate crimes on the rise (Hate and Extremism — In the Mainstream and on the Main Street), along with a gun culture of mass shootings, as if we’re still living in the lawlessness of the Wild West, where families continue to deal with inconsolable losses from dreadful tragedies that all Americans need to come to terms with.

Note

The family of Ree Drummond, aka television’s Pioneer Woman, a staple on the Food Network since 2011 who married into the Drummond family (Oklahoma) in 1996, is the largest landholder in Osage County that also includes churches, oil companies, banks, the University of Texas, and the University of Oklahoma, owning 433,000 acres in 2017, or 9% of the county, as the Drummond patriarchs were able to amass so much land because they were guardians to at least 10 Osage estates, owning a trading company offering extensive services like will executions, deed transfers, as well as undertaker and funeral services that eventually turned into a funeral home, routinely overcharging Osage customers, with Jack Drummond in a late 1970’s interview openly acknowledging a 700% markup for Osage shoppers (The Strange but True Story of the Pioneer Woman's Link to ...), while also purchasing Osage headrights during the Reign of Terror, making money off of the Osage Nation, with the Drummonds eventually purchasing William Hale’s ranch.