The Navajo Boy
The Navajo Boy was a silent film of the 1950s that depicted the Cly family on the Navajo Nation in Monument Valley, Utah. The director, Robert J. Kennedy, narrated the film live at each showing. He provided little written information about the context or the identities of the Navajo people featured in the film. (The original spelling of the film is The Navaho Boy, as was customary at the time.)[1]
He featured Happy and Willie Cly, who have since died. Happy Cly is considered the most photographed Native American person. The "Navajo Boy" for whom the original film was named was Jimmy Cly.[1]
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Navajo people were more involved in making the documentary The Return of Navajo Boy (2000), whose executive producer was Bill Kennedy, son of the 1950s director. The Navajo believed the earlier film had treated them as voiceless stereotypes, and they wanted to better represent their story, especially the damage done to countless families from uranium mining on the reservation, which was unregulated for decades.[2]
[edit] References
- ^ a b "The Return of Navajo Boy". Wiley InterScience. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120182775/PDFSTART.
|
|||||||||||||||||
 |
This article about a silent film is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
