You meet artist after artist and get all sorts of amazing insights. His instincts are spot on, like the selection of the fantastic guitar piece at the beginning in Paris that shows the chops of musician Micah P. Hinson. This sequence not only establishes why Hinson is a worthy subject, as he can play a mean guitar but also sets the tone for the unexpected art to come. Nothing happens as one would anticipate. A great example is when Harjo’s fellow 1491er Bobby Wilson is explaining the Native legend behind a wall mural he is spray painting. He is interrupted by a security guard asking why there is a giant picture of a guy with a sea monster c**k being chopped off by an old lady. The camera captures Wilson explaining the legend to the security guard. It is a mesmerizing composition.
“…a fantastic cocktail party with Native artists…”
The only major flaw keeping Love and Fury from being perfect is Harjo’s confounding decision not to caption the artist’s names onscreen when they first appear. Ralph Steadman font captions are present to tell us various locations of a band’s name, but not the individual artists. They are only listed in the opening credits and the closing credits. Without faces to match the names, a huge opportunity is lost for viewers to look up the artist’s work. I was intrigued by the experimental violist and the Alaskan female hip hop artist, but I couldn’t look up videos as there are no names attributed to them.
The more dedicated will sit down with the credits and look up one name after another, but the on-the-spot inspiration to type the name into the phone because they moved you is not there. Even the listing of all the artists’ names on the poster doesn’t help, as there are no boxes with faces for the names like they had in the 1970s for disaster movies. That this crucial element would be missing from a vehicle for awareness for Native American artists, already underrepresented, is nearly fatal to the project. With Love and Fury, we have a fantastic cocktail party with Native artists where inspirational things were said, but it feels like we got too drunk to remember who said what.
"…sets the tone for the unexpected art to come."
