{"id":19527,"date":"2017-09-26T08:07:51","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T14:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=19527"},"modified":"2017-09-26T08:07:51","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T14:07:51","slug":"in-crow-stories-filmmaker-takes-time-to-look-listen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/09\/in-crow-stories-filmmaker-takes-time-to-look-listen\/","title":{"rendered":"In ‘Crow Stories,’ filmmaker takes time to look, listen"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ride\"<\/a>

Sean Kernan<\/p>

A participant in the Real Bird family’s Battle of the Little Bighorn Re-enactment awaits his turn to ride in Sean Kernan’s documentary “Crow Stories.”<\/p><\/div>\n

During Sean Kernan\u2019s second visit to the Crow Indian Reservation, after he had decided to make a documentary about the Crow people, he was asked by a tribal member what he wanted to say with his film.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to say anything,\u201d Kernan answered. \u201cI want to listen.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was true to his word. \u201cCrow Stories,\u201d which will be shown on Oct. 5 at the Yellowstone Art Museum, contains no narration, only the words of people Kernan chose to profile.<\/p>\n

For long stretches of the film there are no words at all, just lingering depictions of landscape, broken by the sound of the wind, a train whistle in the distance, or a barking dog.<\/p>\n

Kernan, who lives in Connecticut, is primarily a photographer and writer who has also made one documentary before this one. He said in an interview that he has always been drawn to \u201cother universes, other worlds that are unfamiliar.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why he has done projects about Tibetan monasteries, maximum-security prisons in Alabama and West Virginia, and a boxing club in Kampala, Uganda.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t go to the Crow Reservation intending to do any sort of project. He merely accompanied a friend who was going there in 2009. Kernan said he spent a week in Crow country, mostly just observing and listening to people, but he also took some photos and a little bit of video.<\/p>\n

When he returned home and thought about the trip, and looked at the photos and video, he said he decided, \u201calmost immediately,\u201d to go back and do more filming. He said he ended up making six or seven trips to the Crow Reservation, usually for a week to 10 days.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>He tried to remain loose and receptive to what was going on around him. There were occasions when he made plans to film something in particular, \u201cbut something better would happen every time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo make good art you have to let yourself get bored,\u201d he said. And when he did, \u201csomething completely unexpected would happen. I learned to rely on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

On one trip, some people he was with said they needed to go buffalo hunting in preparation for a sun dance ceremony. They spent three days trying to track down the man who had the key to the fence around the buffalo pasture, and by the time Kernan had to leave, disappointed, there had been no hunt.<\/p>\n

But on his next visit, he said, \u201cI hardly stepped off the plane when somebody said, \u2018Come on. We\u2019re going buffalo hunting.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That hunting trip, into the Bighorn Mountains, is chronicled in \u201cCrow Stories,\u201d as is the visit to a meat processing plant where the bison is cut up and packaged.<\/p>\n

On another occasion, at an arrow-throwing contest, one man told Kernan that his cousin, Kevin Dust, was a champion arrow thrower. Where was he? In France, as it turned out, and he\u2019d been there for 20 years, appearing in a Wild West show at the Disneyland in Paris.<\/p>\n

\"Hil\"<\/a>

Sean Kernan<\/p>

“Crow Stories” opens with Pat Hill’s evocation of what it meant to be a Crow Indian in the pre-reservation days.<\/p><\/div>\n

Kernan managed to visit Dust in Paris, and Dust ended up appearing in two long segments of the documentary.<\/p>\n

He also visited with Joe Medicine Crow, the tribal leader and war hero who died in March 2016 at the age of 103. In the film, Medicine Crow shares some life lessons, speaking in Crow and English.<\/p>\n

There is music in the film, too \u2014 Ettinge Little Owl spontaneously breaking into song outside his home, and a performance of \u201cPrayer\u201d by Christian Parrish Takes the Gun, a Crow rap artist whose stage name in Supaman.<\/p>\n

Crow poet Henry Real Bird recites his poem, \u201cRivers of Horse\u201d as the backdrop to Kernan\u2019s footage of a herd of ponies galloping through a high mountain meadow.<\/p>\n

\u201cCrow Stories\u201d has been shown around the country and once in France since it was completed late last year, but the screening at the Yellowstone Art Museum, at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 5, will be the first in Montana.<\/p>\n

Kernan said he is a big fan of the YAM, which he makes a point of visiting on his trips to the Crow Reservation, and it was he who suggested the screening to museum Director Robyn Peterson.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, he said, he will be at a month-long writers retreat and won\u2019t be able to appear at the screening, but he hopes to be able to drop in via Skype and answer questions after the film is shown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During Sean Kernan\u2019s second visit to the Crow Indian Reservation, after he had decided to make a documentary about the Crow people, he was asked by a tribal member what he wanted to say with his film. \u201cI don\u2019t want to say anything,\u201d Kernan answered. \u201cI want to listen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19528,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[6303,6185,3125,1545,3300,6302,407],"class_list":["post-19527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-montana","tag-crow-stories","tag-crow-indian-reservation","tag-henry-real-bird","tag-joe-medicine-crow","tag-robyn-peterson","tag-sean-kernan","tag-yellowstone-art-museum","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19527"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19531,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19527\/revisions\/19531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}