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 Return of Navajo Boy, The (2000)
Director:
Jeff Spitz, Bennie Klain (Producer)
Stars: Elsie Mae Cly, John Wayne Cly
Release Company:
Admur, Spitz, & Associates
MPAA Rating: NR
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Monument Valley 1
Photographic Print
Norton, Mike
Buy at AllPosters.com
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"I never thought that pictures could change anyone's life, but that's before The Return of Navajo Boy."
Lorenzo Begay
Long before Michelangelo created unsurpassed statuary in Rome, the Creator chiseled ultimate tribute to the Old West in the red sandstone formations of Monument Valley, long a favorite backdrop for John Ford westerns. After Ford discovered the location in 1939 for Stagecoach, he returned many other times with John Wayne to shoot films like Fort Apache and The Searchers. Ford and Wayne aren't the only ones to visit and film in the area, even back in the 1950's, when its rugged remoteness made it far less accessible. The Kerr McGee Oil Company, various post card photographers, and unknown filmmakers ventured to Harry Goulding's Trading Post to film Happy Cly and her family.
If you've ever seen old photographs or even present-day postcards of the traditional Navajo woman weaving rugs or herding sheep, you've seen Happy Cly—she was possibly the most photographed woman in America during the 1940's and 1950's. One of the unknown filmmakers from those days was Chicago businessman Robert Kennedy, who shot a 28-minute silent documentary called Navajo Boy that included a traditional healing Windway ceremony. After lying with the family home movies for decades, Kennedy's son, Bill, decided to return the film to the family, setting off a chain of unexpected events chronicled in Jeff Spitz's The Return of Navajo Boy.
Most documentaries about the Navajo focus on their history and culture, and the locals have their spokespeople who are used to these filmmakers and provide them with eloquent canned comments about the Navajo Codetalkers or contrast the modern world with the old ways, or whatever the filmmaker is focusing on. Spitz's film has very little of this because the subject here flies straight to the heart—the home movies flood the surviving relatives with memories, and the history told here evolves from the silent film-within-a-film. Nothing is more important than family in Navajo life, and the return of this family archive sparks an intimacy not often shared on film.
The ten-year-old boy in the film, Jimmy Cly, is now middle-aged and laughs at the images of himself running for a medicine man while his cousin, Elsie Mae Cly, identifies herself as the young girl having her hair wrapped by her grandmother, Happy Cly. Elsie turns out to be the dominant "star" in the documentary. Possessing quite a sense of humor (very typical of Navajos)—one clip shows her proclaim to visiting tourists, "I'm a movie star with John Wayne"—she incorporates traditional Navajo teaching in her comments and sees film as a valuable media to help preserve traditions. She's also the family history storyteller, tearfully recalling her two-year old brother, John Wayne Cly, who was taken away by missionaries and never seen again.
While describing the healing ceremony, the documentary ends up taking what at first seems to be a political/economic tangent when Elsie explains why the ceremony was conducted:
"We had a ceremony to diagnose why we are constantly ill. The gazer visualized something gray, fogging this whole area. The gazer didn't know what it was.
We live in the midst of uranium. We walk upon it every day. Our houses are built with it. It's in our walls."
This uranium horror story isn't lifted from a Tony Hillerman novel—it's the real deal. Spitz decides to follow up the story at a congressional hearing about the uranium mines and compensation in a sequence that initially seems to be out of synch with the film, but when a newspaper writes a story about Spitz's upcoming The Return of Navajo Boy, events unfold that lead to an unexpected family reunion with John Wayne Cly. The hugs and tears are real, and these scenes form the emotional core of the film, faithfully recorded in close-ups shot in real time.
Told in English and in Navajo with English subtitles, and smoothly accompanied with Navajo songs and flute music, the well-paced film plays as naturally as a comfortable visit with relatives. The Cly family warms quickly to Spitz's camera, and a great deal of credit must also go to co-producer Bennie Klain, who also translates the Navajo for English subtitles and provided a great deal of input into the project.
The final shot—with Elsie Mae and John Cly framed next to two slender spires at sunset—is the only one that feels staged, but who can complain about the obvious sentiment in such a beautiful setting? Like Abbas Kiarostami's better films about Iranian daily life, The Return of Navajo Boy unfolds naturally, inadvertently revealing more and more about the Navajo culture as the story unfolds. It's well worth checking out for a truly authentic portrait of one of the Navajo families who played Comanche extras in The Searchers. Unfortunately, it will be hard to locate, since it remains locked up in PBS television's vaults at the present time.
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