The Romance of New Mexico

Page 1 2 3 4 5 Mix impressed the local population with his expansive personality and his insistence on performing all his own stunts, some of them quite dangerous. Local Color (1915), a 16-minute "cowboy" picture, is one of the few survivors of that rich period.

The brief reign of Las Vegas as the film capital of New Mexico was the closest the state would come to being a permanent home for the production of motion pictures. Besides the pictures produced by Fielding and Mix, many episodes of the serial The Hazards of Helen (1915) were apparently shot in and around Las Vegas in those years. After 1917, scores of films would be shot in New Mexico, but only "on-location" from the sunny paradise where many of the rebellious little film companies fled to avoid the dreaded Patents Company - Hollywood.

At the end of the silent period, two remarkable film projects came to New Mexico: a watershed Western about Native Americans and one proposed feature-length documentary on the same subject.

Ácoma was to have been an anthropological documentary-drama along the lines of the classic Nanook of the North (1922), directed by the gifted Robert Flaherty, who had practically invented the documentary form. In 1928 he turned his creative energies to his lifelong dream, a poetic depiction of Indian life. Quarrels with collaborators, however, and with Fox, the sponsoring Hollywood studio, led to his abandoning the film.

The sturdily handsome actor Richard Dix starred in the other feature, Redskin (1928), shot on the Navajo Reservation in western New Mexico and in Gallup. A dramatic tale set against a backdrop of complex racial bigotries, Redskin also made use of Ácoma locations. Not only does Dix, as Wing Foot, contend with unsympathetic non-Indians, but also with intertribal prejudices in the person of the Pueblo girl, Corn Blossom. The film is notable on at least two levels - the compassionate treatment given Native Americans (they are the heroes of the story), and the ravishing color, for this was one of the first pictures shot partially in Technicolor. The color was used as emotional underscoring: amber-tinted black and white representing the world of the white man, full color for the sequences of Indian life.

It is interesting that the first period of New Mexico's film history should begin and end with rapturous vistas of the land and romantic depictions of Native Americans against it. In between, movie stories ran the gamut from cowboys to labor unions, from menacing rattlesnakes to haggling tourists. The constant theme for filmmakers, though, has been the majestic landscape and its inhabitants. As if to see the present more clearly with their new cinematic tools, film artists focused their cameras on the past - that which had endured for ages. Looking at their work today, we are surprised to see the same cliffs, the same hills, the same sunsets, the same adobe dwellings, undisturbed after a century. They are there on the screen, flickering silver mirrors of what is around us every day, awaiting, in the midst of what can become dully familiar, the thrill of rediscovery.