Near Santa Rita, New Mexico, the local Mimbreños have enter into a contract with a Mexican mining company that promises them continued use of their hunting grounds in exchange for safe passage for the company’s convoys. This arrangement has already robbed the band of its self-determination (“Remember the tales of life before the White Man? We lived well without relief flour”), and in any case it can’t last. An American mining company wants in on the profits, and the Mexican government has put a price on Apache scalps: $100 for a brave, $50 for a squaw, and $25 for a child.
APACHES a.k.a. Apachen, a.k.a. Apachen: Blutige Rache
Dir. Gottfried Kolditz, 1973
German Democratic Republic, 94 min.
In German with English subtitles.
With the series “The Revenge of the Apaches is as the Course of the Sun Across The Sky: Three East German Westerns”, Spectacle hopes to contribute to an understanding of the Indianerfilm as a form of radical cinema that—despite having been financed by a massive bureaucratic state—articulates a critique of industrialization and the myth of “progress” in general, whether in their capitalist or socialist form.
By programming further series of East German films with the help of the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst, Spectacle will continue to battle against Western triumphalist notions of Eastern Bloc culture as more ideologically determined than its liberal capitalist counterpart.
http://www.spectacletheater.com/the-revenge-of-the-apaches/
5pm at Spectacle Theatre, $5
124 South 3rd Street, Williamsburg
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