The Red Man's View (1909)

Original title

The Redman's View

Directed by

D. W. Griffith

Genre

Western film, silent film

Country

United States

Runtime

11 min

Rating

5.2 of 10 from 14 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This short silent Western shows a group of Native Americans being forced to leave their land as white settlers advance. It presents the story from the Native American perspective and focuses on their long, sad journey.

silentpoeticmelancholicslow-pacedhistoricalsombersympatheticquiet

What happens

The Red Man's View (also cited The Redman's View) is a 1909 American short silent Western film directed by D. W. Griffith and shot in New York state. Prints of the film exist in the film archives of the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress. According to the New York Dramatic Mirror, the film is about "the helpless Indian race as it has been forced to recede before the advancing white, and as such is full of poetic sentiment". In his 2003 publication The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre's First Half Century, film historian Scott Simon observes that "the film's title works out to mean 'The Red Man's Point of View', and for all the film's difficulty in making drama from a long, passive march, there's nothing like The Red Man's View in Hollywood until John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn more than fifty years later". A remake starring Daniel Baldwin, Saginaw Grant, Booboo Stewart, Elaine Miles, Michael Spears, and Crystal Lightning was scheduled to be released in 2017. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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