Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
De Montfort University
Little White Feather and the Hunter - a 40min, colour, stereo video and book, conceived, filmed and edited by Anna Lucas
Little White Feather and the Hunter is a 40min, colour, stereo video and book, conceived, filmed and edited by Anna Lucas. Commissioned by Commissions East with Essex County Council, funded by Arts Council England, for the ‘Jamestown 400’ anniversary of the first English settlement in North America. Following UK screenings, further dissemination came from an exhibition/residency at Arlington Arts Centre, USA (2009).
The research investigated how historical representation of indigenous and colonial narratives through fact and fiction inform current representations of knowledge and identity.
Lucas gathered audio-visual material from archaeological sites, museums, Native American reservations, and estuary landscapes in Virginia (USA) and Essex (UK) to re-interpret the story of Pocahontas.
Contextual research drew on mainstream media (web, broadcast, Disney animation, cinema) alongside historic engravings, written and oral accounts. Depictions of hunting as food source, trophy, ritualized event and leisure pursuit raise comparisons between contemporary and historic use of land, and became a metaphorical theme as the work developed.
The film challenges conventional documentary form through extended cinematic static location shots juxtaposed with its unusual soundtrack in which diverse opinions from tribal leaders, historians, re-enactors and ancestors are heard without exposing their authority or identity. The soundtrack features sea shanties, hymns and commissioned folksongs sung.
In her essay ‘Failures of Fact and Fiction’, Lisa Lefeuvre, Head of Sculpture Studies, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds observed ‘the film makes no claims for truth – rather it presents an analysis of the ways that fact and fiction form belief systems and a means for understanding the place of individuals in the world’.
This work led to Uncommon (16mm 2012), an observation of three male hunters in rural Dorset, commissioned by Anna Best for Roads for the Future with artists Judith Dean and Adam Chodzko, included in the Lux programme at the Oberhausen Film Festival 2013.
