What if one night the story of America as “The New World” was thoroughly interrupted? What if that story was retold as a viscerally emotional experience using aggressive imagery and a lush soundtrack keyed to the inspired music of George Winston? “The Burial of Natty Bumppo” draws on 19th-century cultural images of American innocence to reveal their grotesque outcomes: the enslavement of human beings and enslavement of the land, the genocide that accompanied colonization, and the environmental degradation resulting from industrialization. The film makes no attempt to narrate American history. It reimagines it visually. The viewer is propelled into a visionary landscape where American myths of the New Land shrivel and decay before our eyes. We watch as the persistent dream of American innocence embodied in Nathaniel Bumppo, the lead character in James F. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, crashes visually under its own terrible weight.
What if one night the story of America as “The New World” was thoroughly interrupted? What if that story was retold as a viscerally emotional experience using aggressive imagery and a lush soundtrack keyed to the inspired music of George Winston? “The Burial of Natty Bumppo” draws on 19th-century cultural images of American innocence to reveal their grotesque outcomes: the enslavement of human beings and enslavement of the land, the genocide that accompanied colonization, and the environmental degradation resulting from industrialization. The film makes no attempt to narrate American history. It reimagines it visually. The viewer is propelled into a visionary landscape where American myths of the New Land shrivel and decay before our eyes. We watch as the persistent dream of American innocence embodied in Nathaniel Bumppo, the lead character in James F. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, crashes visually under its own terrible weight.
Fred Burns
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