There is Hugh Glass, the actual man and there is Hugh Glass the mythologized figure who became the main character in this winter's smash hit movie The Revenant.
The life and times of this man were examined last week by a team of UNBC academics during a public discussion of the information. The guest among them was Grace Dove, a local aboriginal actor who portrayed the wife of Hugh Glass (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) in this latest Hollywood depiction of Glass. They took turns sharing their knowledge and answering public questions at the UNBC Senate Chambers.
Very little hard fact is known of the real person who was born in about 1783 and died in 1833. Glass was an actual frontiersman involved in the hardscrabble fur trade in the area of the United States now called Montana, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
He was reportedly shot in the leg during a skirmish with a group from the Arikara (aka Ree or Sahnish) First Nation. He survived this wound only to be attacked by a grizzly later on the same expedition in 1823.
His injuries from the bear were so severe, and the travelling conditions so adverse, his fellow fur traders buried him and departed, expecting his death was imminent and inevitable.
He survived and somehow advanced, in pain and over wild terrain, to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri River. It was a 320-kilometre trip that took him six weeks, but thanks to a keen knowledge of the natural surroundings, and the help of friendly aboriginal people he met along the way, he got back to his travelling party. He apparently confronted those who left him behind, but it was not the duel the movie made it out to be.
In fact, The Revenant was based on the fictionalized novel written by Michael Punke. The novel was an entertainment story that used Glass as a protagonist but was awash in creative license, conjecture, educated guesses and outright fiction.
The movie script took further liberties.
Led by Benjamin Bryce of the UNBC history department, a collection of professors took turns examining the context of the film. The participants included Ted Binnema (history), Claire Kaufman (geography), Michel Bouchard (anthropology) and Anna Casas Aguilar (Whitman College's Department of Spanish).
Regardless of the imbalance between fiction and nonfiction, the film broke ground in popular culture for its depictions of First Nations characters, the way the land was used almost as a character, and the method-acting style of putting the cast and crew through actual snow, dirt, icy rivers and subzero temperatures to obtain the most authentic imagery possible.
Each professor took turns presenting a miniature lecture on a theme that emerged for them from the film. Each had a slide show to help illustrate their points.
Binnema spoke of the geography and cartography of that era, and how the territorial borders looked back then.
Kaufman then showed clips of the newspaper articles from that era that gave popular culture its first taste of Hugh Glass. She showed some of the exaggerations back then that contributed to the mythology of Glass down the road, but also fed the general mythology of the mountain-man figure in Western culture.
Bouchard then eviscerated the film for what he considered the worst aspect of the screen presentation: the erroneously evil nature of the French colonial figures that ran throughout the storyline. He called it an attempt to pander to the typical white Anglo-Saxon imperialist hero that has done so well at the box office for more than a century, even if it as the expense of historical truth or empathy for concepts that might be uncomfortable or inconvenient for the storyteller.
Bryce talked about the religious imagery that permeate the storyline of The Revenant, including the name itself which means to come back from the dead. Christian mythology has the resurrection as a central theme, and it is reflected in the film on numerous occasions, as is functional imagery of The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost.
The fact it was filmed in Canada, the United States and Argentina, using indigenous actors and crew, a Mexican director, and mainstream "white" lead actors "makes this a rather unique version of American history," Bryce said.
Casas Aguilar looked at gender imagery within the film and found it to be a typical male-based telling of a story to advance a male-centric world view. Even the women in the script, she explained, were there in a literary sense to symbolize aspects of the mythologized male as seen by Western culture. The two most extreme examples, she said, were the mother grizzly which was shown only as dark and primally dangerous compared to Glass's ghostly wife who was always depicted in bright white contrast and idyllic in the eyes of the viewer.
The conversation was enriched by having that very person in the room for the conversation. Dove was born and raised in the Salmon Valley area north of the city, took drama classes at Kelly Road Secondary School, was seen in multiple roles on CKPG-TV in her youth, and is descended from the Tsq'escenemc First Nation near 100 Mile House. She has been a regular cast member of the adventure/sports reality show UnderExposed on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) the past few years. This was her first foray into film.
"I wish I knew all of that before I did the movie," she said, marveling at the research and academic consideration that went into the roundtable discussion.
She opened up her journal and read some of the passages she wrote for posterity during the filming process.
"Everything hurts in such an accomplished way," she wrote in the diary after one long, hard day on the set. Sometimes she was buried in the ground with a prosthetic chest rupturing to allow a bird to fly out in ghostly symbolism. Other times she was suspended in the air to appear as though floating over Hugh Glass on the ground.
Her most challenging time, she said, was a battle scene where she had to convincingly die amidst the chaos of fire and attacking soldiers. Director Alejandro Irritu (who eventually won the Oscar for this project) was not pleased with her initial takes and the window of opportunity was rapidly closing.
"I'd start at 7 or 8 in the morning putting on makeup, which was basically cover me in dirt," she said. "Then we were into rehearsals so we knew what was happening with the scene when we got to golden light which was between 5-8 p.m. That was go-time, and we had no time to wonder what we should be doing, we had to have it by then. That whole village (in the battle scene) was set up because that's how the light hit it between 5 and 8, and I'm literally watching the sun go down, and I was not getting it. I was not delivering it. I had never worked in such technical conditions before, there was so much pressure. In all seriousness, I knew that if I couldn't pull it together for this scene, I was not ready to keep up with these people, the best of the best. All Alejandro would tell me (for instructions as the cameras and crew would reset for the next attempt) was 'do better, do better.' I talked to one of the other actors later, a guy playing one of the soldiers, and he said that's exactly what Alejandro told him, too. 'Do better.' That's all. When he just says 'do better' it gives the actor credit, and just puts it on you and your craft."
She said she felt the spirit of her grandmother Jean, as she endured the pressure of the role. She also got boosts of morale from DiCaprio who would sometimes come over and offer a hug or kind words, and sometimes, Dove said, he would just catch her attention and give her an eye-roll to let her know he was feeling the pressure too, it was okay if she felt stressed.
All the aboriginal actors around the set, playing their roles as peers and equals, portraying characters that were neither villains nor caricatures. "This was a sign that we'd made it, that it was all going to be okay," she said. "Even though it is a white hero, and there are things to complain about (in the script), there will always be something to complain about.
"Art is the medicine, I really believe that," she added. "Acting is my art and it helps me uncover layers, and I feel lighter and lighter as I go through the layers. I feel very grateful to have found something that gives me purpose."
The audience peppered the professors and actor with questions and comments, and one member of the public remarked that this was the first time experiencing an academic discussion that sprang from a popular culture topic. More such roundtables were encouraged by those in attendance.
