Non-Western Warriors

Before motion pictures, the kingdoms and then nations of Europe reenacted their ancient myths on stage. The most spectacular performances, both visually and vocally, took place at the opera.

Early filmmakers soon realized that the new medium could present the same myths even more expansively on screen. The singing would have to go, since early films were silent (except for the music provided by the theater), but there were no limits on the number and scale of the locations and the cast. So productions like Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) exceeded every expectation of visual splendor (see both parts, Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge, instantly on Netflix). Ever since, European and American filmmakers have continued to tell the old myths of heroes and to invent new ones. Recent examples include John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982), Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001-3), and HBO’s Game of Thrones.
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Lang's Die Nibelungen: superior to Jackson's LOTR.

Some of the myths and early history of the East became more well known to West through films of the 1950s and ’60s. From Japan, the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa arrived. Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers and other studios began delivering wuxia films of martial arts fantasy to American and European shores around the same time.

Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961).

Filmmakers in the States then started combining elements of Asian and American mythology. The warriors of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), for example, dropped their swords and became gun-slinging cowboys in John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960). World War II provided new myths in American minds and on screen during the ‘50s and ‘60s, where the Japanese often became inhuman monsters. George Lucas relocated Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (1958) to a galaxy far, far away in Star Wars (1977).

Luke vs. Vader in The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

As film industries have grown in places outside of the West and its chief adversaries in the East, the myths of those overlooked cultures, especially stories of heroic warriors, have also begun taking their places on screen. Below are five films of indigenous people telling their stories to the wider world. Some are almost entirely mythological, taking place outside of recorded time. Others portray more identifiably ancient, medieval, or modern events in a light that celebrates the native spirit and customs.

To Western minds, Soulymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987) may resemble an African Star Wars: a young man with ample, but untested supernatural powers embarks on a quest that brings him into a confrontation with his villainous, magically expert father. A beautiful woman of royal status accompanies and aids him, and both the young hero and the cruel patriarch wield weapons that channel the light and dark sides of the spirit world. For all of the similarities with Lucas’ space opera, though, the differences may be the most intriguing. The landscape of Mali, the sound of the Bambara language, the material culture, and the highly complex system of beliefs, symbols, and rituals will likely come as revelations to European and American audiences that are so often ethnocentric by omission. The filmmaking may impress Westerners less: the shooting is simple, with few camera movements and wide framing at real locations under natural light. Likewise, the visual effects are mostly practical or basic editing tricks. But a cultural tradition so rich needs little dressing up, and capturing it on film in a part of the world short on industrial infrastructure, including filmmaking resources, is no small achievement. Watch the opening minutes of Yeelen in the clip below and see the remainder on DVD from Netflix.

Some have called Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) the most thoroughly Native American film yet made. In the Canadian Arctic, cooperation is crucial to survival, so this ancient Inuit legend becomes especially concerned with the relationship between the individual and the community. Machinations of the village’s leading family drive the humble hero into the wilderness, where he must gain new strength to make his return. If Yeelen is like Star Wars, Atanarjuat resembles the most complex plays of Shakespeare or dynastic television series like PBS’ I, Claudius or Downton Abbey. But the land of almost unbroken snow and ice and the lifestyle necessary to survive there, both shot with documentary closeness, make the essentially human story seem to Western audiences as if it transpires on another planet. Ignore the poor image quality and corny voiceover in the trailer below and see Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner on a handsome DVD from Netflix.

Western audiences are likely familiar with Kazakhstan only as the squalid, backward home of Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional foreign funnyman in Borat (2006). Akan Satayev’s Myn Bala: Warriors of the Steppe (2011) is a grand historical epic that aims to restore some of the dignity of the Kazakh people by celebrating their triumph over the Mongols in the early eighteenth century (and the Soviet Union in the twentieth; the year of the film’s release marks two decades of independence for the Republic of Kazakhstan). The teenage leaders of the Kazakh resistance, including a female warrior, give the film the same coming-of-age dimension as Yeelen, and their effort to unify squabbling tribes against a common enemy may remind Western audiences of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) without the great white savior. Though Myn Bala addresses historical events, there is certainly some mythologizing in its depiction, but likely no more than occurs in Hollywood productions, and the chance to see even a revised account by the modern descendants of the original participants is a worthwhile experience for audiences with little knowledge of central Asia in any era. Watch the horses race and the arrows fly in Myn Bala, available instantly on Amazon and iTunes.

Wei Te-sheng’s Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (2011) also presents a dramatized account of an historical event, the rebellion of the indigenous people of Taiwan against Japanese occupation in 1930. The outward racism and cruelty of the Japanese may not be much of an exaggeration, but the retaliation of the Seediq, a proud headhunting tribe, is not the non-violent resistance celebrated in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) and so many movies concerning the civil rights movement in the United States. Nor is the outcome of the uprising the same, as a sobering bit of text on screen in the final minutes reveals. Decide for yourself whether the ends justify the means in Warriors of the Rainbow, available on DVD from Netflix and instantly on Amazon and iTunes (in each case, compressed to two and half hours from the original four hour release in Taiwan).

Toa Fraser’s The Dead Lands (2014) returns to purer fiction with a tale of Maori warriors in pre-historic New Zealand. Western audiences will recognize some narrative elements: the young, sole survivor of a massacre pledges revenge upon the killers of his kin, as in Conan; the flesh-eating monster first recalls Beowulf’s Grendel, then reveals himself as a human mutated by violence, like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus or even John Rambo; visions of the young hero’s deceased grandmother resemble Luke Skywalker’s congress with the spirit of the departed Obiwan Kenobi. The landscape of New Zealand, free of Hobbits and other Middle-Earthlings, and the artifacts of Maori culture provide the novelties. Cinema shows the bright feather decorations, intricate tattoos, stone and bone weapons, and snarling, tongue-wagging battle displays of these warriors like no other art medium. The film’s conclusion, though, might insert modern notions of conflict resolution into the ancient past. Nevertheless, The Dead Lands delivers a bloody spectacle and cautionary tale. See it instantly on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.

The growing opportunities for neglected cultures to share their stories on the big screen is certainly a positive development. Yet myths of conquering heroes, whatever their provenance, are so often tales that men tell about themselves. In the near future, perhaps more films from overlooked parts of the world that explore the lives of women and the full range of social classes will reach the West. We certainly cannot be too critical of the mostly heroic sagas that have arrived from distant cultures so far; we ourselves are just starting to direct our filmmaking resources toward figures other than the heavily mythologized “Great Men” of our own past and present.