A movie with a mission, that of touting and contributing to a renascent cultural pride, Reel Injun chronicles over a century’s evolving picture of that culture. The thread is Cree Native Indian director/co-writer Neil Diamond’s “res car,” i.e., jalopy, journey from northern Ontario to Southern California and, by plane, back to where it started.

His voice and those of too many interviewees hammer home the thesis that the silver screen has carved the world’s -- including that of Amerinds themselves -- conception of those indigenous peoples forever mislabeled by European conqueror-exploiters. Less emphatic is the plausible opposite conclusion about the influence of social attitudes on cinema portrayals, as for example in the 1960s anti-Establishment flower-power embrace of supposed “Groovy Indian” spirituality and harmony with the environment.

Critical reaction has been more mixed that warranted, much of it wagging a finger at editing (co-directors and –writers Catherine Bainbridge and Jeremiah Hayes). Diamond’s presence as guide is not sufficiently strong to unite material satisfactorily, and, victim of its own ambitions, the eighty-five minutes bulges with too many clips, locations, faces and theories. Discrimination might, for instance, have dwelt more on parallel Martin Luther King’s Movement and on arresting sepia stills, and dispensed with the Band’s First Nations Robbie Robertson’s observations and a theme-park quick-draw shootout. Less might have been better.

Showing for a week at the Museum of Modern Art, the documentary nevertheless convinces of its perspective. With momentary stops along the way at reservations, the in-progress Crazy Horse sculpted mountain, Little Bighorn (tellingly, the Custer Battlefield National Monument), Wounded Knee at Pine Ridge, John Ford’s Monument Valley, and a Native American-themed summer camp for white Americans and Australians, the cinematic way is larded with scores of films, historical footage, talking heads and comments, as well as Diamond’s overheating clunker.

Surprising only until one remembers the self-directed dark humor of other oppressed minorities, activist/poet John Trudell insists that his fellow Native Americans have survived through wry humor, illustrated by their stand-up comedians (including a hilarious quip about Brando’s brave Academy Award refusal, soberly recounted in the present by Sacheen Cruz Littlefeather and Russell Means) and by first-time subtitle-translations of their film lingo.

In silent Edison and nickelodeon days, Indians were “popular screen characters,” originally relatively dignified and played by themselves (in contrast to whites in blackface), nearly contemporaneous with the 7^th Cavalry’s 1890 Pine Ridge Massacre and Turner’s closing of the frontier thesis. The fact that they were paid in firewater and tobacco and that armed goons insured “no treachery on the set” would seem, however, to give the lie to such liberalism and support film historian David Shipman’s assertion of “vile” public and film attitudes even in those earliest beginnings.

Calling up titles famous and forgotten, Reel Injun traces the evolution of opinion about, and representation of, Native Americans. Clips and comments run the gamut from the Romantic Noble Savage to the talkies’ brutal barbarian impeding Progress and Manifest Destiny; from isolated cases of the “good Indian” usually second fiddle to a white man and played by one (Jeff Chandler, Anthony Quinn, Burt Lancaster, Chuck Connors, Burt Reynolds, Elvis Presley and Boris Karloff) to defining performances by Will Sampson, Chief Dan George and Adam Beach; from the tragic, tri-racial cocktail-set darling Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, to Sicilian-American Iron Eyes Cody who remade himself into a favorite film and (shedding an ecological tear) TV Red Indian; from Warner Bros. cartoon caricatures to Disney “objects of desire.” They are all touched on, overwhelmingly, from sympathetic megawatt directors to the new breed of Aboriginal filmmakers on this continent and abroad, an Indian stuntman-turned-teacher with an ethnic goal and a knowledgeable costume designer, historians and critics, activists and performers.

In the face of lingering prejudices and obstacles, the film traces a reel progress. The jury is still out on its optimistic ending, and though stricter selectivity would not have harmed this 2009 compendium, its enthusiastic embrace is instructive and moving. 

(Released by Lorber Films; not rated by MPAA.)