The Shadow Catcher
This superb documentary is composed, from stills and film, around the life-work of Edward S. Curtis, an eccentric genius-photographer and anthropologist who died an unknown pauper in 1952. During 30 years (approximately 1900 to 1930) he took 40,000 glass plates and produced 20 monumental volumes on the North American Indian. His historical legacy is unequalled in the archives of American photography. T.C. McLuhan's film is especially skillful in subtly reenacting incidents from Curtis's life, as recorded in his diary. The Shadow Catcher also includes some astounding motion picture footage taken by Curtis, including scenes from his legendary, long-thought-lost fiction film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, done in 1914 with the Kwakiutl Indians.
• Directed and Produced by T.C. McLuhan. Written by McLuhan and Dennis Wheeler. Photographed by Robert M. Fiore. Narrated by Donald Sutherland and Patrick Watson. (1974, 88 mins, color, Print from Phoenix Films)

My Hands Are the Tools of My Soul
“This moving film illuminates the cultural landscape of the American Indian. American Indians have no word for ‘art' in their languages. Their masks and carvings, pottery, sand paintings, songs and dances are part of the activity of their lives, along with eating and sleeping, hunting, talking, and praying. It is this quality, above all, which emerges so powerfully in the stunning sequences of My Hands Are the Tools of My Soul. And this is what makes it a film not just about art, in the usual sense, but about the life of a people. The film is permeated by the Indian sense of the harmony of nature, the intimate relationship between man and his environment....” --Texture Films
• Directed by Arthur Barron and Zina Voynow. Produced by Texture Films. (1977, 54 mins, color, Print from Texture Films)

Annie May: Brave Hearted Woman
The body of Annie Mae Pictou Aquash, an activist in the 1973 Wounded Knee uprising and 1972 siege of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was found in a ravine in 1976, a bullet in her brain. Lan Brookes Ritz's award-winning documentary, which had its world premiere at the 1979 American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco, is an investigation into the circumstances of Annie Mae's death, and a portrait of the woman. The Washington Post called it, “the strongest statement ever made on film about the way this country deals with the peoples we displaced, the Indians,” revealed in the horrifying manner in which the FBI conducted its investigation. Marlon Brando comments, “With this film, Lan Ritz has taken these grisly details and has created a sense of beauty of the human spirit that touches all our lives.”
• Directed, Produced, and Written by Lan Brookes Ritz. Photographed by Frank Byers and Victor DuBois. Edited by Jedidiah Horovitz and Jerry Feldman. Annie Mae's Voice by Carole Marie. (1979, 84 mins, color, Print from filmmaker)