The Alex Colville Connection

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SPECIAL ART CONNECTION SECTIONS
GROUP OF SEVEN ⎔ SNOW WHITE ⎔ CAESAR ⎔ COLVILLE ⎔ VESUVIUS
COME OUT, COME OUT ⎔ VICTORIA HOLT ⎔ GRADY PAINTINGS ⎔ WALL RUGS
ART OF THE LOBBY ⎔ LESSON KEY BIRDS ⎔ SHARED LIBRARY

THE COLVILLE RESERVATION

There’s an indigenous reservation in Washington state called the Colville Indian Reservation, which came up as a tangential element in a few of my little research dives into the lives of the Albertan Bearspaw people whose portraits appear in the film, like Chief Bear Paw and Chief Walking Buffalo. The one direct connection is how the second shot in the film features Jack driving past Lake McDonald, which was likely named for Duncan McDonald, who was half-Nez-Perce, which is one of the twelve bands of Colville people (people named for the reservation).

The Nez Perce War came to my attention since it ended with something called the Battle of Bear Paw, which is not named for the chief seen in the film, but rather for the mountains in which the battle took place (though I think it’s quite likely the mountains and the Nakoda band’s etymology could be linked in some way). But survivors fled into Alberta, Canada – right into the zone where Chief Bear Paw had held sway. One of the major historical moments that connect Chief Bear Paw and Chief Walking Buffalo (both of the “Bearspaw” band of the Nakoda nation) is the signing of Treaty 7, which Bear Paw signed and Walking Buffalo witnessed the signing of as a child. That was on September 22nd of 1877. The Battle of Bear Paw happened a week later, between September 30th and October 5th of 1877. The signing of Treaty 7 was not good for the Bearspaw people, as it’s believed they didn’t understand the subtlety or intricacy of the document, and what it would mean for them going forward. So, though the Colville/Nez-Perce people who survived the Nez Perce War by fleeing into Bearspaw country avoided a terrible fate, they arrived just in time to share the misfortune of their new brethren – who happened to share the same name as that fateful battle. One of the main chiefs lost in that battle was named Looking Glass, and Stephen King’s novel makes overt references to Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland/Alice’s Adventure’s Through the Looking Glass, something Kubrick’s film does much more subtly. So I suspect this could’ve been part of Kubrick’s reason for invoking this particular network of references. Also, the name Delbert (à la Delbert Grady) is the masculine form of Alberta, the place to which the Colvilles fled.

It’s probably also worth pointing out how the Makah people of Washington state were (relatively) close neighbours of the Colvilles, and how there’s a painting called Makah Returning in Their War Canoes by Paul Kane hanging next to the ghost I believe to be the real Charles Grady (click that last link for details). In the novel, Jack remembers grimly the way his father put his mother in the hospital by beating her with his cane, and I believe Kubrick saw a connection between how Jack reacts to the memory of Mark Torrance and his encounters with Delbert Grady. Both are violent, vicious father figures (though one is a little more pitiable than the other), and I think Kubrick saw in them a connection to western imperialism.

But, despite the incredible symbolic depth of Colville paintings (or even because of how weighty they are), both in themselves and in how they relate to the film’s subtext, I have a harder time seeing the Colville paintings as evoking the people of the same name as strongly as the Bearspaw portraits evoke those people. I realize that probably sounds obvious, and I think I’ve provided sufficient evidence to show the Colville people are not discounted from the film. But the strongest link is in McDonald Lake (and yeah, there are two JEH MacDonald paintings in the lobby – The Solemn Land and Mist Fantasy – the latter of which may connect more to the notion of imperialist genocide more than any other in the film), and that connection really depends on Kubrick knowing about that one, arguably most likely, explanation of the lake’s name.

In any case, here’s links to all five Colville paintings, so you can decide for yourself how likely they connect to all this: Woman and Terrier, Horse and Train, Hound in Field, Moon and Cow, and Dog, Boy, and St. John River.

COMPARISON BETWEEN FILM MOMENTS AND COLVILLE’S OTHER WORKS

If you read my section studying the film from the perspective of the Fibonacci sequence, you’re aware that, from an editing perspective, the film is basically a jigsaw puzzle of geometric forms, and if you’ve read about all the paintings above, you’re aware that Colville is presently next to Dorothy Oxborough for the single artist whose work was most represented by the film. Along with the Group of Seven artists, these are all also the most easily recognizable to average moviegoers. Colville is probably famous in some parts of the world simply from being in this film.

Well, I’m not an art scholar, and I’m sure there are many artists, past and present, who famously used geometry to compose their works, but Colville was one of them, and possibly a prominent figure of this style. There are numerous examples online of him using grids, golden spirals, and other, looser structures to compose images. Below are a few examples to show the range of elegantly simple to archly complex approaches he took over the years. Was it designs like these that inspired Kubrick to try his own Fibonaccian approach?

Also, in pouring through Colville’s canon to try to spot other possible hidden paintings, I noticed a few paintings of his pre-1980 period that seemed to speak to certain of Kubrick’s compositions. Check it out.