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Columbus Circle and the explorer make star turns in film screening in Brooklyn
By
Arun Venugopal
Published Jun 3, 2023
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Arun Venugopal
Published Jun 3, 2023
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Like so many other artists whose work was put on indefinite hold when the pandemic hit in 2020, filmmaker Valerio Ciriaci had to shelve his documentary in progress, which he’d been toiling away at for years.
But in his case, that project was a film on Christopher Columbus, and in May of that year, as millions of people took to the streets for the Black Lives Matter protests, Ciriaci and his collaborators were jolted by the newfound relevance of their film, so they immediately returned to work.
“We decided to widen the scope of that film to include other symbols of American history that were targeted by the protests,” Ciriaci said.
The 70-minute film, a meditative and often eerie documentary called “Stonebreakers,” screens at the Brooklyn Film Festival on Saturday. It includes footage shot across the country, in New York City, Connecticut, Richmond, Virginia, Mount Rushmore and at the Mexican border in Arizona, where crowds of demonstrators went to battle over symbols and occasionally engage in standoffs with their conservative opponents.
“What we were witnessing was not really an erasure of history, as many critics were saying at the time, but rather an explosion of the past into the present,” Ciriaci told Gothamist in an interview.
What we were witnessing was not really an erasure of history, as many critics were saying at the time, but rather an explosion of the past into the present.
Valerio Ciriaci, filmmaker
At Columbus Circle in New York, where the 76-foot-tall statue of Columbus looms over a group of protesters in the film, one demonstrator holds up a sign reading “For America to Rise, Statues Must Fall,” while others exhort the crowd.
“That statue is saying, ‘It’s OK to murder people! To steal their land.’ That’s what he did,” said Roberto Múkaro Borrero, a kasike (chief) of the Guainía Taíno tribal community, holding a megaphone.
At times, the images are surreal, as when the viewer encounters a headless statue, or an artisan is seen cradling a granite head of Columbus in his arms while taking the long view of the protests.
“In art history,” Randall Nelson, a sculptor in Waterbury, Conn., says in the film, “you have two groups, generally: iconophiles, people who love images; and iconoclasts, the ones who tear them down and break them. We’re now seeing a whole new wave of iconoclasm in America.”
At Wounded Knee
The filmmakers said they drew upon the work of Black and indigenous scholars as well as texts like “The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism” by Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer and “On the Concept of History” by Walter Benjamin.
"There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism,” wrote Benjamin.
But certain people interviewed for the documentary resist abstractions, and force the viewer to make clear connections between the past and the present, as when the film journeys from Mount Rushmore, with its tourist hordes, to the desolate fields of Wounded Knee, located at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, just 75 miles away. There, U.S. military forces surrounded a Lakota camp in 1890 and killed as many as 300 men, women and children in what’s come to be called the Wounded Knee Massacre.
Nick Tilsen, an indigenous activist in South Dakota interviewed for the film, criticizes the “fake Americana” that draws tourists to Mount Rushmore, arguing that many are “not really interested in true American history.”
“Let’s talk about the massacres,” said Tilsen. “Let’s talk about the way the government illegally stole these lands. And its direct connection to the poverty our people live in today. Its direct connection to the fact that a Native person is 10 times more likely to be jailed and incarcerated in the state of South Dakota than a white person.”
Confederate statues
The film examines the controversies over Confederate statues as well as those honoring the nation’s founding fathers, but it regularly returns to Columbus statues.
Joseph Sciorra, a folklorist at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, explains in the film that “there’s a story that Italian Americans tell themselves, kind of an origin story for Columbus statues in the United States,” which is “that their great-great-grandparents scraped together their pennies from their miserable working-class lives to donate to have Columbus statues and Columbus monuments built.”
The real story, said Sciorra, involved Italian American elites at the time.
“They were called prominenti, the prominent ones,” he said. These included Carlo Barsotti, owner of a newspaper, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, who is listed on the website of the city’s parks department as the main donor for the Columbus statue.
Meanwhile, the National Italian American Foundation notes on its own website that the city’s Columbus statue “was erected just one year after the 1891 lynching of 11 Italian Americans in Louisiana.” No mention is made of Barsotti, but the organization said the statue was “given to the city of New York by Italian immigrants, who collected ‘literally nickels and dimes’ to fund a statue.”
Ciriaci said 19th century Italian American elites had underlying motives in funding statues across the country.
“It was a way for those business leaders to get into white America, you could say, and get the benefits of what that meant in that time,” said Ciriaci, who is himself an Italian immigrant who moved to New York 12 years ago.
Isaak J. Liptzin, who with Curtis John is one of the film’s producers, said the story of Columbus as embodied in his many statues allows Americans to embrace distinct narratives about the essence of this country.
For Italian Americans fighting to preserve the statues, Liptzin said, the story is one “in which the United States is a meritocracy, where the American dream can be achieved by anyone,” while protesters seeking to bring down the statues “see them as symbols of the opposite, of a country that from its founding and throughout its history has always been blemished by these crimes, by these chapters of oppression. And is somehow defined by its inequalities, up to today.”
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christopher columbus
statues
columbus circle
brooklyn film festival
Race And Justice Unit
Arun Venugopal
Arun Venugopal is a senior reporter for the WNYC and Gothamist Race & Justice Unit who focuses on issues of race and bias in our region. His reporting also tackles the topics of immigration, faith, and inequality. Arun serves as the regular fill-in host of the station's "U.S. of Anxiety" program. Arun was the creator and host of Micropolis, a series about race and identity. He is a contributor to NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. He has appeared on PBS Newshour, On the Media and Studio 360, and has been published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and Salon. He also frequently serves as an emcee and moderator of panel discussions on race, religion, and identity issues and has been a guest host of NPR's "Fresh Air." He lives with his family in Queens.
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