What The Heartsong Of Charging Elk Actually Is
The Heartsong of Charging Elk is a 2013 experimental documentary directed by Bill Morrison. It follows the story of a Lakota man known as Charging Elk, who was photographed at a frontier fair in South Dakota in 1903 and later died in federal custody at the Leavenworth penitentiary in 1904. The film is less a traditional narrative and more of a visual elegy, combining the famous Charles S. Parker photograph, archival footage from the early twentieth century, and newly shot imagery of the plains and landscapes associated with the Ghost Dance movement. The title refers to a Lakota expression or concept related to spiritual song and the practice of the Ghost Dance, a religious movement that spread across Plains tribes in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Morrison treats the archival material with hand-processed film techniques, allowing the images to decay, flicker, and dissolve on screen. This aesthetic choice is deliberate. The film asks the viewer to confront the gaps in the historical record and the way Indigenous voices were captured, distorted, or erased by the institutions that preserved them.
The Heartsong Of Charging Elk: Why It Matters Now
The documentary gained renewed attention when it was referenced in academic circles and online forums discussing Native American representation in cinema. The film does not offer a clean biography. There is no narrator explaining events in chronological order. Instead, Morrison assembles a sequence of decaying photographs, silent film clips, and landscape shots that suggest the trajectory of Charging Elk's life without ever stating it outright. Viewers are expected to sit with the silence and draw their own connections. The famous photograph of Charging Elk was taken by Charles S. Parker during the Deadwood Centennial celebrations. In the image, the man stands in profile wearing a military-style jacket and a beaded necklace. He looks directly at the camera with an expression that has been interpreted in many ways: defiance, exhaustion, resignation, or a kind of unbroken dignity. Morrison builds the entire film around this single image, repeating it, layering it, and letting it deteriorate frame by frame until it becomes almost abstract.
How to Watch or Download The Heartsong Of Charging Elk
The film is available through several legitimate channels. It has been distributed by Film Movement and is listed on platforms such as Kanopy, Mubi, and the Zeitgeist Films catalog. If you are accessing it through a university library subscription on Kanopy, you can stream it directly without any additional cost. Physical copies are sometimes available through the Zeitgeist Films website or Amazon, though stock is inconsistent and tends to appear in limited runs. For those who want a personal copy for offline viewing, the most reliable route is to purchase or rent the digital version through Kanopy or a similar service that offers a download option for subscribers. Streaming platforms in the United States carry the title, but availability shifts depending on licensing agreements. I have found that keeping a Kanopy watchlist updated and downloading when possible is the most practical approach, since the title rotates in and out of catalogs without much warning.
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What the Film Does With Its Source Material
Morrison is known for working with decaying celluloid and repurposing forgotten footage. The Heartsong of Charging Elk follows the same methodology. He takes the Parker photograph and treats it like an archival film element, cycling through exposures, adding scratches, and layering it against footage of the Black Hills and the grounds where the Ghost Dance was practiced. The result is a meditation on loss rather than a historical explanation. The sound design is another important component. The film uses a sparse score composed by Mark Smith and includes field recordings that evoke the wind across the plains. There are no interviews. No talking heads. No historian standing in front of a courthouse explaining what happened at Wounded Knee in 1890. The choices are intentional. Morrison trusts the audience to fill in the blanks, and that trust is not always comfortable.
Where Beginners Often Miss the Point
Many first-time viewers expect a conventional documentary. They want biographical facts, dates, and a clear thesis. When the film refuses to provide them, some dismiss it as pretentious or inaccessible. That reaction is understandable but misses what Morrison is doing. The film is structured around absence. The gaps in the record are the subject. Charging Elk himself has no written words preserved. Everything we know about him comes from a single photograph and a handful of institutional documents. The film makes that erasure visible. Another common misstep is treating the Ghost Dance as background context. It is not. The Ghost Dance movement is central to understanding Charging Elk's story. The dance was a spiritual practice that promised the disappearance of white settlers and the restoration of Indigenous lands. Government authorities saw it as a threat and moved to suppress it, which contributed directly to the conditions that led to the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890. Charging Elk was charged with murder, possibly connected to the aftermath of Wounded Knee, and died in prison before his trial concluded. The film does not spell this out. It implies it through imagery and rhythm.
A Practical Detail That Most People Overlook
I ran into a specific issue when I first tried to watch the film on a home projection setup. The decaying film aesthetic, which is one of the film's defining strengths, looked washed out and muddy on a standard consumer projector. The subtle variations in tone that Morrison builds into the image are nearly impossible to see at low brightness or with a warm color temperature. I had to calibrate the projector to a cooler, higher-contrast setting and dim the room significantly. Once I did that, the layered images and the way the photograph deteriorates became much clearer. Without that adjustment, the film loses a lot of its visual information. This is worth noting because the same issue comes up with any of Morrison's films. His work relies on the physical texture of the source material. Streaming at low bitrates flattens that texture. If you want to experience the film as intended, a decent display and a dark room matter more than they would for most documentaries. The effort is worth it.
The Limitations of the Film
The Heartsong of Charging Elk is not a comprehensive resource on Lakota history or the Ghost Dance. It does not interview tribal members, historians, or descendants. It does not include text cards or citations. If your goal is to learn factual information about Charging Elk or the events surrounding his death, you will need to consult other sources. Works by historians such as Dee Brown, Jerome Greene, or Vine Deloria Jr. will give you the documentary record that Morrison deliberately leaves out. The film is also challenging for viewers who are new to experimental cinema. The pacing is slow. The imagery is repetitive by design. Some viewers find the experience meditative. Others find it alienating. Both responses are valid. The film is not trying to entertain in a conventional sense. It is trying to create a space for reflection on what has been lost and what remains visible.
Where to Find It Today
Kanopy remains the most accessible platform for students and public library cardholders. Mubi occasionally lists it in its rotating catalog. Zeitgeist Films sells a DVD or Blu-ray version, though availability varies. For academic use, the film is sometimes included in syllabi for courses on documentary film, Native American studies, or American visual culture. If you are teaching or studying the film, it pairs well with readings on the Ghost Dance movement and the ethics of archival representation. There is no official download link available for free distribution. Any site offering a completely free download is likely distributing the film without authorization. I recommend using the licensed platforms above instead. The experience is better, the image quality is higher, and the filmmaker gets compensated for the work.
What to Watch for on a Second Viewing
On a rewatch, notice how Morrison uses the sound design to mark transitions between different time periods and locations. The film moves between the fairgrounds in Deadwood, the prison at Leavenworth, and the open plains without clear labels. The audio cues do the work. Wind, distant church bells, the creak of wooden structures. These sounds are not incidental. They are part of the film's structure. You will also notice how the repeated photograph changes as the film progresses. Each recurrence is treated differently. Sometimes it is bright and sharp. Sometimes it is nearly illegible, broken apart by scratches and fading. This visual degradation mirrors the way historical memory deteriorates over time. The photograph becomes a kind of ghost, present but unable to be fully grasped. The Heartsong of Charging Elk is not an easy film. It demands patience and a willingness to sit with discomfort. But for anyone interested in how documentary cinema can engage with Indigenous history and archival loss, it is one of the most honest and formally ambitious works in recent years. Morrison does not exploit Charging Elk's story. He honors it by refusing to simplify it.
