Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explores Indigenous masks that inspired Paris Surrealists | Canada Voices

Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond has an abiding interest in the intersection of Indigenous and colonial culture.

“That is just my reality: I have always wondered about why we are the way we are, the influences,” he said in a recent interview from Germany, where he was attending a Wild West festival that includes hobbyists costumed as “cowboys and Indians” as well as genuine Indigenous educators.

In his 2009 film Reel Injun, he looked at how Hollywood depicted First Nations; with Red Fever in 2024, he looked at white culture’s enthusiastic appropriation of Indigenous culture. And now, with So Surreal: Behind the Masks, he delves into one particular and surprising example of Indigenous art adopted by white artists.

So Surreal tells the story of how the Parisian Surrealists, exiled in New York during the Second World War, stumbled across an antique shop full of masks from Alaska and British Columbia. The Surrealists, led by the poet André Breton and including such figures as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Roberto Matta, were inspired by the images of animals, the sun and the moon created by the Yup’ik and Kwakwaka’wakw peoples, considering them more successfully surreal than their own work.

Several artists, and the famed anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, eventually took these masks home to Paris, where some are still held in private hands and some are housed at the Louvre, at the ethnographic museum Musée du Quai Branly and in the recreation of Breton’s studio at the Centre Pompidou.

“It’s part of French patrimony, it’s considered part of French heritage,” said Diamond’s co-director Joanne Robertson.

Their new film follows a tangled tale criss-crossing the continent and the Atlantic, from Alaska and Vancouver Island to New York’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Louvre. It touches on Yup’ik spiritual dance, the Canadian potlatch ban and issues surrounding the restitution of the masks to their communities. The film is showing on the CBC, but when it is screened at the Museum of the American Indian this month, the story will come full circle, back to the city where one much sought-after mask still resides.

It was while shooting Red Fever that Diamond came across a Yup’ik swan mask for sale at a New York art fair. Intrigued, he and Robertson began to chase its history. The Yup’ik, a people related to the Inuit who live in Alaska and eastern Russia, performed masked dances to glimpse the spirit world, but once danced, a mask was discarded.

“The Yup’ik attitude to the masks originally, way back, was once they were used, they were done with,” Diamond said. “They were just left in the tundra or burned. They were forgotten until another shaman required another mask and you made a new one. I think the Yup’ik carvers and other artists are glad to have these masks in museums.”

Some of these discarded masks were acquired at the beginning of the 20th century by George Heye, the wealthy U.S. collector and amateur ethnographer who founded the Museum of the American Indian. It was when he ran into financial trouble during the Depression that he sold parts of the collection through an antique shop on Third Avenue, where the Surrealists made some amazing finds.

The Yup’ik masks were often made in almost identical pairs and the filmmakers traced the mate of the New York swan mask, originally bought by Breton, to the Louvre. In the film, they bring Yup’ik storyteller Chuna McIntyre to see it, dance before it and speak to it in his language – on a closing day when they were allowed into the empty museum.

“It was really, really hot,” Robertson recalls of their shoot. “There he was with his regalia: He said, ‘I’m gonna do this once.’ We filmed him, and it was extremely moving.” Hearing that this is the museum that houses the Mona Lisa, McIntyre concludes that the swan mask is the Yup’ik’s Mona Lisa.

The ‘Namgis First Nation at Alert Bay, off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, take an entirely different attitude. The Kwakwaka’wakw people lost a large number of treasures in 1921 when Dan Cranmer held a forbidden potlatch on nearby Village Island. His son, Chief Bill Cranmer, (who appears in the film but who died in January) worked tirelessly to reclaim the stolen property scattered in museums and private collections in both Europe and North America. Recovered items, including a feathered frontlet returned by Breton’s daughter Aube, are housed at the U’mista Cultural Centre, which runs Kwakwaka’wakw repatriation efforts.

The missing pieces are well-documented because the RCMP took photos of what they seized.

“It was crime-scene photography,” Robertson said.

Specifically, the film follows two masks shown in the photographs, one of which is the transformation mask – a great pointed beak that opens to reveal a human face. After it was seized, it was acquired by Heyes, wound up at the shop on Third Avenue and was purchased by the French critic and art historian Georges Duthuit, who wrote about and collected the Surrealists. He died in 1973, and today it is believed that the magnificent mask is now owned by his son’s widow, Barbara Duthuit, who does lend out pieces from her father-in-law’s collection.

Diamond traced her to New York but his film recounts how repeated letters from U’mista executive director Juanita Johnston suggesting they begin a conversation about the mask have gone unanswered.

“We have a screening coming up down there. My idea is that we send her an invitation,” Diamond said.

Perhaps as the story of the masks returns to New York and George Heye’s museum, the Kwakwaka’wakw will get lucky and the transformation mask will begin a slow journey home.

So Surreal: Behind The Masks airs on the CBC June 13 and screens at the New York branch of the National Museum of the American Indian June 20. It is also available on CBC Gem.