When trailblazing Native media maker Sterlin Harjo first experienced Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye one solitary day during the pandemic, he says it felt as if he was floating through the film. Floaty and dark, Altman’s 1973 film adaptation of the 1953 book by Raymond Chandler delivers a wry, wise-cracking Elliot Gould as detective Philip Marlowe and takes place in a Los Angeles reshaped by the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Cueing off The Long Goodbye, Sterlin makes a case for treating background as foreground and for storytelling that emphasizes an ensemble over a single hero.

From his family’s famous spaghetti to the funeral parlor his auntie called home, we learn all about the people and the place that made Sterlin the filmmaker he is today. Plus, how Oklahoma Noir may well be the genre we didn’t know we were missing.

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