Catriona Moore and Stephen Muecke
In employing the word 'representation' in the title of this
paper, we are speaking from a now well-established position in media studies
where objects of analysis (say films) are not opposed to some sort of 'reality'
which they supposedly 'reflect' more or less adequately.1 They are rather seen
as signifying objects which are articulated within a field of other signifying
objects such as institutions, languages, criti¬cal discourses and material
artifacts.
Thus the problem for this paper is to trace the historical
emergence of certain signifying practices for film-making in Australia,
con¬centrating on the social apparatuses which produce them. The prob¬lem is
not one of trying to decide if a way of representing Aborigines in film is
adequate to the 'realities' of the way you/they live. There is no discourse
which constructs the 'truth' of Aboriginal lifestyles, though there is one
which would implicitly make this claim, anthropology. Again, this discipline
represents the people studied in a partial and ideological way, and these
representations or signifying practices can be articulated with other
practices, such as film-making, to assure fairly powerful reproduction of current
and conservative knowledge on Aboriginal societies via ethnographic film, one
genre which we shall not be investigating in this paper.
What we would like to examine is the way in which
representations emerge from the use of filmic codes and techniques as they are
artic¬ulated with social institutions and policies. For instance, what sorts of
film-making techniques were deployed in the context of the government policy of
'assimilation'? What sorts of techniques are presently being used in the
context of 'multiculturalism'?3 We would like to examine a number of films in
this way to get a general picture of the discursive formations which
characterize the making of films in Australia containing images of Aborigines.
The first of these is the paternalistic assimilationist formation; a number of
films were made during the fifties and sixties which were part of this
formation. This was followed by a liberal multiculturalist formation, and this
is with us at the present day. The third formation relates to a linking of
Aboriginal groups and individuals with leftist independent film-making groups.
The films resulting are significantly seen as
36 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
being produced within an ideology of 'self-determination'
(the government's phrase) or 'community control' (the Aborigines' phrase).
However, before proceeding with this particular analysis, it
is im¬portant to have a theoretical perspective on the word 'racism'. In the
context of a euphoric revival of Australian film-making, in which some of the
most concerted efforts at being 'progressive' have been in the area of
representations of Aborigines and Aboriginal politics, one must guard against
totting up images as 'positive' or 'negative' (in re¬lation to what?) and
rather shift the mode of intervention to one of understanding the process by
which Aboriginal subjects are construct¬ed and the conditions of plausibility
for such constructions (Bhabha 1983: 18).
An understanding of racism, therefore, depends on an
understand¬ing of shifting relations of domination: the sorts of positions set
up for Aboriginal subjects represented and positions set up for the viewer to
consume the images. (For example, in Gallipoli the lads leave the sta¬tion to
go off to the city. The Aboriginal station-hand runs excitedly after the buggy
as we watch from the homestead). Racism also depends on unifying the people and
making generalizations.
Uninformed discourse, which is removed from those places
where Aborigines are fighting for survival, will have it that 'the problem with
the Aboriginal is this ...' or 'the Aboriginal situation is ...' or even 'the
problem with your Aboriginal is that...'. The repetition of these singulars not
only ignores the multiple contours of Aboriginal experience in this country: different
languages, different lifestyles, different issues, seeking to locate the
'problem' at a human level which effectively obscures the political nature of
issues, but also it sees 'the problem' as being the responsibility of
Aboriginal people; it's their problem, not our problem' some will glibly
announce, the pronouns revealing how the debate has been confined to white
circles.
The way that discourses exclude the considerations of the
people suffering the racial problem has been outlined by Stuart Hall:
Over a long period of time (the media) consensualize certain
frame¬works as the natural, normal adequate way of explaining why people feel
that way about, for example, the unions, Zimbabwe, or the ques¬tion of race.
That very activity rules out a certain number of other ways of understanding
the problems which do not get dealt with in the media. (1980:6).
And:
One of the frameworks that we look at here is race as a
social problem, and there are very well-established ways in television of
setting up a social problem and of handling it, and it matters a hell of a lot
whose social problem you think it is.(1980: 7)
37 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)From this lead we can conceptualize the problem for this
paper. Accepting that Australians live in a racist society (and without
enter¬ing into any red-herring debates about whether it is more or less racist
than, say, South Africa), the problem is to reveal that certain cinematic forms
and practices reproduce this racism in an uncritical way. The problem is also
one of accepting that there is this ubiqui¬tous racist framework that may
entrap even directors and producers who consider themselves radical or
'liberated'. As Stuart Hall (1980) says: 'You get trapped by the framework and
so you have radical and reactionary positions but both within the reactionary
framework'. For instance, this would occur if one took up the debate about the
relative racism of Australia and South Africa, or if one saw the signifi¬cant
issue of racial conflict in Britain as being the one about numbers; how many
black immigrants can the country take in?
In fact, rather than accepting that dominant discourses tend
to re¬produce problems of racism, media representations of Aborigines often
continue to represent Aborigines as genetically responsible for their/your own
situations; the race carries with it the seeds of its own destruction as
Aborigines regularly, in the white discourses, find themselves incapable of
'taking up the challenge', 'holding their grog', and so on. This aspect of
racism could be called the geneticist fallacy. It is the one which allows
sports commentators, in back¬handed compliments, to refer to the 'natural1
ability of black players. This conflation of the natural and the cultural is a
typical strategy in¬forming the representations of Aborigines in Australian
movies. Similarly, in traditional Australian literature, Aborigines have taken
up positions in which they are at one with the arcane and mysterious landscape,
positions which can conveniently be opposed to the fic¬tions of highly
acculturated city life of the whites.
This, then, is one well-attested racist strategy; the
reading of Abo¬riginal culture as 'nature' and as a foil or background to
European forms of culture in Australia. Other racist displacements of meaning
will represent Aborigines as non-adult, non-human, even inanimate (Muecke,
1982); there are very few which can represent Aboriginal societies as engaging
adequately with contemporary problems and on an equal footing with white
society. There is little promotional gain in representing a given group as
different but equivalent in efficacy, so with each representation there is a
corresponding socially-related investment in the production of Aboriginal
culture as a commodity.
But is this a problem? Isn't the commodification of cultures
'standard practice' in certain media? It could be said that the same occurs
with representations of 'Australian culture' as it is packaged, say, for the
tourist industry. But what is at issue is the nature of the appropriations, and
the sector of the population which directly or in¬directly benefits from the
cultural-representational packages.
8 Aust. J.
Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
For instance, in the case of anthropological
representations, which have traditionally sought to reconstruct traditional
life (and have thus worked in parallel with certain romantic 'noble savage'
representations), there is an investment which is of the order of knowledge.
Many Aborigines feel that this knowledge, which has been produced at sites
where blacks and whites encounter each other, is of total benefit to the
whites, and is disseminated in forms (academic discourses) which make it
inaccessible to black people.
Similarly, Tasmanian Aborigines feel that representations of
the demise of their people (The Last Tasmanian, Manganinnie) write them out of
existence just as they are struggling to gain political effectivity.
Representations of Tasmanian Aborigines are thus con¬structed and appropriated
by those who for different reasons wish to reconstruct the past (archeology,
historical dramatization), while a white audience position is set up which is
comforting for those who wish to be assured that the trouble is over.
Manganinnie thus func¬tions as a cathartic experience identical to that
described by Kathe Boehringer for Women of the Sun: 'Feeling bad about the past
is, in some ways, a barrier to understanding it; resolving to 'be better' in
the future may make us feel more noble momentarily' (1982: 19).
These examples point, therefore, to just two of the ways in
which representations of Aborigines are displaced towards dominant discur¬sive
formations (the universities, history as drama) and away from the immediate
concerns of the minority groups. The problems, in these instances, quite
clearly become problems for academics writing papers and teaching materials, or
for professional film-makers en¬gaged in the making of films. The problems for
Aborigines, which may have been visible or articulated at the site of the
encounter, do not emerge in the final product. The annoyance that many
Aborigi¬nal people feel in regard to these appropriations comes out in phrases
like: This film speaks as if we don't exist', or 'We don't want to be
represented as objects of knowledge'. Or again, from the point of view of
Aboriginal people, the 'problem' may simply be absent; the camera may have
failed to represent the people as an oppressed group. And if sub-standard
living conditions are shown, the sound¬track may simply fail to give a
satisfactory account of this.
Prior to the 1970s, blacks have played a very minor part in
Austral¬ian cinema. In the first period of Australian cinema before the First
World War, some movies were made in which blacks were represent¬ed by whites
made up with black faces. Blacks were cast as savages, as ferocious nuisances
to the colonial endeavour. Their roles, some¬times even their appearances, were
indistinguishable from those of blacks in Tarzan-type movies.
39 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
Later, films such as Jedda (Chauvel, 1953), and right
through to Walkabout (Roeg, 1971) present blacks as solitary silent figures who
move through magnificent landscapes, sometimes pausing on a hill¬ top to
provide the motif which completes the picture of the primor¬dial Australian
scene. This colonialist perspective was never reversed such that the pushing
forward of the British Empire across Australia could be seen from the point of
view of the people being displaced. A number of third-world film-makers have
started to rewrite their histo¬ries through films which use the same strategies
as the European and Hollywood studios, but exploit them to their own ends: from
whose point of view is the shot taken? Who is privileged with close-ups? Who is
allowed to speak? And in what language? One early example of such a film is
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966) which recruits the viewer to the Algerian
cause by exposing the logic of French colonial war strategy (Stam and Spence,
1983).
In the fifties and sixties a number of short films were made
for which the structure and effectivity have been traced in Moore (1982). These
films produced by the Commonwealth Film Unit for the Department of the Interior
and the AIAS, some States' govern¬mental film production units and some private
film companies, were made in the context of roughly defined and sporadically
implement¬ed governmental policies of 'assimilation' and 'integration'. As well
as being didactic for the Aboriginal viewer by showing what sorts of values and
white middle-class ways of living were appropriate, they were also concrete
demonstrations of government policy in action.
Areyonga (Villeminot, 1958) does both these things. It depicts
the work of educators and health workers at Areyonga, a 'first stage'
set¬tlement for members of the Pitjantjatjara people, a hundred miles
south-west of Alice Springs. The introductory caption itself, 'Australia
presents Areyonga' articulates the promise of a solution to 'our problem9.
Areyonga is presented as a showpiece of assimilation policies in action. It
also functions as a nexus for a number of dis¬courses of Aboriginal lifestyles.
The problems facing Aborigines are specified as health, housing and education
(vocational, cultural and moral). The main factors impeding successful
assimilation are the Ab¬origines themselves; their lack of hygiene, nomadic
existence, regres¬sive culture, general apathetic, lax behaviour, etc. These
problems culminate in the notion that 'Aboriginality' is a problem.
Other films from the same period reveal similar racist and
discipli¬nary strategies of correcting the negative features of the other
culture by eliminating them, then replacing them with a white middle-class
constellation of values. Other titles reveal this: A House in Town (Department
of Native Welfare, WA, 1969), Walking in the Sunlight, Walking in the Shadow
(Commonwealth Film Unit, 1970), Why Clean? (Crofton Films, (date unknown), Good
Food, Good Health (Department of Native Welfare, WA, 1969).
40 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
After the 1967 (citizenship) referendum, governmental policy
shift¬ed from 'assimilation' to 'integration'. In this context, a strategy of
'cultural brokerage' appeared as Aborigines took control of their own affairs
to a certain extent. The agents performing this brokerage were constructed as
'exemplary individuals'. Two films made about Cha¬rles Perkins in the late
sixties marshall a discourse of individualism (he strives 'relentlessly
onward') while at the same time denigrating his own people (he is marked 'out
from the herd').4
In Man in the Middle, racism is evident in terms of lowered
expecta¬tions for the Aboriginal subject. In order to construct Charles Perkins
as an exemplary family man, we are taken inside his house where he is greeted
by his wife ('a white Australian girl'). He sits down and plays with his
daughter, and we notice the indications of an orderly, well-off life. The room
is neat and clean, with good furniture, a piano in one corner, and we notice
Perkin's wedding ring on his finger in the foreground. All this is normal,
mundane even. However, the voice-over narration forces us to marvel at this
image of successful normality: 'Charlie Perkins, a half-blood Aboriginal, is
one of the most extraordinary men yet produced by his environment ... To his
kinsmen, the course of his life is as miraculous as a tribal myth'.
In other areas there is a similar investment in the
individual who has the ability to transcend both cultures: for instance, book
titles such as The Two Worlds of Jimmie Barker, and Somewhere Between Black and
White. The biography format of the films about Perkins fails to recognise the
political issues and problems for Aboriginal people. It only shows that
Aboriginal individuals can occupy posi¬tions within existing frameworks of
welfare and politics, and that nothing really needs to change once an Aborigine
occupies the posi¬tion behind the desk.
In 1972 Aboriginal sovereignty began to be established with
the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra. A year later the National Aborigi¬nal
Conference was established as a representative body serving to convey the
wishes of the Aboriginal and Islander people to the Feder¬al government. The
firm establishment of an Aboriginal political lobby did much to break down
paternalism as a government strategy; 'assimilation' and 'integration' gave way
to the liberal pluralist attitudes of 'multiculturalism', an ideology which has
had varied effects as it is activated in relation to Aboriginal political
issues, or in relation to representations of Aboriginal culture.
In relation to political issues multiculturalism has been
aligned with notions of 'autonomy' and 'self-determination'. This rhetoric has
been used by the Fraser Government to justify cutbacks in fund¬ing; for
Aboriginal-controlled organizations, and non-intervention in
41 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
state race-relations (such as Noonkanbah, 1980) thereby
adversely serving landrights causes. Generally, Aboriginal culture is put on a
par with other national cultures in Australia. Aboriginal culture, in the
context of multiculturalism, is seen as contributing to the 'richness' of
cultural diversity within the country.
However, this cultural pluralism can in fact be seen as
severely limiting, as multiculturalism can only recognize certain forms of
Abo¬riginal culture as being Valid', as having promotional possibilities, as
contributing to Australia's multicultural image overseas. A limited number of
(traditional) artifacts are organized for mass production and export. Certain
dance forms and music forms (notably didgeridoo), are organized for promotion
by government-funded agencies.
A number of feature films started to be produced in this
time of 'liberalizing the frontier', to borrow a phrase from Tim Rowse (1983).
Storm Boy (Safran, 1976), Manganinnie (Heney, 1980), The Last Wave (Weir,
1977), andThe Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (Schepisi, 1978), produce a set of
conceptions which, rather than deli¬neating the specific characteristics of a
given group in a specific situation, construct Aborigines and their lifestyles
as unitary in rela¬tion to some essential (and unknowable) principle such as
the 'spirituality of the dreaming' or 'closeness to nature' which ultimately
engenders all action.
42 Aust. J.
Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
Another aspect of historical dramas like Manganinnie or
fantasy dramas like The Last Wave is the use of the convention of stars. With
the first film, the production team was careful to select a beautiful woman; a
well-established Hollywood convention demands that the leading lady's
appearance correspond to certain aesthetic criteria which may or may not
correspond to Aboriginal aesthetic criteria. Similarly, in The Last Wave , the
recruitment of DavidGulpilil as¬sures a certain recognition on the part of the
audience; a recognition that the talented Aborigine can 'make it' (like Charlie
Perkins); the establishment of a continuity of Aboriginal representation across
a number of films; and a consequent reduction of this representation to the one
figure (in the rhetorical sense of the work) in David Gulpilil. If notions of
collectivity are evoked in Aboriginal representations of their societies, then
perhaps the elevation of individuals to perform in 'star' roles replaces to
some extent the preferred notion of collectivity.5 Furthermore, the massive
deployment of Hollywood fil¬mmaking conventions in the contemporary Australian
cinema, gives the lie to the discourse of multiculturalism. All we find is
black faces replacing white faces in the construction of films which belong,
be¬cause of their common structure, to the dominant model of the
Hollywood-style movie.
One television series, Women of the Sun, is the
multiculturalist filmic object par excellence. Produced for Channel 0/28 in
1982 by Generation Films, it took the form of a four-part television series,
where each part, in historical order from 1824 to the present, told the story
of an Aboriginal woman's struggle with some aspect of white settler society. It
embodies some of the representational clichés I have described above: the
narrowing of the historical analysis to that of the exemplary (and
good-looking) female individual, and the romantic representation of Aborigines
as proud and defiant in the face of relentless oppression from white
society.
The first of these episodes (Alinta: the flame) supposedly
recon¬structs traditional Aboriginal life, but because the narrative is
orga¬nized around the one figure of Alinta the dominant ideological
repre¬sentation goes against the grain of what is known about Aboriginal
societies. Individuals are not singled out in traditional Aboriginal
representations; in camp people certainly don't call out individuals' names as
they do in the episode in question. Kin names and section names are the
preferred forms.
The last episode (Lo-arna) is largely indistinguishable from
the cop-show genre. It depicts a young girl and her mother, who had been
separated, finding each other again. Rather, they almost find each other: the
dramatic tension is built around their almost meeting. The final shot (a
freeze-frame, like the final shots of all the episodes, capturing a moment of
anguish for the heroine) has the mother framed by the rear-view mirror as the
daughter drives away
43 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
unable to meet her again, or go 'back' to her mother's
culture as the visual metaphor seems to suggest.
When these episodes were rerun on ABC television in 1983, a
sig¬nificant text was added. At the beginning of each episode Pat O'Shane, an
Aboriginal lawyer, provided instructions for reading the texts to follow; they
were to be read as serious representations of the socio-political situation of
Aboriginal people in Australia. This caveat functions to unify the significance
of each episode. Rather than discrete dramas, one is encouraged to read them as
a unified and continuous Aboriginal history of suppressed sovereignty.
While useful in some respects, these techniques also
perpetuate old problems. The usefulness of the series for the broad spectrum of
Aboriginal politics is that it can be used as an argument, or rather more
crudely, as a weapon, in contexts of present manifestations of white bigotry;
certain current disciplinary and corrective institutions and practices are
indicated; the mission, the reserve, and welfare's role in the adoption of
Aboriginal children by white parents.
The series might also be strategically useful in Aboriginal
politics in that it excites a representation of a long-repressed Aboriginal
militancy, which forms a continuum with Aboriginal culture, identity and sets
of demands. Little theoretical justification can be found for this
representation of the lost cause revived, but it could be useful in the construction
of pan-Aboriginal political intervention (in the name of collective notions of
sovereignty, as in land-rights) in the face of actual differences among tribes
and communities, and in the face of the ways in which dominant strategies of
negotiation for politi¬cal effectivity tend to splinter individuals from these
communities.
In rewriting the 'lost' or suppressed history of Aborigines
in the colonial encounter, the series can be seen to be investing in
history-writing strategies also employed by feminists in relation to
'herstory', radical labour historians, and others. Indeed, the series
intersects with feminist reflections on women because each episode is organized
around a narrative about an individual woman. This sort of rewriting strategy
does not, however, explicitly appear — the series could still be read as if it
were 'outside' of politics; the viewer, if he or she wishes, can still reduce
the 'message' to one of the need for 'basic human rights'. As Keith Tribe
(1977: 13) says:
The use of history in the writings of leftist historians is
quite distinct from the 'writing of history' in the films of leftist
filmmakers. In the case of the former, the use of history is directly related
to the problems and tasks of a specific political movement; for the latter, the
associa-tion with specific political work is always more indirect, and cannot
be read off from the film itself The politics of a film are not simply
inscribed in its images and narrative but in the form of its circulation.
44 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
What was interesting about Women of the Sun, and its
investment in multiculturalism, was the way in which this investment was taken
up as a promotional strategy, and the series was widely publicized as a
valuable text for distribution to community groups, unions, schools
45 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
and tertiary courses. As a newspaper reviewer put it, 'I
cannot imag¬ine any secondary school course in Australian social history now
being complete without a set of video cassettes of this series'. (O'Brian,
1982: 3). This sort of marketing is dangerous for an educa¬tion system which
largely lacks media studies courses. Similar things have occurred in relation
to the feature film Gallipoli, for which the promotional material would suggest
that school children take it as being, quite simply, an historical account of
that particular episode of Australia's involvement in the First World War.
Multiculturalism constructs Aborigines as 'cultural' in such
a way that representational packages can be marketed and distributed across a
broader spectrum of society than in the past. We have seen how representations
of Aborigines have shifted from notions of 'Aboriginal race' to 'Aboriginal
culture' via intermediate notions of 'community' and 'individual' and how these
broad categories have been articulated with social practices and film-making
techniques. But within multiculturalism a certain 'positivisation' of
Aboriginal culture occurs. This positive process of recognition allows for the
ac¬ceptance of Aboriginal art, dance, language, etc. whilst simultaneous¬ly
screening out aspects like extended family forms, aspects of Abo¬riginal law,
'undesirable social habits', 'unhealthy' environments and economic
independence, within a rigid social harmony. In this sense the notion of
'common humanity' should be seen as a ruse. Multiculturalism, an admirable
doctrine on paper, in effect allows for specific frameworks of recognition and
acceptance. It, in effect, makes for new constructions of Aboriginal culture
which should not be uncritically accepted as the result of progress or
humanitarian leanings.IV.
Two fairly strong strategies emerge in opposition to the
hegemony of current film-making practices in relation to representations of
Aborigines. One would involve a politics of abstention — handing over money and
equipment to Aborigines so that they/you can con¬trol the sounds and images
'independently'. The second would in¬volve Brechtian distanciation — the
working through of problems of representation whilst in the process of the
construction of alternative images. Here Stuart Hall neatly combines both
ideas:
/ think it is quite important to get people into producing
their own images, because it does not matter how professional they are; it is
not a question of trying to teach kids to be television producers, but it is
just that they then can contrast the images that they produce of themselves
against the dominant images which they are offered, and so they know that
social communication is a matter of a conflict between alternative readings of
society. (1980:8).
46 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
Aboriginal film-makers, or Aboriginal-controlled
film-makers, may be able to produce films which break with dominant cinematic
practices, but they would only be able to do this by self-consciously undoing
current techniques and trainings and making visible this deconstruction. It
cannot be assumed that a just and 'true' Aboriginal expression can be unleashed
through a supposedly neutral medium. If, as we have assumed, the film-making
medium regularly activates racist representations, then the first job might be
to expose their oper¬ation if one wishes to work in the area. The politics of
'speaking out', of'freeing' or liberating a true, unmediated Aboriginal
discourse is to assume 'Aboriginal experience' and 'culture' as given, as
appropriate for all political situations. Particular representations must be
fought for and carefully constructed in relation to political issues and
contexts.
One film which does tend to move away from dominant
representa¬tions of Aborigines and from conventional film-making practices is
Two Laws produced by the Borroloola Aboriginal community in con¬junction with
film-makers from Sydney Filmmakers Coop in 1982. It abandons recognitions of
individuals as 'characters' which would be subject to psychological
development; yet individuals do act out parts in relation to a story while
commenting on their acting out. This Brechtian effect is described by Ian
Hunter as one which oper¬ates if
the actor has the speech and the space in which to criticize
his own work, then his work does not result in a character— (a representation
of a 'personality' or 'human nature') — but quotes character in the context of
its analysis. (1978:49).
Similarly, a wide-angle lens, with its concommitant
'distortion' is used in Two Laws to deliberately unmask the so-called
naturalness of lenses with standard focal length. As the film-makers said:
The use of a wide-angle indicates how film language works.
There are no cutaways, reverse shots or close-ups. The interaction between
people is in one frame so that the contradictions that arise out of
story¬telling and the telling of history are in one frame. (Cavadini, et al,
1981:69-70).
The film develops 'open' accounts, set in a rough
chronology, of first contact with settler society. The first episode of about
30 minutes is called 'Police Times'; this is followed by episodes of similar
length called 'Welfare Times', 'Struggle for our Land' and 'Living with Two
Laws'. The film is thus made in terms of definite problems as con¬ceived by the
Borroloola people — land rights and welfare are dominant. Not only is it with
their own voices that they speak, but they were involved in the process of
film-making from start to finish including viewing a number of ethnographic and
documentary films about indigenous peoples and seeing the complete run of
rushes. The
47 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
film was shot on site in the Northern Territory, and can thus
negoti¬ate current problems and develop film-making strategies to best deal
with them.
But information in these affairs can never be neutral, and
film's mediatory role in getting information across is continually
acknowledged. The film challenges notions of temporality, empirical forms of
validation, notions of character development and its employ¬ment in
psychologized accounts of the past (cf. Women of the Sun). The film bypasses
familiar reliance on formal narrative structures, with their 'closed' problem/solution
formula: instead we have an 'open', or rather 'unfinished' narrative structure,
stressing ongoing processes and audience reflection rather than simple
resolutions or the finished product.
With this sort of reading of films, the role of the audience
is proble-matised as well as that of the filmic text itself. In films like Two
Laws (a film of both political content and political address) the audience is
situated in relation to a certain Aboriginal discourse on issues like
landrights, and a sympathetic broadly left-wing discourse which tries to
interact usefully with it. In other films, such as many feature films and the
series Women of the Sun (without Pat O'Shane), the audience is situated as one
which is in passive acceptance of entertainment.
Lousy Little Sixpence, a recent documentary, made rather
large claims for itself as a film intervening in a situation dominated by
un¬satisfactory film-making practices. The Directors were particularly scathing
aboutTwo Laws in an interview with Pat Fiske:
JERRY (Gerry Bostock): Two Laws to me was unethical, we had
two film-makers giving the impression that the film was being made from a black
point of view, that it was the Borroloola community making the film where in
fact it wasn't, it was Carolyn Strachan and A lessandro Cavadini who made the
film, but who took pains in setting up certain shots to give the impression
that the blacks were making the film...
ALEC (Morgan):... they spent twelve months by themselves in
a room editing that film and yet they say 'the community made it'. What I think
is the important thing for whites to get through is to stop treatingAborigines
as some sort of strange animal Sometimes the facts are really hard to
comprehend — when I saw the film up on the screen last week, I'm suddenly
saying 'that is a hard fact that in 1938 they were standing outside and calling
for land rights' but it is a fact — I'm not putting theory in the film I'm just
presenting facts. (Filmnews, Octo¬ber 1983: 11).
Despite Alec Morgan's disclaimer, he does have a theory of
documentary: that it should present 'facts', a type of journalistic as¬sertion
that says nothing about the criteria by which these so-called facts are
selected, norabout how the documentary is constructed.
48 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
One would not want to de-emphasize the valuable effect of
Lousy Little Sixpence in bringing forward film archive material, and setting it
up against present-day Aboriginal political struggles. Some sub¬jects viewing
the film may not have been aware of certain events, a middle-ground of
Aboriginal history in the period between the wars. But how is this history
being told? This film is certainly much more tightly structured than a
collection of 'hard facts'. It employs the standard documentary devices of
biography, autobiography, popular narrative history (the voice-over narration
bridges those moments when archival footage is inserted into the narrative).
These tech-niques are standard to films like Union Maids, much admired by
Morgan:
The dynamics of the film work between the footage of the
people you are interviewing and the material that is on film, archival film,
photographs, etc. The best films that I have seen that worked in a dynamic way
is where they have got that combination of good inter¬views and spectacular
footage, such as Union Maids. (Filmnews, October 1983: 11)
'Good interviews' presumably means subjects who don't
contradict a history already constituted: personal experience and anecdote
merge with the popular history of the past giving the film a signifi¬cance
deriving from the present ('calling for land rights') in the same way described
by Noel King for Union Maids:
These two trajectories then merge, the one of individualist
life history, the other by collectivised national consciousness and in each
case the movement is teleological: from a past to a present, from a point of
origin or genesis along a causal chain until we reach the present The present
becomes the point from which we can know the past The effect of employing such
a familiar narrative system is that the origin always already contains the end.
(1982: 12).
The 'dynamic' of Lousy Little Sixpence is not an historical
dynamic, it is more 'spectacular' a juxtaposition of different kinds of images
sutured by the voice of the (Aboriginal) narrator and unified and un¬derpinned
by an ideology of authentic experience. It is enough for the people interviewed
to recount their experience, for it is the experi¬ence which counts
unproblematically, not the way in which it is rep-resented or mediated by
language or the filmic codes. King again:
A series of witnesses are unanswerable in their existential
authenticity; they are constructed as incontroversible within a textual system
which effectively forecloses any possibility of dialogue and anal¬ysis ... The
interview format in Union Maids constructs a notion of history as experienced
by subjects but the film has nothing to say about the rules which construct
interviews and subjects in and for interviews. (1982: 14)
Morgan and Bostock, who were critical of the attempts at
technical innovation in Two Laws, have
produced a film which is virtually
identical in its techniques to a dominant form of
documentary-making [Union Maids). Its investment is not in changing practices
of film-making, but in providing a particular historical content ('suppressed
for generations, now the hidden history is told', says the advertising
pamphlet). History, in this instance, is read cathartically as moments of
dramatic release in personal anecdotes ('quiet and ironic passion', says John
Baxter of The Australian,endorsing the film; 'a powerful and ... shocking
contribution to the building of an Aboriginal history' says Meaghan Morris of
the Financial Review, qui¬etly and ironically, [both on the advertising
pamphlet]).
Another film, one which is particularly guilty of failing to
address its audience in a way useful to any cause, is Sons of Namatjira.
(Curtis Levy for the AIAS in 1975). The film starts inside a bus, a tourist
bus. What better way would there be to transport a discourse of popu¬lism to
Alice Springs? The first voice is that of the bus driver/guide introducing the
home of the famous Aboriginal landscape painter, Albert Namatjira. Now dead,
his home has been converted into some sort of museum. Why does the film adopt
this populist mode of taking us to the site 'just like any tourist'? The film
has failed to state its intentions — this narrative beginning establishes
nothing except a banal position for the viewing subject to occupy: the back of
a bus, unlikely to be a visual pun.
In the next scene in which the tourists are interviewed,
populism is maintained with the current affairs 'vox pop' strategy of gaining a
truth-effect by randomly selecting an average human subject. At this stage, the
film is revealed as a documentary; according to a general rule for this genre
the words anchor the images; what is seen comes into line with what is said in
voice-over. The populism, and its refusal to be partisan in relation to certain
issues, also demands that the interviewer, in a series of banal questions,
refuse to contest the bla¬tantly racist statements of the subjects being
interviewed:
Excuse me, can I just ask you if you know anything about
Albert Namatjira? (...)
He liked comfort didn't he? It's quite a solid building ...
you don't expect it to be quite so comfortable inside, do you?
Do you think he would have had a happy life?
(Woman) Well to
himself I suppose he was... happy.
(Man) Before he
was famous, yes. But after he was famous, no.
(Woman) He died
more or less a broken-hearted man, didn 't he, so they tell us, on the bus. The
bus-driver said...
(Man) Well he
couldn't comply with two civilizations, his
own and ours...
The critical problem for this sort of exchange is how to
read it. Given that, in 1975 as much as now, there were dominant racist dis-
50 Aust. J. Cultural
Studies, 2:1 (1984)
courses on Aborigines circulating, then these are confirmed
by these kinds of statements which make assumptions about what sort of living
conditions to expect for Blacks, and about the inability to 'cope' with two
cultures — this results in romantic tragedy, especially in the case of the
artist. It is only the populist convention in the making of documentaries which
prevents the film-maker from direct¬ly challenging these assertions. But a
second reading is marginally possible. As the film-maker is working for the
AIAS, and this is an institution which purportedly supports enlightened and
non-racist research, then he is perhaps assuming a similarly enlightened
audi¬ence which, in the previous sequence, will read the racism and there¬by be
roughly informed about its presence among tourists. But one showing for the
general public which we heard about was at the PIFT (Perth Institute of Film
and Television) in the context of Abo¬riginal Arts '83 in April of that year.
Nothing about the context of this showing secures either a racist or a
non-racist reading: it rather suggests that, in a festival of Aboriginal arts,
that the film is to be read in relation to its subject matter: Aboriginal
painting.
In fact, in the interview just discussed, the aesthetic is
taken up very quickly as a topic to be validated by a 'scenic' pan shot of the
country. An anonymous tourist's words have the power to divert the camera in
the direction of the hills — a technique which makes the camera (the film)
subservient to populism:
(Female tourist) '... / actually come from Canada but I, I
know him (Namatjira) very well... and this is why I'm here really, just to see
the sort of country (CAMERA PANS) that he painted. It's very beautiful I know
that he had a family of sons who also painted...'
These voices are the ones which introduce us to Namatjira's
family in the next sequence. Now we can no longer hear what is said — only
mumbling in camp as the camera approaches from afar. What follows then is a
series of exchanges between whites and the Namatjira brothers. Again the
problem of reading. Are we supposed to immedi¬ately recognize the racism of the
whites negotiating for sales of paintings? If we do, what then? The
interviewer's techniques of negotiation certainly don't provide an alternative
model. Film cannot show instances of racism to what it may assume is a
non-racist audience, and expect by its agency to thus magically eliminate it.
It needs to identify the problem (by uttering the word 'racism' for instance)
and then start to negotiate its effects, the institutional prac¬tices that make
it a way of life for people who negotiate with Aborigines, and the economic and
cultural conditions which make it possible.
But as well as failing to identify the working of racism,
the film also perpetuates it in other ways. In an interview with Keith
Namatjira, the film-maker discusses painting as a way of making a living:
How much a week would you be making from your paintings?
How much, about three or four hundred a week... (inaudible)
Where does all your three or four hundred a week go?
Some groceries, some cool drinks for the kids, ice-cream,
cigarettes... get a little bit of beer or something...
(SILENCE. CUT TO PAN SHOT OF SHELTER WITH FIRE, RUBBISH,
BEER CANS, FLAGONS).
This interrogation about the household budget is loaded in
favour of a racist reading. The interviewer assumes that there are no savings.
'Where does all your three or four hundred dollars go?' Furthermore, and this
may have come in at the editing stage, the mention of the word 'beer' is-
enough to stop the interview so that the audience can be treated to a shot of
the 'morning after' — perhaps. The silence does not give us any idea how to
interpret the images. What it does is activate an explanation which lies quite
outside documentaries: the dominant racist discourse which pertains to
Aborigines and alcohol.
These are just some of the things that make this film a
potentially racist document: an unmediated presentation of material which could
be construed as racist by a non-racist viewer, a populist framing of the film
which also remains uncontested, a failure to discuss living conditions and to
discuss painting as a viable economic endeavour — these things tend to be
elided by the presentation of the effects of drinking — the camera finds an
empty beer can, the interviewer arbi-trarily conveys to us that someone lost
his driver's licence as a result of drinking. Silence intervenes where dominant
racist interpretations should be challenged. Silence also occupies the
syntagmatic position of the narrator's voice. But the absence of a narrator
does not guaran¬tee equal time for the participants in the dialogues. The
speakers of Aboriginal English sometimes need sub-titles, the interviewers set
the agendas and maintain linguistic control, and other white partici¬pants
'talk over' their interlocutors.
These are film-making strategies to which, not even years
ago, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies was not immune. The film
continues to be circulated for public viewing and it is used in educa¬tional
institutions and in training programmes for Aborigines. What would be intriguing
to know is the use to which it is put. We hope we have shown that if it is
shown unaccompanied by a critical discourse it will undoubtedly contribute to
the reproduction of racism as it in¬forms the most common cinematic
representations of Aborigines in Australia. What its circulation in
institutional contexts seems to pro¬claim is the need for widespread media
education.
Catriona Moore is a member of the Fine Arts Department at
the Uni¬versity of Sydney, and Stephen Muecke teaches at the South Austral¬ian
College of Advanced Education's Magill Campus.
Notes
1. See
Bennett (1982) and Stam and Spence (1983).
2. See
MacBean (1983) for an account of the 1978 International Eth¬
nographic Film Conference in Canberra.
3. See Moore
(1982).
4.
CharUs Perkins (ABC, 1967) and Man in the Middle (BBC, 1967).
5. See
Cavadini, et al, (1981) for a discussion of collectivity in relation to
film-making in an Aboriginal community.
References
Bennett, T. (1982) 'Media, reality, significance' in
Gurevitch, M. et al (eds)
(1982) Culture, society and the media, London; Methuen.
Bhabha, H.K. (1983) The other question ...' Screen, 24: 6, pp.18-36.
Boehringer, K. (1982) 'Women of the Sun', Filmnews, July 1982, p.19. Cavadini, A.,
Strachan, C, Merewether,
C, Stern, L.
(1981) Two Laws/Kanymarda
Yuwa', Media Interventions, Sydney, pp.63-77.
Hall, S. (1980) 'Fetishism in film "Theory" and
"Practice"', Australian Journal of Screen Theory, 5 and 6. pp.48-66.
King, N. (1981) 'Recent Political Documentary', Screen22: 2,
pp.7-18.
MacBean, J.R. (1983) 'Two Laws from Australia, One White,
One Black', Film Quarterly, 36: 3, pp.30-43.
Moore, C. (1982) 'Representations of Aboriginal People in
Film: "Assimilation", "Integration",
"Multiculturalism"'. Thesis submitted for MA (prelim), Dept of Fine
Arts, Sydney University.
Muecke, S. (1982) 'Available discourses on Aborigines', in
Botsman, P. (ed.) Theoretical strategies, Sydney: Local Consumption
Publications.
O'Brian, D. (1982) 'Women of the Sun: Tragic History
Relived', Sydney Morn¬ing Herald, August 2, p.3.
Rowse, T. (1983) 'Liberalising the Frontier: Aborigines and
Australian Pluralism', Meanjin 42: 1.
Stam, R. and Spence, L. (1983) 'Colonialism, Racism and
Representation — an Introduction', Screen 24: 2, pp.2-20.
Tribe, K. (1977) 'History and the Production of Memories',
Screen 18: 4, pp.9-22.
Source: humanities.curtin.edu.au/
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