Celluloid Subjects to Digital Directors. Jennifer Debenham

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Название Celluloid Subjects to Digital Directors
Автор произведения Jennifer Debenham
Жанр Культурология
Серия Documentary Film Cultures
Издательство Культурология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781789974805



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camera equipment and film stock available to Spencer and Gillen in 1901 meant they needed to work within its limitations; modifying their ambitious goals and their approach to filmmaking. As camera and film stock technology became more sophisticated, however, filmmakers gained greater flexibility in how, when and where they could film Aboriginal people. Film stock moved from the volatile nitrate, through celluloid safety film to video tape to the present standard and high definition digital recording. The addition of synchronised sound and colour added new and exciting dimensions to the films.

      The fourth aspect makes connections to the sources of funding the projects attracted. Significantly, funding provided a prescribed agenda through ideologies and cultural expectations, designating the parameters that justified the expense and the time allowed for a film project. More recently, government bodies established to promote filmmaking as part of nation building added to the provision of funding provided earlier by individuals and organisations looking to answer questions. Each film presents a particular style of filmic representation, contingent with its production date, the level of funding available as well as the ideological agenda of the institution, the filmmaker and audience expectations.

      The purpose of the survey is to open up discussion based more firmly on the long-term development of visual images constructed of Aboriginal people. Combining both the longue durée approach and the theoretical frameworks developed in media ecology the discussion will define how much these constructions have been affected by scientific, social and political shifts and the camera and film technologies available to the filmmaker. The circumstances under which Indigenous filmmakers have appropriated the technology of film production and use the camera as an instrument of communication is a principle aim of the discussion.

      The exploration of some films benefits from interviews conducted with some of the filmmakers in 2007, 2009 and 2010 in several locations. I first went to meet filmmakers Warwick Thornton, David Tranter and film editor Dena Curtis at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. I then met Mitch Torres, an independent filmmaker in Broome, Western Australia and Troy and Stephen Albert at Goolarri Media, also located in Broome. I also interviewed then Message Stick host Miriam Corowa at the ABC Studios in Ultimo, Sydney and then retired AIAS filmmaker, Ian Dunlop in Canberra.

      In taking a longitudinal approach and employing a discourse drawn from anthropology, history and film studies, new findings emerge about the relationship between Aboriginal people and filmmaking. Until the late 1960s, many of the filmmakers represented Aborigines as living in a timeless ethnographic present – outside of history and destined to die out. The dramatic consistency of the representation is continued from Spencer’s and Gillen’s, Aboriginal Life in Central Australia, film in 1901 to Ian Dunlop’s ←11 | 12→Desert People (1966). Warburton Aborigines (1957) was among the first to contest that image. Once Aboriginal Australians began to be involved in filmmaking, a different set of representations began to emerge. Among the first films to show this is My Survival As An Aboriginal (1978). When Aboriginal people worked behind the camera and had much greater control over the filmmaking process they challenged the stereotypes of “primitivity” and the ethnographic present in which many of the earlier films trapped them. Finally, Aboriginal historical accounts, such as Torres’ Whispering in Our Hearts: the Mowla Bluff Massacre (2002), and Tranter’s Willaberta Jack (2007) are reminders that Australia does indeed have a black history and Aboriginal perspectives form an important understanding of colonial dispossession from their point of view. The Aboriginal sense of visual performance and their agency, so clearly apparent in the film by Spencer and Gillen, continues in the later films. What is uncovered is that film is a comfortable medium for many Aboriginal people because it relates readily to an intimate understanding of the visual – a fundamental concept practiced in oral societies.

      Unfortunately, there is scant reliable evidence with regards to audience numbers and individual reactions to many of the films. Television and cinema attendance numbers were not reliably accounted for until quite recently in a systematic way. The analysis relies on how the films, given their historical context, were both products and drivers of social changes in relation to Aboriginal people on a broader scale. The advantage of this study is that it provides a longitudinal view to explore the changing relationship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous Australians through the medium of documentary film. It raises awareness that the power of the image to create and sustain stereotypes also contributed to shifting and at times conflicting attitudes toward Aboriginal people, challenging the understanding about “race” in Australia.