Celluloid Subjects to Digital Directors. Jennifer Debenham

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 third aspect links technological changes in camera and film stock technology with broader shifts in scientific paradigms, the exploration of the relationship between ideology and technology reveals the importance of inter-connecting discourses, foregrounded by a media ecology approach. ←9 | 10→In a temporal sense the diachronic nature of media ecology is concerned with the successive development of technologies and how they influence the environment.¹⁴ This technological environment makes connections between parallel streams of development while simultaneously it is also concerned with their synchronicity. Media ecology is interested in how these developments in technology interact “with other factors in the formation of cultures and consciousness” causing significant social, cultural and political implications.¹⁵ The inter-connection between modifications in filmmaking technologies are closely related to how Aboriginal people were represented on documentary film and how audiences read the films within the time frames of the day. An important relationship is established between present-day audiences and the way in which people read the films at the time of their production. This reflective relationship can produce a cognitive distance that is a valuable marker of the shifts made in social and cultural expectations of not only the films but how the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples has been changed and shaped.

      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.

Finally, each film was exhibited to the public near the time of their production. The public’s familiarity with the images underlines the role the films have played in the formation of stereotypes and attitudes towards Aboriginal people. Today, all of the films are readily available from archival repositories such as the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA); the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS); the South Australian Museum and Australian university libraries; the film ←10 | 11→distributor Ronin Films and online sites. Many of the films continue to have a participatory role in academic inquiry, with some, such as Aborigines of the Sea Coast (1950) continue to be included in primary and secondary school study sites. To a lesser or greater degree this level of availability is encountered for most of the films produced since Essie Coffey’s film, My Survival As An Aboriginal (1978) where study guides have been formulated by Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) and are readily available on the Screen Australia website.¹⁶

      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.

1 The term “Indigenous” includes all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. “Aboriginal” is used to specifically identify those people belonging to communities on the mainland and Tasmania.

2 Marcia Langton, Well I Heard It on the Radio and I saw it on the Television …: An essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things, Sydney: The Australian Film Commission (1993), 81.

3 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: issues and concepts in documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1991), 3–4.

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