Celluloid Subjects to Digital Directors. Jennifer Debenham
different times Australians understood Aboriginality and how the extinction of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population could be rationalised as the inevitable outcome of the colonial process.
The over-arching discussion connects the exploration of the documentary films to developments in scientific discourses with political and social debates about Aboriginal peoples. Rather than examining the films entirely through the theoretical models employed in film studies, the methodological approach uses the films to anchor the discussion about the nature of race relations in Australia. It emphasises their value ←1 | 2→as cultural and historical artefacts and demonstrates how each film graphically illustrates the continually shifting relationship between ideology and technology.
Aboriginalities
Each film signposts shifts in how Aboriginalities were understood by both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal Australians. Bidjara/Iman descendant and public academic Marcia Langton’s incisive observation that “‘Aboriginality’ is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, imagination, representation and interpretation” provides an important framework for the study. “Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people create ‘Aboriginalities’” in an infinite array of intercultural experiences.2 Recognising that Aboriginality is not static underlines the importance of these modalities in which documentary films play a significant role. Indeed, Langton’s appraisal of the social and cultural dynamics in her description of Aboriginality embraces the similar dynamics of media ecology and the emotional investment inherent in documentary film production used in this study. First let us consider the emotional dynamics inherent in the making of documentary films.
The work of scholar Belinda Smaill (2010) draws attention to the role emotion plays in documentary film production. Traditionally documentary films are associated with what Bill Nichols refers to as “discourses of sobriety” and the genre’s connections with science, education and social responsibility.3 Exploring the importance of the emotions produced by documentary films, which include pleasure, hope, pain, empathy, or disgust, Smaill is interested in how the audience is ←2 | 3→addressed by and how they relate to these emotions. In particular “how emotionality marries with the social project of documentary in ways that make the non-fiction genre a compelling site for understanding how fantasies of self and other circulate through specific textual practices”.4 Recognising these emotions circulate in the public sphere connected as they are with instrumental power structures that include “science, economics, politics, foreign policy, education, religion and welfare”,5 Lauren Berlant argues that “public spheres are worlds of affect”. It is where Jim McGuigan maintains that “popular culture, including television and cinema, offers a mass mediated aesthetic and emotional form of communication that is integral to perceptions of collective life”.6 In synthesising these views, Smaill “indicates that emotion can be thought of not only as a psychical response to particular stimulus, but also as integral to the way subjects experience public spheres at particular historical moments”.7 The films in this study are emblematic of the conditions in which Aboriginality was constructed, negotiated and comprehended in the public sphere, simultaneously driving and reflecting these changes.
Belinda Smaill observes:
Emotions move along with histories of signification and, through this, become associated with and shape relationships with objects such as images and genres, a text and/or the institutions surrounding the text, in systematic ways.8
As the representation of Aboriginal people on documentary film changed, the types of emotional responses and the relationship with Aboriginal people were reshaped by their new images and narratives. Part of the aesthetics were also shaped by changes in technologies; not only those associated with film production but also in the multitude of effects technologies made in everyday life.
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Media Ecology
To clarify the important relationship between ideology and technology, the study is framed by the intellectual tradition known as media ecology. Its development as a discreet field of enquiry, steered by the writings of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman (amongst others) in the 1960s, it did not become identifiable in its present form until the 1990s. Approaching the analysis of media through an ecological lens relies on understanding media as an environment in which complex eco-systems interact with each other. The inclusive, multi-disciplinary methodology defines media as “a collection of inter-connecting systems that at once reflect and stimulate each other as it seeks to understand the symbiotic relationships among culture, communication, and technology”.9 The importance of recognising the symbiotic relationship between media, communication and society puts into focus the inter-subjectivity alluded to earlier in Langton’s definition of Aboriginality and Smaill’s argument regarding the role played by the inherent emotions that are stimulated by the production and exhibition of documentary films. Together, this inter-disciplinary approach to exploring the films provides a new avenue to evaluate the production of documentary film by and about Aboriginal Australians. By selecting films from across an extended timeframe, the study explores the dynamics in an original format.
The Longue Durée
Forming part of a broader dialogue, the films are employed to illustrate the shifts in social attitudes and political exigencies about Aboriginal people. This is achieved by applying French historian Fernand Braundel’s longue ←4 | 5→durée approach. It provides the necessary historical distance to trace the minute changes in the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Each film is historically emblematic of these shifts, signposting changes in the representation of Aboriginal peoples. The approach to the films differs from other important studies of Australian documentary films. Unlike Ian Bryson’s valuable Bringing to Light: a history of ethnographic filmmaking and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (2002) and Lisa Milner’s insightful Fighting Films: a history of the Waterside workers’ Federation (2003), which concentrate on specific institutions, this book considers a range of institutions that made films about Aboriginal peoples to examine their ideological motivations for making the films. The book also examines a range of filmmakers, rather than focusing on a specific individual like Anna Grimshaw’s valuable work on David and Judith MacDougall in The Ethnographer’s Eye (2001), and Graham Shirley’s informative piece on Cecil Holmes for the National Sound and Film Archive (NSFA). Tracing the production of documentary films about and then by Aboriginal people, the book traces the journey from early ethnographic films to a recent and critical phase in the trend toward decolonisation of the documentary screen.
Decolonising the Documentary Film in Australia
Decolonisation of research methodologies is especially important to documentary film production by Indigenous filmmakers. Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work outlines the importance for the Other to “research back” to challenge the “underlying code of imperialism and colonialism”.10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers now engage with all aspects of film production; not only do they use cameras they are sophisticated and conversant with the intricate processes of ←5 |