After more than a hundred years of filmmaking in New Zealand the corpus of films made either by or about New Zealanders has built up to such an extent that it is now possible to trace changing representations of themes and motifs repeated over time. This article looks at representations of a controversial topic: the collection of Maori artefacts, especially those associated with death and memorial practices, by European colonists and visitors. The treatments of this subject, selected from across a fifty-year period from the mid 1950s to 2007, are interesting because they show developing recognition of the validity of Maori claims for the return of alienated cultural property but also because they demonstrate the persistence, nevertheless, of certain fantasies about the spiritual benefits that contact with such artefacts can offer to troubled European souls. By analysing depictions of material culture representing key points in what one Maori scholar has called ‘the cycles of interdependence and desire that prepared the ground for colonisation’[1] this article provides a micro-study of the complex interweaving of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives in the making of films about New Zealand.
The first film is The Seekers [2] , a 90-minute drama also known in the United States by the title, Land of Fury, which was made in 1954, directed by Ken Annakin for the British production and distribution company the Rank Organisation, About encounters between British and Maori in the pre-colonial period, The Seekers was screened in New Zealand, Britain and America in its day, but has had little sustained attention until recently when the staff of the New Zealand Film Archive have held screenings of the film as part of a project of collecting information about its production.[3] The second film was made more than 50 years later in 2007 for screening simultaneously on the British television channel ITV1 and on the New Zealand channel TV1. Called The Man Who Lost his Head [4] it is a comedic drama featuring the English actor Martin Clunes who has made a career out of playing repressed but attractive middle-class professionals, including a rural GP in the series Doc Martin. In this one-off piece, Clunes is Ian Bennett, a curator from the fictional British Imperial Museum, sent to New Zealand to frustrate an inconvenient claim for the return of a Maori artefact; a carved self-portrait of a Maori chief, Takataka, who, unable to return home, died in England during the nineteenth century. The third film is, by contrast with the other two, devised and directed by a New Zealander, Barry Barclay. Te Rua (1992) is an impassioned act of advocacy, in the form of a contemporary drama, for the return to New Zealand of ancestral Maori carvings sequestered in a museum in Germany.
It is that issue, the moral legitimacy of European interests acquiring, and then retaining custody of, Maori cultural artefacts, that links all three films, although it is featured in them to different degrees. The general activity of collecting souvenirs of one’s travels to foreign countries is an ancient one, but during the nineteenth-century period of imperial expansion by Britain this practice achieved an intensity which has prompted several recent discussions of its purpose and effects in relation to New Zealand and to Maori concerns in particular.[5]
Collection as an imperial activity
In a recent book entitled Displaying Maori, art historian Conal McCarthy has described how the 1850s and 60s saw the founding of numerous museums around the British empire, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Colonial Museum in Wellington. Initially, the display strategies of such museums evinced a cluttered eclecticism with the spoils of explorations into ‘new’ natural habitats and newly annexed indigenous cultures mixed in together: whale skeletons hovering over stuffed moa, adjacent to weapons or cloaks from Hawaiian or Maori communities for example.[6] However, as participants in the Enlightenment project of perfecting and classifying knowledge, these museums sought to reveal the essential, fixed meanings of objects, considered as typical, or superior, examples of their type.[7] Over time, groups of objects were gradually differentiated from one another, their interpretation guided by categories provided by the developing fields of geography, geology, biology, history, anthropology and psychology. Individual objects became evidence of the powers of European scientists and scholars to theorize, to investigate deeply, and then to pronounce on, the functions and significance of material goods from societies distant in location or time. This fixing of meaning is explained by McCarthy as occasioning a shift in the status of such objects from ‘curios’ in the early colonial period to ‘specimens’[8] , echoing the move of collection itself from an amateur to a professional, nationalistic and typically imperial, activity, in the sense that to claim to understand something better than its makers did is also to provide justification for assuming guidance of the culture from which it came.
In the scientific and emotional economies of the time artefacts connected with distinctive practices around the great life-events such as birth and death were of particular appeal. European collectors expressed wonder and sometimes, envy and horror, at the diverse cultural practices of ‘others’, especially of those judged to be at an earlier, less disciplined stage of civilization.[9] In his book on images of Maori in New Zealand film and television Martin Blythe has written of the way in which what he calls ‘the imperial romances of Maoriland’[10] functioned as a commentary on and counter to, the perceived over-rationalization and decadence of the originating British homeland. The British-based Maori anthropologist Amiria Henare makes a similar point about the less mediated practice of object collection: pre-colonial indigenous peoples were seen by Europeans as being closer to their passions and more willing to express them, whether they took sensual, or even violent, forms. Collecting objects that were indexical of these passions was therefore a way of embodying the wary attraction that travellers from European societies felt towards Pacific peoples and their cultural practices.
Europeans were at once repulsed and fascinated by such examples of what they took to be passionate abandon and this perversity may explain the eagerness with which sailors on Cook’s and subsequent voyages sought out gnawed human bones and preserved heads as macabre souvenirs.[11]
Maori tribal cultures in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods (until the 1860s) were an especially rich source of objects connected with rituals around death, for instance cannibalism[12] and, the impetus for this article, the preservation of the heads of the dead. [13] In the pre-colonial period the latter practice had two dominant applications in that the heads of enemies killed in inter-tribal conflicts would often be used both as trophies and bargaining objects, while the heads of deceased loved ones would also be preserved as a focus for grief, remembrance and communication beyond death.[14] Both these applications were developments from an underlying worldview that saw mauri, or the life-force, as capable of presence in different media (flesh, other products of the natural world) and, to a certain extent, transferable across locations. A less grisly manifestation of this worldview, also relevant to this piece, is the belief that carvings (whakairo) and communal houses (wharenui) embody the mauri of ancestors in a significant and active manner.[15]
During the early contact period, some Maori realised that these culturally distinctive items, especially tattooed heads, were of sufficient interest to Europeans that they would be prepared to trade valued commodities, such as muskets, for them. A small group of chiefs, especially northern tribal leaders wishing to equip themselves for inter-tribal conflict therefore became systematically involved in the provision of preserved heads for trade. The Ngapuhi chief Pomare was among them, as described by the English traveller Jack Rutherford in the 1820s:
The whole country dreaded the name of Bomurry (Pomare). This great warrior showed us several of the heads of chiefs whom he had killed on this expedition, and these, he said, he intended to carry back with him to the Bay of Islands, to sell for gunpowder to the ships that touched there.[16]
While fascination with Maori practices of tattooing and the preservation of heads was evident in this and other early European accounts[17] it was not until 1896 that an extensive description of different kinds of practices around the treatment of the human head was provided, in ‘Moko’ or the Maori art of Tattooing‘, by the avid amateur collector Major-General Horatio Gordon Robley: a source which is still a frequently-cited authority on the topic. For example, the Maori art historian and writer Ngahuia te Awekotuku notes that the widespread but now controversial use of the term mokomokai for tattooed, preserved, heads can be attributed to Robley.Mokomokai has a slightly derisive connotation according to te Awekotuku, since “it may be translated literally as an inferior, pet or enslaved person, with moko, or facial tattoo”.[18]This usage of the term does have relevance to historical reality since, as the quote above indicates, the heads offered for trade were typically the heads of enemies killed in battle, or enslaved after it, rather than the heads of loved kinsfolk. However, the use of the term mokomokai, although still the predominant descriptor for this kind of artefact until the middle of the 1990s, when the entertainer Dalvanius Prime formed the Mokomokai Education Trust[19], is no longer the preferred term amongst Maori, for whom it adds another, undesirable, layer of abjection to the treatment of ancestors whose mana had already been reduced by the manner of their involuntary exile from their homeland. Instead, as we shall see, the more neutral term upoko tuhi “inscribed or patterned head” is utilized.[20]
Reframing Historical Loss
One of the most interesting developments in historical study recently, where it shares a border with anthropology, is the intensified investigation of material culture: that is, the study of the provenance and functions of objects and the meanings that they might have activated for the people who have owned or exchanged them over time. While the historic alienation of cultural property from Maori is often framed within a negative political context as a manifestation of unequal clashes between colonizer and colonized, as it is, for the most part in both Te Rua and The Man Who Lost His Head, the propensity of objects to also facilitate ‘mingling’ between cultures has recently been emphasized. Within a study comparing the material cultures of Scots and Maori, for instance, Henare argues that within both cultures treasured objects act as “a particularly enduring form of social bond, allowing generations separated in genealogical time to come together”[21] through their appreciation and use. Re-examining the colonial encounter between British and Maori cultures, she contends that: “artefacts became the principal medium through which the two people initiated contact, tried to communicate and established friendly or hostile relations with each other”.[22] “Objects” Henare says “were consistently used, along with verbal exchange, to challenge, placate, seduce and test each other, not only in friendly encounters but in the brandishing of weapons [and] the firing of guns”[23] .
Underlying these statements, which arise from a discursive re-framing whereby objects are no longer seen to have a discoverable fixed meaning but are viewed as catalysing different meanings in response to social change, is the post-colonial desire to reclaim a sense of agency for Maori in that early contact period. Henare, Te Awekotuku and others cite European eyewitness accounts in order to show that rather than being passive victims of exploitation, Maori were eager to engage in trade from the time of Cook’s first voyages onwards. Te Awekotuku in particular outlines the dynamic by which the Ngapuhi chiefs Hongi Hika and Pomare, during the 1820s, actually manufactured preserved, tattooed, heads as a medium of exchange. While not approving of the practice, Te Awekotuku sees it as an understandable response to European intervention: a “reconfiguration” of traditional practices “by certain Maori for specific gain”.[24] A mere 40 years later this preparedness by some Maori to commodify traditional practices in exchange for imported material goods or status had led to the beginnings of the tourist industry in the thermal region of the central North Island, and also to the sale of carvings and indeed entire marae buildings overseas.[25] But, whilst also highlighting the consensual participation of Maori in trade, Henare, in particular, asserts that these exchanges had an unintended consequence of helping to undermine Maori self-sovereignty: “Very early on the influx of European goods, material and techniques bound Maori ever more tightly into imperial circuits of trade and created cycles of interdependence and desire that prepared the ground for colonisation”.[26]
The Seekers and mokomokai
The Seekers traces one such small, personalized ‘cycle of interdependence and desire’ as it stands for many others. Based on an historical novel of the same name released in 1952 and written by a New Zealander, John Guthrie, it is set in the period preceding formal British colonalisation: the ‘Musket Wars’ era between 1815 and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. In fact, although historical accuracy is not a strong point of the film, it is probably set in the years before 1831, since it was in that year that the trade in preserved heads was by banned by the regional European authority, the Governor of New South Wales.[27] So, whilst produced more than a century later than the events to which it refers, The Seekers is set in, and reflects, a period in which both the fascination with preserved heads, understood within the mokomokai framework, was at its peak.
The film is the second of two large international productions made in New Zealand in the decade after 1945. The other was the 1947 American film Green Dolphin Street [28] which is also, as Brian McDonnell has described, an historical epic employing emblematic references to aspects of Maori culture to provide “readily recognisable signifiers of foreignness” for American and British audiences.[29] The Seekers was filmed in the Whakatane and Rotorua districts in January 1954, immediately after the young Queen Elizabeth II’s successful first visit to her dominion and thus partakes of the optimism of this late flowering of British imperial presence. In generic terms the film is a melodrama or historical romance, with a lush, mythologizing aesthetic and ripely-expressive acting-styles that today invite amusement as much as emotional engagement.
At the beginning of The Seekers an English seaman, Philip Wayne, accompanied by a bosun who conveniently speaks Maori, lands on the shores of northern New Zealand. Within minutes he has stumbled into a cave that is a repository for koiwi or the bones of the dead. Horrified, he stumbles back out again into the embrace of waiting warriors, who take him to their chief Hongi Tepe, played by the renowned Maori opera singer, Inia Te Wiata. Through an act of physical courage Philip Wayne rapidly gains the trust of both Hongi Tepe and of his dying father, although not of the local tohunga, who is distressed at the challenge to his own authority when Hongi Tepe gifts Wayne a block of land. The historical references here, much muddied by the demands of fiction film-making, are to the recorded incidences of ‘Pakeha Maori’ that is, to early European visitors who became the protégés of Maori tribal leaders.[30]
As a sign of this new relationship, the Englishmen are included in a ceremony where Hongi Tepe’s wife Moana performs an erotic, ecstatic dance to humiliate a group of captive enemy warriors. The climax of the scene is the revelation that the ‘captives’ consist of a series of preserved heads set up on cloak swathed poles. Wayne’s revulsion at this discovery establishes the Eurocentric moral values of the film and therefore reconfirms the ‘civilized’ decency of those in the implied audience also perceived as Europeanised.
In a subsequent sequence Philip Wayne returns to his ship to go back to England for marriage to his fiancée Marion. Wayne is followed to the ship by the tohunga offering a basket of heads for sale. Outraged, Wayne tips the heads into the sea, unaware that the ship’s captain had solicited them in the expectation of profitable re-sale in England. As revenge, a head is planted in Wayne’s luggage, and on landing in England he is arrested, tried and condemned both for trafficking and for bringing disrepute to the reputation of the British people. This incident makes indirect, displaced reference to the banning of the trade in heads in 1831.
Publicly scapegoated, Wayne returns to New Zealand with his saintly new wife and sets to work building a settlement on the land given to him by Hongi Tepe, while his wife teaches the chief the rudiments of both English and the Christian principles of peace, compassion and non-aggression. This theme of the Englishman exiled by a moribund, unjust society at home and finding freedom and natural justice in a so-called ‘savage land’ occurs in several early films made in New Zealand[31] as does the theme of the conversion of tribal leaders to Christianity and Christian moral values.
In the final third of the film, three destabilising factors: increasing inter-tribal tensions, the lure of exotic sensuality which takes Wayne into an adulterous affair with the chief’s wife and a further encounter with the trade of moko mokai for muskets, undermine the viability of this Edenic-situation, and Wayne and his still-loyal wife find themselves under fatal attack. Her steadfastness and his willingness to suffer in penance for breaking faith with her leads to their redemptive deaths in the conflagration of their settlement. Individually these colonists do not survive, but spiritually they do, in the form both of their infant son, Richard, who is taken under protection by Hongi Tepe, and in an eerie final scene, by a squad of unnamed, new, European settlers advancing up the beach. This scene is a visual distillation of the process that Henare would later describe whereby the ground was ‘prepared’ for colonisation by numerous small-scale interactions and moments of trade between the two peoples.
The presence of mokomokai, of muskets and, additionally, of erotic spectacle constitute the moments in The Seekers where cultural values are demonstrated to clash and where choices are acted out in relation to both the differentiation of cultural identity and its blurring. Wayne in particular is in danger, at one point, of abandoning key aspects of his English Christian values by engaging in an affair with Moana. While sexual activity most clearly embodies the desire to merge, the use of mokomokai as signs of horror marks the moments in which pre-colonial tribal culture can be seen as most definitely out of order and in need of chastisement and reform. The instinctive judgmental reactions of the Englishman in this matter are a sign of his deep ‘rightness’, even if he does otherwise sin in terms of Christian morality. The film therefore echoes the double movement of fascination and repulsion around mokomokai that was present in the period of imperial expansion. By contrast, the corresponding European objects in the exchange, muskets, while acknowledged initially as troublesome, are naturalized into the narrative and used repeatedly by the settlers, including the pacifist Marion, to defend the settlement and their lives.
Remembering its production during a late renaissance of British colonial fervour, as well as noting the patterns that are played out using material objects as catalysts for preferred meanings, it is evident that The Seekers is a film that endorses the spirit of British colonisation. There are moments of paradox that break through the umbrella of European superiority, there is acknowledgment that there are good and bad people in both Maori and British groupings, and there are minor instances of agency on behalf of key Maori characters (Hongi Tepe’s befriending of the Waynes and his rescue of their son, his wife’s seduction of Philip), but they do not disturb the overall ‘progressive’ momentum of the narrative. Colonisation is portrayed as a fraught but well-meaning and justified activity, and hence its moral trajectory is to legitimate the protagonist’s right to live, and in fact to die, in his adopted home.
The role that mokomokai play in this trajectory, the judgmental attitudes they enable, are however more typical of a later period in the nineteenth century – the period of intensive and increasingly aggressive colonisation from the 1840s to the end of the century than they are of the relatively tolerant and disorganized pre-colonial period. Both Henare and Te Awekotuku contend that as the imperial and indigenous cycles of interdependence and desire tightened to a situation where overt colonisation became a possible goal, the existence of what they called ‘macabre’ curios from Aotearoa became part of the justification for British rule. They were now used as sensual evidence for the necessity of rescuing Maori from their heathen depravity in favour of a triple-fold regime of applying ‘principles of moral, spiritual and agricultural improvement to the land and its people’[32] , where these terms are defined in terms of European understandings of their meanings.
Te Rua and the return of Maori cultural property
We move now from a 1954 feature which retrospectively fantasized the historical period of the 1820s, to a 1991 film which dealt with contemporaneous issues. Te Rua was devised and directed by Barry Barclay, a bicultural New Zealander and filmmaker who became strongly identified with the indigenous rights movement from the 1970s onwards.[33] He was one of the first two people of Maori descent to direct a feature film[34] and two years previously had made The Neglected Miracle, a documentary about corporate threats internationally to the genetic diversity and indigenous guardianship of plant resources. Of the theme of that film, Barclay is cited in Stuart Murray’s book as having said: “to have power over the plants you use for food, for dyes, for fibre, for medicines and so on, is to have the dignity of sovereignty”.[35] In Te Rua the quest for a renewed sense of the dignity of sovereignty is pursued through the narrative of a group of Maori from the southern coast of the North Island trying to re-establish a relationship with stolen ancestral carvings held by a museum in Berlin. As with The Seekers, this story draws on elements of the historical record in depicting a situation where carvings from the building that is the spiritual focus of a marae community – the wharenui – have been traded away, or gifted, to foreigners. This is most famously the case with the house Hinemihi, which, while covered with ash from the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera, ensured the survival of the tribal members who sheltered in it, but was later sold to a British collector, and now resides in the English countryside at Clandon Park in Surrey.[36] Nevertheless, as is now the case with upoko tuhi, for Maori physical alienation does not always equate with the severance of spiritual ties. For example, when members of the tribe that features in Te Rua see their stolen carvings again, the whakairo are addressed as living beings and, even though they are located thousands of kilometres away, at least one resident of the home marae, the kuia Nanny Matai, can sense fluctuations in their mauri from that distance.
Attempts are made by young tribal members to break into the museum and retrieve the carvings, but in fact progress is not achieved until two events occur which involve the sacrifice of European cultural power. The spiritually-tortured leader of the museum’s Board of Trustees, Professor Biederstedt, comes to realize that his institution’s moral claims to control the carvings are unjustifiable, and he is helped to that understanding by the Maori theft of the marble heads of European figures from antiquity. The ‘cycle of desire’ between Maori and European comes full-circle and the energies change to favour the Maori case for management of their own treasures.
The change in dynamics that the film depicts, and to a certain degree, prefigures, was accompanied in the wider cultural environment of the 1980s and 1990s by a further transformation in general terminology for valued items of Maori material culture from the museological ‘specimen’ to the Maori term ‘taonga‘ (treasures) and, later on, by the replacament of the mokomokai appellation with the more respectful upoko tuhi: developments prompted partially by the revaluation of Maori art and craftwork after the highly successful tour of the United States by the Te Maori exhibition from 1984-1987.[37] The first Taonga Maori conference in November 1990 at which museum officials from fifteen museums in eight countries gathered to discuss the significance and future care of Maori objects also contributed to this reevaluation. From this time onwards, the repatriation project, which included the return of as many as possible of the approximately 300 preserved heads that were estimated as having been sold or traded up until 1830[38] was pursued with quiet determination. For instance these are the words of Edward Ellison, head of the repatriation panel at Te Papa, speaking at an international colloquium in early 2008 at Le musée du quai Branly in France.
The ancestors we are talking about in this colloquium have descendents, they belong to a tribe, to awhanau to iwi; while their identity may not be known, they have connection, they have a homeland […] The repatriation panel feels a duty to the remains, to bring them back from their lonely resting places in strange lands, from people who are foreign to our culture and our language, and who are not well placed to care for our ancestors in a manner that befits them. We think this work is principally in the first instance for the departed, to bring them safely home. It is important to our culture, central to our wellbeing and […] is an element of the rebuilding of our culture in this post-colonial era that needs to be put right.[39]
While the tone of Te Rua is, as Stuart Murray describes, ‘angry’, concerned with issues of responsibility and justice[40] , the request for the return of upoko tuhi as framed by Ellison has a moderate, reflective tone, which is itself an indication of the ongoing success of projects either of repatriation or of obtaining a greater degree of power and involvement in the care of Maori taonga held overseas.[41] As Henare observes, the recognition of early exchanges, notably those involving human remains, has “[itself …] become a tool in the fight for recognition and redress of past wrongs, (for) the self determination of colonized peoples”.[42] In the post-colonial context upoko tuhi have been reframed as objects both of spirituality and of politics, but a different kind of politics from that justifiying colonisation: of reassertion of indigenous cultural values and a corresponding condemnation of the acquisitiveness and intransigence of colonising powers. The fascination with preserved heads remains but, as Barclay argued, using different but related objects in Te Rua, their negative meanings have now transferred to the foreign collectors and institutions that continue to keep the heads in their possession.
The Man Who Lost His Head and upoko tuhi as taonga
All of the above elements, albeit treated in a comic mode, are also present in the last of the three examples: a co-production between the British company ITV and the New Zealand company, South Pacific Pictures. The script for The Man Who Lost His Head is the work of the English writer Mark Wallington, acclaimed for his comic scripts about social issues in English countryside locations[43] , and represents, therefore a predominantly British viewpoint, although it also shows signs of local input at the level of detail from the Maori cultural consultants Bradford Haami and Ngamaru Raerino. Nevertheless, the script’s overt, extensive acknowledgment of the strength of indigenous cultures’ arguments for the return of artefacts surrendered in the heat of the original colonial encounter, is an indication of how much has changed in the fifty years since the production of The Seekers. So, too, is the sensitivity evident in the decision to make the artefact a wooden head carved by an imprisoned chief, Takataka, as his surrogate, rather than a fleshly upoko tuhi as was the original intention.[44] Despite this substitution, which renders the programme suitable for primetime international audiences by avoiding the moral hazards associated with depicting the flesh of a deceased human being, the arguments made in the diegetic situation are otherwise similar to those made by Barclay and Ellison for the repatriation of upoko tuhi and other cultural artefacts.
However, in The Man Who Lost His Head these vivid contemporary politics conducted on an international stage have been scaled down to a tiny community, isolated from the multi-cultural context of contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand. The politics have also been softened so that only one Maori character, Zac, carries the anger of the anti-colonial movement, although explicit criticisms of colonialism are voiced, in a humorous mode, by several characters. Rather, as with The Seekers, the film loads a number of ideological concerns onto a small group of representative British figures (the authoritarian, museum director, his venal untrustworthy sidekick, the fussy, frigid English fiancée) whose unlikeability is compensated for by the bumbling charm of the well-meaning museum curator, Ian Bennett. Trussed up in a suit, Bennett comes to the seaside community of Otakataka ostensibly to assess whether it has suitable facilities to house the head, should it be returned, but more importantly, comes to ‘re-discover’ himself: to relax by evading the strictures of British society, to re-connect with nature, to bring ‘progress’ to the local people and to find both love and true purpose in life. He does this by very similar means to Philip Wayne, although these means are refocused through a comic frame. He cultivates friendships with members of the tribe versed in knowledge of the past, has a relationship with a sensuous local woman, and finds himself on the wrong side of the law with regard to possession and location of the treasured head. Like Philip Wayne, Bennett becomes a modern version of the ‘Pakeha Maori’ and is accepted as a member of the indigenous community.
The action of returning the head to the community is the means by which Bennett’s rehabilitation is achieved. However, not only has the medium of embodiment – wood not flesh – changed, but the meanings associated with mokomokai have been upgraded to reflect the altered political connotations associated with upoko tuhi. They are no longer commercial objects in the negative sense they were previously, where Maori individuals were deliberately tattooed and killed to allow the purchase of the muskets with which Maori killed one another. Instead, this single head representing Chief Takataka is said to have been carved by him, voluntarily, and is thus aligned with the post-colonial re-framing of Maori as active agents in the pre-colonial period. Due to the intervening era in which they were isolated and displayed in museum contexts, upoko tuhi have been removed from trade circuits, but have remained in cycles of desire, regaining some of their previous meaning as beloved relics of deceased and admirable ancestors. As a result they can no longer be used in a simple way to assert European moral superiority because the initial act of exchange has been reframed as an act of unjustifiable sequestration by colonial powers: a situation that in The Man Who Lost His Head is acknowledged both explicitly and through the typification of the English characters who wish to keep the head as self-serving and hypocritical.
In The Man Who Lost His Head, the head itself also functions to achieve the social equilibrium comedy typically promotes, as well as illustrating the societal ‘mingling’ function that Henare attributes to objects, by means of initiating relationships between members of both ethnic groups. The relic of Takataka regains the power of agency, in a similar manner to the ancestral carvings in Te Rua, and directs people’s lives through its still-extant mauri, expressed in the visual clichés of the supernatural thriller by a throbbing glint in the eyes and by the inculcation of shared night visions in the English hero and Maori heroine.
Nevertheless, cognisant as it is of contemporary debates about cultural property, The Man Who Lost His Head cannot abandon using the appropriated artefact as justification for a slightly different form of colonisation. In contrast to the gravity of Ellison’s explanation of the motivations for repatriation, the spiritual appeal of being reunited with their chief is presented as only a minor aspect of the hapu‘s desire to see him again. Instead, a supernatural concept of his absence is adopted in the form of a curse that has hampered tribal achievement and prosperity. Self-regulated economic development and effective production are presented as pre-eminent community goals, goals which can be afforded when the head is finally returned, dropped, broken and found to be full of diamonds. This is an outcome inconsistent with the tropes typically associated with populist stories about Aotearoa/New Zealand, which, as outlined, the programme otherwise employs. It could be argued perhaps that the diamond-windfall represents some European-derived return for the value extracted from New Zealand in earlier times, but in narrative terms the moment short-circuits, to jarring effect, the storylines previously carefully elaborated. Contemporary Maori aspiration in this case is represented as significantly utilitarian and self-interested in function, rather than being focused on providing a state of re-immersion in his environment for the spirit of the exiled tipuna, or ancestor.
Rather, the film’s activation of spiritual tropes is linked repeatedly to the English character, Ian Bennett. He is the one who is moved by the beauty of the New Zealand landscape, and who learns to liberate the best aspects of his personality by encounters both with nature and with the warm-natured Lollie, a local woman who stands in contrast to his superficial, obsessive English fiancée. As the title makes obvious, Bennett loses his own excessive attachment to rationality and develops sensuality and emotional connectedness. He wins the trust of the Maori community, brings the chief’s head back and gains the right to remain in Aotearoa. His spiritual regeneration is doubly underscored both by his romantic relationship and by his functional assumption of Chief Takataka’s place in the community as the motivator of its future.
In this sense, The Man Who Lost His Head, while reprising elements of The Seekers, has commonalities with comic episodes in the revisionist, supernatural Maori-made television series Mataku[45] , which also makes political and spiritual points in a light and inoffensive manner. The contributions to the script of Haami and Raerino may be significant here since The Man Who Lost His Head shares with Mataku certain strategic responses to power inequalities in the contemporary New Zealand environment, namely the raising of difficult inter-cultural political issues by associating them with a magical object from the past, but then softening those political implications by playing the narrative out in terms of personalized, comedic, solutions.
Discussion
It is usually the case that directors and production teams make films because they wish to reach a large audience, and that desire is particularly pertinent to international productions made on location in New Zealand due to the expense and effort involved in travel. Part of the appeal to a large audience can be a sense that the topics depicted, and the way they are treated, bear relevance to the interests of contemporary audiences, while at the same time not alienating them with confrontational, personally challenging, content. The Man Who Lost His Head for instance, shows itself to be acquainted with, and respectful of, Maori calls for the recognition of their cultural sovereignty partially by means of its support for the repatriation of alienated artefacts. This is only one aspect however, of a narrative that otherwise mobilizes the more comforting characterizes of both the summer-holiday-in-an-exotic-place genre and the journey-of-personal-discovery thematic. That all of this, anchored by the attractive persona of actor Martin Clunes, is a popular recipe is evidenced by the fact that The Man Who Lost His Head was the most watched programme in Britain on the night it was first screened in 2007, attracting a 9-million person audience and still attracted an audience of 2.8 million when it was repeated on New Year’s Eve, 2008.[46] It has also been popular in New Zealand, having been repeated twice, including in the prestigious Christmas Eve slot in December, 2008.
Evidence of the popularity or otherwise of The Seekers, as an indicator of its fit with its times, is more difficult to obtain, but it was certainly screened in Britain and America as well as New Zealand. A series of contemporary reviews held by the New Zealand Film Archive show that it received a mixed critical response, with several reviewers unimpressed by its frequently overwrought tone[47] . However the reviews also show that for all reviewers the issue of whether the film was accurate in its portrayal of pre-colonial Maori society was a matter of concern, with the New Zealand reviewers, one of whom was the New Zealand Herald’s specialist in Maori affairs, being more convinced of both its good intentions and achievement in that respect.[48] The Seekers still exploits a nineteenth century formulation of the lurid and ghoulish appeal of the phenomenon of collecting preserved heads, but it does so within a changed ideological climate that, by the 1950s, recognized as valid, even as an ideal, Maori desire for their tribal cultures to be represented fairly, and if possible, accurately.[49]
By contrast the cultural politics of Te Rua are writ large in both the film’s narrative and its aesthetics. It is a more controversial and polemical film because it is made from a doubly ‘insider’ perspective, that is, inside New Zealand, and also from a Maori viewpoint on the issue of the return of alienated cultural property. Barclay’s film is an active participant in the move to change thinking and language on this issue: a process that would culminate for him in the book Mana Tuturu (Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights), published three years before his death in 2008.[50] However, even in this case, the bi-cultural ‘cycles of interdependence and desire’ are still operative, as the project began with the availability of some funding from a German state co-production fund that was interested in exploring connections between Germany and Maori[51] Part of Te Rua was shot in Berlin and it featured German actors in two pivotal roles (Maria Fitzi as Hanna and Günter Meisner as Professor Biederstedt). Barclay’s fierce championing of Maori rights, as embodied in his plan for the film, did not lead to an easy production climate however and there were difficulties with obtaining permissions to film at a museum in Germany and with the structuring of content in post-production in New Zealand.[52] As a result,Te Rua found it hard to connect with appreciative audiences and as late as 1997 Helen Martin was recording that it had still not been screened in Germany.[53]
In exploring the issue of the trade in artefacts of the dead, all three films make different choices from the repertoire of meanings available for discussing these material objects. In practice the trade in preserved heads was contested at the time on moral and sentimental grounds by some Maori and Europeans, but the ability to elevate critique of the trade to a meta-critique of colonisation was still not feasible in the 1954 treatment of this issue. By the time of Te Rua the debate was getting underway in earnest and we can see that the return of upoko tuhi in particular, was accepted as mainstream opinion by 2008, in the Clunes’ piece. However, despite these changes in the circulation of meanings round these material objects, their underlying function in the two mainstream texts, separated by half a century, is broadly similar in ideological terms. Both films, as a fundamental premise, insist on the right of Englishmen, identified specifically as incomers, to enter, and to stay in Aotearoa/New Zealand
In the earlier film the right to remain is both personal, through gaining the favour of a Maori leader who admires the stoicism of British Christianity in action, and collective: the British must continue to enter the country, even if individual members die, to persist in effecting its improvement. The more recent text, The Man Who Lost His Head extensively acknowledges, in a somewhat superficial manner, the authoritarianism of the colonial institution, but separates the individual from it. Ian Bennett as an individual Englishman, by means of standing in the place of the repatriated artefact, and by means of undertaking the transformative process of the contemporary mediated ‘spiritual journey’, can still be accepted into the Maori community, which is now however, coextensive with ‘ New Zealand’, rather than being a bizarre remnant of an outdated culture. Bennett makes far more personal changes in order to fit in than his predecessor Wayne, does: the previously ambivalent appeal of the Pacific way of life as sketched out in The Seekers has firmed up into a superior alternative to life in contemporary Britain. However, in the process, the aggregation of individuals and their effect as a colonising force still remains unexplored or is no longer perceived as an issue.
In these productions I have looked therefore, at what, within a film or media studies paradigm, might be considered props or aspects of mise-en-scène, but rather than dealing with them in passing, have foregrounded them as pointing to an articulation between transformations of understanding of the significance of objects in material culture and the increasingly self-conscious incorporation of these objects as elements in narrative construction. Moreover, the ideological connotations of the choice to highlight these objects relate especially to changing discourses about relationships between European incomers and tangata whenua in texts created in colonial and in post-colonial environments respectively. Insofar as my inquiry is grounded in screen studies it views representative strategies in media products as political in effect and there is a coincidence here with the framing of material culture studies where the senses, as our primary source of access to objects, can also be viewed as political in training. All these three films are good examples of how the representation of numinous objects – mokomokai, upoko tuhi and whakairo – can crystallize but also make diffuse, complex political situations, by layering together the metaphorical and physical properties of those objects in an appeal to the senses. As the visual culture theorist JTW Mitchell has asserted:
The senses are political. Politics involves issues of representation in two meanings of this word – the ability that each thing or person has to represent the interests of another person or thing, and the images that are created to evoke states of affairs which are absent or not entirely present. The politics deriving from the senses are especially obvious to all parties in colonial situations where different constructions of the world through the senses clash or mingle.[54]
With thanks to Kathy Dudding, Bronwyn Labrum, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Brian McDonnell for their help in providing research materials for this article and to the peer- referees for their useful comments.
Endnotes
[1] Amiria Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Material Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
[2] Ken Annakin, dir. The Seekers. Feature film. UK, Rank Organisation, 1954.
[3] Reference to prior screenings of The Seekers is made in the audiotape Audio Interview by Peter Limbrick, held at the New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington. Item number A1157. 12/9/08.
[4] —- The Man Who Lost His Head. Television movie, ITV1 with South Pacific Pictures. UK/NZ, 2007.
[5] See for instance Henare, 2005, Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden & Ruth B. Philips eds Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006, Conal McCarthy Exhibiting Maori: a history of colonial cultures of display NZ: Te Papa Press, 2007.
[6] McCarthy, 2007. pp. 13-21.
[7] This point is made variously in Henare, 2005; McCarthy 2007 and Dean Sully ed. Decolonising Conservation: caring for Maori Meeting Houses Outside New Zealand, Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, 2007.
[8] McCarthy, 2007, p. 20.
[9] Henare, 2005, p. 70.
[10] Martin Blythe, Naming the Other: Images of the Maori in New Zealand Film and Television. Metuchen N.J & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1994, p. 10.
[11] Henare, 2005, p. 71.
[12] Paul Moon, This Horrid Practice: the myth and reality of traditional Maori cannibalism. Rosedale NZ: Penguin Books, 2008.
[13] Horatio Gordon Robley, Moko or Maori tattooing. Southern Reprints (1987, first edition 1896). See also Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Mata Ora: Chiselling the Living Face, Dimensions of Maori Tattoo’. In Edwards et al. Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. Oxford & New York: Berg. 2006, pp. 121-140, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. ‘He Maimai Aroha: A Disgusting Traffic for Collectors: the colonial trade in preserved human heads in Aotearoa, New Zealand’. In A Kiendl ed. (2004) Obsession, Compulsion, Collection: on objects, display culture and interpretation. Banff, Canada: the Banff International Curatorial Institute. pp. 77-91 and Henare, 2005.
[14] Te Awekotuku, 2004.
[15] Barry Barclay, dir: Te Rua. Feature film NZ/Germany, 1991.
[16] James Drummond ed. John Rutherford, the White Chief: a story of Adventure in New Zealand. Wellington, Whitcomb and Tombs Ltd. 1908, p. 28.
[17] See for instance J.C Beaglehole ed. The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768-1771 2 vols. Sydney Public Library of New South Wales, 1962); John Rawson Elder ed. The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden 1765-1838; E.H McCormick ed. Augustus Earle: Narrative of a Residence in New Zealand, Journal of a Residence in Tristan de Cunha, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
[18] Te Awekotuku, 2004, p. 91.
[19] Information about the Mokomokai Education Trust from 2000 is still online. Retrieved from:http://www.digitalus.co.nz/mokomokai/trustheads.html.
[20] Te Awekotuku, 2004, p. 86.
[21] Henare, 2005, p. 25.
[22] Henare, 2005, p. 31.
[23] Henare, 2005, p. 35.
[24] Te Awekotuku, 2004, p. 78.
[25] McCarthy, 2007. Scully ed. 2007.
[26] Henare, 2005, p. 106.
[27] Te Awekotuku, 2004, p. 84.
[28] Green Dolphin Street. USA, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1947.
[29] Brian McDonnell. “All Virgin Soil and Don’t Belong to No-one”: Notes on the Representation of 19th Century New Zealand in Feature Films 1947-1954. The New Zealand Journal of Media Studies. Vol. 4, No 2, 1997.
[30] Robley, 1987, Henare, 2005, Te Awekotuku, 2006.
[31] See for instance The Adventures of Algy, NZ/Australia, 1925, Under The Southern Cross, U.K. 1927.
[32] Henare, 2005, p. 90.
[33] Stuart Murray, Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema. Wgtn.NZ: Huia Publishers, 2008.
[34] Barclay’s feature Ngati appeared in 1987, Mauri by Merata Mita the following year.
[35] Murray, 2008, p. 66.
[36] See the accounts of three wharenui traded or gifted to foreigners in the late 1800s in Sully ed 2007.
[37] A report on this conference is provided Cultural Conservation Advisory Council allied with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1991; See also McCarthy, 2007. p. 3.
[38] Te Awekotuku, 2006.
[39] International Symposium, Le Musée quai du Branly, Retrieved fromwww.quaibranly.fr/en/programmation/scientific-events/past-events/international-symposium-from-anatomic-collections-to-objects-of-worship/index.html. Feb 22, 2008 p. 8.
[40] Murray, 2008, p. 73.
[41] For a discussion of the involvement of Maori in the conservation of ancestral wharenui held in the United States and Europe see Sully, ed. 2007.
[42] Henare, 2005, p. 95.
[43] Details of Wallington’s credits as a writer can be found at:http://www.mbalit.co.uk/pages/writers/wallington.html.
[44] Diana Wichtel, ‘Carry on Clunes’. New Zealand Listener, August 25-31, 2007. Retrieved fromwww.listener.co.nz/issue/3511/features/9456/carry_on_clunes.html p. 2.
[45] —- Mataku. Television series. TV3, NZ, 2002-2005.
[46] Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/media 2009/jan02/tvratings.
[47] See for instance ‘World Premier of The Seekers. Auckland Star. n.d. Review held by NZ Film Archive, Wellington.
[48] — ‘Real attempt to Show the Maori as He Was’. New Zealand Herald. n.d. Attributed to “a Herald staff reporter specialising in Maori Affairs”. Review held by NZ Film Archive, Wellington.
[49] In this regard Brian McDonnell notes that the Maori language spoken in The Seekers was sometimes left untranslated and that the casting of the Maori performer Inia Te Wiata as Hongi Tepe was a sign of good faith, in contrast for instance, to the much-criticized casting of Indonesian dancer Laya Raki, as his wife, Moana. McDonnell 1997.
[50] Barry Barclay. Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights. Auckland NZ, Auckland University Press, 2005.
[51] Helen Martin. Te Rua. In Helen Martin and Sam Edwards eds. New Zealand Film 1912-1996. Oxford University Press, p. 154.
[52] Murray, 2008, p. 73 & p. 76.
[53] Martin, 1997, p. 154.
[54] cited in Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden & Ruth B. Philips eds Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006, p. 24.
Created on: Sunday, 29 March 2009