Category Archive for: ‘Issue 31 – Dossier: U-Matic to Youtube’

“Working in Communities, Connecting with Culture”: Reflecting on U-matic to YouTube A National Symposium Celebrating Three Decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking

In June 2010, the Film and Television Studies program at Monash University and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) co-hosted a national symposium celebrating three decades of Australian Indigenous community filmmaking. [1] The occasion for this event was the DVD release of the internationally acclaimed Indigenous community film Two Laws (1981), produced thirty years earlier by the Borroloola …

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“These Are The Choices We Make”: Animating Saltwater Country

Associate Professor John Bradley is Director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He has been actively involved in issues associated with Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management for 30 years. The majority of this research has been undertaken in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory with particular emphasis on the marine and island environments …

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Two Laws: A Filmmaking Journey

Alessandro Cavadini was born in Italy and educated at Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano. He worked in design, theatre and film and continued in these fields in Paris and then in Australia. In addition to his own films with Reddirt Films, which he produced, directed, shot, and edited, he has worked in various capacities in 15 other projects in Paris, …

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Was Two Laws Experimental?

Asking this question of a film that was shot in 1980 in the remote Australian Aboriginal community of Borroloola is part of a broader set of questions about technique and form (politics and aesthetics) for arts practitioners. What is an experiment for the arts, as opposed to the sciences? Is it a process of composing a piece (of writing, film, …

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Aeroplane Dance: Whose Story?

In the early 1990s, Trevor Graham with the Yanyuwa people at Borraloola created a film called Aeroplane Dance (1994) (known by Yanyuwa speakers as Ka-Wayawayama). It begins with the line that this is “the story of one American Bomber who created a legend” – amplified by the first end credit stating that it is based upon the official report of …

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Models of Collaboration in the Making of Ten Canoes (2006)

Film is an inherently collaborative art form produced by the skills and decisions of (among others) the director, co-director, producers, photographer and cast. According to the norms both of the commercial narrative film industry and ethnographic practice, a vertical hierarchy privileges the authority, control and decision-making of the director. Alternatively, collaboration can operate as a collective process that distributes authority, …

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Darlene Johnson on Making Films in Arnhem Land

Interview by Therese Davis Darlene Johnson is from the Dunghutti tribe of the East coast of New South Wales and currently resides in Sydney. Her first short drama, Two-Bob Mermaid (1996), won the Australian Film Critics Circle Award for Best Australian Short Film. It was nominated at the Venice Film Festival for the Baby Lion Award. It won the Best …

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Victorian Indigenous Communities and Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling, as a specifically developed and trademarked technique, is one of the ways in which Indigenous communities in Victoria have greatly increased access to the tools of media-making and new media forms in digital culture to tell their stories. In contrast to industrial models of media production, Digital Storytelling is a social, “grassroots” film practice, first developed in the …

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The Farm (2009) and Indigenous Remembrance

The Farm is a story about a place that my family simply calls “the farm”, but is specifically Tally Ho farm, near Bodalla in NSW. I recently “Googled” Bodalla and found a sparse, almost blank map, which I thought was rather appropriate: a lack of detail, a lack of representation of Indigenous peoples, and a lack of filmic representation. To …

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Story, Film Style and Cross-cultural Collaboration in Aeroplane Dance (1994)

In 1997, Graham ventured into writing and directing new media. From 1997 to 2000 he co-wrote and directed the encyclopedic documentary (CD-ROM and website) Mabo – The Native Title Revolution, which was nominated for a British Academy Award (BAFTA) in 2001. In 2002 and 2003 he worked in Yirrikala in Arnhem Land where he directed the documentary Lonely Boy Richard …

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