Les McLaren & Annie Stiven
Taking Pictures
Distributed by Ronin Films, 1996.
http://www.datatrax.com.au/roninfilms/

Uploaded 29 May 1998

Taking Pictures is a history of documentary filmmaking between 1969 and 1992 by non-Papua New Guinea (PNG) nationals. Inter-cut with original footage from 19 films made during this period are interviews with the filmmakers in which they remember what they were trying to do at the time of production. It is a broadcast format film (55mins) sponsored by the Australian Government filmmaking bodies and a television broadcaster (SBS).

It is a revision. Like any history, it is a story based on a patchwork of fact and fiction, record and memory. Most of all, Taking Pictures is poetic reflection by the filmmakers: Les McLaren, Annie Stiven, Gary Kildea, Dennis O’Rourke, Chris Owen, Bob Connolly, Robin Anderson, Steve McMillan and Ian Dunlop. Neatly embedded in Taking Pictures are two other interviews with local filmmakers Kumain Kolain and Martin Maden, wedged in to represent the new order; to represent the disjunction between the past and the present. What I am interested in here, is reviewing how successful McLaren and Stiven were in trying to visually represent the displacement of non-national filmmakers by nationals in post-independence PNG.

McLaren and Stiven set out to reveal something of the problem of speaking for others that arose in filmmaking in the 1970s. Prior to 1975, PNG had been a mandated territory of Australia. PNG was in reality a colony of Australia, assuming the governmental apparatus of a country that was itself a former colony. Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, many countries across the globe threw off the yoke of their colonial administrators (Bangladesh, Vanuatu, Benin, Algeria, Mali, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Belize etc.) and erupted into the milleu of what was fast becoming a post-colonial world. With the emergence of PNG as a post-colonial nation in 1975, the year of its independence, came a growing desire for nationals to control their own representation in media; something that was formerly the province of the Australian government image makers. Through interviews with the filmmakers of this post-independence period, Taking Pictures tries to address the problems surrounding the calls for self-representation. What these filmmakers experienced was a growing disjunction between what they thought they knew to be their jobs, making documentary films, and the locals‚ need for self-representation. Taking Pictures is an exegesis of this disjunction through a revelatory process of the discussion of pro-filmic events.

The films discussed in Taking Pictures are played out in a roughly chronological order so that the viewer can detect a change in filmmaking praxis over time. The earlier films such as Kama Wosi (McLaren and McMillan), Trobriand Cricket (Kildea) and Towards Baruya Manhood (Dunlop) are situated as idealistic representations of cultures undergoing dramatic change as the world waits on their doorstep. In the guise of the authoritative ethnographic eye, these films and the later The Red Bowmen (Owen and McLaren) Shark Callers of Kontu (O’Rourke), Man Without Pigs (Owen) portray localised people and places in PNG as isolated units of meaning˜micro studies of socio-cultural activity. Made in parallel with these were the more interactive and interpretive films such as Yumi yet (O’Rourke) and Ileksen (O’Rourke and Kildea), which focussed on the social upheavel aroused by independence. AsTaking Pictures develops chronologically, the viewer recognises a change in praxis in the work of O’Rourke in his “Cannibal Tours” and Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson in their trilogy First Contact, Joe Leahy’s Neighbours and Black Harvest. Towards the end of the 1980s, change is detected in the move away from authoritative accounts towards more reflexive filmic discussions about the presence of outsiders in PNG and the repercussions of its colonial past. In McLaren and Stiven’s Cowboy and Maria in Town too, we see a film about urban issues, something that had previously gone unrepresented in the work of the non-national filmmakers.

McLaren and Stiven inform the viewer of the representational disjunction through the juxtaposition of two interviews with local filmmakers and excerpts from their films. The first national is Martin Maden who was trained at the Skul Bilong Wokim Piksa, PNG’s national film school established in 1980. Maden had the opportunity of attending an Ateliers Varan direct cinema workshop in Paris in the mid 1980s with two other nationals, Pengau Nenga and Bike Johnston. During this workshop the three men made Stolat, a film about trying to make a film in Paris when you don’t speak French and you don’t know anybody. I am unsure why McLaren and Stiven include so much about Stolat in Taking Pictures because it is about the three men’s experience in Paris but it could have two purposes: to represent the irony of foreigners making films in the country of others or to sign-post the fact that Maden and his colleagues are sophisticated trans-national filmmakers highly skilled in the production of documentary cinema. In any case, the inclusion of the Maden interview and sections of Stolat serve to provide a rupture in the narrative of Taking Pictures – nationals were taking control of their ability to represent themselves.

The other interview with a national is with Kumain Kolain, a Baruya man who featured in Dunlop’s Towards Baruya Manhood as a boy and who was later invited to France by the anthropologist Maurice Godelier to learn filmmaking. Again, McLaren and Stiven include excerpts from one of Kolain’s films Sinmia, which was shot on Super 8 and is of a Baruya ceremony. The interesting aspect arising out of this juxtaposition is the motivatory imperative employed by Kolain to justify his filmmking. Kolain states in Taking Pictures that nationals must document all aspects of their culture and put it in a government library before it is lost to change. This is the same imperative that Dunlop and some of the other filmmakers used to justify their filmmaking of ceremonies and other aspects of material culture (carving etc.). There is a growing body of literature on the problems associated with the salvage paradigm of cultural collection (see Clifford 1988) and how it disregards the notion of cultural change and continuity. What is important in the context of Taking Pictures however is that the difference between Kolain and Maden tells the audience that nationals may want to make different films to those formerly made by the non-nationals, but they also want to make the same films for the same reasons.

Taking Pictures is successful in its communication of the disjunction brought about by post-colonialism in documentary filmmaking. Similar films could possibly be made in North Africa and South America and could definitely be made in Australia. It suffers the problems associated with making broadcast documentary by not delving deeply enough into the complex theoretical side of this predicament but it still maintains a logical integrity regardless of this.

It seems this film was motivated by much the same angst that affected anthropologists in the late 1970s and 1980s when they found that the people they represented often did not appreciate what they were doing. On one level this film acts as a mea culpa for its participants, the independent and government sponsored filmmakers who operated in PNG during the 1970s and 1980s. On another level though, this film acts as a palimpsest, wiping clean the slate in order that another generation of filmmakers may engage in the representation of PNG and its people. It is a call for optimism in a world where representing people other than the self requires more than just Taking Pictures.

Works cited:

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Harvard university Press: Cambridge, 1988.

Ian Bryson,
University of Technology, Sydney