In conjunction with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum exhibition, “Icons of the Desert: Australian Aboriginal Painting from Papunya,” which opened on January 10, Cornell Cinema is pleased to present the film series Visions of Aboriginal Australia. “Icons of the Desert” is the first exhibition to focus on the founding expressions of Papunya art or “dot-painting,” a movement that began at the settlement of Papunya near Alice Springs in the central desert region of the country in the early ‘70s, a style that has become a visual language adapted by different Aboriginal peoples around the country.
Professor Roger Benjamin, the exhibition’s guest curator, will lecture about the exhibition on Thursday, February 12 in advance of the official opening on Friday, February 13, and a symposium that will take place on Saturday, February 14. For more information visit www.museum.cornell.edu
The film series includes two films by internationally acclaimed Australian director Rolf de Heer, both featuring Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, who made his first screen appearance in Nicolas Roeg’s exquisite Walkabout (1970).
The Tracker (2002) is primarily a fable about the racial history of Australia in which “the Fanatic,” a government trooper, leads two white men, “the Follower,” an unseasoned trooper, and “the Veteran,” an experienced fighter. On horseback they follow an Aboriginal, “the Tracker” (David Gulpilil), searching for traces of “the Fugitive,” an Aboriginal accused of murdering a white woman. Massacre and murder follow. Clear-cut notions of truth and justice are subverted and the question becomes not one of will “the Fugitive” be caught, but what is black and what is white and who is leading whom? “The film's mythic point of view is evocatively underlined by the substitution of illustrations for live action whenever violence erupts. These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad [de Heer commissioned Coad to paint 14 landscape and figurative works for inclusion in the film] create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.” (Stephen Holden, NY Times) The paintings can be viewed at www.petercoadart.com.au
Ten Canoes (2006) is also unique in that it is the first feature film to be shot entirely in Aboriginal language (predominantly Ganalbingu). Set in the distant past, tribal times, Dayindi (played by Jamie Gulpilil, son of David Gulpilil) covets one of the wives of his older brother. To teach him the proper way, he is told a story from the mythical past, a story of wrong love, kidnapping, sorcery, bungling mayhem and revenge gone wrong. A tragic-comedy shot on and around the Arafura Swamp in north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia, the entire cast are people indigenous to the swamp region, who were responsible for the making of all the traditional artifacts needed for the film, such as the swamp-specific bark canoes, the spears and other weaponry and the dwellings. The film, shot in Cinemascope, is unlike any you have ever seen.
The series concludes with Benny and the Dreamers (1993), which revealed for the first time on film the Australian Aboriginal peoples' version of their first contact with white culture, an event which changed their traditional way of life forever. It was shot in the Papunya area and includes rare archival footage. It will be shown with the documentary Mick and the Moon (1978), made by Geoff Bardon, the Sydney school teacher who arrived in Papunya in 1971 and encouraged the Aboriginal tribesmen to transfer the dot-painting designs of desert ceremonial imagery to small masonite boards for the first time. “Icons of the Desert” will feature a number of these early Papunya boards. Professor Fred Myers of NYU, author of Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Duke University Press, 2002), who did his doctoral research at Papunya from 1973–75, will introduce the program, and be joined by Bobby West, whose father appears in Benny and the Dreamers.
The film series is cosponsored with the Johnson Museum of Art.
image: detail of Mystery Sand Mosaic, 1974, by Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi