Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy

Director Tracey Moffat

NIGHT CRIES: A RURAL TRAGEDY         B+                                                                       Australia (17 mi) 1990 d: Tracey Moffat

Look at that sunset, Howard!  It’s like the daytime didn't want to end, isn’t it?  It’s like the daytime was gonna put up a big scrap, set the world on fire to keep the night from creeping on.                    —Rosemary Sidney (Rosalind Russell) from Joshua Logan’s PICNIC (1955)

Among the more culturally impactive and critically acclaimed short experimental films, this one, at only seventeen minutes, seethes with an underlying power that reaches out of the frame and literally grabs viewers by the throat, displaying a rare visual assurance and raw, unadulterated drama, likely leaving viewers surprised, yet blown away by the experience.  Feminist assertions run into difficulty when confronted with an Aboriginal filmmaker, adding layers of underlying complexity that might not otherwise be encountered, such as Australia’s history of forced adoption, making this intense mother and daughter experience especially difficult, yet the filmmaker, first and foremost, demands to be viewed through an artist’s lens.  Tracey Moffat may be Australia’s most successful artist, one of the few to have established a global market for her work as a photographer, filmmaker, installation artist and music video director, holding around 100 solo exhibitions of her work in Europe, the United States, and Australia, while at least two of her films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, with this film premiering in the Best Short Film category at Cannes in 1990.  Moffatt has the experience of growing up “between cultures,” born to an Aboriginal mother and a white Irish father, she was adopted by a white working-class family and raised in the Brisbane suburbs, where her birth mother would come visit, reminding her of her Aboriginal identity, yet her life was surrounded by the prevailing European culture, becoming fascinated with Hollywood movies, where among her earliest influences were the black-and-white, everyday photographs appearing in Life magazine in the 1960’s, basically documents of American culture imprinted in snapshots.  Studying film and video at the Queensland College of Art, she’s become an internationally renowned photographer, where her subject matter mirrors her own life, feeding upon themes of childhood memory and adolescent alienation.  While addressing issues of identity and survival through an Indigenous Australian viewpoint, often resorting to a dreamlike imagery, where memory becomes imprinted with trauma and pain, she is reluctant to be thought of as an Indigenous artist, believing she is expressing universal themes of despair, anger and frustration, and ultimately grief.  While she may view the world around her in a photographic sense, it’s perhaps essential to incorporate a more historical view, as the Australian colonial history towards Aboriginals has been abysmal and pathetic, much like the United States policy of segregating natives to “out of the way” reservations or reserves, yet the Australians went further, mandating a curfew from sunset to sunrise in the reserves, while also implementing a government and church policy of assimilation that mandated the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families from 1910 to 1970 (The Stolen Generations - Australians Together), with hopes of “civilizing” them, considered wards of the State, sent to re-education camps where they were raised as Christian whites, forbidden from speaking their native language, with their Native dress, customs, and history purged from their collective memories, not to mention their families, punished severely for non-compliance, with the sole purpose of training them to work in white society, a racist policy literally wrought with the most vile primeval instincts of the human condition.  While there have been a multitude of films depicting the horrors of this ethnic cleaning, including Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002), or Warwick Thornton’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country (2017), none have portrayed the trauma quite like this film, which veers into the abstract and avant-garde.   

The first thing that stands out is the degree of artifice, using a hyper-saturated color scheme that places this outside all boundaries of reality, living instead in a world of dreams or myth, set in the vast emptiness of a surreal desert landscape, revealing a troubled relationship that is immediately at odds with each other, an elderly white woman in a wheelchair requiring full-time care and an Aboriginal caretaker who is none too pleased with her role, where the only real action to speak of is wheeling her to the outdoor outhouse to do her business, waiting impatiently, having a smoke, occasionally drenching herself in water from the oppressive heat, dreaming of faraway places, reading a brochure about South Molle Island, where once sacred Aboriginal land has become a tourist resort destination.  This uneasy relationship of co-dependency is at the heart of the film, with photographs on the mantelpiece suggesting this is her adoptive mother, with recurring black and white flashbacks that establish a longstanding relationship, yet what’s most provocative is the aural sound design, including recorded sounds of screaming during a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, forcing viewers to contend with an internalized trauma that largely goes unspoken and unrecognized.  Drawing from a couple of Australian cultural landmarks, the film pays reference to the Charles Chauvel film JEDDA (1955), released in the UK as JEDDA, THE UNCIVILISED, notable for being the first to star two Aboriginal actors in the leading roles, while also the first Australian feature to be shot in color.  Made during a time when it was Australian law to remove Aboriginal children from their homes and place them in white foster families, the film follows the travails of Jedda, an Aboriginal child whose mother died in childbirth while delivering her, raised by a white woman in a white world with no regard for her real ancestry, setting the stage for a tragic intersection of colliding cultures.  Moffat’s poetic work challenges the underlying premise of Chauvel’s film suggesting Aboriginals are primitive, seen wrestling with crocodiles, living in a world that resembles the jungles of King Kong (1933).  The second influence is Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira (Albert Namatjira - Artists Profile - Cooee Art), whose work saturates the coloring and the light of the film (more can be found here:  The Heritage of Namatjira: The watercolourists of Central ...), an assimilated artist who was himself separated from his family at the age of 13 and sent to live in Hermannsburg Mission run by white Lutheran missionaries, becoming the first prominent Aboriginal artist to work in a western idiom.  His western-influenced watercolors of the outback bore a significant difference from the abstract symbols and designs of traditional Aboriginal art, yet his own tragic life reflected the harsh realities of racism, a celebrity selling out exhibitions in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney during the late 1930’s, becoming the most popular Australian painter of his time, perhaps even in Australian history, earning a sizeable income, but as an Aboriginal he was not allowed to buy property or own a home, so he ended up living in poverty, becoming a subject of public outrage.  Australia eventually passed a law granting him full citizenship in 1957, which allowed him to vote, own land, build a house, and even buy alcohol, which was his ultimate undoing, as while he was allowed to drink, other Aboriginals were not, eventually arrested and charged with supplying alcohol to an Aboriginal person.  This conflict of Aboriginal custom, where everything was expected to be shared, and Australian law, which restricted alcohol solely to one individual, led to his imprisonment, released after a few months for humanitarian reasons, but he died a premature death shortly afterwards at the age of 57.  The irony is not lost that it was his citizenship, issued a full decade before citizenship was granted to the rest of the Indigenous population from the 1967 referendum, that prevented him from living long enough to reap the benefits, as up until 1967, Aboriginals in Australia were not viewed by the government as human and were not even counted in the nationwide Census.    

The film has an unusual opening, featuring Aboriginal singer Jimmy Little dressed in a suit and vest singing a mainstream song about how God will answer our “phone” prayers, a hit record that topped the charts in Australia, Jimmy Little - Royal Telephone [Bandstand 1963] - YouTube (3:02), a song of faith that recognizes the influence of Christianity on Indigenous families.  Little and Namatjira were extremely popular figures that helped change the way Australians perceived Aboriginal people, where it is no accident that Moffat chose two assimilated Indigenous artists to be placed in such prominent positions in her film.  Much like the photogenic sensibility of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) released the following year, both artists understand the deeply affecting quality of photography, where every frame of the film is imbued with the compositional qualities of a still life.  For them, filmmaking is that profound intersection between sound, image, art, history, and personal experience, literally merging them into a unique artform.  Moffat’s choice to present the film in a stagy, theatrical manner is intentional, as the cliché’d Australian film has an obsession with photographing real landscapes, instead exploring themes of being trapped and oppressed by one’s personal experiences, revealing the difficulties involved in transcending these cultural limitations.  The caretaker in the film is played by Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, who is a stand-in for the director, as the film embodies her own cultural separation issues.  A commentary on aging and loss, the contrast between the two individuals is stark, an old, withered white woman (Agnes Hardwick) on the verge of dying, who is toothless and may already be blind, wearing a prosthetic hand, viewed as totally helpless, and her daughter, who clearly doesn’t want to be there, but she is performing her obligatory family duties, reflecting back at earlier times together, where a sullen Aboriginal child is being scrubbed by a white woman and placed in a typical middle class party dress, offering no further comment, allowing the images to speak for themselves, where the singlemost aspect of the experience is unrelenting trauma and pain, which is never explained, yet is inherently revealing, exposing the difficulties of coping with the situation, at first tenderly, but growing more aggressive, offering small hope of any spiritual redemption.  Little is seen again near the end of the film, but his voice is muted, representative of the silence of Indigenous history, while the song is also representative of cultural assimilation, as he’s dressed as a white man, singing words more reflective of white culture, where assimilation is seen as a means for survival, creating a psychological fracture or divide, expressed through a curious montage of audio and visual disorientation, at times resorting to radical choices, where earlier images have been disassembled, as if waiting to be reconstructed and remembered anew, where each frame in the film is haunted by sound.  Other than Little singing the song, there is no dialogue in the film, accentuating the importance of the surreal sound design, moving from the emotional extremes of loving and hating, such as the gleeful hysteria generated from the sound of a whip (contrasted against her mother sleeping, jumping convulsively with each crack of the whip), then moving quickly to the quiet tenderness of washing the old woman’s feet, both quietly humming “Onward Christian Soldiers,” a song associated with missionaries.  The emptiness of the exterior landscape couldn’t be more pronounced, suggesting the emotional disconnect between mother and daughter, where another flashback sequence reveals a startled child at the beach momentarily losing track of her mother, suddenly finding herself all alone, becoming frightened and distraught, sobbing in pain, where Little’s soothing song is shown to be little more than an illusion.  This situation repeats itself at the end, with the daughter lying in a fetal position on the floor reduced to infantile cries of a baby, where a lost emotional connection speaks volumes, leaving one paralyzed in fear.  

Patty Mills Opens Up About Racism and Social Injustice  NBA basketball player describes the effects of racism and growing up black in Australia, August 2020, YouTube (30:13)

Sweet Country

Director Warwick Thornton

SWEET COUNTRY              B+                  

Australia  (113 mi)  2017  ‘Scope  d:  Warwick Thornton

Special Jury Prize winner at Venice where it premiered, Aboriginal writer/director and cinematographer Warwick Thornton of 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 Samson and Delilah takes us into the Australian Outback at a time when whites were grabbing up all the Aboriginal lands.  Revealing some of the ugly truths about the nation’s colonial past, the film is told from an Indigenous perspective, where according to the director, “A lot of our history was written by colonizers who wanted to write these stories about themselves to put themselves in a favorable light.  A lot of it is a lie.  Now we're starting to write down our history with our version of events.”  Set in central Australia in 1929 (though it feels timeless and could easily have been 100 years earlier), the film is shot near Alice Springs and the MacDonnell Ranges, the birthplace of the director, where the vast and spectacular lands are an outstanding example of an ancient landscape untouched by man, barren and empty, with picturesque gorges sculptured by the elements over time.  In something of an assault to the senses exposing a more primitive, raw edge even before the film begins, viewers hear a jarring sound design filled with racial insults and threats that remain off-camera, yet this unorthodox technique prepares viewers for what follows.  In a film where no one person is essentially a lead character, where all contribute to the whole, the only certainty is the hardship of the land, where Sam Neill plays Fred, a preacher who works as a local farmer, who believes all are equal under the eyes of God, and has an Indigenous couple working for him, Sam (Hamilton Morris) and Lizzie (Natassia Gorey Furber), treated fairly, sharing meals and dinner prayers together.  Their lives are interrupted by the presence of a neighbor, Harry March (Ewen Leslie), an ex-soldier still haunted by visions of the war (WWI), deftly shown through flashback sequences, drinking himself into a stupor every night trying to forget, yet he asks for help digging fence posts on his land, borrowing Sam and Lizzie for a couple days while Fred goes on a temporary excursion out of town.  Closer details, however, show a merciless treatment by the new settlers towards blacks, dispossessed, thrown off their land, living in slave-like conditions where they are treated as property for the exclusive use of whites, overworked, usually working for free, treated like livestock, and forced to sleep with the horses.      

Shot in just 22 days, the film has an expansive feel about it, covering a lot of ground, using an expressionist style of photography along with a naturalistic sound design that allows viewers to feel they are right there, given a front row seat, watching history unfold.  Interjected into the story is a somewhat rebellious half-breed Aboriginal youth, Philomac (played by twin brothers, Tremayne and Trevon Doolan), who seems to straddle both worlds, rarely speaking, stealing regularly, however, often getting himself into trouble, but somehow always slithers out of it.  His developing conscience is at the center of the picture, as he’s a work in progress, much like the nation as a whole at that stage.  Philomac lives with his father, the principal white landowner of the region, Mick Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright), subjecting him to all manner of abuse, yet also treating him like a favored son.  The contempt shown to the Indigenous population is on full display throughout this film, as it typifies how whites view them.  This is most clearly expressed by Harry March, however, in particular during one of the most disturbingly graphic scenes, as one by one he casually closes the shutters of his home on Lizzie, literally locking her inside and making her a prisoner, creating a feeling of dread and slow suffocation until it’s pitch black, using only sound to express the horrors of sexual assault.  Threats to Lizzie suggest March will skin her husband alive if she utters a word about it.  In the aftermath, he kicks them out, as if that was the sole reason to ask for help in the first place, though he really had his eye on a much younger teenage niece that was alertly sent away beforehand.  In conversations with Sam, he could tell the man was touched in the head and not acting right.  But when Philomac arrives on his property, March zealously chains him to a rock, but he’s clever enough to escape anyway, making his way across the desert back to Fred’s ranch, hiding in a nearby structure as he hears March approaching on horseback, drunkenly bellowing for Sam to let him in, knowing Philomac is in there (he isn’t), shooting out the windows and kicking in the door before Sam shoots him dead.  Shooting a white man is about the worst offense possible, as any Indigenous person is presumed guilty by white society, living outside any democratic process, as they were not citizens at the time and had no right to vote.  Most weren’t even paid in wages, but forced to receive alcohol or tobacco instead.  In Australia, Aboriginals weren’t even recognized as “people” until a Constitutional referendum in 1967 included them in the census for allocation of federal seats in Parliament (Australian referendum, 1967 (Aboriginals) - Wikipedia).  Knowing the laws weren’t meant to protect them, Sam and Lizzie set out into the Outback, where a posse led by Sergeant Fletcher, Bryan Brown from BREAKER MORANT (1980), sets out after him. 

With a nod to Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002), Fletcher’s rage knows no bounds, developing a manic obsession to track him down, where his feverish anger drives him into the heart of tribal lands, where unforeseen consequences are all around him, including deadly scorpions, tribal attacks, and a mutiny in their midst, suddenly finding himself all alone.  Singlehandedly entering a desolate stretch of white desert (shot in the dry salt flats of Lake Gairdner), a lone speck under an oppressive sun, lost in a sea of emptiness, pushed onwards by madness and delusion, recalling the brilliant desert scene in Stroheim’s Greed (1924), where sheer arrogance plunges him further into the depths of his own doom, eerily shot by Thornton (co-shot with his son Dylan River), mixing close-ups with extreme wide shots, resorting to stark imagery and surreal hallucinations, creating an insurmountable confusion, yet somehow he manages to survive, though still filled with sadistic contempt for the man who got away.  In a strange reversal of perspective, we see Sam and Lizzie actually tracking Fletcher, planting footprints for him to follow, luring him into a death trap, always remaining just out of range, but the hardship becomes too much for Lizzie who announces she’s pregnant.  This has a profound effect on the outcome, as the presumed outlaws suddenly turn themselves in, seen sitting in the middle of the street one morning before Sam is locked up and threatened with a hanging.  The town itself is dangerously unbalanced, with white men largely outnumbering the women, mostly due to land opportunities driven by the cattle industry.  When a judge arrives (Matt Day), there’s no church or courthouse, so seats are set up on the middle of Main Street, with a table for the judge.  Bringing civilized decorum to an unruly town that’s never had to follow rules, Thornton uses an interesting device to illuminate the moral hypocrisy of the town’s lynch-mob mindset, all gathered together in the center of the street to watch a movie, of all things, in this case The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the first full-length narrative feature film, an Australian outlaw epic with sympathies clearly leaning towards the escaped outlaw (gunned down in a police shoot-out 26 years before the release of the film), painting police as comical hooligans, a film that was so successful with the public that a law was introduced (fearing civil disobedience) banning “bushranger” productions, or films about escaped convicts, which remained in effect until the 1940’s.  As much as the town loves and identifies with Ned Kelly, something of an Australian folk hero, they fiercely condemn Sam Kelly (yes, given the same last name) with a pathological bloodlust.  It should be pointed out that at Coniston Station in 1928 (Coniston :: The Coniston Massacre), just 400 kilometers from Alice Springs, more than 100 Aboriginal men, women, and children were slaughtered by murderous shooting parties that went on a two-month shooting binge in retaliation for the death of a local white man who took liberties with a married Indigenous woman, murdered by her husband, with a court inquiry declaring “the killing of all blacks to be justified” afterwards, the last legally sanctioned massacre against Aborigines, where an Indigenous population that was estimated to be about 500,000 in the late 18th century had shrunk to just 31,000 by 1911.  With subtle character development, using dialogue sparingly, and both flashbacks and flash-forwards in presenting a strangely compelling narrative, along with non-professional Aboriginal actors, the director’s use of various desert landscapes is simply stunning, creating a poetic exploration of racism and colonial exploitation. 

Goldstone

Director Ivan Sen on the set with actress Jacki Weaver

GOLDSTONE            B+                  

Australia  (110 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Ivan Sen                      official site

Like the Tony Hillerman detective stories taking place on the Navajo Indian Reservation that show insight into what it means to be an Indian in the 21st century, several filmed by Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne-Arapaho Native American, including SKINWALKERS (2002) and A THIEF OF TIME (2004), with more than a few similarities to Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017), this film offers an Indigenous perspective in the remote Australian outback, creating a clash of racial and cultural interests, featuring an oppressive film noir atmosphere that literally reeks with malice.  In a follow-up to his hugely successful earlier film MYSTERY ROAD (2013), Aaron Pederson returns as Indigenous detective Jay Swan who enters the murky waters of a land that has been compromised for well over a century, evidenced by sepia-toned archival photographs that open the film, which resemble similar American photographs of the first railroads being built across an open frontier, which included a mysterious Chinese presence that has all but been excluded from the history books.  Despite getting himself tossed into the pokey for swirling on the road and driving drunk, Swan’s introduction to local white cop Josh Waters (Alex Russell) is a contentious one, searching for a missing Chinese migrant girl, continually warned that he doesn’t belong there and that he should turn back around and head home.  Literally every single white person he meets offers this exact same advice, all of which suggest a small cabal of nefarious criminals and thieves.  With much of the land fenced and declared off-limits, containing extensive mining deposits, where dynamite blasts are a regular occurrence, Swan’s rented trailer out in the middle of nowhere is shot up by a greeting biker gang party that officially sends the message that he’s not wanted around there.  To his credit, Swan is not deterred, a man of few words, in the Eastwood mode, with Josh helping him relocate to an even more isolated cabin.  Viewers know things will get more interesting once vehicles start taking the dirt roads, which are offshoots of the more traveled paved roads, which stretch for miles in a straight line, obstructed by absolutely nothing along the way.  Sen, an Indigenous director who also writes, shoots, and edits his films, while also writing the music, likes to use aerial shots that reveal the extent of the emptiness in the vast landscapes that lead to nowhere, where the clearly visible geometric straight lines of the roads imposed by the whites is a sign of cultural oppression, as it expresses an artificial structure imposed on nature.   

Swan is officially introduced to several town notables, including Johnny (David Wenham), the Furnace Creek Mine boss, who is attempting to buy, or more likely steal, huge parcels of Aboriginal land for an unspecified development project, Tommy (Tommy Lewis), the corrupt head of the Aboriginal Land Council, and then, of course, there’s that lethal smile from the town mayor, Maureen (Jacki Weaver), easily the most diabolical character in the film, all of whom make nice little speeches about how they like the way things are in these parts and they don’t need any outsiders stirring up the pot.  Swan has apparently heard and seen all this before, recognizing signs of government authorities trampling on the rights of Indigenous people, yet he’s a world weary character with a mind of his own, which includes wandering into the restricted areas where he sees a transport plane bringing a handful of Asian girls to the vicinity, signs of sex trafficking, but as Josh quickly reminds him, he has no proof.  Nonetheless, viewers see the girl’s passports taken away, as each one is paying off a family debt, essentially becoming prostitutes for the mining workers, where they are treated much like they have been for the past hundred years.  There are quirky developments that make this film interesting, as there’s a woman in a pink trailer with a neon sign that advertises Pinky’s, where she’s basically a woman for hire, but shows a cunning spirit that suggests an entrepreneurial mindset, as she’s pretty much left to operate on her own with no hassles from the police.  This little detour doesn’t get Swan any closer to his missing person, but it does offer a glimpse into Swan’s distressing past and gives him a lay of the landscape, as everybody in this town is paid off and gets a cut of the action, which allows them free access to do as they please.  Another detour leads him to Jimmy, David Gulpilil from Walkabout (1971), RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), and THE TRACKER (2002), now affectionately described as the “old man,” an Aboriginal elder, a keeper of the spirits, who actually knew Swan’s father, as he was part of the “Stolen Generation,” where as many as 100,000 Aboriginal kids were abducted from their families and raised as whites.  Jimmy takes him on an exploration of a sacred site, a spectacularly tranquil creek that wanders through a breathtakingly beautiful rock formation that contains Aboriginal rock paintings, suggesting a timelessness, literally worlds apart from the corruption and utter desolation surrounding it.  It’s Jimmy’s daughter Maria (Ursula Yovich) who reminds Swan, “This land, you belong to it.” 

The corruption of the region represents the colonialist mentality from the days of old, which has continued into the present, as no force on earth has stopped it.  Sen approaches the subject with an almost anthropological point of view, where the present is an extension of the past, with each character representing an historical cultural interest, where the pieces may need to be realigned.  When things don’t go the way the scheming developers planned, they resort to murderous plots and ruthless dealmaking, eradicating any obstacles that stand in the way, all of which have a smell of stench attached to them, but in this remote and underpopulated area, that has never stopped them before.  What changes is Josh, as he has a sudden shift of social consciousness and civic responsibility, developing an interest in the affairs of others, including Michelle Davidson as Mei, one of the sex workers, piqued by their obvious unwillingness to talk to him, suggesting there’s plenty more underneath the surface that he’s never bothered to consider, always looking the other way as a matter of convenience.  He never wanted to be the guy to interfere or rock the boat, and was comfortable with the laissez faire idea of live and let live.  After a series of curious inquiries about her situation, Mei, however, stops him dead in his tracks by confronting him with the ultimate question:  “If you find the truth, what will you do with it?”  This realignment of the stars eventually brings the two law enforcement officers together, reluctantly at first, but both are the only ones with an interest in uncovering the truth, though Swan’s had his finger on the pulse from the outset.  It’s the latecomer that swings the balance of power, a multi-racial task force to eradicate the evil elements, which ends up in protracted gun battles that are carefully choreographed and staged, including the infamous biker gang and other hired thugs protecting the capitalistic interests of the unscrupulous mining company and developers, who view the land as essentially worthless except for the money it can produce.  Perhaps these two guys should have joined forces at the outset, as racial stigmas and common misperceptions (not to mention payoffs) may have played into that, while nobody likes to hear someone else tell them what to do, but mutual interests finally turn the tide, becoming a rousing modern western in contemporary times.  Extremely successful in winning Australian Film Critics Association Awards, with Sen winning best director and best cinematography, Pederson winning best actor, while Weaver won best supporting actress, The Guardian (The 10 best Australian films of 2016 | Film | The Guardian) called it the best Australian film of the year.