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In May 2006, I was standing dumbfounded in the foyer of the Sydney Opera House, watching a huge crowd snaking out the door . . . to see the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival and there were twice as many people as seats available . . . . Why is it that Indigenous film has been so well received in Australia and on the world stage? What is it that makes the work distinctive and sets it apart? —Sally Riley (Wiradjiri), manager, Indigenous Branch, Australian Film Commission The questions framed by Sally Riley1 —filmmaker, dramaturge, and advocate for the development of filmmaking by Indigenous Australians—are precisely the ones I want to address. What has enabled the emergence of such vibrant filmmaking across many genres—and in particular the development of feature films—in what one might think of as the periphery’s periphery? Aboriginal people comprise only about 2 percent of the population of Australia, a small nation that is itself seen as being “off-center.”2 Given this kind of cultural location, how is it that Australia’s Indigenous media makers—particularly those oriented toward feature filmmaking—have managed to attract the attention and support of the wider Indigenous community, as well as non-Indigenous communities at home and abroad?3 Research into how the “media worlds”4 of Indigenous feature filmmaking came into being in Australia is part of the broader project of the burgeoning work in the ethnography of media, which turns the analytic lens on the production, circulation, and consumption of media in a variety of locales. Indigenous filmmaking in any part of the world raises important 84 Faye Ginsburg Peripheral Visions Blak Screens and Cultural Citizenship 01 Iord_Part 1.indd 84 12/17/09 10:11 AM 85 Blak Screens and Cultural Citizenship questions about the role of media in the discursive evolution of diversity. In Australia, such work contributes to the expanding (if contested) understanding of Australia as a culturally diverse nation. It offers alternative accountings to those presented by unified national narratives and it also demonstrates the value of analysis that takes into account the offscreen cultural and political labor of Aboriginal activists and their fellow travelers whose efforts at gaining a space in this cultural arena have made this work possible. More broadly, the study of Indigenous media is part of the broader discussions regarding how contemporary settler states and their citizens negotiate diversity—what some call cultural citizenship—a topic that has gained considerable currency over the last decade, but which gives only occasional attention to media, despite the foundational work of Benedict Anderson5 in clarifying the role of print media in the formation of modern nations.6 As an exception to that tendency, Australian media theorist John Hartley has argued in his work on this topic that “the evolution of new forms of citizenship is matched by post-broadcast forms of television, in which audiences can be seen as organized around choice, affinity, and the production as well as consumption of media. These developments have powerful implications for the way nations are narrated in broadcast television . . . Indigeneity points the way to new notions of nation and television.”7 Hartley’s work points to the critically important role that Aboriginal media have played in Australia over the last two decades in the creation of an Indigenous public sphere.8 His deployment of Jürgen Habermas’s language to capture how media made by and about Indigenous people has created a new space of representation for their concerns has a colloquial counterpart: the term Blak screens, used in the title of this article. I draw on its use in the title Blak Screens/Blak Sounds, given to the inaugural (and now annual) 2001 Message Sticks Festival of Indigenous film and music held at the Sydney Opera House. The use of the Aboriginal English Blak takes up a term of pride and assertion of cultural identity, marked by its orthographic change from Black to Blak, which emerged along with the Aboriginal activism of the 1970s—a period in which symbolic politics borrowed heavily from the language, strategies, and tactics deployed by the u.S. Black Power movement. To associate Blak with the term screens in this context inverts the usual association of the idea of the black screen in film or television as blank (and in this case devoid of Indigenously authored stories and images), and rather claims it as Blak, or proudly Aboriginal, now that Indigenous directors are creating their own work. The development of Indigenous filmmaking in...

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