Bringing to Light: A History of Ethnographic Filmmaking at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (review)

The history of the Aboriginal people in Australia offers a sadly familiar refrain, like a classic tale type whose details are modified as it advances from one continent to the next but whose core structure and central themes remain intact. The stretch of the timeline is unusual—the Aborigines have lived in Australia for more than forty thousand years, compared to roughly ten thousand years of homeland occupation for the American Indians and just four thousand for the Inuit—but the key events rumble with a faithful echo that brings to mind other regions and other conflicts. The arrival of Europeans brought to Australia disease, advanced weaponry, and an alien way of thinking about land, property, labor, and God's will. In the twinkling of an era, the world changed dramatically for the Aboriginal people. Traditional systems of governance, communication, travel, resource management, and leadership crumbled under the weight of the incoming ships, and slavery, poverty, relocation, and death took their place.

Just over 100 years ago, anthropological filmmakers began to record Aboriginal rituals and lifeways, certain that assimilation and annihilation exhausted the list of options for this dying culture and these dying peoples. This was salvage anthropology in a visual vein, and it was carried out with good intentions and faulty foresight.

Once again unfolding in symmetrical balance with other sagas on other continents, the Aboriginal people refused to choose between absorption and evaporation. They persisted, adapting as humans always have to new circumstances and conditions, and they began to consider this noisy and fragile tool that was being used to capture their actions and present their situation to the world. Recognizing the power of the visual media, they began to claim that power as their own.

This shift toward control over their own visual presentations accelerated in the 1970s, coinciding with a decline in non-Aboriginal ethnographic filmmaking due to an increasing anthropological distrust of the visual.

Bringing to Light focuses on the ethnographic filmmaking that took place at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. The Institute operated from 1961 to 1991, its thirty-year span embracing two significant movements. Bryson calls one shift epistemological and the other relational. In other words, ethnographic filmmaking was a key element in changing the way cultures are known and in the relationship between cultures, researcher and informant, and filmmaker and subject. He quotes David MacDougall on the back of the title page: "No ethnographic film is merely a record of another society; it is always a record of the meeting between a filmmaker and that society."

Bryson uses as his foil the position taken by Peter Loizos, who characterizes the evolution of ethnographic film from 1955 to 1985 as a sweep from innocence to self-consciousness. Bryson takes that position as a "point of challenge" (pp. x-xi), going on to refute the idea that early ethnographic filmmakers were innocent or naïve about the nature of their representations:

Peter Loizos argues in his book Innovation in Ethnographic Film that the shift in practice came about through the loss of epistemological and theoretical innocence in ethnographic filmmaking—that people like Roger Sandall were somehow innocents with cameras. I will argue to the contrary that filmmakers like Sandall were far from innocent and that Loizos' perceived movement to a self-consciousness in filmmaking is too simple an account of the changes that took place in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia.

(p. 76)

Bryson offers readers brief but thorough introductions to Roger Sandall and David MacDougall, two important figures in Aboriginal film research. Sandall is a retired anthropologist who casts an acerbic eye on conventional anthropological thinking. MacDougall is a filmmaker and visual anthropologist who argues that ethnographic film is not merely anthropology with moving pictures, but rather a radical form of anthropological practice that sheds new...