Over the past 100 years, Australia has moved on from the collections of still images of Australian Indigenous people, produced with the purpose of documenting something that at that time seemed was quickly disappearing, to celebrate a culture that showed resistance, is still alive and strongly established in Australia.
Nowadays, films and television series on Aboriginal themes are often produced by their protagonists, who since the 1970 have become more and more empowered to control their own representations.
When the movie Blackfire was filmed in 1972, it was considered the first Australian Aboriginal movie in history because it was shot by an Aboriginal director, Bruce McGuinness. From then, we come to today's films such as from director , which in 2012 entered the top 15 highest-grossing Australian films of all time at the local box office, reaching nearly $15 million.
In short, these numbers don’t look like a niche.
It is also worth mentioning television - with a series like Cleverman by Ryan Griffen, which tells the story of an Aboriginal superhero who inherits the power of the Cleverman, an important figure in many Australian Aboriginal cultures.
A six-episode series co-produced across Australia, New Zealand and the United States which became a mainstream hit while maintaining its strong Aboriginal identity, as Matteo Dutto explains.
"Aboriginal cinema has deeply changed Australian cinema in the past 40 years"
Aboriginal cinema has a strong impact on Australian cinema identity. It hasn’t only “deeply altered the image of Australian cinema abroad and the perception of what is Australian cinema in Europe and the United States," says Matteo. "But it has also had a strong impact on how movies are made in Australia."
of how Aboriginal cinema contributes to define the idea of Australian cinema overseas, is the first , organized in 2016 in a tiny cinema in Paris.
, where the programme is usually devoted to the latest Hollywood blockbuster or French filmmaking, spends five days dedicated to screening the best of Australian Indigenous film-making.
Matteo Dutto is undertaking a PhD in the School of Film, Media and Journalism at Monash University and his research interests revolve around Aboriginal story-telling and history-making practices and on the current struggle of young Indigenous film-makers and artists to introduce Indigenous perspectives in the discussions about Aboriginal history.
"Through the works of writers, film and film directors, activists and aboriginal artists, these stories are kept alive and reinterpreted," Matteo explains. "Not only as stories of resistance related to the past, but also as legacy of resistance."
This is how the stories are not only understood and learned, but also have a real impact on the present.
The power of storytelling in portraying “the other”
"Ever since Indigenous authors have started using the camera to tell their stories, the dynamics of power of representation have changed," explains Dutto.
This is, according to Maori director Barry Barclay, what mainly defines Aboriginal cinema: the power of Self-expression. He explains this concept through an example considering the film The Bounty - a classic mid-eighties Hollywood movie by Roger Donaldson - which tells the arrival of colonizers and the encounter with the Indigenous people.
One sequence is described by the Australian-born New Zealand film director: the camera is set on the deck of the ship, facing the mainland. The story therefore takes shape from the perspective of those arriving in the new land, in this example, the colonisers.
"According to Barry Barclay, the idea behind Indigenous cinema is to imagine the same scene but repositioning the camera on the beach, facing the sea," says Dutto.
"The change of the perspective means giving control to those who saw the ships arrive."
Indigenous cinema is part of Australian cinema but, at the same time, it maintains its own uniqueness and identity, which is strongly linked to activism, community and the stories that are told and handed down over time.
"Indigenous cinema tries to tell new stories from an Aboriginal perspective to keep these stories alive, to keep alive the language and the culture, to tell stories that are part of present times, not a distant past, erased by the colonization."
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