Journal de la Société des Océanistes

148 | 2019 Filmer (dans) le Pacifique

The Rise of Film Authorship in Papua New Guinea. A personal Journey L’émergence du film d’auteur en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée. Une trajectoire personnelle

Martin Maden

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jso/10673 DOI: 10.4000/jso.10673 ISSN: 1760-7256

Publisher Société des océanistes

Printed version Date of publication: 15 July 2019 Number of pages: 23-36 ISBN: 978-2-85430-137-3 ISSN: 0300-953x

Electronic reference Martin Maden, “The Rise of Film Authorship in Papua New Guinea. A personal Journey”, Journal de la Société des Océanistes [Online], 148 | 2019, Online since 01 January 2021, connection on 22 July 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jso/10673 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/jso.10673

This text was automatically generated on 22 July 2021.

Journal de la société des océanistes est mis à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modifcation 4.0 International. The Rise of Film Authorship in Papua New Guinea. A personal Journey 1

The Rise of Film Authorship in Papua New Guinea. A personal Journey L’émergence du film d’auteur en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée. Une trajectoire personnelle

Martin Maden

Introduction

1 A film is just a film. On the surface, we have the images and the effects in a juxtaposed series of scenes. But it is the background philosophies and invocations subservient to those scenes which drive the authenticity of an art object such as a film. It gives art a particular body to those who know how to recognise and read from it and creates a personalised film festival inside every viewer.

2 I started making films in the Aiyura Valley of the Eastern Highlands Province, as a young photography student of 18 years old in 1982. Having arrived in this cold and windy valley from the coasts of New Britain one year earlier, I saw myself emerge from my own poverty. The sores on my skin dried up in the cold mountain air and while admiring that, I came down with malaria. Reading Athabasca, a novel by Alistair MacLean (1980) while in bed with my malarial fevers made me experience the cold like I never would have imagined, had I been reading the book back in a warm coastal Rabaul. I had quinine ringing in my ears for a week and was suffering my first and final bout of homesickness. Then when I didn’t die, I got out of bed to become a global child. But I did not realise it then while I was busy trying to get over the hurdles of education.

3 I was struggling with a system of education where I had to be better than others to get by in life. I had done that for ten years of schooling already but when I became healed of my various wounds of hardship, I struggled with the notion of having to compete to outscore some of the most beautiful people that I had come to see in a new light beyond

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the rigors of academic point scoring. Confused and uncertain, I went to see my senior, Lujaiah Kousa, the president of the Students Representative Council to seek her advice. I wanted to see what kind of a career path I could still salvage from a self-perceived adolescent wreckage. She went with me through my apparent academic ineptitudes and we finally settled on the arts as my biggest hope for a future.

4 A simple villager, I had never held a real camera in all my life before 1982. Yet there I was, in a photography major course and there was a Nikon F2 on the table with an array of lenses. This was in the days before zoom lenses became commonplace. There were only three students in the major course and out of those, I was the only one who had volunteered to be the darkroom lab technician. So, for one whole academic year, while other students joined sports and other extracurricular activities, I would change and mix all the laboratory chemicals and clean up the dark room for the next day’s classes. I went through all the lessons we had learnt and with everyone gone from the lab. I began to experiment further with photographic printing, designed and made a pinhole camera and using lithographic film, I captured, processed and printed a pinhole camera photograph of my school. As film and video students, we were also making a film in the Markham Valley about an old clay potter. Looking back, the social, ethical, philosophical and logistical failings I experienced while making that film in 1982, are still important references in my filmmaking of today.

5 This paper is based on my experience of “direct cinéma”, and the ethics and pedagogy from which I have taught Direct Cinema workshops through the Ateliers Varan in Papua New Guinea, the Pacific and internationally. Ateliers Varan was founded in 1981 under the impulse of Jean Rouch to train documentary filmmakers both in France and across the world. Drawing on my own journey as a png filmmaker, this paper retraces the emergence of film authorship in Papua New Guinea since the 1980s. The “rise” I am exploring here builds on earlier ethnographical filmmaking, including the important works by Ian Dunlop, Marek Jablonko, Maurice Godelier and others. Kumain Nunguya who worked with Maurice and Marek later trained under Les Ateliers Varan and is himself a png filmmaker. His film Sinmia. Haus Bilas Bilong Manmeri Bilong Baruya shot in 1986 and other contributions however mirror the creative and artistic aspirations and struggles described.

Early media Developments and Cinema Experiments with Papua New Guinea

6 In the early documentary filmmaking of the Post World War II era, styles of documentary were based on news reporting and the newsreel types of presentation that were used during the war years to bring news of the front and war propaganda to the cinema. This 1930s style of documentary presentation was quite effective and is still used today mainly in television documentaries. The film is driven by a linear narrative which provides the storyline for the sequences. Below is an example of a narrative driven newsreel style taken from a documentary made by the Bulolo Gold Dredging Limited in Colonial New Guinea. The moving images show gold being refined and poured into ingots. Eventually, eight gold ingots are assembled for the camera and a “Voice of God Narrative” informs the way we have to understand the scene: “… making a gold ingot worth approximately 2 500 Pounds. This little collection totals about 20,000. Never before has gold been so important to the British Empire.

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This precious cargo will assist Australia’s overseas credits. A wilderness contributing to the welfare of a nation. A work which the Bulolo Company is proud to undertake. Proud of achievement and proud of service.”

7 By the early 1960s, the United Nations started to apply pressure on Australia to advance the colonial territories in its mandated care to independence. So, before the 1968 general elections in Papua New Guinea, the Australian colonial administration established the Department of Information and Extension Services (DIES) (later renamed the Office of Information), which embarked on a programme of political education intended to acquaint voters with some of the broader aspects of the political system. The administration brought these awareness programmes to us in the rural villages, using radio, publications, films and through talks by administration officers and others. When I was old enough to recall, as a child of about four, I remember cuddled up against my mother as the whole village came out to gather on several occasions to listen to these political awareness gatherings which often ended in disagreements of opinion between the various political factions that had sprung up in East New Britain.

8 Tolai people had earlier protested that they did not want political programs solely broadcasted in “wiswes” (English). They wanted a radio station broadcasting in their own language and speaking clearly on issues in a manner where a majority of the people could understand. They also wanted local people interpreting political issues to them in terms they could grasp. “Independence” for instance had to be called “Tibuna Warkurai” – self-rule. In the mid to late 1960s, (1969?) “Radio Rabaul” was established as a shortwave radio station and became the first local radio in Papua New Guinea. It was broadcasting in Kuanua, the language of the Tolais and Tok Pisin. It also relayed the ABC news in English.

9 For us smaller children, our favourite program on our new radio station were the traditional legends “kada umana kakur”. The “Mataungan Movement” was on the rise by this time so adults were more engaged with the political awareness and action broadcasts.1 Not everyone had a transistor radio. I often went to our neighbours’ homes to listen to the radio during the scheduled broadcasts of our traditional legends. At times when my mother was in conflict with an aunty who had a radio and I could not sit down in my maternal uncle’s yard, I would stand at the edge of their house and listen to the short wave radio from across the hedges. My most favourite radio voice was that of my cousin Pauline Kaite. She had a clear voice that could carry through the shortwave radio frequencies so I could discern details of the storytelling from a distance.

10 What the colonial administration may have failed to harness effectively was the energy of secessionist movements right across Papua New Guinea, perhaps with the exception of Bougainville. Most just wanted local governance systems incorporated into modern governance methods so that traditional systems of survival could guide equitable, modern government.

11 In their book Papua New Guinea - A Political History in a chapter on The Emergence of Secessionism, the authors cite Ali Mazrui, an African political scientist and critic of Australian colonialism who charged Australia with “having denied Papua New Guinea ‘an infra-structure for nationhood’” (Griffin, Nelson & Firth, 1979: 147). This he felt “was the greatest of all imperialist sins”: “[…] In many ways the British were humane, and in many ways the Australians have been humane. The British were exploitative, but the Australians were indifferent. There is only one thing worse than exploitative colonialism – and that is indifferent colonialism.” (Mazrui, quoted in Griffin, Nelson & Firth, 1979: 147)

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12 For Mazrui, it was this indifference which explained the Australian failure to promote cultural homogenisation, economic interaction among indigenes and autochtonous institutions for conflict resolution. Importantly, Mazrui argued that among the forces generating nationhood “the strongest of all its political antecedents; the possession of national history and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation; pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.” (Mazrui, quoted in Griffin, Nelson & Firth, 1979: 147).2

13 Pointedly then, when independence finally became inevitable, the colonial administration and corporate funded films started to incorporate local sentiments, but of the kind where the native vulnerability to modernization was brought to the screen as seen in the film My Brother Wartovo (Richardson, 1972). Funded by the Australian government and the Shell company, the film is based in East New Britain and finds its protagonist, a Tolai man called To Wartovo abandoning a village based economy and striving to survive in the huge Australian logging operations in West New Britain where lands being cleared by large-scale logging are being subdivided into oil palm plantation blocks. The Narrator of the film is To Wartovo’s brother who works for the Shell Company. A third brother works for the newly established giant Panguna mine on Bougainville.

14 This film is a perfect example of “corporate sensitivity” to the natives of a colonized country by justifying the system through the native’s vulnerability and inability to walk alone into the world of capitalism without the guiding hand of big brother. In other words: “Don’t rush independence. There is still gold in Wau and Bulolo and now also on Bougainville.”

15 At that point in Papua New Guinea’s history, both the people of Bougainville and the Tolais of East New Britain were the most vocal and defiant in their opposition to Australian colonial rule and both wanted to secede separately from the colonial experiment with fabricated nationhood. Bougainville in particular, had had a harsh history of contact with Europeans especially since its encounter with blackbirding, which was the kidnapping of forced labour for Queensland, now part of Australia. Thinkers on Bougainville say that blackbirding began on Bougainville in 1836, when plantations in Fiji and Queensland started coming to the islands of New Guinea for labour.

16 It is reported by Bougainvilleans that the first killing of a white man on Bougainville had happened in Siwai when a black birder kissed his Siwai wife in public. This was taboo in local custom so the brother of the woman had no choice but to protect the dignity of his clan and to slay his brother in law, a white man and slave trader. After 1899, when the Germans annexed New Guinea, a number of Bougainvillean kings were put to death by the Germans for lack of compliance with Christianity and the new colonial regulations. Bougainvilleans maintain that their cultural awareness and their struggle to be self-determining and free from colonial rule started in the 1830s to the present. This colonization, they say, was carried on by Papua New Guinea and finally led to hopelessness and a civil war that started in 1989 and lasted for 15 years, where an estimated 20,000 lives were lost. By the early 1970s, Bougainville was struggling for secession and independence through several movements like the Mungkas Association.

17 In East New Britain after the Germans lost New Guinea to the British after World War I, the German plantations and lands were expropriated by the Australians. This was at a

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point in colonial history when natives in New Guinea were still stateless and had no suffrage. Such being the case Tolais could not represent themselves in a court of law to query this expropriation, so long as they had no standing in a colonial court of law. Frustration with a justice system where native plaintiffs had no standing in court in a place where the former German colonial administration had once established courts that had hearings in the local language, brought about an urgent struggle for self- determination by three different groups but most notably by the Mataungan Association. This struggle for independence, at times became violent and in fact some assets and properties of the Shell company became threatened in East New Britain. It is perhaps no coincidence that East New Britain and Bougainville were selected as the settings for the film My Brother Wartovo.

18 Just as the colonised third world people had no suffrage, no right to vote and no right to speak in their own defence in a court of law, bring injustices against their persons to court, nor allowed to accuse a white man before the courts, so was the practice in filmmaking. Black people could not represent themselves on the cinema screen. When they had an issue of “public interest” or inspirations worthy of the cinema or television screens, they had to look for sympathetic white filmmakers that could bring their stories to the screen. For black people in Melanesia (Melanesia actually means “black islanders”), this was one of several obstacles our humanity had to cross before we could have a legitimate film and television screen presence.

19 On the occasion of Papua New Guinea’s 43rd Independence anniversary, former member of parliament Andrew Baing recalled the hope that accompanied Independence in 1975: “… As a young public servant, I stood at Sir Hubert Murray Stadium and had the privilege to watch a great historical moment for this nation as the Australian flag was lowered and the PNG flag was raised. I came from a generation that was confronted with racism, a time when we were referred to as natives. A time when travelling on airplanes, natives were not served a meal when the Australians were, or natives were not allowed to swim at Ela Beach. It was an emotional event and tears streamed down my face as I witnessed this momentous event. We were a young country so full of excitement and hope, no longer were we to be under the rule of the Kiap…” (Baing-Waiko, 2018)

Film as an Instrument of Colonisation

20 Ordinarily in the 1970s, how could a third world artist ever become a filmmaker or even a film author? With the world in the first cold war, the media dominated by an omnipresent propaganda machinery of the epoch and so many countries still in the grips of colonisation and its inherent mindsets, where were the realistic avenues in the third world where young people could strive for an equal voice in the global cinema and television forums?

21 These were the difficult questions that these people and their particular colonial masters could not answer very easily. For the dominated, there seemed to be no viable grounds to such questions. The disciplines where third world authors existed were in music and later on, in literature. But film was out of bounds for the great majority of third world children due to a number of hurdles.

22 The main hurdles were the high technical demands of filmmaking and the very high costs of film production in the era of the celluloid based cinema. With third world

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countries still in the process of cutting the apron strings from colonial masters, cinema was not a priority. Building a cinema industrial infrastructure in a third world country was a daunting task. On the one hand, in terms of the technical considerations and the massive amounts of training that would have been required to populate local industries with authors, artists and technicians. On the other hand, a mass media empowered third world may perhaps have been viewed as a threat to the status quo and the economic intentions behind colonization.

23 But the lack of a viable cinema generated by the third world was quite a potent demoralizing factor during that great period of colonization. The cinema and television of the epoch gave the colonizer the sole right of speech regarding the condition of the planet and the right to justify the choices and decisions of the systems at play. And for quite a long time since 1929, the year of the first film with a sound track, people of the third world had come to accept an inferior position in the affairs of humankind. Film and television itself had come to be used as the means by which the hierarchies of power and consequently of racial discrimination were popularized and reinforced, to the point it seems where whole nations of people developed even to this day a profound syndrome of inferiority complex.

24 Consider a case in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s, when two Australian filmmakers Bob Connolly and the late Robin Anderson, making films meant to appeal to the popular sentiments of middleclass Australia, made a series of three films sometimes known as the First Contact Trilogy (1983, 1989, 1992) which reinforce the traditional values of colonial conquest. First Contact (1983) is the story of a third world country that becomes discovered by three white men and which eventually reaps a “Black Harvest” due to its inability to conform to colonial austerity ideals. I once asked Bob Connolly about his misrepresentation of history in the first part of the trilogy. He told me: “[…] filmmaking is about telling a good story […] you’ve got to know your audience.”

25 My point about historical accuracy was that Father Ross, a Catholic priest was in fact the first white man in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Father Ross had simply walked along an old trading route from the Ramu valley, into what is today the Simbu Province and established a Catholic Mission in Mingende at the edges of the Waghi Valley.

26 The film also conveniently forgot to mention that the protagonists of the story, the Leahy brothers, were in fact being led through the Highlands by Jim Taylor, an Australian Kiap (colonial administrator) based in New Guinea. Jim Taylor is in the film, he shoots the pig in a key sequence of First Contact but he is not mentioned by name, which the filmmakers knew. Instead, a clever narrative line makes the audience believe that the man shooting the pig is Mick Leahy. So just like that, an historical figure of Papua New Guinea was whitewashed by the arbitrary choice of a filmmaker, in order to construct “a good story”.

27 One of the fascinating aspects of the First Contact Trilogy is the popular reception of these films by Papua New Guinean audiences. Even though the series is condescending to their aspirations and their right to self-determination, they love the juxtaposition of historical footage intercut with interviews of people who were in the historical photographs and films. Perhaps it is the conditioning of how to view films or perhaps it is the pride and enthusiasm of the old people who are seeing themselves as young people that carries the film to Papua New Guineans. But once the film has brought this

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local enthusiasm about colonial conquest to the screen, it follows by indulging in the native admiration of their white masters and how Papua New Guinea was better off under colonial rule. At the end there is no equitable “first contact” but rather primitives being discovered and corralled into new systems through the power of the rifle and failing that order, a “black harvest” (1992).

Rocking the Foundations. The Filmmaking of Dennis O’Rourke in Papua New Guinea

28 By the time the Australian filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke came to Papua New Guinea, the Office of Information was already populated with a number of Papua New Guineans who were capable, mainly as production assistants, camera assistants and sound recordists. Some of these local technicians worked on the films that were mainly produced and directed by Australian filmmakers. The first films from the Office of Information started to hit our 16mil primary and high school screens in 1974, just one year before independence. I was 11 years old at this time but still remember the first film I saw in a newsreel/didactic presentation style called: “The Eight Point Plan” concerning how we were to understand policy directions of our emerging new government.

29 My own very Catholic mother had earlier advised me to stay away from films in the fear that some of these would destroy the moral, ethical and religious upbringing of Catholic children. In any case, she was too poor to give me 5 cents every time I wanted to watch a new film at school. So, it didn’t matter whether she allowed me to watch films or not. I could not afford to go behind the blinds anyway. In the mid 1970s, we had some Western movies in 16mil format also reaching our primary school including John Wayne. When I first approached a cinema enclosure as a kid, John Wayne was speaking about some Western cowboy issue and I just stood outside the blinds of the cinema screening and listened. Then a friend told me that we could go around the back and peep through the blinds from the other side of the screen. The film was projected onto a screen of plain white cloth and so facing the cinema audience from outside the blinds, we could lie on the grass and, parting the coconut leaf blinds, we could look at the projected image in reverse. The only problem was that if John Wayne shot somebody on his right, we would see him shoot to the left but at least these were the coolest and not so crowded seats in the whole cinema. In addition, we were really more outdoors than anyone else in these outdoor screenings!

30 By the time our primary school teachers were making us watch government policy making methods on the screen, we children actually wanted to know whether there was a John Wayne or a “Japanese Sword” film in the other reels. It took us a while to adjust from a bullet filled screen of a John Wayne film, to appreciate diagrams, pie charts and other means of illustrating ideas, information and technology on the screen. But the more I reported back to my mother about the contents of the films we were watching at school, she started to relax her stand against the cinema.

31 She herself had been a theatre artist in the village women’s theatre but had lost her husband four years earlier when I was only seven. She was now suffering a nervous breakdown and could no longer come to my school to sell at the school market since she had also developed a phobia about crowds and enclosed public spaces. Thus, I became one of her main sources of information about what was going on in our broader

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community. She abandoned theatre, one of those vestigial cultural legacies of German New Guinea, and a play that she had been planning for the two of us to perform at a local art festival called the “Tolai Warwagira Festival” which was vibrant in East New Britain in the 1970s. It was a tragicomedy where she was to be a farmer and I was to be a thieving parrot that would steal corn from her garden and destroy the entire crop. After my father died, she still entertained this stage play a little while longer until her struggles with bringing up eight children on her own finally led to a breakdown.

32 That anecdote would illustrate the artistic creativity that was in the homes of even the poorest Papua New Guineans, much of which had no avenue of making it onto theatrical stages or cinema screens during Australian rule. I personally think of the post-war years, from the late 1940s until independence in 1975, as the killing fields of creativity and self-determination in a great epoch of colonisation. Fundamental Christianity and a barren capitalist colonization that followed two great world wars were for Papua New Guinea a cultural curse for which we are still paying the price. For these events combined took away all creativity and self confidence in most of our elders who endured those times. The martial law of the war years combined with the new administrative laws under the barrel of the “Kiaps” rifles created a new system for Papua New Guinea where men became the main decision makers for our societies and our women folk became subservient and passive participants in public affairs. I believe that it was in this period of the robbing Papua New Guinean women of equal determination in the affairs of community and nation state, that the creativity of Melanesia was fundamentally destroyed because cross gender enrichment had been in many cases systematically destroyed. Wars, colonial plantations and factories only employed men. The men who brought home alcohol, axes and shillings.

33 The first filmmaking revolution in Papua New Guinea came through Dennis O’Rourke in 1974. I’ll let Roseanne O’Rourke, former wife of Dennis, tell the first part of this story: “Dennis and I met shortly after he arrived in PNG in 1974. There was great excitement amongst us all, gearing up to Independence as you may recall. Dennis was swept up by this mood, influenced by his love for me, my family, PNG friends and the people. His first two films, Yumi Yet and Ileksen show this. Dennis was a great romantic and an avid reader. Importantly, Dennis’ film making style at the time challenged the status quo of ethnographic/documentary films. Papua New Guineans were no longer the subjects with ‘voice overs’ on images. He portrayed us as we were and in Cannibal Tours, the tourists become the subjects. In Shark Callers of Kontu, the people of Kontu told their story with the beautiful backdrop of Calling Sharks. I have no doubt that these films enlightened many in the world and gave us a voice. These films are still studied in educational institutions. PNG gave Dennis a platform to practice his craft and he went on to make important and sometimes controversial films in the Pacific, Australia and the world. There are many people to thank in PNG in particular, who facilitated access for Dennis to make these films.” (O’Rourke, 2013)

34 Dennis in his life and work was a stout defender of Papua New Guinea and its people (see Larcher, this volume). Sometimes in his films he was quite blunt in his criticism of things that destroy PNG culture such as the church scene in Shark Callers of Kontu where fanatical missionary preaching is intercut with a shark caller’s duel with a two-meter shark. At another time, when Dennis and a friend were refused service at a segregated bar in a hotel patronised by a white planters’ fraternity, Dennis reached across the bar and picked up the thin white man and raising him into the air said to him: “You ‘orrible little man. You’re just a long thin streak of pelican shit.”

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35 After Dennis had restored the man to his feet, the two friends were served a much- needed drink after a long day of filming in the heat of the New Ireland Province. Some years later, while Chris Owen and I were filming together on West New Britain, Chris saw the “racist” white man again in another hotel and whispered to me: “Martin, I know that man. I’ll tell you the story later.”

36 When I first saw Dennis O’Rourke’s films Yumi Yet (1976) and Ileksen (1978), it was quite simply the first time I saw fellow Papua New Guineans voicing their raw and original emotions and opinions on the cinema screen. It was fantastic. There suddenly came an incredible realisation, which many of us experienced following this new screen phenomenon of Papua New Guineans speaking out to represent their own interests. Not only was this normal and fitting, but we also experienced a far more powerful effect from the utterances of our fellow Papua New Guineans than we had ever experienced from the cinema of the days when we had to be represented by the voice of an unknown white man representing colonial policies in our lives. Even though the “voice of God narrative” had become normalised in mainstream documentary filmmaking it got blown away overnight by the power of authentic affinity with the human struggles that fuelled new voices.

37 How could the third world have done for so long without first hand direct cinematic representation on the screen? A lot of empirical evidence around the planet indicate that we did not do very well with our humanity suppressed for a great part of the planet’s modern history.

The post-Flower Power Era and New Wave Filmmaking in Papua New Guinea 1973-1979

38 Through Dennis O’Rourke, the sacred cinema screen became shattered and black people now replaced John Wayne hero type role models, to simply express current opinions about the way we felt our world was going and how we could function better. In this period of what could be called “Papua New Guinea’s new wave cinema”, from 1973 to 1979, a group of left-wing filmmakers arrived in Papua New Guinea, some straight out of the flower power movement of the 1960s and from the Sydney and Melbourne “Push”.

39 Chris Owen came from the Sydney Push. He often insisted that he was from the “Old Push” as opposed to the “New Push” which had a branch, the Melbourne Push (see Bonnemère, this volume). When he first arrived in Port Moresby in 1973, he was confronted by white men on the segregated whites only Ela Beach and almost got beaten up for the “Beatles” kind of hairstyle he bore during those days. He joined the new Institute of PNG Studies that year as their resident filmmaker. Chris Owen then spent the next four decades based at the Institute of PNG Studies, where he would make some of the most valuable films in Papua New Guinea’s film heritage. One of his tasks was to play a technical and supporting role to visiting anthropologists who wanted to record important ceremonies and rituals for posterity. Because of this, in many of Chris’ films, the narrative direction is based on the flow of traditional rituals, but he himself brought to the screen some of the most dramatic, aesthetically and technically astounding images: The Red Bowmen (1978), made in collaboration with anthropologist Alfred Gell is already a classic documentary film. A collaboration with Andrew

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Strathern led to Bridewealth for a Goddess (1999) and, with Hank Nelson and Professor John Waiko, came Man Without Pigs (1990).

40 Probably the most defining film of the New Wave period was Kama Wosi (1979) made by Les MacLaren on the largest of the Trobriand Islands. It is the most poetic of all films made in Papua New Guinea and is made with remarkable affinity, understanding and love of music and music making. Les MacLaren went on to teach music at the National Arts School in Waigani and brought up many contemporary PNG musicians and the greatest music act ever assembled in Papua New Guinea, the band “Sanguma”.

41 In addition to these, Trobriand Cricket (1974) is a special case film in Papua New Guinea. A so-called “micronationalist” political movement, the Kabisawali Movement commissioned and produced through the Office of Information and new government of Papua New Guinea, a film to be made by anthropologist Jerry Leach and filmmaker Gary Kildea. The Kabisawali movement on screen seems to have wished to use the evolution of the sport of cricket in the Trobriand islands to demonstrate how traditional forms of government and administration, especially their chieftain system, could be utilized to design a more appropriate system of government for Papua New Guinea. Grand Chief Nalabutau was one of the hosts of the cricket matches and his nephew John Kasaipwalova is in the film speaking to local chiefs about aspects of Trobriand Cricket. The resultant film is an important portrayal of the spirit and nature of the people of Melanesia. I often regret that Gary Kildea did not make more documentaries in this vein of filmmaking.

42 Gerard Beona who at the time was working with the Office of Information was a production assistant on this film but later went on to become Minister of Culture and Tourism under whose ministry Chris Owen at IPNGS and I at the Skul Bilong Wokim Piksa (Film School in Tok Pisin) worked as filmmakers.

43 But while the New Wave cinema in Papua New Guinea broke some long-held traditions of the cinema screen, in all those years of filmmaking, the Papua New Guineans were only employed in film as technicians. They were the production assistants, camera assistants, sound recordists, or even script writers. Not a single PNG film author emerged. It is only in 1983, following their participation in an Ateliers Varan Workshop, that Philip Uram and Simon Mers, former Office of Information technicians, became film authors.

Evolution of Jean Rouch’s Philosophies and The Rise of Third World Film Authors

44 It was Jean Rouch who brought cinema authorship to the people of Papua New Guinea.

45 The seeds of inspiration for this evolution seem to have been sown earlier through a now classic film Nanook of the North (1922) by Robert Flaherty. While there would have been a score of other influences from the French and Parisian cultural scenes to form his sensibilities and cinematic approach, Nanook of the North, constructed in the manner in which Jean Rouch also defined his work in “Ethnofiction” and “shared anthropology”, seems to be one of the greatest influences on Rouch’s evolution as a filmmaker.

46 Jean Rouch coined the term “cinéma direct” in the late 1940s and is considered the father of this film genre. It was his unwillingness to accept “vérité” as a viable term in our definition of cinematic authenticity, when the cinema itself is based on a

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technology which uses optical illusions of movement to tell stories. This led him and others in France to define cinematic authenticity as “cinéma direct”. Their search became one aimed to achieve cinematic beauty and authenticity beyond optical illusions, derived from a direct, conscientious and authentic collaboration between filmmakers and film subjects, whether in documentary or in works of fiction. Cinema Direct places a great emphasis on the relationship between filmmaker and film subject and allows film subjects to be involved in any process of film creation that they can manage.

47 The idea of third world film authors was born out of Jean Rouch’s earlier work in Niger, Mali and Ghana where, by the 1950s, he was already moving beyond his Direct Cinema approach and evolving into “shared anthropology” and Ethnofiction both of which led to the productions first of Moi, un noir (1958), set in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and of Cocorico, monsieur Poulet (1974), filmed in Niger. Jean Rouch’s award winning film, Moi, un noir (1958) is credited to have been one of those films that launched the French “Nouvelle Vague” or “New Wave movement”. Edward Robinson, a main character in Moi, un noir (Me, a Negro), went on to become one of Africa’s seminal filmmakers because of the collaborate way Jean Rouch had worked with him.

48 In 1978, Rouch was asked by the government of Mozambique to make a film about the happenings in the recently independent nation. Instead of accepting the offer and making his own films about Mozambique, Jean Rouch suggested instead to train local Mozambique filmmakers who would then, as film authors, make films from a local perspective about issues emerging and affecting the life of the new country. Thus, “Les Ateliers Varan” came into existence, tasked with the training of third world filmmakers, starting in Mozambique, which became the first third world country to have its own film authors.

49 It is the work and teachings of Jean Rouch that brought that particular “auteurs” essence of the French cinema to Papua New Guinea for the first time in 1983, leading to the induction, training and upbringing of the first film authors in Melanesia. I know first-hand because when we Papua New Guineans started to come into contact with Direct cinema, amongst our teaching materials were the films of Jacques Tati, the films of Jean Rouch himself, from Richard Leacock and the Maysles brothers. There were also numerous films from the new film “authors” of Les Ateliers Varan Direct Cinema workshops. A growing number of third world filmmakers were joining the ranks of new film authors. New Papua New Guinean film authors joined these numbers in 1983 during the first Atelier Varan film workshop in Goroka.

50 From the ensuing French cinema of that particular era of the 1970s to the 1980s, it is quite important to connect Jean Rouch back to Jacques Tati who is the quintessential film author of all times. It is from this French holy grail of film authorship that people like Jean Rouch offered the concept of film authorship to the third world. And it is this holy grail to which so many film teachers in our globalized environment are oblivious, seemingly due to the primary focus on the monetization of our films. Whereas Jacques Tati gave us pieces of his heart through his films, Hollywood sometimes just repackages our own hearts and gives it back to us for a nickel in a coin slot, sometimes with effected compassion. Herein lies the fundamental differences between the traditional French cinema and the nickelodeon cinema. It comes down to the “standing” of the author who is not allowed to be fraudulent. A film d’auteur requires that an author possesses a raison d’être and a definite vision of the final film outcome, the underlying

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lynchpins of authenticity. Incidentally, Jean Rouch’s Cocorico and Jacques Tati’s Jour de fête (1949) were major influences on Papua New Guinea’s first road movie and comedy, Tinpis Run (Nengo, 1991), for which I worked as a director of photography.

51 Mainstream schools of thought would have young filmmakers of the world “shop around” and speculate over popular film ingredients. But the essence of raison d’être comes from a dedicated pursuit of a chosen profession. Artists are expected and allowed to emerge their own styles from within their chosen discipline through local responses to intrinsic artistic challenges. These original responses eventually give rise to a rich and diverse culture of cinematic manifestation. Jean Rouch himself in Moi, un noir had struggled with the limitations that prevailed before synchronized sound and image was possible, but through careful collaboration and innovation with his film subjects, they created an art object that won prestigious film awards which helped launch the Nouvelle Vague.

Giving a Voice to Third World Filmmakers at International Forums

52 As Jean Rouch’s work evolved, we can see that this artistic French expectation of raison d’être gave him and others at Les Ateliers Varan the basic instinct to “donner la parole”, or allow artistic voices to emerge from their newly formed third world authors which progressively became a growing community and a college of international filmmakers. At the height of the movement, from the 1978 Mozambique experience onwards to about 2005, Les Ateliers Varan was training third world filmmakers in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Pacific and even Portugal. Over a thousand filmmakers in the third world were inducted into filmmaking and given confidence through a basic technical platform, “cinéma direct”, from which they could begin their forays and individual growth as film authors. During the height of first cold war, when mainstream television and the Hollywood dominated cinema gave no consideration to a third world perspective about how the earth was being managed, it was the few Cinema Direct forums that gave third world filmmakers a voice on global issues.

53 While it may be true that mainstream film school training in other parts of France and the Western world provided film students with greater technical capability, the Cinema Direct school of thought was offering authors human empowerment. While mainstream film schools offered an understanding of how large film-crews functioned through industrial chains of command, the Cinema Direct school taught authors independence and a greater social understanding and sensitivity. It taught them to work with minimal equipment and small film crews. While the mainstream film schools were being influenced by advertisement styles of editing to dynamically destroy the notion of time and place, in my understanding cinema direct was teaching authors to respect human space and time.

Ateliers Varan in Papua New Guinea: a personal trajectory3

54 The Skul Bilong Wokim Piksa was perhaps the tiniest film school on the planet in 1982 when I arrived there. It was situated on the northern side of a mountain called Mt. Kiss,

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so named because in colonial times, European lovers used to go to its peak to admire the Bena and Asaro Valley landscape. On the Southern side of this mountain is the town of Goroka which nestles on an alluvial plain formed by the Bena River to the East and the Asaro River to the West. Looking away from Goroka, one faces the North looking into the summit of Mt. Otto, the second highest mountain in the Eastern Highlands Province.

55 Upon arrival here, there was no film action going on and, still being on trial, I was tasked with building the footpath from the carpark up to the office entrance because the steep hills of orange clay were very slippery in the rain and many visitors had rolled down the hill in the past in their great hurry to leave our vicinity. In the end, building the footpath was inadvertently the way I was able to prove that I was hard working to the Director of the Skul Bilong Wokim Piksa, Paul Frame. He was primarily an architect and I had perhaps proven some design capabilities with my pine log arrangement for the footpath. As a result, after two weeks of apprenticeship, I was admitted to a fulltime student position, earning K30 per fortnight. It was my first ever salary and I was not looking back.

56 The next year was the first Atelier Varan workshop to be held in Papua New Guinea and, at 19 years of age, I was admitted to it as the youngest film student. Séverin Blanchet, one of the directors of Les Ateliers Varan in Paris came off an Air Niugini plane to lead the workshop with Francoise Varin, a film editor. It was a Super 8 film workshop. Three participants from the former Office of Information who attended this first workshop were not impressed with the Super 8 equipment because they had been working with 16mil prior to this workshop. As a result, they failed to appreciate the limitations of Super 8 film equipment and film stock and I, the youngest person on the workshop with my own high school training and the extra experiments I had invested in my own upbringing, became the best camera operator of the whole workshop. The punching bag sequences and river crossing sequences of the little boxing film I made, made my French tutors take notice of my camera work.

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PICTURE 1. – Chris Owen and Martin Maden on the set of their film Lukautim Bus (1993)

(© Thomas Vigus, the main character of the film)

57 I think the realisation that I wanted to be a filmmaker came to me in August of the following year, in 1984, in Lae. At that time, I was editing my third film Tupela Tingting at the Skul Bilong Wokim Piksa, the little film school in Goroka, Papua New Guinea where I was a student. I was disillusioned about what I was doing with my life. I was not satisfied with my camera work and my construction of the film. I was 21 and my first film about a boxer was incomplete. I had just spent the first part of the year with my camera waiting for over five months for a volcano in Rabaul to erupt, wanting to film how such a natural disaster would affect the livelihood of my people. As I sat down to edit Tupela Tingting, feeling dissatisfied with my filmmaking, I nearly decided to give up filmmaking. After speaking to some friends who encouraged me to pursue, I realised that I actually loved filmmaking and that I may have some talent for it. Tupela Tingting (1984) was in the end recognised as the best film of the workshop and was invited for screening at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Canada. I also received an invitation to attend an advanced workshop in Paris, France.

58 I arrived in Paris in the spring of 1985 with a film to screen and it became a hit at the Paris workshop. Eventually, I became a camera man for the PNG film project in Paris. Working in a foreign language in Paris, my colleagues and I sweated it out until finally one day, I found our film subject, Anthony Mastalski, an 85-year-old Polish immigrant living in the suburbs of Paris. With him we went on to make a timeless documentary film. Jean Rouch invited us to mix the film in his studio at the musée de l’Homme. There, in the studio where he had mixed Moi, un noir in 1958, with his Nigerien filmmakers, three Papua New Guineans were invited to mix the sound track of their first ever 16mil film, Stolat (1985). To me, it was the most beautiful studio.

59 This was my first time mixing a 16mil film. Stolat won “Best ethnographical film about France” in 1986 at the Jean Rouch Film Festival. It was the first film by Papua New Guinean authors to win an international film award. Stolat was made and screened in

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Paris, 90 years after the Lumiere Brothers” first film screening in Paris in 1895. I was spooling the film and sound track back into their reels when Séverin Blanchet rushed down to fetch me. “Hey, come back upstairs. They all want to meet you”. It was a great time. Champagne and red wine.

60 After the success of that first 16mil Spring Workshop in 1985, I was asked by other members of Les Ateliers Varan to start teaching in the Varan Workshops. We also started to progress the idea to produce Tinpis Run (1991), PNG’s first comedy and road movie. I also started planning with Séverin Blanchet, the extension of Les Ateliers Varan Workshops in the Pacific over to New Caledonia. In 1992, the late Séverin Blanchet and I held the first Ateliers Varan workshop in New Caledonia. The workshop was commissioned by the Agence de développement de la culture kanak and oversaw the production of twelve films. Our last workshop was held in 2009, before my friend and colleague was killed in Kabul, Afghanistan while attending to the new workshop we were establishing there. Our students from the first New Caledonian workshop are in fact the first Melanesian authors from New Caledonia and they were instrumental in the creation and running of the Festival International du Cinéma des Peuples Ânûû-rû âboro.

The creation of Process filmmaking: Crater Mountain Story (2007)

61 In 2001, I was again in a state of doubt about whether filmmaking was actually solving the global issues of our planet, and again gave up filmmaking for three years to become Director of an environmental NGO called the “Environmental Law Centre”. My trouble with film and especially the television media of today is that while denouncing the human peril, it often fails to intervene to save real people’s lives. For all the hype the media creates, there is no commensurate action to restore injustices. The end result is a “fear-based media” which turns most humans into passive observers of other people’s pain in the deteriorating state of our planet. In every middle-class society, both in the third and first worlds (if those categories are still current) consumerism seems to have become a way of comforting a majority of the earth’s citizens in our implicit anxieties and our own lack of effort at making our planet a better place to live in. It was during my work as director of the Environmental Law Centre that I started to collaborate with the Research and Conservation Foundation of Papua New Guinea (RCF).

62 In 2005, while I was filming for my film Gina’s Wedding (2008), people at the RCF told me about an awareness film they were planning. During the consultation about their film project, I advised them against reproducing “podium style approaches” to public awareness, as I doubted the efficiency of this approach in Papua New Guinea. Instead of a film that had all the answers, I rather encouraged them to create a process film. I wanted them to make a film that gave the power of reflection, decision making about land, environmental, socio-political and economic issues to the village people whose land was threatened. They asked me whether such a film could be made and I said, yes it could. So, I developed the idea in writing and they liked it. Because I was living in Germany at the time, I offered to help find someone else locally to make the film. Despite the additional airfare costs, they decided to proceed with me.

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PICTURE 2. – Photogram of Gina's Wedding by M. Maden (2008), a film on the organization of the wedding ceremony of a German ethnologist and her English fiancé in a village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea

(© Martin Maden)

63 Crater Mountain Story (2007) was filmed among the remote Maimafu people, in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. I had secured 5 weeks of filming and the first two of these weeks were taken up with consultations. The 1.500 Maimafu people are organised in seven clans – the Furuvila, Mengino, Lioni, Djugubi, Udja, Hauninavavo and Kuseri – who live in villages on either side of the Hé River. The Furuvilla and the Mengino clans occupy lands on the right bank of the River and the five other clans live beyond the left banks. The two sides of the river were engaged in a dispute when I arrived for the filming. In order to walk between the villages for introductions, negotiations, and to present ideas and seek community input, you had to cross a few smaller rivers, some swamps and climb several mountainous ridges and descend into some steep valleys. I decided to base myself and my equipment on the right side of the river and walked and swam to every location from there. I visited each one of the seven villages and stood in the middle of their squares to tell them stories about myself, explaining my intentions and answering their questions, dealing with their doubts and trying to encourage them to work together on a single film rather than on two or even seven films.

64 The most crucial element of the making of the film was the discussions about the industrial exploitation issues faced by the villagers. It was only after gaining the trust and co-operation of the community that we were able to look at these issues together and, using their lost art of theatre forums, to construct a community film based on an idea of “cinematic democracy”. The seven clans were given a carte blanche to think about the various issues raised by a local mining project and to propose related scenes to the overall film (Pict. 3). The commissioning role remained with me, to review their proposals, mainly to prevent duplications. I was especially strict on the “casting” and didn’t allow men to play women and children’s parts. Otherwise I allowed any presentation to be filmed and I shot about 38 hours of material. Because of the sheer size of the area that had to be covered by the film, and the rains that fell every day, I could not watch many rehearsals and I did not know all the details of how

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presentations would open and close. As a result, the camera work relied on the documentary cameraman’s art of anticipation and of dynamic involvement with live action. A great part of the Maimafu population is illiterate and the people were at first hesitant due to their lack of confidence with film technology. I had to ground them in one art form that they were confident with – theatre. After the last scene had been played, a crowd picked me up with my camera still in my hand and chanting, they carried me through the Village of Kuseri, over fences and right to the house where I was to sleep that night. They appreciated what (the process) we had just done together. Because of the very nature of this process film genre I created, it is difficult to judge the film by its screenings’ reception. Rather, it should be assessed by the processes taking place later, in the filmed societal environment. These processes can be very difficult to see and to measure.

PICTURE 3. – Screenshot from the film Crater Mountain Story from M. Maden (2008). Mama Abigarama protests against the mining project which threatens her community

(© Martin Maden)

65 The film has been shown in the villages several times and I have received great responses. The villagers do however get sad when they see people that they have lost since the filming. As such, the screenings can become a time to cry for loved ones that have died. There are very few cinemas left in PNG which makes it difficult to assess the broader reception of the film. It was shown mostly in community and NGO forums where it was noted how viewers closely identified with the film actors and gained an understanding of the issues raised in the film by listening with interest to what these actors had to say. The Maimafu people also have copies, which they watch in one of their two video screening places. Outside of PNG, the film has been shown at a festival in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 2006, at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia in 2008, and at the Forum Doc film festival in Brazil in November- December 2008. Reviews from colleagues and academics have been overwhelmingly positive. The film is also shown in university courses where it is used to discuss both environmental politics and the subversion of the ethnographic film genre it displays.

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Conclusion

66 As I have shown in this paper, the roots of Process filmmaking initially grew from the teachings of Jean Rouch in direct cinema, especially the philosophy of “donner la parole” and “shared anthropology” that he practiced in Africa. The second main influence emerged from my work as a community development worker with the NGOs, for which I worked for more than 4 years, through a development approach called “Participatory Rural Appraisal”. This was an individual and community self-empowerment tool developed to assist communities in rediscovering self-determination. The third critical influence on my conception of Process filmmaking was the work of the Brazilian theatre practitioner, theorist and political activist Augusto Boal, founder of the “Theatre of the Oppressed” (1979).

67 Indeed, the Crater Mountain people had had a vibrant traditional theatre that got destroyed by evangelisation. Their theatre was a step further than the theatre of Augusto Boal, in that in Maimafu traditional theatre every member of society, including women and children, could use theatrical presentation to criticise any aspect of society. It was a democratic process for social and governmental change in a small community.

68 All these threads came together while I was being faced with the imminent reality of social and environmental degradation of the remote Maimafu people. As I started filming with poor and illiterate communities facing mass exploitation in rural Papua New Guinea, I realised that many of them were going to lose the war to protect their livelihoods from the large transnational corporations which were after their oil, gold or timber. It became obvious that the films I would be making with endangered rural communities could not be an artistic end unto itself. I had to go beyond the art of filmmaking and its pursuit of a desired artistic result. After Crater Mountain Story, the films could no longer be films of an artist who just worked towards artistic results. These new films had to be process films. But what process? The main process that is crucial to illiterate rural people faced with such graves dangers is their survival as a people, a culture, a language and a welfare system.

69 I worked with the Maimafu for 5 weeks, finding a way to unite a divided community, pick up the pieces of a degraded culture and remind them of their never-ending dignity as a people in the face of danger. The simplest process the people gained from their filming experience started with their original self-determination and affirmation of their identity as a people. Then, when the corporate world would inevitably encroach upon this self-determination and divide people even further, the process would be of survivors reminding themselves of where they had been, what they had lost and perhaps how they might recover. Indeed, when I started making Crater Mountain Story with the Maimafu people, I already suspected that I may not be able to make a second film, that would continue the process towards community survival. If you can only manage to make a single film in what you would have hoped to be an ongoing process, the film can be used for self-reflection and even serve as a contract for illiterate communities. In recording their agreements or fears, that film alone can eventually be used in several processes of restorative justice.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BAING-WAIKO Jennifer, 2018 (sept. 17-18th). Andrew Baing’s speech for the Papua New Guinea’s 43rd Independence anniversary, Facebook Wall of Jennifer Baing-Waiko (https:// www.facebook.com/jennifer.baing).

BOAL Augusto, 1979. Theatre of the Oppressed, London, Pluto Press.

GRIFFIN James, Hank NELSON and Stewart FIRTH, 1979. Papua New Guinea. A political history, Richmond, Heinemann Educational Australia.

MACLEAN Alistair, 1980. Athabasca, Collins, London.

MADEN Martin, 2011 (June 14). Post “Rereading the History of Papua New Guinea”, Tok Piksa [Blogspot of Martin Maden] (http://tok-piksa.blogspot.com/2011/06/rereading-history-of-papua- new-guinea.html).

O'ROURKE Roseanne, 2013 (June 29). Post “Death of Dennis O’Rourke, maker of passionate films”, Blog Post hommage to Dennis O'Rourke (https://asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/2013/06/death- of-dennis-orourke-fiery-maker-of-passionate-films.html).

Filmography

CONNOLLY Bob and Robin ANDERSON, 1983, 1989 and 1992. The Highland Trilogy [First Contact, Joe Leahy’s Neighbours and Black Harvest], Documentary films, Australia/Papua New Guinea, 58+90+90 min.

FLAHERTY Robert, 1922. Nanook of the North, Documentary film, USA/France, 78 min.

KILDEA Gary, 1974. Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism, Documentary film, Office of Information – Governement of Papua New Guinea, 50 min.

MACLAREN Les, 1979. Kama Wosi: Music in the Trobriand Islands, Documentary film, Australia, 48 min

MADEN Martin, 1984. Tupela Tingting, Documentary film, Papua New Guinea, Les Ateliers Varan, 17 min (available online on the Ateliers Varan website http://www.ateliersvaran.com/fr/ cinematheque/stolat_988 and http://www.ateliersvaran.com/fr/cinematheque/les-pompes-a- eau-tupela-ting-ting_388).

MADEN Martin, 2007. Crater Mountain Story, Documentary film, Papua New Guinea, 50 min.

MADEN Martin, 2008. Gina’s Wedding, Documentary film, Papua New Guinea, 52 min.

MADEN Martin, Bike JOHNSTONE and Pengau NENGO, 1985. Stolat, Documentary film, France, 20 min.

NENGO Pengau, 1991. Tinpis Run, France, Belgium, Papua New Guinea, UK, 90 min.

NUNGUYA Kumain, 1986. Sinmia, Papua New Guinea, IPNGS, 48 min.

O’ROURKE Dennis, 1976. Yumi Yet, Documentary film, CameraWork/Office of Information – Papua New Guinea Government, 54 min.

O’ROURKE Dennis, 1982. The Sharkcallers of Kontu, Documentary film, IPNGS, Australian Film Commission, 52 min

O’ROURKE Dennis, 1988, Cannibal Tours, Documentary film, Australia, CameraWork, 72 min.

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O’ROURKE Dennis and Gary KILDEA (réal.), 1978. Ileksen: Politics in New Guinea, Documentary, Papua New Guinea, 57 min.

OWEN Chris, 1978. The Red Bowmen, Documentary film, Papua New Guinea, IPNGS, 58 min.

OWEN Chris, 1990. Man Without Pigs, Australie, Papua New Guinea, IPNGS, 59 min.

OWEN Chris, 1999. Bridewealth for a Goddess, Australie, Ronin Films, 72 min.

RICHARDSON John, 1972. My Brother Wartovo, Australia, 55 min.

ROUCHE Jean, 1974. Cocorico, monsieur Poulet, France, 90 min.

ROUCHE Jean, 1958. Moi, un noir, France, 73 min.

TATI Jacques, 1949. Jour de fête, France, 75 min.

NOTES

1. The “Mataungan Movement” was a Tolai political movement which emerged in the late 1960s in East New Britain. Through the creation of the Mataungan Association, it called for self- government of the region. 2. See also a development of this argument in Maden, 2011 on my blogspot Tok Piksa. In this blogspot, I engage in discussions about perceptions, images and imagery, applicable to the abstract, the imagination, the fine arts, photography and cinema to provide a Melanesian view and cultural perspective on local and international events. 3. The final section is an extended version of an interview conducted by Elizabeth Seyeri and Friends of Vienna University, Austria.

ABSTRACTS

This paper is based on my experience of “direct cinéma”, and the ethics and pedagogy from which I have taught Direct Cinema workshops in Papua New Guinea, the Pacific and internationally. Drawing on my own journey as a PNG filmmaker, and my training in the Ateliers Varan school of documentary cinema, this paper retraces the emergence of film authorship in Papua New Guinea since the 1970s in the wake of the country’s independence. It finally turns on my own practice and on process films, a method of filmmaking I have developed in rural communities which articulates cinematic democracy and social interventions towards restorative justice.

Cet article se base sur mon expérience du « cinéma direct », ainsi que sur l’éthique et la pédagogie à partir desquelles j’ai animé des ateliers de cinéma direct en Papouasie Nouvelle- Guinée, dans le Pacifique et ailleurs. S’appuyant sur mon parcours singulier de cinéaste papou de Nouvelle-Bretagne et sur ma formation à l’école de cinéma documentaire des Ateliers Varan fondée au début des années 1980 par le cinéaste français Jean Rouch, cet article retrace l’émergence du film d’auteur en Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée depuis les années 1970 au lendemain de l’indépendance du pays. Il revient sur ma propre pratique et sur les films processuels, une méthode de tournage que j’ai développée dans les communautés rurales et qui articule la

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démocratie cinématographique et un mode d’intervention sociale permettant une action de justice réparatrice.

INDEX

Keywords: film authorship, cinema, Papua New Guinea, Ateliers Varan, Jean Rouch Mots-clés: film d’auteur, cinéma, Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée, Ateliers Varan, Jean Rouch

AUTHOR

MARTIN MADEN Melanesian writer, filmmaker, film director, camera man, [email protected]

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