[CINEMA) BACK TRACKING BRIAN MCfARLANJO CONSIDERS RACIAL MKrfERS AND THEIR HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION IN RECENT AUSTRALIAN CINEMA ONE of the criticisms levelled at new Australian cinema in the 1970s was its dependence for'cultural capital' (and, up to a point, for economic capital as well) on films set securely in the past. Once they'd got the vulgar popular successes of Alvin Purple and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie out of their way, it seemed our film-makers turned to the past as a more aesthetically respectable means of breaking the decades of semi-drought in local film-making. As the discerning noted, such films as Sunday Too Far Away, Picnic at Hanging Rock and My Bril­ liant Career, set variously twenty or sixty or more years earlier, were nevertheless able to comment on the contemporary scene and dramatise continuing cultural complexities and conflicts in the national psyche. Another, ongoing criticism of Australian cinema has been its general unwill­ ingness, in mainstream cinema at least, to engage with matters of social or political significance. It hasn't, for instance, had much in common with postwar Italian neo-realism, which so poignantly explored the pressures on ordinary lives; equally, it hasn't had much truck with the American habit, from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, of encapsulating social concern in powerfully orchestrated melodramatic scenarios-or with the British 'new wave' of the late 1950s and ls91 BRIAN McFARLANE early 1960s, in which working lives were taken seriously in low-key, realist dramas, stressing character rather than incident. There has been, that is, no antipodean tradition of the kind represented by the likes of Umberto D (1951, Italy), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960, UK) or, closer to my purposes here,Jn the Heat of the Night (1967, USA), There have been clear, discrete successes, like the two discussed in Meanjin ('Local/Global', l/2002), the character-driven ensemble piece Lantana and the genre thriller The Bank (2001), but there has been no tradition of films growing out of social commitment. There has been the odd film that has focused on, say, drug abuse, on the treatment of disability, on gender issues, on the unemployed, on radical political commitment or youthful alienation, but these have rarely exhibited a courageous grappling with the issues at stake. Too often such films have been inconclusive melodramas, lacking the aesthetic guts to pursue the mode in full cry, as if that would somehow vitiate the importance of the matter. Racism is one of the subjects that has hardly had a serious treatment in new Australian cinema, except in the small-budget 'art cinema' in which directors such as Tracey Moffat have worked, finding critical acclaim sometimes but not audi­ ences of a size to make serious impact. Perhaps the commercial failure of Fred Schepisi's fine film version of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksfnith (1978) helps explain film-makers' unwillingness to address this most appalling stain on the national conscience. Further, for much of the preceding century, when Aborigi­ nals had any kind of presence in Australian films, they were there, as often as not, as exotics, as Nature-oriented counterpoints to 'civilised' white man, and in stories in which 'a progatonist is privileged and the character is psychologised ... in keeping with the imperatives of classical Hollywood cinema'. 1 That is, these were not films explicitly addressing social ills; they were films about individuals, rather than about a race. In 2002 there was an unexpected rash of films whose ostensible subject is racial bigotry in one or other form. I will look briefly at four of them here: The Tracker, Australian Rules, Black and White and Rabbit-Proof Fence. What is beyond doubt is that all have their hearts in the right place; they are all made by white film-makers; they are all more or less absorbing; and they are all set in the past. There is nothing remarkable about these aspects, though they involve some related concerns and issues that are worth raising. It is difficult to imagine a film on such sensitive issues that didn't have its heart located in the right place (a sort of outback Triumph of the Will?). Black film­ makers have continued to operate at the fringes of the industry, not in the (6o] Back Tracking mainstream where these four films essentially, if none too securely, belong. If none of the four is ever actually tedious, equally none of them offers a really sustained, passionate attack on prejudice, nor does any exhibit the unambigu­ ously melodramatic power that infused Hollywood's social-conscience pieces such as Crossfire (1948) or The Defiant Ones (1958). And though the fact that they are all 'safely' set in the past need not imply irrelevance today, it does make one wonder why, like the seventies period-pieces, they choose not to tackle the indocile present directly. Are these matters too raw? Would film-makers get funding to expose contemporary scars on Australia's reputation? However committed one may be to the idea that a film is a film and each new work must be judged on its merits as a film, I think it is impossible to take this line unreservedly in relation to this batch of films. Their subject-the ways in which white society has sought to keep Australia's Aboriginal population subor­ dinated to the mores of European culture-is too important for such an easy way out. Part of the value of these films is tied up with the kind and quality of the contribution they make to an ongoing dialectic about a matter central to the national conscience. Aesthetic judgement is therefore not enough. While writing as a film critic here, I am aware that my views are likely to be less important than those who come at the films from different professional directions. Those who have sought to administer laws humanely, whether from black or white commu­ nity standpoints, have more serious rights to assess the wider cultural and social value of these films. Having said that, l would also suggest that the better a film on such themes is made the more likely it is to have socially beneficial results; the most potent cinematic documents have always been the product of passionate involvement, imagination and dexterity in exercising the tools of trade. From this point of view all these films have value, more substantial in some than others. They all draw on different cinematic genres: The Tracker has obvious affiliations with the Western; Australian Rules mixes social bigotry with family melodrama; Black and White, the most contentious of the four, uneasily blends courtroom drama with social document; and the narrative of Rabbit-Proof Fence belongs to the long tradition of the quest motif. Part of the interest of the films is in considering the sort of stylistic and generic hybridity on offer in them, and how far this serves the issues at stake. Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, for much of its length, recalls the Western in its narrative, its iconography, the characters who enact its conflicts, and its ideology. In narrative terms, it involves a 1922 search (for a black man alleged to have murdered a white woman) through difficult country, which recalls such classic [61] BRIAN McfARLANE Westerns as John Ford's The Searchers (1956); in both ftlms, the action focuses on a search party that feels it is being observed by those who know the landscape better than it does. Visually, The Tracker opens on a wide shot of the outback, then moves to a medium shot of three men riding, before cutting to a series of close-ups. The first of these close-ups is on David Gulpilil, as the tracker, walking, and this small film-making decision stresses both his centrality to the film's drama and the actor's iconic status. The look of the film in terms of place, of characters in the frame and in their relation to the landscape, echoes not just The Searchers but such other Westerns as Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur (small character group against the wilderness) and Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller, especially the scene in which the party rides through soaking rain. The film aurally evokes Altman, as well, with the use of ballads on the soundtrack to fill in the narrative gaps and intensify the mood. The range of characters keeps suggesting the Western: there is the tough leader of the search party, the neophyte who queries the leader's decisions, the weathered older man who recalls any number of those wise seniors who do their best to restrain the hard man's hardness and to temper the boy's impetuous youth-and the indigenous tracker himself. The fact that none of these is given a name, but is just known by his character function (the Fanatic, the Recruit, the Veteran and the Tracker), underlines the kind of mythic status they are meant to embody. Ideologically, too, it reminds one of those revisionist Westerns of the 1970s that were intended to direct our sympathies away from the white settlers/adventurers and onto the displaced 'natives: But despite aU these echoes, The Tracker is not a Western. However resonantly it begins as a transplanting of a familiar genre, it ends, perhaps not wholly in its own interests from the point of view of taut drama, as a meditation on racism. It may be set in 1922, but its preoccupations are contemporary, most tellingly in that sense of somehow rendering Gulpilil's tracker invisible to white conversa­ tions.