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 Modification 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 Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 148 | 2019 The Rise of Film Authorship in Papua New Guinea. A personal Journey 2 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. Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 148 | 2019 The Rise of Film Authorship in Papua New Guinea. A personal Journey 3 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.