Two Laws

A version of this article appeared in The Age, June 4, 2010.

A group of indigenous women and children sit cross-legged in the long grass, shot through a wide-angle lens, some clutching cans of soft drink. Only part of their dialogue is subtitled, but one of them explains for the benefit of the camera: “You say 'Two Laws' in your language. In Yanyuwa we say 'Kanymarda Yuwa'.”

This is one of the first scenes in Two Laws, an extraordinary 1981 documentary made by the Borroloola Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory in collaboration with visiting filmmakers Carolyn Strachan and Alessandro Cavadini. The film was initiated by the community in the late 1970s, as a weapon in a land rights dispute which, 30 years on, has only just been settled in their favour. At this stage Strachan and Cavadini had been working on political films with Aboriginal communities for the best part of a decade; Strachan began as a student of media and history, while the Italian-born Cavadini had a background in design and theatre, arriving in Australia from the radicalised Europe of 1968.

The pair brought with them a sophisticated understanding of film language, ensuring that local protocol determined form as well as content. Strachan, who acted as sound recorder, always had to stay with the women, while Cavadini, as camera operator, was aligned with the men. “You'll also notice that there's never any talking heads,” says scholar Therese Davis. “That's because in the law, there's the person who can tell the story, but there also has to be somebody there who's authorising that person to tell the story, so they both have to be in the frame.”

Accordingly, close-ups were eschewed and wide-angle lenses used throughout, allowing each shot to capture as much as possible of the group and the surrounding area. Likewise, Davis says the deliberate pacing was intended to recreate the community's experience of time – bringing the audience “as close as you could to being there with them, sitting in that circle.”

As well as reflecting on the conditions of its own making, Two Laws blurs the lines between documentary and historical dramatisation: over the course of the film, community members re-enact events from a horrific past then well within living memory, including an incident in 1933 when more than 30 people from the region were chained together, beaten, and forced on a two month march by a rogue police officer. As Davis points out, similar filmmaking tactics were viewed as groundbreaking when Rolf de Heer and his collaborators employed them in Ten Canoes (2007). “But it had actually been done 30 years ago.”

After Two Laws was complete, Strachan and Cavadini left for New York, where they still live and work today; the film came with them and soon gained an international reputation as a seminal achievement in ethnographic cinema. It also launched a tradition of indigenous filmmaking at Borroloola – the focus of “From U-Matic to YouTube”, a two-day conference at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, organised by Davis as part of her ongoing research into collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australian filmmakers. She says the event marks a watershed for everyone concerned: “The community's never really had a public voice, they've never really had a chance to talk about the process of making the film.”

Though Two Laws belongs on the short list of essential Australian movies, for decades it was barely seen outside educational institutions. While bootleg copies have circulated, Strachan and Cavalini resisted releasing it on video, feeling that the medium was unable to capture what was always intended as a communal, theatrical experience. In 2007 they finally consented to a DVD – but in a major coup, the film will screen at the conference in its original 16mm format, in a print specially imported from the US.

Four members of the Yanyuwa community of Borroloola are flying down to participate in discussions (regrettably, none could be reached in time for this article). The visit was arranged by anthropologist John Bradley, who has worked in the area since Two Laws was made. “They've all talked in public forums before,” he says of the Yanyuwa visitors, “but this is a very different kind of forum where their culture, if you like, is on show, and they have to listen to many people respond to it. I have no doubt that they will be strong and forthright in their opinions about things, but it's a new world.”

Bradley says that for years the Yanyuwa community found Two Laws too painful to watch (“It's a film full of dead people”) though they have recently begun to look at it again. Meanwhile, recent film projects in Borroloola have moved on from efforts to make contact with white Australia. With less than a dozen full-time speakers of the Yanyuwa language still alive, digital animators in Melbourne have been working to preserve the “intangible heritage” of the community's stories and songlines in a new but culturally authorised form.

In contrast with comparable short animations that have screened on SBS, no attempt was made to reference indigenous approaches to visual representation. Bradley says this is because the Yanyuwa artistic tradition is focused on “poetry and singing” rather than painting or design; hence the animators went “straight to realism,” guided by the community's descriptions of what mythological figures might look like.

“The crisis is the survival of their kids, and the survival of their culture,” Davis says. “Their kids aren't interested in watching documentaries like Two Laws, so what they've very cleverly done is adopt new technologies like 3D computer image modelling.” She compares the results to a first-person video game: “The idea is to get the kids interested in country and actually take them on a virtual tour of their country.”

“For the outsider it mightn't seem very important,” Bradley adds. “But believe me, when it's shown at Borroloola you see that the community immediately enters that space – to the point where we've had people mourning in front of a TV for ancestors who once held that knowledge.”