AustLit

Stewart Cunningham examines Charles Chauvel's career during the last decade of his life (1950s), a period in which the director made only one feature film - Jedda (1955).

Colin Johnson examine's the construction of Aboriginal identity in Charles Chauvel's Jedda, arguing that the film is not a realistic depiction of life, or of conflict between European and Aborigine as it is often taken to be, or a mishmash of 'Hollywood' images and romanticism transferred to Australia. Instead it is a film constructed from the ideological position of Chauvel - a position Johnson refers to as 'ideological authenticity.' A number of contradictions arise from his position, he writes. 'One such contradiction involves the positioning of the Aboriginal male in Australian film. From the book, Walkabout, it may be seen that Chauvel had ideas on what constituted a 'true' Aborigine, and this 'trueness' had little basis in reality, but in his holding such notions as 'the noble savage' - a stereotype familiar to us from Tarzan films.' However, while Chauvel sought to project the idea that he had made a quasi-documentary film, a 'true' story though clothed in action, showing what happens when the Aboriginal enters the white world and how it leads to tragedy, the flatness of his European characters, and the strength of Tudawali's role enables us to read the film as an Aboriginal text.'

'When reading the film as an Aboriginal text we see that its central conflict, the stealing of women and its resolution, is an old problem inherent in Aboriginal society. This central conflict enables Aboriginal men to strongly identify with Marbuk. 'Identification' is extended to Aboriginal women, too, especially mission women and station women, in that Christian indoctrination forbade them to have anything to do with such savage myalls as Marbuk. The mission inhabitants, predominantly women, were forced to forego their Aboriginality at least consciously. Only in dreams was it allowed to emerge, and it did. Forbidden, the savage, or the free Black Man became a fascinating sexual object for those women. Chauvel unwittingly transcended his film, for when he depicted the lure of Marbuk for Jedda, he was depicting the lure of Aboriginality for mission blacks... What makes his film rise above a B Hollywood film is not a plot so much as his casting of a black man in the leading role. Tudawali's acting ability and charisma dominates the film.'

Using the theatrical and film productions of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll as an example, Tom O'Regan explores the failure of film studies to create the kind of productive relationship with theatre/performance studies that it had had for more than a decade with literary theory. He argues that 'nowhere is this more evident than in the separation of the study of Australian theatre and filmmaking in critical discourse. This is despite the fact that the theatre has constituted a reference point for film producers from pre-sound cinema days to the present in terms of film properties, script-writers, acting talent, and directors; and there has always been a significant crossing over of personnel from one medium to the other right up to David Williamson in the present.'

Tom O'Regan notes that 'historiographically, the Australian film industry of the 1950s is known for both the restrictive circumstances of production and its location films.' In this essay he examines both the development of particular frameworks for the appreciation of films (including Australian cinema) and the interrelationship between film and cultural spheres (particularly theatre and arts policy) across the decade. O'Regan also demonstrates how events and discourses of the 1950s formed an important conceptual and institutional pre-history for subsequent developments in the 1960s leading towards the 1970s Australian film industry revival.