The Ethnographic Filmmaking of Ian Dunlop in a Decade of Change

Abstract

IntroductionIn 1979 Ian Dunlop produced a paper covering the first seventy years of ethnographic filmmaking in Australia.1 This was a period of significant achievement, starting as it did with the first ethnographic footage shot on location anywhere in the world - on Alfred Cort Haddon's expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898, and by Baldwin Spencer in central Australia, in 1901.Dunlop drew his history to a close with the films of Aboriginal ceremonies shot by Roger Sandali for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in the 1960s, feeling that these marked the end of an era in Australian ethnographic film. In his final paragraph, he was prescient in anticipating that films being made from the end of the 1960s and beyond would be different in a number of important ways: while the subject matter of early ethnographic films had been 'predominantly that of traditional Aboriginal life', films were now being made about 'societies in change'; there was now 'a much closer co-operation. . .between the film-maker and the people being filmed'; and new recording technologies were making a more intimate engagement with people possible.2This paper will examine the way that Dunlop's own ethnographic filmmaking evolved over a critical period of about ten years from around the mid-1960s. His early films, particularly the major series he made in the Australian Western Desert in the mid-1960s, did indeed focus on traditional life. But from the end of the 1960s his work articulated, to greater and lesser degrees, with radical developments taking place in ethnographic film both in Australia and elsewhere in the world. These developments can be seen as forming a backdrop for Dunlop's filmmaking over that period, as he gradually became aware of the groundbreaking work of filmmakers like Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, John Marshall, Timothy Asch and David MacDougall. The collaborative nature of Dunlop's later work in northern Australia, however, can also be understood in terms of a career-long sensitivity towards the people he worked with, and his increasing openness to being led by them.When Dunlop first started making films, in the 1950s, he was working with 35 mm cameras that were large, heavy and very noisy. Shooting with synchronous sound involved putting the camera in a blimp - a huge soundproof box mounted on a massive tripod. Alongside the blimp, a truckload of sound equipment and one or two sound engineers were required. In other words, if one was shooting a documentary with a small unit in a remote location, it was impossible to shoot sync-sound. At best, some wild sound could be recorded with a wire or (later) tape recorder. So early documentaries tended to have a lot of music in them or background chatter and bird chirps recorded on location - or more likely taken from a sound effects library.In 1957 Dunlop made his first trip into central Australia when he was recruited to work on a film about the establishment of a remote weather station.3 The film included some footage of Aboriginal people who were at that time camped near the weather station, but with the 35 mm camera his cameraman was using, Dunlop was severely restricted in filming with them. All the scenes had to be carefully set-up, including a kangaroo hunt where people were asked to throw spears at a dead kangaroo that had been propped up against a tree. But despite the difficulties with arranging them, these scenes reveal an early interest in recording traditional technologies and, apart from the kangaroo hunt, the beginnings of an observational approach to filmmaking. More importantly this contact with Western Desert Aborigines and the realisation that there were still people living a traditional hunter-gatherer life in the desert started Dunlop on a decade-long quest to return to the Western Desert to film 'a day in the life of a nomadic family'.4In the meantime, in the early 1960s Dunlop was commissioned to make a film about the work of a government Patrol Officer on the May River in the upper Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. …