We Dont Need a Map, Film Review

Film Review We Don’t Need a Map Directed by Warwick Thornton, 2017, 85 minutes, color. Distributed by Ronin Films, Australia. https://www.roninfilms.com.au Rowena Potts New York University We Don’t Need a Map opens with a provocation. “G’day Australia. How you goin’?” Australian Aboriginal cinematographer, filmmaker, and artist Warwick Thornton asks, in voiceover. We hear children singing the national anthem and see an inky black cosmos pierced by tiny, racing splinters of light. These could be stars, we realize, if we were traveling through space at a great speed. “We are standing here with our chest out, wrapped in the Australian flag and the Southern Cross,” Thornton muses. He is referring to the most distinctive constellation in the Southern Hemisphere, also a feature of the national flag. It is a symbol that has recently been co-opted in the service of a xenophobic nationalism in Australia. “Are we a monoculture with a potato up our bum? Are we worried that someday someone’s gonna steal our barbecues and beer?” Thornton’s tone is irreverent, his language idiomatic, and he is speaking to a non-Indigenous Australian audience. A feverish title sequence follows, rapid cuts propelled by the tempo of punk rock. Backlit shots of metal figurines, including a horse and rider rearing over the camera, are played at dizzying speed. Light trails from traffic, and landscapes in time-lapse are juxtaposed with handheld shots of the Southern Cross on flags, on bumper stickers, and tattooed on a man’s pale shoulder. Thunder claps, sparks fly, and dogs growl. The result is unsettling: things are out of balance; something is not right. The final two images are of a small Aboriginal child sitting in a canoe, crying with rage, and two metal dingoes, animated by an invisible puppeteer (Thornton, as the film will soon make clear), fighting on the sand. Commissioned by Australia’s National Indigenous Television (NITV), with support from the governmentfunded Screen Australia, We Don’t Need a Map addresses Thornton’s grave concern that the Southern Cross is becoming “the new swastika”—a symbol weaponized to promote a white national identity that excludes recent immigrants, refugees, and Indigenous people. Thornton, a Kaytej man from Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory, directed and co-scripted the documentary with producer Brendan Fletcher. Principal cinematography was conducted by Thornton, who was assisted by his son, Dylan River—a talented filmmaker in his own right. Thornton plays a dynamic, performative role in a film that takes shape around his personal quest to understand the contested nature of a constellation whose meaning continues to evolve. The film combines formal and informal interviews shot in the homes and workplaces of Thornton’s interlocutors, playful reenactment scenes with metal figurines and puppets, and strikingly beautiful observational sequences filmed on the traditional lands of Australia’s First People. It is tightly edited and loosely structured, with an improvisatory roughness that allows it to chart complex cultural and political terrain without offering easy solutions. Following race riots that took place in Cronulla, Sydney, in 2005, the Southern Cross acquired a particularly racist and anti-immigrant connotation. As Muslim Australian hip-hop artist Omar Musa wearily says to Thornton in an interview, “I see the Southern Cross as a symbol that is dangerous for people like me, however I’m defined.” Yet, for Aboriginal people, the Southern Cross is imbued with profound spiritual and ancestral significance. These stars, as Indigenous poet, filmmaker, cultural activist, and scholar Romaine Moreton points out to Thornton, “are not just ideas or abstract symbols.” Rather, they embody Indigenous knowledge systems and creation stories, providing the foundation for an alternative, deeply relational way of being in the world. “We are in kinship with country,” Moreton explains. “We are in kinship with animals, we are in kinship with plants, with mountains. We are in kinship with the constellations.” This ontology is as unfamiliar to the white nationalists who tattoo the Southern Cross on their bodies today as it was to the British settlers who began their invasion of Aboriginal land in 1788. That white nationalism is Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 34, Issue 2, pp. 163–165, ISSN 1058-7187, online 1548-7458. © 2018 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12171. 164 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 34 Number 2 Fall 2018 a virulent extension of settler colonialism is not lost on Thornton, who deploys a striking panoply of wire figurines made from found materials and recycled scrap metal to reconstruct the violent expansion of European settlement in Australia. These are “bush toys”—the creations of Aboriginal artists David Wallace and Johnny Young, from the remote communities of Ltyentye Apurte and Titjikala in Central Australia. Thornton manipulates these models with his own hands, performing and reconstructing a colonial encounter that is ongoing. The arrival of Captain Cook, for example, is staged against the brilliant red sand of the Central Desert, an inverted sea. Thornton’s hand guides a small wooden sailboat, complete with bush toys dressed in red and blue felt naval attire, across the sand, past a wire figurine that holds a boomerang and a sign saying: “Fuck off, we’re full” (an ironic reference to an Australian anti-immigrant and anti-refugee slogan). Thornton’s handheld camera cuts to a shot of multiple figurines representing Aboriginal men, women, and children, feet firmly planted in land Cook claimed was unoccupied. These aggressively satirical bush toy reenactment scenes offer a powerful device for Thornton to explore the white possessive logics (Moreton-Robinson 2015) that structure Indigenous people’s experience of dispossession in Australian settler society. This includes the theft and exploitation of Aboriginal land by settler pastoralists. In one scene, shot low to the ground, in fixed frame, Thornton walks across an open expanse of desert planting small metal windmills until they fill the area. These stand in for the so-called Southern Cross windmills, a brand of water pump designed in the early twentieth century and produced in the hundreds of thousands. “This looks like a good place to put a windmill,” Thornton repeats, again and again, forcefully planting hard metal structures into the soft earth (Figure 1). In another scene, Thornton confronts a bush toy replica of Cook perched on the edge of a tin boat. “Now I talked to the mob,” Thornton tells him, “and they reckon you can stay, eh. But you’re gonna have to behave yourself. None of this rapin’, pillagin’, stealin’ country. None of that, eh.” The result is a darkly humorous caricature of the settler mentality. Thornton’s metal wire bush toys serve to evoke the violence of a process that somehow exceeds the limits of representation. The toys allow Thornton to create a new visual record of colonization in Australia, and a new narrative of encounter. While it has every right to be, We Don’t Need a Map is anything but dogmatic. Rather, it represents Thornton’s generous invitation to non-Indigenous Australians to join him in a process of active decolonization, as he interrogates the layered meanings of a constellation most have never thought to consider from an Indig- FIGURE 1. We Don’t Need a Map director Warwick Thornton with a bush toy model of a Southern Cross windmill. Film still. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] enous point of view. Thornton does this by weaving together conversational interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics, astrologers, astronomers, rappers, tattoo artists, advertising executives, and rock musicians. He also elicits the perspectives of Aboriginal custodians living on Yolngu, Wardaman, and Warlpiri country. This diverse set of voices serves to highlight the inherent absurdity of singular national narratives or monolithic conceptions of culture. They also introduce us to the multiple ways that Indigenous people have incorporated the Southern Cross into their cosmologies and sacred ceremonies. On Warlpiri land in Alice Springs, for example, Robin Japanangka Granites and Harry Jagamarra Nelson, two senior men Thornton describes as part of his own Central Desert “mob,” produce a sacred ground painting representing the Southern Cross (Figure 2). This ceremony is revealed to us slowly, reverentially, over the course of the film. Medium shots filmed at eye level show Granites and Nelson sitting side by side, not far from a smoking campfire and under a canopy of stars, starting their work. The dimensions of the painting are marked with red thread and nails; the two men carefully spread hot gray ash in lines following this design. Crane shots show the design at various stages; Thornton’s patient, long-exposure cinematography conveys time passing. A mesmerizing wide shot shows the ground painting complete, resting under a brilliant night sky. The final images in the film are of the painting being carefully unmade and swept away. Thornton introduces this unfolding process in voiceover: these custodians “are going to show us something incredibly amazing,” he says, before explaining that much of this knowledge is restricted, available only to those who are initiated. Because of the trusting relationship these men have with Thornton, however, we are privileged to witness parts of the ceremony. Film Review FIGURE 2. Warlpiri custodians Harry Jagamarra Nelson (left) and Robin Japanangka Granites (right) in the process of creating a sacred ground painting representing the Southern Cross. Still from We Don’t Need a Map. [This figure appears in color in the online issue.] Yet Thornton has made his film in a distinctly “unprivileged” camera style, one that makes explicit that this documentary is an artifact of relationship and encounter (MacDougall 1982). His filmmaking is both reflexive and deeply collaborative. He includes himself, and his crew, in all observational sequences and many interviews. He also draws consistent attention to the social relations and cultural protocols “embedded” within his production practice (Ginsburg 1994). In one scene, Bill Harney, a Wardaman elder, informs the spirits that a crew is coming to film on ancestral land. In another, Thornton asks for his interlocutor’s permission to film a specific creation story. Thornton also extends this “aesthetics of accountability” (Ginsburg 2018) to nonIndigenous audiences. He foregrounds that the reproduction of sacred imagery on national television could have unintended consequences. “When they watch this movie,” Thornton says toward the end of the film, while assisting in the creation of the ground painting, “some of them are a bit…not lost, but they’re looking for connection, them mob. You know, people who put the Southern Cross on a tattoo? Some might go, well, we want that one!” referring to the design he is helping Granites and 165 Nelson to produce. “They’re not allowed,” one responds. “No. Don’t,” the other repeats, emphatically. We Don’t Need a Map took shape as part of a landmark documentary initiative by NITV and Screen Australia called “Moment in History.” It premiered at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2017 and was the first in a series of four excellent documentaries broadcast on NITV’s free-to-air service that July, branded with the hashtag #WeAreHere. It later screened to a New York audience at the 2017 Margaret Mead Film Festival in Manhattan, where Thornton was the recipient of the Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award. In the classroom, this film is of interest to students and scholars working on issues of critical indigeneity, indigenous media, visual anthropology, nationalisms, and identity. It could be paired with anthropological writing on the politics of representation and knowledge production, theories of nationalism and modernity, and the politics of borders and migration. This film could also be viewed alongside Cronulla Riots: Day That Shocked the Nation (2012), an online documentary produced by Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which provides valuable context for understanding the rise of white nationalism in Australia (http://www.sbs .com.au/cronullariots). It would be particularly thoughtprovoking for American students in light of the rise of white nationalism in the United States. References Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. “Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.” Cultural Anthropology 9: 365–82. Ginsburg, Faye. 2018. “Decolonizing Documentary On-Screen and Off: Sensory Ethnography and the Aesthetics of Accountability.” Film Quarterly 72: 39–49. MacDougall, David. 1982. “Unprivileged Camera Style.” RAIN 50: 8–10. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.