Screen Shot 2018-11-02 at 2.15.36 pm.png

CAMELS & THE PITJANTJARA

Camels & the Pitjantjara

dir. Roger Sandall
English narration
1969; 45 minutes

curated by Anna Georgia
introduced by Rene Kulitja


This session of the Walk-In Cinema includes the screenings of feature-length Camels & the Pitjantjara, local filmmaker Ahmed Adam’s Mark & Memory (2017, 6 minutes), and a Q&A with curator Anna Georgia facilitated by Ahmed.

From the 1920s onwards, when motor vehicles displaced camels as a mode of supply in central Australia, camels gradually went feral. As Camels & the Pitjantjara shows however, in the 1960s the Pitjantjara were making good use of camels to facilitate their travels and connections with other areas.

This remarkable film, shot in 1968 (released in 1969) follows a group of Pitjantjara men, led by "Captain", a veteran cameleer, who travel out from their base at Areyonga Settlement, to capture a wild camel, tame it and add it to their domestic herds. They then use camels to help transport a large group of people from Areyonga to Papunya, three days' walk away.

This film departs from the usual emphasis of the AIAS (now AIATSIS) films in the 1960s on recording ceremonial life and traditional craft skills. Since its formation in 1964 through to the early 1990’s, AIATSIS commissioned the recording of Australian subject matter considered to be ethnographically or historically significant, for archival purposes.

Over the years, producer Roger Sandall made many recordings for AIAS documenting Aboriginal men’s ceremonies (which remain under tightly clan-controlled viewing restrictions), as well as whole films. Camels and the Pitjantjatjara is significant because it moves away from what Sandall decried as the ‘painfully rigid format’ of ritual recordings to explore, in a more open-endedly curious and cinematically immersive way, how indigenous cultures were responding and adapting to European colonisation. The film also touches on the malaise of life at Areyonga, where the men are generally bored: "yesterday's skills are meaningless" in the Settlement where food and necessities are generally supplied.

In Camels we are introduced to individuals (Captain and Nosepeg) who show the camera how their people were incorporating European animals (camels, horses, dogs, rabbits) into their way of life both productively and with affection. In the 1960's, the Sandall's highlighting of this robust adaptability was important not only in belying any notion of indigenous people ‘dying out’ in the face of European settlement, but also in its epistemological departure from traditional approaches to anthropological filmmaking as objective record or scientific illustration.

Roger Sandall (1933-2012) was a New Zealand born anthropologist and filmmaker educated at Columbia University, who was part of a vibrant avant garde and social documentary film culture in New York in the 1960s. His work was known and respected by the likes of Jean Rouch, John Marshall, and Robert Gardner; and his ideas about ethnographic filmmaking developed in dialogue with David and Judith MacDougall, and Colin Young.

Produced, directed and written by Roger Sandall
Photography Roger Sandall
Second camera Nicolas Peterson
Editor Roger Sandall
Sound Laurie Fitzgerald
Anthropological Consultant Nicolas Peterson

An AIAS Film Unit production - 1969 - English dialogue and narration

Ronin Films wishes to advise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that this film may contain images and voices of deceased persons.

Note that the film is narrated in English. Passages of dialogue in Pitjantjatjara language are not translated.

Note also that the word "Pitjantjara" in the main title is an earlier Anglicism of the modern term "Pitjantjatjara".

SCREENING
+ Q&A

Wednesday 28th April


FOOD SERVED 6:30PM
SCREENING 7:00PM
Q&A: 8:00PM

The Walk-In Cinema
is generously supported
by Screen Territory