My Mirror column:
The unforgettable David Gulpilil, who won a 2014 Best Actor award at Cannes for Charlie's Country, first appeared on screen 45 years ago.
While writing about Thithi last month, I was reminded of a film I saw at IFFI two years ago, called Charlie's Country. On the surface, the two films have little in common. Thithi's gently sardonic observational portrait of a Kannadiga universe stitches together an impressive multigenerational cast of non-actors, while Charlie's Country stays almost entirely with its principal protagonist, a grizzled Aboriginal man called Charlie.
But at the vortex of Thithi's whirl of activity is also a wiry old man. Gadappa (literally 'Beardman') is determined not to be tied down by restrictions of religious ritual or law or property. Like Charlie, he wants to be free. The difference between them is that Gadappa has once been a householder. And that grihasthi, unhappy as it was, has left him a line of sons and grandsons. It is this family, this community, that wants to make him conform, and it is them that he defies when he wanders off with his preferred tipple instead of signing documents and lighting pyres.
The restrictions Charlie wants to be rid of are of a wholly different kind. Though he ostensibly lives in an Aboriginal 'community', there is nothing left of the world he once knew. The old social fabric, ripped from its inherent connection to the land, is adrift.
Rolf de Heer's film begins on a tenuously comic note. Frustrated with life on the dole and lowgrade industrially processed food, Charlie and his friend Black Pete rig up a battered Land Rover and leave the corrugated shacks they call home to set out on a hunting expedition. They manage to snag a water buffalo, but their guns, the car and the fresh meat-to-be are all confiscated by the local authorities. Down but not out, Charlie crafts himself a spear from a young tree. But this, too, is an unauthorised weapon, according to the white-fella policeman. When even the spear is taken away, Charlie decides the only way to reclaim his country is by living in it the old way.
As you watch David Gulpilil walk into the wilderness, armed with not much except the clothes on his back, you cannot but remember the magnificent actor's first cinematic appearance — as a limber young fellow in Nicholas Roeg's haunting, hallucinogenic Walkabout, which turns 45 years old this week. The 1971 film, with Gulpilil as an Aboriginal teenager who saves two English children lost in the desert, remains memorable for, among other things, the quivering thread of incomprehension and fascination between Gulpilil and the white girl (British actress Jenny Agutter, then 17).
In Roeg's film, Gulpili's character was on a walkabout, a traditional Aboriginal practice in which a boy who turns 16 must spend months learning to survive on his own in the bush, hunting and gathering food and water, essentially living without shelter.
It is the genius of De Heer's film — and a profound source of its tragedy — to return the actor, some five decades later, to another filmic walkabout. This time, though, there is no fantasy of cross-cultural conversation. I don't know if they did even when Roeg arrived to make his film in 1969, but white people in Australia no longer live fearfully on the edges of the wilderness, attracted or frightened by its untamed beauty. Certainly they need no rescuing.
Walkabout contains many scenes of Gulpilil spearing animals for food, from small lizards to kangaroos. A near-climactic sequence made clear the difference between Aboriginal hunting and the white man's hunting, between hunting for survival and hunting for sport. A lean, young, big-eyed Gulpilil is wrestling with a single buffalo, on foot. He has almost succeeded in bringing it down when he is swept off his feet by two white hunters in a jeep and a cloud of dust. Within minutes they have gunned down several animals, taking away only a couple and leaving the others to rot where they fell. Despite Roeg's somewhat dated zooms, jerky pauses and associative visual leaps (to a maggot-infested carcass, for instance, and later a pile of bleached buffalo skulls), it is a powerful sequence.
Watching Gulpilil now as Charlie, heading out to hunt with a vehicle and guns, feels strangely wrong. And yet, if 'civilisation' has come to the bushman, why should the machine not be part of it?
But the Aborigine has neither been equipped to handle Western industrial society, nor can he possibly remain the mythical being he once was. What little equipment Charlie has seems decrepit, like his surroundings. In any case, hunting even a single buffalo for food is now illegal. Having killed off animals on an industrial scale, the white man now forbids hunting. The irony is total.
We may want to watch Gulpilil live off the land and hunt with a spear. Gulpilil may want to watch himself live off the land and hunt with a spear — for the wrenching quality of these films derives from the fact that the actor is playing a character whose predicament is not distant from his own. But people are not untouched by the histories that sweep over them. Having fractured this world into pieces, how can we now expect its members to present themselves as unharmed wholes?
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3rd July 2016.
The unforgettable David Gulpilil, who won a 2014 Best Actor award at Cannes for Charlie's Country, first appeared on screen 45 years ago.
While writing about Thithi last month, I was reminded of a film I saw at IFFI two years ago, called Charlie's Country. On the surface, the two films have little in common. Thithi's gently sardonic observational portrait of a Kannadiga universe stitches together an impressive multigenerational cast of non-actors, while Charlie's Country stays almost entirely with its principal protagonist, a grizzled Aboriginal man called Charlie.
But at the vortex of Thithi's whirl of activity is also a wiry old man. Gadappa (literally 'Beardman') is determined not to be tied down by restrictions of religious ritual or law or property. Like Charlie, he wants to be free. The difference between them is that Gadappa has once been a householder. And that grihasthi, unhappy as it was, has left him a line of sons and grandsons. It is this family, this community, that wants to make him conform, and it is them that he defies when he wanders off with his preferred tipple instead of signing documents and lighting pyres.
The restrictions Charlie wants to be rid of are of a wholly different kind. Though he ostensibly lives in an Aboriginal 'community', there is nothing left of the world he once knew. The old social fabric, ripped from its inherent connection to the land, is adrift.
Rolf de Heer's film begins on a tenuously comic note. Frustrated with life on the dole and lowgrade industrially processed food, Charlie and his friend Black Pete rig up a battered Land Rover and leave the corrugated shacks they call home to set out on a hunting expedition. They manage to snag a water buffalo, but their guns, the car and the fresh meat-to-be are all confiscated by the local authorities. Down but not out, Charlie crafts himself a spear from a young tree. But this, too, is an unauthorised weapon, according to the white-fella policeman. When even the spear is taken away, Charlie decides the only way to reclaim his country is by living in it the old way.
As you watch David Gulpilil walk into the wilderness, armed with not much except the clothes on his back, you cannot but remember the magnificent actor's first cinematic appearance — as a limber young fellow in Nicholas Roeg's haunting, hallucinogenic Walkabout, which turns 45 years old this week. The 1971 film, with Gulpilil as an Aboriginal teenager who saves two English children lost in the desert, remains memorable for, among other things, the quivering thread of incomprehension and fascination between Gulpilil and the white girl (British actress Jenny Agutter, then 17).
In Roeg's film, Gulpili's character was on a walkabout, a traditional Aboriginal practice in which a boy who turns 16 must spend months learning to survive on his own in the bush, hunting and gathering food and water, essentially living without shelter.
It is the genius of De Heer's film — and a profound source of its tragedy — to return the actor, some five decades later, to another filmic walkabout. This time, though, there is no fantasy of cross-cultural conversation. I don't know if they did even when Roeg arrived to make his film in 1969, but white people in Australia no longer live fearfully on the edges of the wilderness, attracted or frightened by its untamed beauty. Certainly they need no rescuing.
Walkabout contains many scenes of Gulpilil spearing animals for food, from small lizards to kangaroos. A near-climactic sequence made clear the difference between Aboriginal hunting and the white man's hunting, between hunting for survival and hunting for sport. A lean, young, big-eyed Gulpilil is wrestling with a single buffalo, on foot. He has almost succeeded in bringing it down when he is swept off his feet by two white hunters in a jeep and a cloud of dust. Within minutes they have gunned down several animals, taking away only a couple and leaving the others to rot where they fell. Despite Roeg's somewhat dated zooms, jerky pauses and associative visual leaps (to a maggot-infested carcass, for instance, and later a pile of bleached buffalo skulls), it is a powerful sequence.
Watching Gulpilil now as Charlie, heading out to hunt with a vehicle and guns, feels strangely wrong. And yet, if 'civilisation' has come to the bushman, why should the machine not be part of it?
But the Aborigine has neither been equipped to handle Western industrial society, nor can he possibly remain the mythical being he once was. What little equipment Charlie has seems decrepit, like his surroundings. In any case, hunting even a single buffalo for food is now illegal. Having killed off animals on an industrial scale, the white man now forbids hunting. The irony is total.
We may want to watch Gulpilil live off the land and hunt with a spear. Gulpilil may want to watch himself live off the land and hunt with a spear — for the wrenching quality of these films derives from the fact that the actor is playing a character whose predicament is not distant from his own. But people are not untouched by the histories that sweep over them. Having fractured this world into pieces, how can we now expect its members to present themselves as unharmed wholes?
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3rd July 2016.
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