In a savage land-review

Opinion

From Brisbane, Max Quanchi reviews the latest film set in Papua New Guinea s Trobriand Islands and one he thinks is set to become a minor classic and international box-office success

IN a savage land, just released in Australia by producer and direc tor Bill Bennett, has the appearance of a formula film. With a set piece lovers triangle, exotic location, missionaries, traders and ending with key characters caught in the onset of World War II in the Pacific, it has a plot and characters instantly recognisable to theatre audiences.

Movie goers will like the naked villagers, the jungles and coasts of Papua New Guinea, strange and amazingly photographed rituals and a sort of boys-own adventure full of stereotyped villains, heroines and heroes. Two anthropologists, a young and recently married Aus tralian couple, arrive for fieldwork in a coastal village in the Tro briands in 1941 and earnestly start asking questions, taking pho tographs, scribbling down observations and interviews in notebooks and then tapping away at the typewriter.

It is a simple enough story and has a ring of historical truth about it with references to the anthropologist Malinowskis earlier fieldwork on the same island. In 1923, a young woman had travelled from South Australian to Papua and when Philippa Bridges reported back to the Royal Geographical Society branch in Adelaide she noted cynically that in Papua there was “a population of 2000 white people of whom 1782 write articles about anthropology for the Sydney Bul letin.”

When Philippa Bridges was in Papua, Frank Hurley was also there filming Pearls and savages, which went on to screenings in Aus tralia, England and the USA with considerable box-office success. A book with the same title was equally popular. Outsiders still write arti cles and books, and now they make feature films As the anthropologists In a savage land, Evelyn and Phillip, progress from being outsiders to being accepted into the village’s secret, customary rituals, exchanges and ceremonies, they confront the island’s resident pearl trader, the resident Scottish missionary and the local patrol officer and government administrator.

Audiences will be intrigued by sequences of swirling, noisy Trobriands style cricket, dances, mourning rituals and village archi tecture, cooking and games. This is convincingly depicted and verges

on a documentary style of filming.

Wandering conspicuously through this panorama are the two anthropologists, their marriage gradually falling apart as the woman rejects her gendered subordination in both the marriage and the cou ple’s research work. In seeking information on the role of women and sexual relations in the village, eventually her behaviour threatens the traditional position of power held by village men.

A sub-plot revolves around the two anthropologist’s relation ship with other European residents, though these scenes are a little overladen with posture and cliche. But an argument with the trader on the verandah of their house in the village, another during a courtesy call on the Magistrate and one with the missionary over burial proce dures, while presented in a simplified and confrontational manner, do

indeed raise controversial issues common in the colonial era. The Mis sionary wants to avoid secular and territorial challenges to his evan gelical work; the District Officer and Magistrate wants to prevent ideas from circulating that might upset the established colonial order of master-native relationships and the trader ignores everything except profit in pursuit of better pearls and favourable bartering terms.

The trader, Mick, is portrayed as a friend of the villagers even though he is clearly exploiting them over pearl prices. Mick is helpful and attentive to villagers and anthropologists alike, and early in the film, just gets on with his business of making money. This characteri sation differs from the cameo violent, drunk, psychopath or pathetic trader of film and fiction.

Mick’s role salvages traders from the list of colonial era bad guys and may indeed be historically closer to the actual relationship resident traders had with indigenous communities.

The film also raises a debate only recently resolved by regula tion in Island nations, regarding the relationship between indigenous intellectual property and foreign researchers. When Evelyn secretly photographs a couple making love in a cave is she exercising the legit imate right of anthropologists to gather evidence?

When Phillip argues that he is adding to the world’s knowledge of itself, does this excuse his prying, intrusive behaviour and ulti mately his appropriation of this villages indigenous knowledge?

He argues that his altruism is preferable to the trader’s barter ing of mouth organs for pearls. The trader replies that at least he pays the villagers and questions the anthropologist for using details of vil lage rituals and practices to gain a professorship or to publish a best selling monograph. These debates about fieldwork have raged for much of the 20th century. The film also has a feminist critique running through all these events, starting with the marriage (mostly of conve nience) necessary to get a university grant for the fieldwork and sur facing in debates over their respective research work.

It is also the agenda behind some over-the-top utterances from the District Magistrate and Phillip’s obsessive behaviour as the mar riage disintegrates. Evelyn’s subsequent experiences alone in another village, her adoption of Trobriand mourning custom when Phillip dies of dysentery and her later assertion of her own sexuality could have been easily trivialised, but instead become the central motif of the film.

It is a film about Evelyn. The role should make Maya Stange into the next Australian acting success story. Theatre audiences might miss these nuances, derived as they are from earlier and current anthropological and historical debates. Readers of Conrad and Kipling and students of the colonial era will immediately recognise that the plot is a reasonable reconstruction of documented and similarly ambiguous meetings on the frontier between indigenous peoples and

Continued next page

Continued from previous page

officials.

In this context, In a savage land will earn a place alongside Black Robe and At the play in the fields of the Lord and others as a critical film of the first contact, white-meets-black genre.

On the popular level, the majority of viewers will respond to the idea of expeditions in foreign lands, the romance that develops between Evelyn and the trader and the complications that arise with the approaching Japanese invasion.

The opening in Adelaide is conventional the student falling for her professor is a familiopm^j§'|>j^.^iw ie action quickly moves to the tropics.

The ending involves a jump back to Evelyn’s successful but lonely life as a best-selnhg anthropologist. It

anthropologists, traders, missionaries and colonial

is a stock-in-trade twisting, romantic ending that audiences will have seen before, but will still enjoy. When an early cut of the film was screened at a conference in Sydney in July this year it was severely criticised by anthropologists including many indigenous scholars. Pro ducer and Director Bill Bennett admitted at a pre-release screening in Brisbane in October that he had been tinkering with details of the films for most the year so it will interesting to see how the final ver sion is received.

In a savage land will no doubt be criticised for exploiting indigenous wisdom, traditions and culture and the amateur actors, and for misrepresenting the Trobriands, but these crimes, surely to be debated further, will not detract from the film’s popular reception in suburban theatres. * Max Quanchi is a senior lecturer in the Asia-Pacific Studies Pro gram, School of Humanities and Social Science, QUT. ■