FRANCES CALVERT

Cracks in the Mask, a 57 minute documentary film about Torres Strait Islanders, their traditional masks and their artefacts which are now found in European museums, was screened at the second Ethnographic Festival in Berlin where it won two awards; it then went to the Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane Film Festivals. From a special screening in Adelaide, it went on to the Cork Film Festival. Frances Calvert is an Australian documentary maker living in Berlin. Talking Broken, 1990, was her first film, also on the Torres Strait Islands.

Why has the film appealed to Australian audiences?

I'm very interested in the way Australian audiences have responded. Most people have gone straight for the content, for the strong political message which everybody sees as repatriation: why are these artifacts not back in Australia? how can people try to negotiate to get them back? I've always been pessimistic about the return, especially of works of art, but I think it's because in Australia at this time we're thinking very much about the rights of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. We're thinking about a whole range of issues, from land rights to art. Torres Strait Islanders want to separate and have their own authority rather than being a small part of ATSIC. So it's all very much in the news: Wik and the Stolen Children, the lot.

This response would be quite different from the appeal to Germans that would lead to awards at Berlin?

They look at the second level of the film, my attempt to offer some rather avant garde reflections upon museums as such. The film was screened in the very museum where I filmed in Berlin. They actually called a conference afterwards to discuss the way that they appeared to the public, some of the problems they have in dealing with visitorss from the Pacific. In the film, the director speaks almost a baby-talk, telling the Torres Strait Islander about skulls and headhunting, as if he didn't know. I find Europeans see Torres Strait Islanders as representative of any small indigenous minority, somewhat marginalised, that has lost all its material culture and now wants to reclaim it - even after years of missionary presence and a lot of bureaucratic activity that led people to become good Australian citizens and disregard their own art for a long time.

Was that the appeal of the Torres Strait Islanders for yourself in making Talking Broken as well as Cracks in the Mask?

Yes, the great question of why a white person makes a film about Torres Strait Islanders and aborigines! It's a very sensitive issue in Australia. Germans would never worry about how a white person looks at black people. I did not want to make a film about Torres Strait art, a normal television documentary, say; I always knew that my films would have a sense of collaboration. In fact, Ephraim Bani, the Torres Strait Islander in the film, felt free enough to act exactly as he wanted to and to say what he wanted. He knew the whole time that my interest was in museums and that he could direct his part of the film as he wanted. Of course, I found which museums had the greatest collections of Torres Strait Island artefacts. I got to know their curators, asked for permissions and so on. Basically, the interviews are all straight, there are no set ups, there are no retakes.

And why I came to Torres Strait? It's an old story. I was helping a German film-maker with his research in northern Australia and I asked, who are these people with fuzzy hair. I think a lot of Australians - this was the mid-80s - didn't realise how Torres Strait Islanders differed from Aborigines. I think a lot of people didn't know what Melanesian art was. So the films gradually grew out of this, about not really knowing a lot about one's own country's indigenous minorities. Then when I went there - I went back many times - people said to me, `Tell this story'. There was this longing to have their story known, their longing to actually see objects which they knew existed but which they knew had been lost from the islands.

I find that in Australia people use very strong verbs about this loss - they say `stolen', `plundered', `robbed'. We're not necessarily talking about things that were stolen; it's about a kind of accident of history that anthropologists collected these things. We know that people paid. There are receipts. But, in a sense, what does it matter if there's a receipt for five pounds in Cambridge? It's more that it's a sad loss over the years and, especially, that people stopped making these beautiful, elaborate turtle-shell masks.

The islanders would like to revive the art because they are now allowed to catch turtles, so they could use turtle shell again. There's one artist operating there, doing scrimshaw work on turtle shell, in fact using the catalogue of black and white photographs from the 1898 Haddon Collection for his inspiration. I don't know when people stopped making the masks, but it seems to be somewhere around 1920. There wasn't the same demand for big elaborate ceremonies. Making a 6 or 7 feet long mask - the longest is a 7 feet crocodile - sewing them together, putting the turtle shell in hot water, bending it etc., is a lot of work. There is still fantastic dancing in Torres Strait, but you see things not made out of turtle shell but made out of cardboard, fretwork or wooden nose-clips.

How does Talking Broken connect with Cracks in the Mask?

My first film, Talking Broken, came out in 1990. It hasn't the same linear argument as Cracks in the Mask; it's much more of a mosaic. The theme is social change and the question was always: how do these people who are Melanesians and who see themselves as separate from the Aborigines and the Papuans just across the water - living, in fact, in a First World country - see their development and their future. I interviewed many people and became friends with many. Talking Broken is about the encounter and the way they talked about what they hope for.

In Cracks in the Mask you began with your own voice-over. You sounded as if you were on a quest. Then, afterwards, for the bulk of the film, Ephraim Bani and his wife were on their quest. What was your quest? The museum quest?

I knew that my quest was not to find Torres Strait art and to hold it up to them and to say, `Look, isn't this beautiful?' That is not fair in any way. You don't go to Europe, find things and say, `Nice stuff they've got over here'. I felt, as an Australian who lives in Europe - and I say this in the commentary - I have access to so many museums. I could study a thousand different cultures in all the ethnographic museums if I wanted to, but I ask myself why? I think it's much more important to say, when we go into those museums, how do we look at this material? What's going on in our heads? We can't ever hope to imagine what those people felt, the people who made these things, or even to understand how they feel about how they're represented.

I wanted to cast a more philosophical light on museums as such. I've met so many people in Europe who don't reflect. They say, `Aren't we lucky to have all this stuff?' And I say, `Well, do you understand it? Does it mean anything? When was the last time you went to an ethnographic museum?' So the film is about people making other people's heritage into their own commodities.

Ephraim and his quest?

He was always working on this film. I showed him photos of the new collections I'd seen, and he kept saying, `It's wonderful that we were the subject of a major expedition in 1898, because a lot has remained, thank goodness, and we have been closely studied. But it doesn't matter any more. We donn't have any of this stuff. We haven't had any access to it but it's wonderful that we can travel over there.' He confided to me at the beginning that he felt that the force of his personality and his knowledge would somehow convince the curators to look kindly upon his longing to have things back. He said to me once, `I don't even have the language to talk to these people, we are not even speaking the same idiom, we're not on the same wavelength. All I can do is be nice and grateful that they've allowed us to come in between 9.00 and 5.00. The debate has not even begun.'

There was quite a range of responses from the curators.

I certainly chose elements of each encounter that reflected something different. I thought there was a certain similarity among the British curators - very friendly, very welcoming, very open, but basically just showing him the stuff.

Speaking of `stuff', the Scots commentator had a great deal to say about `stuff'.

I liked Charles Hunt. A lot of people think he's a spoof in the film, but I chose him because he has some very interesting ideas about representation. He says in the film, `Whatever happens in the museum doesn't happen because people are there; it happens because the objects are there.' And when you think about it, they are just bits of stuff: feathers, grass, whatever. He says the Torres Strait Islanders have a very close relationship to stuff. It is unmediated.

While western Europeans have become word-conscious?

He says we got hung up on words. We started analysing and cataloguing and classifying and lost that relationship with the `stuff'. Maybe museums are the thin silken cord that ties us back to a time when we had a relationship to stuff - and he means a very direct knowing, not having to verbalise what it is, but just knowing. So, now he asks, `How can we in the west try to say something about that in our exhibits?" He uses words. He's a great lover of treating words as importantly as objects in his glass cases.

His approach was a contrast to the woman who commanded Ephraim, off-screen, `Don't touch the exhibits'.

She was just the woman who brings the material in and out, but she certainly felt she was in authority.

That sequence had a great impact on the audience. It seemed to crystallise a lot of their thinking and emotions about Ephraim's quest and the treatment he received.

I think so. It was not a set-up and, in a way, I was at a fairly low point. I had had a lot of trouble getting access to the British Museum's collection. I was very pleased that they finally waived the fee of two hundred pounds an hour, because they said, `Well, if his people hadn't made this stuff, we wouldn't have it'. I thought that was a good enough excuse. And I felt, damn it, this interchange actually happened. I think it was the culmination of the experiences that we both had, really.

Another point you make, as do the curators and even Ephraim himself, is that the artefacts have moved from being part of the heritage to being considered as part of world art. And who has rights to this art?

In Australia we are not buying a lot. We are not really rich enough. We're not really working a lot on the international auction market. Every now and again we do but, in general, we are not seen as a country like the United States which has a huge market thirsty for new objects. I didn't have time in the film to go into the question of art theft. I just touched on it briefly, but we know it's been happening for a long time. There have always been self-appointed dealers attaching themselves to museums, especially those that were behind the Iron Curtain before 1989. We know that there's theft and resale going on. It's an open secret that stolen art resides in Switzerland for 20 years and then it becomes the property of the person who has bought it.

So I wanted to say that the emotional arguments about the Torres Strait Islanders having a legitimate right to see this material or to have it back almost don't count when these objects have become art and they are now collateral, commodities, and they will go on being passed from hand to hand for huge sums of money.

I often tried to find out what people thought a turtle-shell mask, say, might sell for. I heard of one magnificent example that was estimated at 250,000 Swiss francs. These are big bickies. The Australian Museum would not be in a position, I'm sure, to buy back one mask for a quarter of a million. Or to set up a museum on of the Torres Strait islands.

Ephraim and his background?

I always knew that Ephraim knew more than anyone else about his stories and traditions. He comes from the western islands of the Torres Strait. It was always very difficult to know whether the word `king' - `I am descended from the King Bari' - means the same as in our culture, but there is a strong sense, despite the kind of democratisation that took place with the entry of the Australian government, forcing people to take surnames and all that kind of thing, of his being a leader. He received a good education, went to Brisbane University, started an MA there - I think he might have finished it, but I'm not sure - and then he had a chance to go to Canada to study how people write about their own language, towards creating a dictionary with spelling, procedures and so on. I've met other Islanders who have gone to university, but there's something about Ephraim. He really does know his traditions.

His reading from his diary was certainly a very effective way of structuring the journey.

I saw him writing this diary and I was longing to know what was in it. When we did the long interview, I asked him about every aspect of the journey. I said, `Could you tell us what's in your diary?' And he said, `Oh, just a few things here and there'. I was, in fact, honourable enough not to steal this diary, I've never read it. But when we made the rough cut of the film, I also realised that Ephraim and his wife, Petharie Bani, were exhausted at the end of the shoot - although he said that,in many ways, it had been like a holiday. I realised that he was not in a position to do his commentary. He hadn't really mulled over it thoroughly, so I left it for about six months. We did the rough cut - I take a long time to edit films - and when I looked at this rough cut, I knew it was not strong enough for Ephraim. It wasn't working strongly enough for him. So I rang him up and invited him back to Berlin. He liked the rough cut, used his diary and he recorded it over weeks. So it's not a set-up. He probably is the most philosophical Australian indigenous person you've ever heard.

Very articulate and a strong presence. Somebody remarked that the usual thing is for Europeans to come out to the Pacific, but this time it was the Pacific going to Europe and that was a different mindset for us to watch.

Yes, I think it is time we heard thoughts from the people actually affected by it.

Your musical score was distinctive.

It's very new music. I didn't want to use any classical music and I don't believe that the whole of the soundtrack should be Torres Strait songs because that's not our culture. I wanted this kind of tension all the time between them and us: them looking at us looking at them. and I also wanted ironic music. I knew that I hoped to make points every now and again, so I've taken John Cage and I took Edgar Varese for the percussion piece at the end which is quite powerful because it's actually quite small. It's not bombastic music. When the masks recur during the film, that's Brett Dean and Simon Hunt's new music. I know Brett from Berlin, he plays with the Philharmonie. I decided not to use the wax cylinder chants from 100 years ago under Haddon's film, because I thought they speak only to the islanders. It also might upset them because apparently these words, while the translation of them seems to be meaningless, they do belong to a ceremony that people are trying to revive. So I used western music instead.

You commented that you went bankrupt blowing the film up to 35mm. It looks beautiful, especially the photography of the pieces themselves.

That was a conscious decision. I hope that the beauty of the film will actually persuade some Australian museums to mount an exhibition one day. It's only they who can get them to Australia.

My cameraman did not know anything about Torres Strait, but after a while he kept saying, `But this is fantastic, these are so beautiful'. He sensed how lost to public gaze they were and he wanted to do justice to these objects. So we worked for a long time in the British Museum. We were not allowed to touch, so he decided to give them life and beauty by using dimmers rather than the bright lights you use for an interviews.

The lighting reminds us of paintings.

I had made the intellectual decision to see these artefacts as art, because I think a western viewer does. In the interviews the style is much more verite: things are moved and turned and talked about and they come in and out of focus and so on. And you see Ephraim's direct connection to them. I felt this would challenge the western viewer to say, `But this is art', and then to listen to these people talking about museums and, like the man in Neufchatel, question the way we look at all these objects. Is it because we need other people's heritage or is it to give us a good conscience in case the culture disappears? We have all their material culture in our storerooms.

I thought these challenges, these quite extreme, almost surrealistic ways of looking at a museum were the kind of challenges that make the film, I think, an experience.


Interview: 31st July 1997