[to appear in Screening the Past]

Title: Was Two Laws Experimental?

Asking this question of a film that was made in 1982 in the

remote Australian Aboriginal community of Borroloola is
part of a broader set of questions about technique and
form (politics and aesthetics) for arts practitioners. What is
an experiment for the arts, as opposed to the sciences? Is
it a process of composing a piece (of writing, film, or
music) within a repetitive cycle of substitution and failure
until something surprising happens? That quasi-scientific
model is certainly an interesting one to work with, but how
is the model constituted? To experiment in that scientific
sense you need a lab, time, and colleagues: the lab is for
assembling the materials in a controllable environment;
time is for unfolding the process of repeated testing and
failure; and colleagues are for referral, peer review and
institution building.

I want to make a case that it is not so different for the

humanist, the practitioner who is interested in changing
the way people think and feel about public issues. But the
experiment, in the humanities and creative arts, has been
conceived of somewhat differently. In writing and art
workshops and film co-ops, experiment (when it is
defined, and it rarely is) usually takes the form of a
gesture towards liberation from convention. For example,

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according to Vladimir Turbin’s (1961) Comrade Time and
Comrade Art, “…the greatness of Picasso and Mayakovsky
consists in their ingenious refashioning of conventions,
their capacity to dream up cultural forms that respond to
altered psychic conditions and technological
possibilities.”1

The experimental was thus also an avant-garde, a term

that encompasses both political and aesthetic movement
within a revolutionary paradigm. This vanguardism was
expressed much more strongly by a group of historians
influenced by mai ‘68 and writing in 1991. Daniel S Milo
and his friends in Paris constituted a working group in
“experimental history”, publishing a volume of essays
entitled Alter Histoire.2 Their obsession was to
…liberate the imagination of the historian, admire
the force of the possible, intervene in order to spread
disorder. This libertarian attitude carried with it
certain polemics: a refusal of history as reenactment
and the dogma of the opacity of the past, and a
distrust of systems of description and explanation.3

Their method? The practice of an experimental history

which would systematically defamiliarise and displace
historical objects.

I can’t trace the whole history of experimental film here,

which could be said to begin, at least iconically, with Un

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Chien Andalou and continue right through Vertov and
Eistenstein and into the post-war American avant-garde.
This filmic experimentalism not only developed in parallel
with similar modernist experiments in literature and the
visual arts, but also with the idea of science as progress.
Film was a technologically innovative medium and was
initially denigrated by the aesthetic mainstream, yet it
also sat unproblematically, I think, with scientific
experimentalism and its own self-confident progressivism.
I would like to hold for a moment this image of a self-
confident Euro-centric modernism, unified and
vanguardist, enlightening the rest of the world as it moved
forward. In my conclusion I want to suggest that this
version of an experimental modernism must take pause as
it encountered and continues to encounter, its colonial
others. Their practices, technologies and forms of
knowledge (translated and known through ethnography)
were and are able to count on the frontier of the modern,
as I have argued elsewhere.4

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera was experimental in

that it made explicit the process of creation within the
technical constraints (man, camera, various modes of
montage, angles—the whole gamut), as opposed to the
camera being a mere vehicle for some more conventional
proscenium view of an unfolding narrative drama. In other
words, while the larger tradition swears allegiance to
verisimilitude, its offshoot, the experimental tradition,

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diminishes the importance of illusion and highlights the
reality of the work itself: its materials, tools, and
processes.

I have asked Alessandro Cavadini to situate himself within

this history of experimental film, and was hoping for a
response along the lines that produced 1980s filmmakers
like Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Tracey Moffatt, Sadie
Benning, Moira Sullian and Isaac Julien, working to resist
familiar narratives as they opened up spaces for identities
that were previously inexpressible within an overarching
white, patriarchal and heteronormative gaze. But I have
yet to receive a response.

Suffice to say that in the late 1970s an Italian filmmaker

Alessandro Cavadini, in partnership with an Australian,
Carolyn Strachan, made a film called Two Laws which was
about the clash of cultures in a remote community called
Borroloola in the Northern Territory.5 The film was a
success (according to Strachan and Cavadini) in Aboriginal
communities agitating for land rights. This was at a time
when the Top End and the Kimberley, where the film
toured around the communities, were still very much
frontier societies and the Land Councils were just being
born. For instance the Kimberley Land Council started in
Broome in a very small way in 1978.

Down south in the cities the film was a critical success,

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while indigenous issues there were far from mainstream.
Again, a landmark in the representation of Blackfellas in
film was 1978, when the film of the Chant of Jimmy
Blacksmith was released.6 Any alternative to the three
great ways Indigenous issues were discursively posed (the
Racist the Romantic and the Anthropological) presented
as ‘difficult’, unheard, and thus posed something of an
‘essay’ in understanding, a test of public acceptance. And
indeed it was hard to get the general public to view Two
Laws. It was perceived as too long-winded and
unconventional.

Meaghan Morris was a film critic for a newspaper at the

time, and no doubt away of the difficult nature of the text,
she wrote about it in this way:
As a means of contesting the imposition of white
laws of land ownership, social organization and
values, and of history-telling, Two Laws also
contests the laws of white cinema—our cherished,
but arbitrary, conventions about focus, editing,
perspective and pace.
According to these conventions, [she goes on]
good focus is sharp, hard-edged and clear; a
proper perspective is ht illusions one inherited
from renaissance painting; and a decent editing
job whips us back and forth between individual
characters…
Two Laws creates a softly rounded world in

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 which the borders between people, objects and
landscape are more fluidly defined, and in which
“reality” seems to stream in from the edge of the
image, rather than being displayed for us in flat
little snippets on screen.7

So how did the filmmakers achieve this “ ‘reality’ [that]

seems to stream in from the edge of the image”? It was a
case of the use of a wide angle lens, which this film made
famous, at least in Australia. The film-making duo came to
the remote community equipped with a range of lenses,
just in case. They were shooting on 16mm. and shot some
experimental footage on different lenses and sent the film
away for processing. Then, when it came back, they
consulted with their partners in the community. As you
can imagine, this was a long process, over a number of
months, as what was being tested was also the film
team’s (basically Cavadini and Strachan’s) relationship
with the various clans of Yanyuwa people. They had to be
integrated into this community, at least far as people to
be trusted with disseminating their stories.

Let me take the iconic wide angle as my example. The

Yanyuwa mob didn’t like the way the standard lens cuts
their heads off; they wanted the whole body. And they
wanted the person speaking to be seen in connection, co-
present with their own kin also in co-production of the
stories. And they wanted to be seen with their sacred

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country as co-present rather than as background
landscape. It thus became clear that there were a whole
set of rules and conventions operating for them, which
make the film a useful illustration for laws of kinship and
for the ownership and control of stories as they are
produced and made public collectively.

So while one is tempted to align the politics of the film

with a kind of experimentalism, this is not a politics or an
experimentalism of breaking free. It is a matter of a
specific technique (the wide-angle lens) that moves from
one place to another and then aligns itself with a new set
of rules. It finds new partners, and something is invented
that corresponds, to the extent that it is successful, to
Meaghan’s interesting phrase about a “‘reality’ [that]
seems to stream in from the edge of the image.”

Experimental cinema, then, would be making explicit the

“ingredients” or elements one is constrained to use within
the artificial environment of the laboratory. I don’t know if
Strachan and Cavadini thought they were in a somewhat
more natural environment out there in the bush; but I do
want to stress that it was an environment where the
human actors who thought they were in control were
striving to control various other actors. And, as in any
laboratory, one never quite knows which actor will
produce the surprise. The Yanyuwa, for instance, would
have been (I imagine, like so many of their countrymen

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over the years) working to insist on various Dreaming
ancestors being taken seriously as actors in the unfolding
set of stories that were to be filmed.

The wide angle lens was one actor doing remarkable work.
And so too were the viewing public. This is where, in a
post-colonial or post-colonising situation for experiments
with film, one of the actors becomes the virtual or implied
public. As I said at the beginning, the “humanist [is] the
practitioner who is interested in changing the way people
think and feel about public issues.” Bruno Latour (whose
philosophy I am trying to adapt to the humanities) joins
the dots for me here, linking the constitution of the public
to an experiment:

I think we have become interested in pragmatism

again because ‘the public’ continues to be a
problem. ‘The public’ is not what is meant simply
by a certain definition of the common good. If you
speak about it in terms of a common good, then
you have to find the experiment that makes it
work. Where is the experiment that proves that you
are right? If you decide you can define what is good
for Americans or good for architects, for instance,
where is the proof? Prove it! Find the protocol of
the demonstration. Decode this protocol. Engage
politics, not in the sense of feeling good and having
the right set of political positions and so on, but

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 around the protocol of debriefing the collective
experiment.8

Bruno Latour himself has “debriefed the collective

experiment” that is European modernism, suggesting that
not only have “we never been modern” but that
modernism itself should be “recalled” like a defective
product in order to reconstruct it in the light of new
environments and conditions.9 It would thus be a good
idea to review modernism in order to catalogue its
failures, treating its projects as experiments that were, in
fact, destined in some way to fail.

This approach works against the arrogance of

vanguardism in both politics and aesthetics. Because
when one thinks that one is leading the way in breaking
away from convention, one is in the same position as
explorers, equipped with know-how and technology, who
imagine they are passing the frontier of civilization into
some kind of void. But all one is doing, I have argued, is to
transport a technique from one context into another
where it encounters a new set of rules. That new context
is a new public, or in the case of Two Laws, two publics,
whose viewing conventions caused them to understand
the wide angle lens differently, and then to begin to
understand each others’ societies differently. But because
it was an experimental process, neither would have seen
the effects of the lens as “just right.” The effects

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succeeded or failed just enough to allow both publics to be
encompassed within that somewhat more expansive
frame.

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1
Matthew Jesse Jackson, The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow
Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-gardes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2010),
p. 36.
2
Daniel S. Milo and Alain Boureau, eds., Alter Histoire: Essais d'histoire
experimentale, (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991). The manifesto essay by Milo is
called 'Pour une histoire expérimentale, ou le gai savoir', pp. 9-55.
3
Milo and Boureau, Alter Histoire, Back cover.
4
Stephen Muecke, Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy,
(Kensington: University of NSW Press, 2004)
5
Dir. Alessandro Cavadini, Carolyn Strachan, 1981. DVD released by Facets Multi-
Media, Inc. in 2008.
6
Dir. Fred Schepisi.
7
Meaghan Morris, “Two Laws: An Unquiet Realm of the Aboriginal Struggle,”
Financial Review, April 30th 1982. Reproduced in Two Laws DVD booklet, Facets:
Cine-Notes, 2007, pp. 22-3.
8
“Interview with Bruno Latour: Decoding the Collective Experiment,” by María J.
Prieto and Elise S. Youn http://agglutinations.com/archives/000040.html
9
Bruno Latour, trans. S. Muecke, “The Recall of Modernity: Anthropological
Approaches,” Cultural Studies Review, Volume 13 Issue 1, pp. 11-30.