‘Defiant Access’ and ‘Cultural Revenge’: Australia Re-imagined Through Archive Cinema

Borrowed, remixed, archival, or appropriated images and sounds that are used to build found footage montages have the potential to create counter narratives that disrupt the illusion of a dominant, homogenous sense of identity proposed by films representative of a nation. The creative process of researching, accessing, watching, selecting, cutting, and copying images from original sources have historically challenged the definitions and limitations of piracy. However, this approach to filmmaking can also be seen as one that is necessarily oppositional and defiant, one that reveals the illusion implicit in national cinema and speaks back to those forces that regulate the circulation of images and sounds under the guise of protecting intellectual property rights. This can be seen acutely in a tendency in post-celluloid filmmaking, particularly in films that draw from the archive with the aim of creatively revising film history and its deep connection to the national imaginary.

Found footage, sample, or even essay films like Camera Natura (Ross Gibson, 1985) draw from the historical archive, decontextualising and remixing existing imagery to create a new montage, one that both reflects and redefines the original. Tracey Moffatt’s video collages ‘look out’ onto Hollywood film, remixing shots and developing lateral associations across films. Moffatt’s films Love (2003), Artist (1999) and Lip (1999) arrange shots synchronically and thematically, recomposing the history of Hollywood cinema. These examples emerge from an increased level of accessibility, affordances of a changing material film culture from celluloid to video and then towards the immateriality of the digital. As Laura Mulvey describes this moment, “At a time when new technologies seem to hurry ideas and their representations at full tilt towards the future, to stop and to reflect on the cinema and its history also offers the opportunity to think about how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology. Out of this pause, a delayed cinema gains a political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘before’ and its ‘after’.”¹ Australian film has a long history of remixing, one that begins in the earliest days of exhibition as footage that became part of The Corrick Collection, was shot on the very location that they would be projected that night for audiences who saw themselves on screen for the first time.² This was a time when films were bought and sold, edited, cut, remade, and claimed with title cards inserted to highlight the names of their new owners. When copyright, or intellectual property rights were merely ideas, early cinema, as Malte Hagener states, “was rampant with illegal copying (and reshooting!) of films … and this did not stop once the cinema became established as a cultural force and industry.”³

As access to films has broadened, the advertising campaigns warning against piracy have been created to counter it. Advertisements shown at the start of VHS tapes warn against their duplication. Creative Content Australia’s anti-piracy campaign shows Bryan Brown walking into a spotlight in a black and white shot, directly addressing the audience with a warning that “the game’s changed” and that illegal downloading is a “helluva risk” and “a high price to pay after all.” This advertisement played in cinemas and now is available to watch, perhaps even download, from Pirate Bay. Rather than seeing piracy as theft, this article proposes that archive films that quote, displace, de-propriate, or parody are creating space for new images, narratives, or voices that emerge from the ‘shock’ collision of existing footage. In this context the concept of piracy refers less to the illegal circulation of complete films, and instead to the ways that cinematic fragments (images, sounds, shots, or sequences) have been reproduced and recombined to reveal less visible power relations, or even to create a new text from decontextualised, yet familiar, relics from the archive. One way to understand piracy is to see it through the prism of modernity, colonisation and systemic power structures, as a way of revealing those less visible hierarchies that control the circulation of images. Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz adopt a “contrapuntal reading” of postcolonial piracy to highlight the associations between the rise of copyright and the “related logics at work in the violent dispossessions of settler colonialism in the Americas, Southern Africa, or Australia and New Zealand.”⁴ Referring to recent South Asian scholarship on piracy, Lawrence Liang argues that piracy “becomes a mode through which excluded social worlds make their way into the cultural sphere through innovative techno-practices and lay claim to cultural participation not through a logic of developmental paternalist access granted by the state but as a form of defiant access.”⁵ 

This desire to remix the archive informs the “documentary fiction” that Soda_Jerk describe as the dual, or split view that is highlighted in their feature film, Terror Nullius (Soda_Jerk, 2018). Dan and Dominique Angeloro, also known as Soda_Jerk, define their montage cinema as, “sample based films with a rogue documentary impulse.”⁶ Beginning production of their films in Sydney with the appropriately titled Dawn of Remix (2012) and now collaborating from their studio in New York, Soda_Jerk have researched, accessed, selected, spliced, edited, and composed sixteen films to date. The collaboration with The Avalanches on The Was (2016) offers evidence of their interest in experimental and provocative associations between image and sound, a tendency that characterises their film work. Their “séance cinema” builds evocative temporal associations across film history. After The Rainbow (2009) juxtaposes some of the roles played by Judy Garland as a young child and then older woman. Terror Nullius is apex sample cinema, a film that draws from a sweeping history of Australian national cinema, politics, and culture. It is also a film that has endured controversy. Soda_Jerk describes how Terror Nullius was, “disowned by its commissioning body which called the film ‘Un-Australian’.” Prior to its release, The Ian Potter Cultural Trust withdrew support for its promotion, citing Terror Nullius as, “a very controversial work of art.”⁷ Introducing Terror Nullius to an audience at The Irish Film Institute, Soda_Jerk announced that, “We didn’t make this work for any boardroom. We made it for the queers, the kids, the arrived, the exiled, the migrants, the misfits, the makers, the punks, the pirates, the protestors, the shift workers, the shit-stirrers, the over educated, the under-privileged, the seniors, the survivors, and the peoples whose lands Australia always was, and always will be.”⁸ 

Terror Nullius is a digital-avant-garde work of post-cinema art. It is indebted to affordances of digital culture, deeply connected to film history, and specifically to the defiance that characterises avant-garde cinema. Terror Nullius prioritises the materials, cinematic specificity and techniques that were similarly the focus of structuralist filmmakers. In P. Adams Sitney’s terms, the impetus for experiments by structuralist avant-garde filmmakers was to develop a “radical otherness” of film that is strikingly poetic, precisely by working with the potentiality of celluloid.⁹ In this context, structuralist avant-garde films are both oppositional and cinematic, necessarily counter to the mainstream, featuring an impulse towards deconstruction and renewal. Terror Nullius is a film that is indebted to this impulse, but is part of a post-celluloid, postmodern flow of images that are used to construct a powerfully original narrative from pre-existing elements. One aspect of this renewal is evident in the ways that Terror Nullius understands the limitations of copyright and challenges definitions of piracy.

There is no explicit mention of piracy in Australia’s Copyright Law.¹⁰ When films are referenced, the quaint terminology used in this document is “cinematograph”. Cinematograph, a term that would otherwise describe the camera/projector used in early cinema, refers to, “the aggregate of the visual images embodied in an article or thing … and includes the aggregate of the sounds embodied in a sound-track associated with such visual images.”¹¹ Defining the “aggregate” in remix films is notoriously slippery as only a slight portion, or even a scene that disaggregates image and sound, constitutes the unit of cinema. Copyright Law defines an infringement of copyright as a reproduction, or adaptation of that work, something that is “imported without the licence of the owner of the copyright without sufficient acknowledgment.”¹² Sample films like Terror Nullius end with detailed and extensive lists of credits, acknowledgment that seems to be more than sufficient. The most relevant clause is one that identifies avoiding an infringement of copyright in allowing for “fair dealing with purpose for parody or satire.”¹³ It is this clause, and the provision for “fair use” that creates space for the remix.¹⁴ In relation to Was, Soda_Jerk describes their understanding and negotiation of copyright, “We’re interested in the politics of images: how they circulate, who they benefit, and how they can be undone. We’re definitely opposed to the ways that the current copyright regime facilitates the ownership and control of the narratives and resources of collective culture. But of course, you have to know the law in order to purposely break it, so it’s probably also true that we give many more shits about copyright than most and have studied art and law both in Australia and the US.”¹⁵

The definitions of piracy have been redefined in response to increasing access to media in the digital age. Ramon Lobato explores informal networks of film distribution, placing “shadow economies of cinema – unmeasured, unregulated and extra-legal audio-visual commerce – at the centre of our analytical lens.”¹⁶ He looks at the role that copyright has played in defining piracy, in “turning knowledge into capital” and classifies it according to its “six faces.”¹⁷ In contrast to a singular definition of piracy as illegal, Lobato posits that it can appear as: access, resistance, authorship, free speech, free enterprise, and as theft.¹⁸ In this context, Lobato reconfigures conventional definitions, writing that, “Instead of thinking about piracy as a singular practice, it is necessary to think in terms of piracies. Depending on the context, piracy may be theft or a legitimate business practice, a free speech act, or a form of political resistance. Sometimes it is all of these things at once.”¹⁹ Furthermore, Lobato shows how definitions of piracy differ across territories.²⁰ It is not always illicit, or even opposed to the protection of intellectual property or copyright, but instead, a range of constructed definitions of ownership and regulations of individual creativity. Piracy can be understood not only as a creative force, one that reveals the constructed and illusory nature of copyright control that is often rationalised as a force protecting “originality”, but in accordance with Lobato, as a strategy designed to dismantle an entrenched master paradigm around intellectual property and copyright ownership.²¹

Terror Nullius works at the edge of copyright law, borrowing images from Australian film history in a gesture of defiance. This film begins with a polyphony of sounds, voices, promises of a story, real or imagined. The first sounds constitute a rendition of the Australian national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, played on kazoo. Immediately, the sounds and images signal an approach to Australian history designed to parody the official. Text tells the viewer that this film is “a drama, not a documentary”, whilst a voice begins in the traditional fairy tale style with “once upon a time”. The voice of an Australian Indigenous man is heard announcing, “I’m gonna tell you a story, not my story.” Sounds, both disembodied and depicted diegetically provide multiple introductions to Terror Nullius, situating the viewer somewhere between fiction and documentary, pastiche, and parody. The picture of Australian visual culture that emerges via this dialectical method seems to be more on the side of truth than fiction. Terror Nullius constructs a range of propositions as a third meaning arises from the juxtaposition of sounds, voices, images, scenes, and sequences from the Australian film archive.

Figure 1: Terror Nullius

Sound is significant in drawing attention to voices that have previously been silenced or obfuscated in Australian cinema. This notion of story, particularly the stories told through Australian Indigenous perspectives, have only recently been expressed in mainstream Australian cinema. Beginning Terror Nullius with an Indigenous voiceover also invites us to consider approaches to ownership of images in Indigenous Australian cultures, systems that are less aligned with copyright or intellectual property and organised instead along lines of responsibility and familial networks, where rights to reproduce patterns, symbols or images, are earned. Marcia Langton writes, “Aboriginal Art does not emphasise original or creative individuals or assign them any responsibility as author. Walpiri artists earn rights to paint certain pre-existing designs, not so much to introduce new ones. Rights to an oeuvre are inherited so that one’s son, daughter-in-law, or some other individual continues producing the same designs.”²²

Terror Nullius then builds a constellation of political voices, incorporating Gough Whitlam’s final speech as Prime Minister on the steps of Parliament House in 1975, a speech that reveals the impact of colonial powers with the Governor General calling for Whitlam’s resignation, the document, as Whitlam reveals, “countersigned by Malcolm Fraser.” What might be less visible is the influence of Whitlam’s reformist government, one that transformed access to education and therefore education itself, opening Universities to new disciplines like Cinema Studies. In Terror Nullius the voices of the crowd chanting “We want Gough!” risk drowning out his otherwise booming oration. Archive cinema, found footage films, or documentary fiction like Terror Nullius, decontextualise film history to produce alternative perspectives of the illusions perpetuated by mainstream cinema. The images and sounds that Terror Nullius selects and transforms, expose some of the unquestioned biases and give rise to voices and signs of a less visible culture. 

Terror Nullius remixes signifiers of a culture, unsettling with the use of juxtaposition. Shots from Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) feature a Volkswagen Beetle in the deep ochre desert sand, but in this context, it is carrying an Indigenous flag alongside an “anarchy is order” sign, symbols for this scene and perhaps the film itself. The bus from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Elliott, 1994) glides past in the background, trailing a diaphanous scarf carried by the wind. Two seminal works in the construction of the cinematic mythology of Australia are composited within a single shot. Both images signal the continuity of an attempt to navigate the Australian landscape, but in this context the presence of Indigenous cultures is written back into the images, and consequently revealed as the hidden dimension of the original films.

Figure 2: Walkabout

Figure 3: Picnic At Hanging Rock

Terror Nullius uses samples to build powerful sonic juxtapositions to dissolve a coherent and stable sense of individualism. A scene from Lantana (Ray Lawrence, 2001) shows Anthony La Paglia’s character Leon getting into his car, inserting an audio tape into the sound system and hearing this speech: “Few, or none of these events were recorded by white Australians and remembered. As children, we were given to understanding that we were merely innocent bystanders to the slow and natural death of an ancient people, the first Australians, rather than the inheritors of a past.” This is an audio sample from John Pilger’s film, The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back (1985). Seemingly listening to this, Leon begins sobbing uncontrollably. His emotion is intensified by the sounds of crickets, familiar sounds of an Australian summer, that here increase in volume until they drown out everything else. Writing on this scene also, Nori Neumark describes the unbearable intensity and “painful emotion of recognising the reality of the violence that is at the heart of terra nullius“, the description of ‘nobody’s land’ that rationalised colonisation.²³ Mechanically reproduced (and replaced) sounds of a monologue are woven in with an imagined response. Finally, both are drowned out by sounds of the landscape itself. This sequence is powerful precisely because it draws from dominant histories, but re-casts visuals and audio to allow for a deep and affective identification with the impact of colonisation on screen and in the audience.  

The notions of originality and ownership have been contested across film and cultural history. In 1935, Walter Benjamin proposed that in the age of mechanical reproduction and when technologies of the cinema necessitated copying, originality became occluded, and the aura diluted.²⁴ Remix films maximalise the notion of reproduction and multiply the amount of images, scenes and sounds that have been dissected and recomposed. Such an approach opposes the singularity of the aura and of the original, instead embracing reproduction as a democratising force. In the work of Bruno Latour, recognition of the original can become clouded by “the fac simile.”²⁵ Latour writes about the “terrible cognitive dissonance” in response to art that is “de and then re-materialized” with the use of digital technologies used for conservation purposes, resulting in a facsimile that could be “actually more original than the Paris original.”²⁶ In Erika Balsom’s recent work on moving image art, “it has become possible to speak about an “aura” in film and video art in a number of ways: the contractual regulation of the limited edition model of sale; the privileging of photochemical film in an age of digital transfers; the entrance of film into the museum; and the ephemerality of site-specific and performance-based forms of cinema.”²⁷ Terror Nullius occupies a realm between moving image art and popular film. It exists somewhere between mass re-production and the exclusivity of museum screenings. 

Questions of originality and cultural authenticity have specific resonance for Australian screen culture. In the 1980s, Meaghan Morris identified different ways of looking at the problems of unoriginality in national cinema and articulated corresponding approaches to effecting change within the industry.²⁸ For Morris, unoriginality was an endemic Australian problem, a by-product of cultural imperialism, evidence of how Hollywood conventions dominate and articulate frameworks for film production.²⁹ One response to this is to create originality and authenticity to counter these claims of unoriginality, to protect Australian film by emphasizing local content, to screen out the international influence by developing clearly defined borders.³⁰ Archive cinema takes this to another level, using the images and sounds that constitute the history of Australian cinema, deconstructing them, isolating specific moments, and juxtaposing them with others. Morris’s second intervention provides a way to contextualise Soda_Jerk’s films in terms of positive unoriginality.³¹ Here, the intention is to perceive unoriginality within a positive frame where unoriginality is accepted and celebrated as an aspect of contemporary postmodern cinema. Darren Tofts defines the remix as, “the name we can give to this shift, a term akin to new historicism or postmodernism: cultural paradigms that articulate what comes after the philosophy of originality, presence, will and individualism.”³²

Editing is one of the key creative methodologies that inform the remix. Whilst this filmmaking technique would aim to be less visible, or seamless in mainstream cinema, the remix relies on making it visible, perhaps even felt, as part of the experience of watching the montage. Digital montage cinema intensifies analogue editing processes that rely on celluloid, film splicers, glue and tape. The technique used in sample films like Terror Nullius is influenced by experiments in Soviet montage cinema, translated into the immaterial, digital realm. Sergei Eiseinstein’s regulation of the flow of the montage by attending to the rhythm of the edit, creating synchronous patterns, or clashing asynchrony was designed to destabilise the viewer. He also edited according to a specific aesthetic, juxtaposing images according to the intensity of their tones, contrast, or degree of luminosity.³³ He identified “intellectual montage” as an effect of collisions between dissonant images, or image and sound.³⁴ In The Film Sense Eisenstein demonstrates “that synchronization can be “natural,” metric, rhythmic, melodic and tonal”,³⁵ however, it can also be motivated for dynamic collision and to destabilise the spectator, to provoke a sense of shock.

Sampled and archival films foreground the process of editing, revealing, rather than disguising the cut. Influenced by constructivist montage, sample films like Terror Nullius are reconstructions born from deconstruction. It moves between the hard montage of Eisenstein’s collisions, and an editing style reminiscent of Harun Farocki’s cinema, which has been described as “a general relatedness, rather than a strict opposition or equation.”³⁶ In Terror Nullius the editing is hard, but it is also lateral, linear, and deep. Its use of compositing means that the associations between imagery can emerge from within a single shot, dissecting foreground and background spaces. Rhythmic patterns ebb and flow. Extreme editing is visible in images that exist on screen for less than a second, a subliminal intensification of the MTV aesthetic. Images from Rage (ABC, 1987-) strobe on screen, necessitating a warning for audiences who might find this lighting affect physically destabilising. Terror Nullius is not dedicated to the creation of a logical sense of temporality, or classical, causal driven continuity, rather it could be described as an intensification of associative editing for collision and shock, a culturally resonant revision of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage.

Visual connection and point of view shots help to construct the associations implied in Terror Nullius. Points of view act as the connective tissue between disparate shots and films, creating new meanings in the remix. Sequences of white lace-clad young women wandering throughout the landscape at Ngannelong in Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) are closely followed by images borrowed from Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005), generating a sense of murderous threat. The same sequence includes shots of Sonny and Skippy from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (Lee Robinson, 1968-70), who watch the women as they sleep. In another sequence, fiction and reality intersect in the layered images and sounds of violence. The historical threat to women in Mad Max 2 (Miller, 1981) is updated as it is overwritten with Mel Gibson’s aggressive and violent phone messages to his wife, audio that is available within the public realm. This sequence ends with a hint of revenge as Nicole Kidman’s character Judy, from BMX Bandits (Trenchard-Smith, 1983), jumps over Max on her BMX bike as he lies injured on the road.

Remixed films are often seen within two distinct, yet interrelated, contexts, that of the film itself in its new form, and then the references it is drawing with its own history. With specific reference to the ways that the image of Australia has been oddly doubled, provoking the capacity to “see double”, Ross Gibson expands, writing that, “Westerners can look south and feel, “at home,” but because the region has also served as a projective screen for European aspiration and anxiety, Australia also calls into question the assumptions and satisfactions by which any society, or individual feels at home.”³⁷ This duality of vision, seeing double, or more powerfully, provocatively undermining the comfort of a [singular] perspective in relation to the ways that the nation is shaped though the cinema, is very much Soda_Jerk’s project in the construction of Terror Nullius.

Contesting the limits of copyright can also be understood as a mode of cultural revenge, as remixing, splicing and remaking films has the potential to decolonise mythological narratives, as has been posited by Nori Neumark.³⁸ Seeing the remix film as precisely that, the importance of the samples, copies, rather than prioritising the original, or as Neumark writes, “Resisting the temptation to try to trace the remixed samples back to authenticating origins.”³⁹ For Neumark, “whilst a sense, or memory of a source can identify the viewer’s experience, remix doesn’t depend on recognition of sources.”⁴⁰ Neumark posits that films like Terror Nullius have the power to shape the white cultural imaginary.⁴¹ She writes that these films carry the distinct responsibility to reframe, remix and reveal the complicity of films in shaping histories, even in fiction.⁴² Neumark writes, “This is the cultural imaginary that Terror Nullius avenges … revenging it affectively, making it felt” and how film “has helped shape a terrorised and terrorising white cultural imaginary.”⁴³ The film itself is shaped to disorientate and disturb. The pulsating strobe light at the beginning of Terror Nullius confronts and visually assaults the viewer, and at the same time, invites them in. It disrupts a nostalgic backwards look. The remix has the potential to transform its original source whilst simultaneously creating a new film. Darren Tofts sees evidence of this complex relationship in earlier iterations of Soda_Jerk’s screen art. Tofts writes, “The didactic tone here is important; Tap Hop, like much of Soda_Jerk’s work, is a ‘lesson’ in how remix is not slavishly ripping off a pre-existing text. But it also creates a new text to be added to the historical archive of moving image-sound works.”⁴⁴ Tofts includes Soda_Jerk amongst a wave of “anti-copyright warriors championing fair use, piracy and anti-copyright activism.”⁴⁵ 

Working at the edges of copyright regulation in the creation of Terror Nullius and other sample films results in cinema built on a sense of defiance. These films value the specificity of digital technologies, the circulation and access to the archive, and the ability to reconstitute these fragments in exile. Remixing creates a critical pastiche that opposes the regulation of copyright, accusations of piracy, and potential for censorship. These films look back at film history with a desire to revise it, alter its shape and frame. These are films that complicate clear classifications of original and copy, films that are built from loaded images and proceed through the development of hyperconscious connections. In Pursuits of Happiness, Stanley Cavell suggests that it is important that we, “let the object or the work of your interest teach you how to think about it.”⁴⁶ Remix cinema requires its audiences to think beyond a singular vision, narrative, or image. It is the fractured form, the defiant juxtapositions and the radical connections in Terror Nullius that asks us to think about cinema, film history and Australian mythology as fractured, incomplete, dissonant, and illusory precisely because it has been consciously missing the perspectives and stories of Australia’s first storytellers. Dale Kerrigan appears right at the end of Terror Nullius, directly addressing the camera uneasily, an expression of the limitations of his singular perspective. In a year that the Australian population will be asked to vote on the inclusion of an Indigenous voice to contribute to the ways that Indigenous issues are discussed and governed, narratives like Terror Nullius offer, “an un-writing” of Australian national mythology,⁴⁷ it also asks us to reconsider how the slippery boundaries of intellectual property, copyright and piracy can support a more inclusive future cinema.

Endnotes