Theories of Art, Performance and Society in Aotearoa 2

Theories of Art, Performance and Society in Aotearoa, 2 The first of the series on Theories of Art and Society in Aotearoa was introduced with a review of Francis Pound’s ‘The Space Between’ and a discussion of writers from the early 1990s. Another important book from around that time was Martin Blythe’s ‘Naming the Other, Images of he Maori in New Zealand Film and Television’ of 1994. This is an interesting analysis. The book traces the history of Maori images in film. These include images or statements of what he calls 'Maori Land', the tourist catalogue, if you like, the use of Maori by the Pakeha state to produce statements of integration and assimilation and then the increasing presentation of their own image by Maori in more recent times. All sections of the book are stimulating. Blythe provides an extremely welcome overview which is, of course informed by his own ideas of race relations and cultural theory. The book is an updated doctoral thesis from U.C.L.A. and these things show in the text which is academically stilted and overly dedicated to stating propositions, especially about the 'other'. All these aside this is a refreshing book, a long range punt which is spectacular and arresting even if there is the occasional, alarming speed wobble and some concern about its eventual accuracy. For example, how should a reviewer react to the following? If the Treaty Of Waitangi is a Gordian knot then essentialist solutions are probably too drastic. Much better to wait for the Treaty to live out its usefulness rather than to abolish its principles or institutionalize it in law. Its power for many Maori still resides in its ambiguous definition, so it is really a question of waiting tactfully for it to lose this power. When that happens, we will no longer be in an age governed by national identity. (page 10). The late eighties warp of L.A. seems to have enveloped Blythe in something of a post-modernist haze. And yet this thesis is challenging, 'At such a time it is no longer possible to conceive of New Zealand in the image of Man and Woman Alone, as the unitary psychological subject of history which the liberal historians constructed in the post-war period. For better or worse, New Zealand in the late Eighties became a centrifugal national mythology which is following the American model of mass-mediated pluralism and fragmentation into artificial differences. Nowadays packaged entertainments like the America's Cup yachting, World Cup rugby, and a Nuclear Free Zone are traded on the international image market, and New Zealand is identified with a plurality of corporations and constituencies of which the government is but one. Similarly there is a centrifugal expansion of Maori identity and the mythology of Aotearoa taking place. While it is no longer politically acceptable to use a totalizing term like "Maori" without also being duly attentive to iwi affiliations, in fact this only conceals the greater uniformity of which it is a symptom. The irony is that differences are usually celebrated when they have already been lost - when (Pakeha) New Zealanders and/or Maori have become a more homogeneous mixture. The museum is not the internal confinement of exotic images of past New Zealand culture and history, or the art gallery the return home from the world of living taonga, New Zealand itself has become the museum, the art gallery, the nostalgia for a disappearing difference between Maori and Pakeha. pg 150 Part One of the book is titled 'Maoriland'. With subtitles like 'Noble Savage in Hollywood', 'The Birth of a Nation' and 'Romances in Maoriland'. Blythe proceeds to suggest that the British Empire 'was (and is) a state of mind' (pg15). New Zealand was British but this was offset by a 'darker' (and 'feminine') adversary 'Maoriland' (its other names include 'Moa-land', 'Kiwi-land' and 'Zealandia'. Blythe then takes a look at the stereotypes of good natives versus not so good and coins an interesting phrase 'the ignoble savage' which he uses to describe 'the more dubiously regarded Te Whiti, Rua Kenana, Ratana and the Morehu and Te Rauparaha and Te Kooti Rikirangi'. (pg 17). Obviously, Blythe is writing before Belich's reinvention of Titokowaru as a great Maori leader. Blythe talks about censorship, Hollywood influences and the genre of 'timeless romance' developed by American, British and French film makers. 'Within the timeless eternal live various Maori Noble Savages: Romeos and their Juliets, wise chiefs and heroic warriors all quite unlike their European counterparts in that they are not subject to the ravages of time, history or society. This is Utopia before the Fall, a place inaccessible to all but the most intrepid traveller'. (pg 21). The distinction is set up between the timeless romance which is 'an imperial and international genre' (pg 20) and the historical romance set up by the nationalist film makers. This immediately starts to ring bells. In my own work for example I have referred to the curious need of local ethnographers such as Salmond and journalists like King to retreat into history. Blythe adds spice to things by beginning to talk about darkness and then atavism, especially the 'atavistic Pakeha'. Kurtz and 'Apocalypse Now' start to shadow this reviewer's mind but somehow Conrad & Coppola don't seem to occur to Blythe. The first part of the book then moves into its stated purpose and is a good review of a set of films including 'The Romance of Hinemoa' and then the films of Rudall Hayward including 'Rewis' Last Stand'. The second part of the book shifts from Maori land to New Zealand. Blythe begins this part with a discussion of government newsreels and the integration myth. In an analysis of the 1940 film 'One hundred crowded years'. With some interesting references (and tributes) to the somewhat neglected historian W.P. Morrell's New Zealand of 1935 Blythe carries on to look at 'Weekly Reviews', and various myths of national identity including 'Man (or Woman) Alone' and the harmonious nature of race relations. Blythe does an excellent job of analysing the transition from glorious or glorified amalgamation of the Maori circa 1940 through a brief relapse into historical romance after the war and then, to a decline in cheerful optimism and what Blythe calls 'impatience' as a 'social problem genre' emerges in features on Maori Health in Weekly Review 402 of 1949. (c.f. Blythe pg 82-85). As the 1950s dawned two genres were in evidence, the tourism travelogue and the social commentary. 'Broken Barrier', the feature film of 1952 flirts with both following on from films like Michael Forlong's 'Aroha', the story of the daughter of an Arawa chief. As Blythe catalogues the development of the social problem genre in the 1950s one can see why there was such reaction to Ans Westra's Washday at the Pa in 1964. By the time we get to the documentary 'The Maori Today' and 'The Hunn Report' in 1960 we are, as Blythe would have it, in the group of a nationalist myth. Interestingly, Blythe points to W.H. Oliver as an historian who stresses myth making and artistic imagination. This is as opposed to Sinclair who colonizes Maori into brown skinned New Zealanders. He suggests that Oliver segregates and Sinclair integrates (pg 105). 'Their attempt to integrate the twentieth century Maori into their twentieth century texts was a political decision which directly confronted the by-then (..) mythologies of the Happy Maori, the lazy Maori, and, to a degree, the Social Problem Maori. They substituted these with a revamped Historical Maori. (Blythe pg 105). Blythe suggests that by the late seventies the pessimistic social problem film is in the ascent. As Blythe sees it 'Maori culture is to be split off from the New Zealand nation'. (pg 106). Blythe suggests that, 'The model is a realist one; it presupposes that 'Maori Culture' could be identified analytically, and then working backwards, the sources of inspirations could be represented to the parties most interested in saving it,' (pg108) and that, 'By the Eighties the Realist model has reversed almost completely - inspiration has become a timeless spirit, the materialist model of cultural production has given way to an abstract religious discourse and history itself has been ousted by culture'. (ibid) Blythe has several recurring complaints and themes. One is against 'essence' or 'essentialism' which he never explains in a satisfactory manner though one can see what he means. By the end of the eighties strategies of annexation have, Blythe argues, cancelled one another out. Pakeha silence and Maori control of the screen. It is difficult to work out at times whether Blythe is talking about collapsing dualities, duelling banjos or whatever. In fact though it is very exciting stuff. Take the following, for example, 'In short, the two analytic strategies have produced each other, but in ironic and malevolent reverse: each other's Other. The annexation genre of social problems has been taken over by Maori programming as "the pakeha problem": are they fitting in with us?-so as to exclude the Pakeha. Annexation has produced self-exclusion. The exclusionary genre of cultural essences has been redefined by Pakeha filmmakers in such a way that they now themselves think in terms of a Maori cultural essence in which they too annex a mana and a turangawaewae and wear a bone manaia carving around the neck. Exclusion has produced self-annexation. (pg 149-150) Blythe falls back on collapsing tensions in Part Three in a discussion of Donna Awatere's work, Awatere's thesis works best, in my view, as an ironic counter-critique to the Myth of Integration. In that sense, what it offers the Pakeha is the inverse of what has been offered the Maori over the last hundred and fifty years. This is also consistent with Awatere's derision for Pakeha social policies which profess integration while practicing "separate development" (pp.8, 14-15), and her simultaneously calling for Maori separatism and withdrawal. In short, Awatere has produced a parody. There follows what has to be one of the most interesting, if uneven, discussions in recent times. Blythe looks at 'Broken Barriers' and 'Runaway' in brilliantly perceptive essays helping to helping to explain why John O'Shea, the director of 'Runaway' thinks his film may have become 'hallowed with time' (Runaway Revisited). But it becomes obvious that Blythe is allowing at least one theme to recur too many times. Throughout the book he talks of Pakeha 'atavism' and atavistic film. This does several things: it allows a solid reconsideration of the Man Alone thesis, it seems a credible reaction to resurgent Maori film making and it allows us to appreciate the dark side of films made in this country is well as to reflect on the suicides in films, notably David's at the end of 'Runaway'. When he gets to a consideration of 'The Lost Tribe' however the concept of atavism will not bear the weight Blythe has put on it. He has painted himself into a corner where he cannot handle Pakeha imaginings and he dismisses the film as evil. This actually brings the reader up short because the book is so promising, so refreshing and, at times, such very good analysis. To come down with a moral thud (rather than just to contemplate a moral void which Blythe seems to think Pakeha are and should be doing) is quite disconcerting. It should be remembered that Blythe's book stops circa 1988. This was before 'Once Were Warriors', 'Heavenly Creatures' and 'An Angel at my table" all of which took things further. As Sam Neill has recently argued in his film about New Zealand film this is a very dark theatre. Neill's argument though is spindly and vacuous compared to Blythe's. The latter has the texture of a formidable talent. That this is not realised fully is probably the measure of several things. Doctoral work does not easily translate into readable literature. Blythe's work is the first of its kind - in fact I think it is the most original and provocative work I've read in years - it ranks with W.P. Morrell and J.C.A. Pocock - and this makes exposition difficult. Also, Blythe is mercifully determined not to give us an easy read unlike so many of the 1990 academics and writers so who is to complain when he seems difficult, stilted or occasionally wrong. A contribution, something that shifts everything else a little. Bibliography Blythe, Martin, 1994 Naming the Other, Images of the Maori in New Zealand Film and Television, The Scarecrow Press Inc,