Becoming Unrecognisable
I remember staying up through the night to watch CNN's live coverage of Yitzhak Rabin's burial service and how it was a speech given by his granddaughter at that event which brought me closest to the significance of his death.i The granddaughter explained to the world watching that the memorialising images of Rabin's face was not the face she knew. This was not her grandfather we saw on the screen. On the contrary, in death Rabin was, for her, unrecognisable - 'a smile that is no longer'. While...
The Face of Diana
While I was researching this book, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, resulted in a media event on a scale never seen before. Up until this point, I considered that perhaps Diana was the face of the media age. In a strange way, her death came to confirm this view. The event reached unprecedented global proportions when live television coverage of her funeral service was watched by an estimated one in three people worldwide, making it the then single most viewed event in human history.i...
II The Violence of Defacement
About three quarters of the way into Mabo - Life of an Island Man, the metaphoric defacement of' 'Mabo' that the film seeks to compensate for is suddenly literalised in the shocking image of a racist attack on Eddie Mabo's grave. This attack occurred in June 1995, immediately following a Torres Straight Islander tombstone unveiling ceremony held in Townsville to commemorate Eddie Mabo and to celebrate the High Court judgement.xiv We learn that while indigenous and non-indigenous members of...
IV Mass Media as Face
In her study of the Weimar period in Sabine, Hake identifies a widespread critical interest in physiognomics 'in sociological writings on the metropolis George Simmel , in the morphology of world history Oswald Spenglar , in the first contributions to emergent film theory Bela Balasz , in metaphysical speculations on the body Ludwig Klages, Rudolf Kassner , and in a new theory of temperaments Kretchner '.xiv Hake speculates that in the destabilizing conditions of modernity physiognomy provided...
III Faciality
It is argued that the invention of the camera in the nineteenth century reinvigorated the principles of physiognomy. And how The camera was crucial to the development and popularisation of influential positivist forms of social categorisation and subjugation, such as Francis Galton's programme of Eugenics and Cesare Lombroso's racist theory of criminality.vii Photography's apparent objectivity allowed for it to be easily applied in the service of social forms of surveillance and typification,...
II Live History
The terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, New York, September 11, 2001 was a catastrophic event that even now commentators compete to make sense of. But whether critics see the attack as the end of postmodernism, payback for American dominance, God's judgement of American secularism or the beginning of a New World Order, they all agree that September 11 is a singular media event. In 'Notes on the Logic of the Global Spectacle' Jonathan Flatley argues that what makes...
I Film as Prosopopoeia
When Mabo - Life of an Island Man was first screened at the 1997 Sydney International Film Festival, it received a standing ovation that lasted more than five minutes and was voted Best Documentary Film. Since then, it has won numerous other national and international film awards.iv It has also had a successful national theatrical release and has been screened on national television ABC in prime time on several occasions. Reviews indicate that this positive reception is largely due to the...
VI Face to Face
Mabo - Life of an Island Man makes Eddie Mabo recognisable to Australian audiences as a face, as the face of native title. But as I have tried to show in this analysis, coming face to face with another is never straightforward nor does the familiarity generated by this particular form of intimacy guarantee a non-hostile relationship. In May 1884, for instance, some five years after Queensland annexed the Torres Straight Islands, the cover of Illustrated Sydney News featured an etching, titled,...