Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Bruce Spence, Wandjuk Marika, Roy Marika, Norman Kaye, Ray Barrett
Director
Werner Herzog’s offscreen antics—some highlights are conveniently curated here—are
as striking as the images and scenes he wrestles onto screens. In many cases,
the former enable the latter, such as the feat of transporting a ship over
mountainous terrain in Fitzcarraldo, or eliciting career-best work
from the legitimately bestial Klaus Kinski on five occasions. As a younger
cinephile I imbibed on the Herzog Kool-Aid, marvelling at the German auteur’s
derring-do even if occasionally bored by the films themselves. As I creak
towards middle age, I find myself warier of both the exploitation underpinning
said derring-do—whether of an unhealthy specimen like Kinski, or the South
American extras who performed the actual manual labour of transporting that
ship—and of directorial braggadocio more generally. This piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum nicely articulates a few of my reservations about the Herzog
persona.
Nonetheless, I was intrigued to finally watch Where
the Green Ants Dream—which
falls between Fitzcarraldo and his final film with
Kinski, Cobra Verde, in his eclectic filmography—to see what Herzog
would do with Australian subject matter. After all, the Australian New Wave and
filmmaking revival emerged in the wake of foreign directors—Britain’s Michael
Powell with They’re a Weird Mob and Age of Consent, Nicholas
Roeg with Walkabout, and Canada’s Ted Kotcheff with Wake in
Fright—filming Australian stories and finding something anthropologically
intriguing, unexpectedly romantic, or fundamentally broken about our country
and culture. Herzog is not the sole purveyor of New German Cinema to tackle an
Australian story: a few years later, Wim Wenders would make Until the
End of the World. But where Wenders’ film cast marquee international
talent (including William Hurt) and worked within the parameters of the road
movie genre he excelled in (see his ‘Road Movie Trilogy’ and Paris,
Texas), Herzog’s film cast
local talent—both established character actors and non-professionals—and
(forgive the pun) mined new terrain, dramatizing the clash of cultures between
a major Australian mining company and the Indigenous custodians of the land
over a native title dispute.
When Ayers mining company begins running tests on
Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, Aboriginal protestors from the Yolngu
people (a culture that also featured in Yolngu Boy)
place themselves in the path of the explosives and bulldozers. The region is
considered sacred to the Yolngu, as the place where—according to the film’s
title—the Green Ants Dream. The film presents attempts by a middle management
geologist (Bruce Spence) and company head (Norman Kaye) to negotiate with the
Yolngu spokespeople (real-life Yolngu activists Wandjuk Marika and Roy Marika)
for permission to mine the site, and the eventual escalation of the dispute to
the Supreme Court.
No
shoes were eaten and no gonzo or Herculean feats were involved, to the best of
my knowledge, in the making of Where the Green Ants Dream, and
watching Herzog’s engaging and fairly amiable film out of context I would not
have predicted the animosity that greeted its release. An excellent article by Andrew W. Hurley provides a fairly comprehensive portrait of the film’s
negative reception. To
recap, film critics were uneasy about what they perceived as Herzog’s suspect
blending of documentary and fiction film tropes. The Marikas—who had been
involved in Milirrpum v Nabalco, the
native title dispute that heavily inspired the production—and other Indigenous
stakeholders expressed similar ambivalence about Herzog’s mixing of fiction and
fact, as well as his appropriation and recontextualizing of Green Ant Dreaming
from one culture and region to another. Given the current industry focus on
following protocols for shepherding Indigenous stories to screen with the
utmost sensitivity, Where the Green Ants
Dream is very much a product of its time, and I can’t imagine something
like it being smuggled through the system today. And producer and commentator
Phillip Adams, who helped get the project rolling, took vocal offence at what
he perceived as a largely unflattering portrait of the government’s attitudes toward
Indigenous Australians and land rights.
The
paragraphs below are not intended as defences of Herzog’s film or rebuttals of
these critical positions, but my own thoughts about the film do somewhat bounce
off of these positions.
I
find the film critics’ ambivalence about the film most confounding. While the film
uses some vérité techniques, documentary footage and many non-professional cast
members, the presence of recognisable faces like Spence (Stork, The
Road Warrior, Oz),
Kaye (Lonely Hearts),
and Barrett (Don’s Party, On Our Selection)—what a trio of Wii Miis they would make—and on-camera
appearances by filmmakers James Rickertson (Blackfellas),
Bob Ellis (who did script polishing), and Paul Cox (Lonely Hearts, Innocence)—who
penned My First Wife while assisting
on the production and like Adams clashed with Herzog (David Stratton, The Avocado Plantation, p.99)—and clear staging of
many scenes betrays the film’s status as fiction, albeit inspired by fact. Admittedly, the
film never really raises a sweat, nor telegraphs emotion through an original
score, nor ladles on excess drama, meaning moments of victory or defeat are
rendered anti-climactic. This gives Where
the Green Ants Dream a matter-of-fact, anthropological vibe, but at no
point did I puzzle over what precisely I was watching.
In light of the abovementioned protocols to minimise
misguided cultural appropriation, Herzog’s seemingly cavalier transfer of Green Ant Dreaming from one region and culture to another wouldn’t occur
today, and does imply some cultural generalisation, i.e. that in Herzog’s view
all Indigenous peoples are basically alike. I’d argue that’s not the case, and
that Herzog is sympathetic to the Yolngus’ dispute, having nurtured the project
for a decade. But as intimated above, he doesn’t telegraph that sympathy, and
as far as Herzog’s concerned his authorship overrides that of the Yolngu
characters and stakeholders. Indeed, from its opening frame—a dedication to his
mother—Herzog claims primary ownership of the story, and a large part of what
makes the film intriguing is its tug of war between authors. Following this
dedication, classical music plays over images of desolate Australian terrain,
followed by didgeridoo music (also used memorably over the opening of Roeg’s Walkabout): all this connotes a mix of
genealogies and influences, both literal and artistic. The most striking
imagery in the film, in fact, is of things that don’t belong: of industrial
machinery and vehicles sitting like alien objects in the middle of desert
landscapes, of mounds of excavated earth peppering the flat terrain (looking
rather like spectacular ant hills), captured in 180 degree panning shots that
routinely serve as the establishing shots for most scenes. As for Herzog
bending Indigenous beliefs to his own narrative whims, and dramatizing real-life
events and casting those involved but spinning his own version of events, for
better or worse that’s of a piece with his larger body of work, both as a
director of fiction features and documentaries. In short, Herzog asks how
fiction can be more authentic and dangerous, and how reality can be made more
interesting. His methodology and modus operandi is ultimately to print the
legend, but embellishing with fact where needed. That doesn’t make it less
shonky here—it’s still Herzog exercising (white) authorial privilege over
another (black) culture’s story—but ultimately measuring the film by the same
yardstick as other regulated Australian productions doesn’t really work.
Adams
criticised the film for ignoring recent advances in native title dispute, and hence
painting a largely unflattering portrait of Australian authorities. On the one
hand, this is indicative of either Herzog’s lack of consultation, overriding of
consultation, or the fact the Milirrpum v
Nabalco verdict that inspired the film (from 1971) remained his primary and
static point of reference over a decade of development. On the other hand,
there’s arguably an element of “Hey, I can call MY cousin a loser, but YOU
can’t” to Adam’s reaction, implying the right to criticise Australian policy and
practice should be kept in-house. Whilst there had been native title progress,
there was still a long road ahead; the film signals this, and even features a
surrogate character for white audiences—in the form of the lanky and lovable
Spence—to condemn rather than condone the mining company and Supreme Court
verdict. The abovementioned matter-of-fact vibe of the film—it’s not overtly
damning, and neither are its Indigenous protagonists overly sympathetically drawn nor
its mining executives overly nefariously drawn—and the dry humour Herzog mines from
scenes pairing Spence and Kaye’s verbal diarrhea with the Marikas’ quiet and
expressive stoicism—exchanges between unstoppable (chattering, blabbering) forces and immovable (silent) objects—might also have rubbed commentators the wrong
way, suggesting the director was not taking his subject seriously.
The late Hugh Keays-Byrne shows up in a small role of Kaye’s corporate lackey, and his presence brought to mind several films he’d appear in over the subsequent decade (Strikebound, Kangaroo, and Resistance, which he co-directed) that were fairly didactic in their messaging. I suspect a more straight-shooting, level approach would have made Where the Green Ants Dream's critics in 1984 more comfortable. As it stands, it is the friction between sensibilities—both within the plot and aesthetically—and tonal peculiarity that make Where the Green Ants Dream fascinating, and make any conversation about it pointedly complicated but also worthwhile and potentially dialectical. The film is also, as indicated earlier, engaging and fairly amiable; like many Herzog films, it purports to be about more than it actually is, and to say more than it actually does, but I’ll gladly take this lark over the punishing likes of Woyzeck or Cobra Verde.
Ben Kooyman