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Tudawali (1987)

 


Director: Steve Jodrell

Starring: Ernie Dingo, Frank Wilson, Bud Tingwell

Singin’ in the Rain. Sunset Boulevard. The Bad and the Beautiful. All about Eve. A Star is Born (x 2). The Day of the Locust. The Stunt Man. Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The Player. Living in Oblivion. Barton Fink. Ed Wood. Gods and Monsters. Bowfinger. State and Main. Mulholland Drive. Adaptation. Tropic Thunder. The Artist. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The Disaster Artist. Mank. Dolemite is My Name. And many, many more. The catalogue of Hollywood films about Hollywood - some wholesale fiction, others based on true events - is a robust one, peppered with many classics, much sardonic satire, and equal parts self-congratulation and self-loathing.

In contrast, the Australian film industry, with its government subsidised output and oft-transient star system, has 1987’s Tudawali, a pair of Errol Flynn biopics, and, for genre fans, Cut. A cynic would say there’s not much to commemorate. I’d disagree: there’s certainly grist for the satirical mill in the local industry, along with different eras and productions warranting dramatisation. But the impulse to self-mythologise/naval-gaze/bite-the-hand-that-feeds hasn’t taken hold. As for self-loathing, that’s the dramatic modus operandi of 50% of modern Australian films; why get meta about it?

Tudawali dramatises the rise to fame and subsequent tribulations of Robert Tudawali, an Aboriginal labourer plucked from obscurity to star in Charles Chauvel’s celebrated 1955 film Jedda. Playing Tudawali, the first major male Aboriginal film star of the twentieth century, is Ernie Dingo, one of the major male Aboriginal film stars of the late twentieth century. Looking back across the Down Under Flix archives, I’ve reviewed a lot of Dingo-starring films (The Fringe Dwellers, Crocodile Dundee II, Blackfellas, Dead Heart, Bran Nue Dae), but Tudawali provides easily the best showcase of his emotional range as an actor, as his onscreen character (and offscreen predecessor) grapples with illness, financial and marital woes, and diminishing career prospects.

A telemovie made and screened for SBS, Tudawali is well-directed by Steve Jodrell, and the format works in the film’s favour. Whilst I’ll always, hands down, opt for film over television as both entertainment and photographic medium, the 16mm fullscreen photography of Tudawali gives it a certain bluntness and immediacy that’s quite effective, heightening it as both a raw character study and “exposé”, a look behind the figurative celluloid curtain.

Oddly enough, the film reminds me most of Star 80, Bob Fosse’s dramatisation of the brief life and tragic death of model-actress Dorothy Stratton. Star 80 is a stylistically unlikely companion piece, but both films share similarities in their depiction of the manufacturing and repackaging of star image. Tudawali appears as protagonist in the biographical screen story; on actual screens - in theatres and televisions and editing rooms - within said screen story; in news stories and television programs within said screen story; in footage from Jedda itself (like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where the real Sharon Tate appears in film footage watched by actress Margot Robie in a movie theatre, so too does the real Tudawali appear, in footage from Jedda, watched by Dingo in a theatre); and at film’s end, Tudawali’s image continues to be harnessed by others, in footage screened following his passing.

The lack of physical resemblance between Tudawali and Dingo may be a sticking point for some viewers, not to mention the framing of Tudawali’s story via mostly white vantage points: Chauvel (Frank Wilson), a journalist (Peter Fisher), and a doctor (Bud Tingwell). However, these serve to reinforce the theme of how Tudawali’s star image was and continues to be disseminated, and his ultimate lack of control over it. That lack of control echoes Tudawali’s lack of agency over other elements of his life: a commonplace experience for Indigenous Australians of this and subsequent eras. Whilst Tudawali may be anomalous as an Australian film about the industry itself, it is one of many grappling with these ongoing cultural challenges.

Ben

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