The colonial camera: Main debates concerning the representation of minorities through media

Résumé du document

The question of the representation of a culture through media raises creates political, ideological, esthetical or social issues. I will briefly analyze the main problems highlighted in the issues stated above, in order to understand why media plays such a important role in our imaginary construction of the cultures. It was not until the late 1980's that Anthropologists started paying importance towards media. One cannot deny the ubiquity of the global media. Television, video, radio, play a significant role in our every day lives and have a huge sociocultural significance.

Extraits

[...] In the description of the film moonlight in 1910 there is the first reference to an Aboriginal presence. The wife of the actor-director, Agnes Gavin, full of brown make up, plays the role of an aboriginal woman. It is the same in the movie of Alfred Rolfe, Coenee and the echo”. Charles Woods, who has played the Aboriginal man in Coenee and the Echo did the same in Bondage of the bush”. This other fact is also very significant of the representation of aboriginal people is the early Australian cinema. [...]

[...] The name of this movie is “Moora Neya, the message of the spear” . What is very significant of how the racist and discriminatory representations of Indigenous people has been disseminated is not so much the story than the advertisements for the movie. For example, one advertisement describes some of the dangers braved in making the film after much trouble, the blacks were induced to face the camera . During the corroborree the natives became excited, and threw spears and boomerangs one hitting the machine”. [...]

[...] One particularly prevalent racist framework has been the conflation of nature and culture, in which aboriginal culture, (for example its affinity with the land) is seen as natural and opposed to culture. According to Jenning's analysis, Aboriginal people are even sometimes represented as non- adult, non-human, even inanimate (like all the Aboriginal people which are sitting on the floor in The tracker, and the two aboriginal characters in where the green ants dream) Sometimes they are dressed in hides which are more reminiscent of African adventures. [...]

[...] The colonial camera: Main debates concerning the representation of minorities through media The question of the representation of a culture through media raises a lot of different debates with central topics concerned whether political, ideological, esthetical or social questions. I will not try to explain all these debates, but I will briefly sum up the main problems highlighted through these debates, in order to understand why media plays such a important role in our imaginary construction of the cultures, and to define what is really in task in these questions. [...]

[...] Even if the colonial stereotype is a very complex and ambivalent question in terms of representation, we can undoubtly say that the creation of stereotypes was a way for the new born nation to position on the Aboriginal people, and to define the difference between this two cultures in terms of power and resistance, domination and dependence. In this point of view, Moore and Muecke develop an analysis by looking at the use of filmic codes and techniques as they are articulated with social institutions and policies”. They trace the historical emergence of three discursive formations in the filmic representation of Aborigines, which they relate to prevailing government policies and ideological movements. [...]