Gurrumul film is raw beauty
Simon CollinsThe West Australian
Saturday, 20 January 2018 4:15PM
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Camera IconDr Gurrumul Yunupingu in concert at Kings Park. Credit: Duncan Barnes
Djuna Djuna Yunupingu never expected his nephew Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, who was born blind in 1971, to leave their Galiwin'ku community on Elcho Island in East Arnhem Land.
"It was a shame that he would be someone who'd never show his independence," Uncle Djuna says in the landmark documentary Gurrumul which opens the second season of the Perth Festival Lotterywest Films next month.
"He'd be unable to get around different places. He'd always have to stay close to home."
Not only did Gurrumul leave Elcho Island — population 2200, 530km east of Darwin — but he travelled the globe performing traditional Yolngu songs with a modern spin for world leaders, royalty and music superstars, before his tragically premature death last year, aged 46.
The beautiful, raw and intimate documentary about the highest selling indigenous artist in Australian music history was conceived by South Fremantle-based director Paul Williams and Melbourne-based producer Shannon Swan. After joining Gurrumul's Darwin-based record label Skinnyfish Music as in-house filmmaker in 2012, Williams met Swan who suggested making a film about the unlikely pop phenomenon.
Having witnessed the incredible passion Gurrumul's manager Mark T. Grose and close collaborator Michael Hohnen had for indigenous music, Williams pitched the idea of a doco around their fruitful relationship as well as the clashes between blackfella and whitefella cultures.
"That was the pitch and initially they said, 'No way'," Williams says.
But they soon talked the Skinnyfish pair around, and Williams and Swan embarked on three years of filming the ARIA Award-winning musician who released three acclaimed albums between 2008 and 2015.
"Before we started filming, I'd probably been to Elcho five or six times," the director says. "It's great filming up there because it's so colourful and so unique. That remote, indigenous culture is still intact. It's awe-inspiring."
The difficulties were mostly logistical, particularly getting a film crew to Galiwin'ku at short notice. They used four directors of photography to pounce on last-minute opportunities on Elcho.
"Filmmaking generally needs to run on a tight schedule," Williams explains. "Time is money and things happen at their own pace in a place like that. You either have a nervous breakdown or just roll with it.
"I was very conscious of the fact that, as a filmmaker, I was in their world and I was following their rules. I had to be very sympathetic with that and they were very patient with me — it was a two-way street."
Gurrumul's aunty Susan Dhangal Gurruwiwi was a vital asset, serving as indigenous liaison, helping them understand how the traditional Yolngu world relates to balanda (white) society, and also offering her "gentle, philosophical" thoughts on camera.
"As a filmmaker you just dream of someone like that entering into the sphere of a film," Williams says.
Gurruwiwi also recalled that Christian missionaries had brought 16mm and 8mm cameras with them in the 1970s, leading to Williams tracking down incredible footage of Gurrumul as a baby and young child. The vision works perfectly alongside autobiographical 2008 tune Gurrumul History (I Was Born Blind) — a rare song in English rather than his Gumatj or Galpu languages.
The other gold mine was the 200 hours of material filmed across the past 20 years, much of it by Skinnyfish staff.
This footage ranges from Gurrumul playing with rockers Yothu Yindi and reggae/ska outfit Saltwater Band, where Hohnen discovered his breathtaking and otherworldly voice, to backstage footage learning the Police's Every Breath You Take moments before a duet with Sting on French TV in 2009.
The film opens with one of his first major media interviews — a painfully awkward encounter for The 7.30 Report, where a flustered journalist fails to elicit a single response from the stoically silent rising star.
"His totem is the saltwater crocodile (or baru)," says Hohnen, who subsequently served as Gurrumul's spokesman. "I know it sounds ridiculous, but you know how they can sit there for hours and not do a thing? He had that quality. We never once got him to do anything he didn't want to do."
More than musical collaborators, Gurrumul and Hohnen were like brothers — or wawa.
Behind the scenes footage shows the indigenous legend playing with Hohnen's children, joking with band mates on the road and generally being anything other than the shy enigma embraced by music lovers.
"Isn't it beautiful," Hohnen says. "It is great that people will see he had this complete other wicked, funny side."
The documentary also portrays the vulnerable nature of their relationship. In 2010, Gurrumul failed to turn up at Darwin airport to fly out for a massive US tour that was likely to elevate him to global superstar status. It was later reported that chronic kidney-related illness forced cancellation of the tour.
"That totally ruined our business for a couple of years," Hohnen says ruefully.
Williams says the thought of sharing vision of the Skinnyfish team at breaking point trying to track down their friend while handling furious US promoters partly prompted Hohnen and Grose to knock back the doco. But, he adds, the sequence reveals the sacrifices each side made for the other.
The other impressive aspect of the film is the impeccable sound design, which weaves original music and traditional singing around a fresh score by Hohnen, Gurrumul and Finnish-born composer Erkki Veltheim.
"My No.1 goal was that Gurrumul would be able to find it intelligible," Williams says. "Making a film for a blind man is a little bit of an oxymoron."
Gurrumul, who listened to edits on his iPod or "watched" it with a family member, approved the film three days before his death on July 25, 2017. Both Hohnen and Williams attended his traditional funeral on Elcho Island in November.
Gurrumul features stunning sequences shot during the funerals of his mother and father — the superstar insisted the film crew return to shoot the latter in 2014.
"He orchestrated that whole scene," marvels Hohnen, who says the public ceremonies surrounding funerals on Elcho are "like the scene of an opera".
At Gurrumul's funeral, he adds, "there were four different clan groups all singing different song cycles at the same time. I just sat there immersed in it all. I was really emotional but really proud to be part of that".
While his family invited filmmakers to shoot more footage, they decided to leave the film as it was when approved by the late singer. They also respected his wish that the doco focus on his music rather than his long-running health battles, according to Williams.
"He didn't want to turn this into another treatise on the tragedy of aboriginality over the past 240 years in this country. He was really strict and forbade it — and I agreed with him on that," he says.
While a person's name is traditionally "retired" when they die, the Galiwin'ku community gave Skinnyfish special permission to continue using Gurrumul's name after his funeral.
According to Hohnen, a new album combining Yolngu and classical music should be released in April (the film shows Gurrumul working with Veltheim to turn the droning repetitive sound of the yidaki into a score for cello).
And there could be more electronic tracks similar to his 2013 Flume remix A Baru in New York — Gurrumul closes with an upbeat remix of GITAR by Perth producer Dazastah.
The doco with a difference has featured at film festivals in Melbourne, Adelaide and Darwin. But the most poignant screening will be when Gurrumul makes its Elcho Island premiere later this year or next year.
Hohnen agrees. "(His Elcho family) don't want him forgotten," he says.
"In a way, they're saying, 'He put us on the map'."
Gurrumul screens at UWA Somerville from February 12-18 and ECU Joondalup Pines from February 19-25.
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