Charles Chauvel’s Jedda (1955) holds an important place in the history of Australian cinema. Long considered a classic, it tells the tale of a young Aboriginal orphan, the eponymous Jedda (Rosalie Kunoth-Monks), who, despite attempts by her adoptive white parents to assimilate her into settler society, and despite being betrothed to a mixed-race stockman, Joe (Paul Reynall), is drawn inexorably towards Marbuck (Robert Tudawali), another Aboriginal man who comes from the bush to the cattle station where she lives in the Northern Territory. Marbuck abducts Jedda, only to find himself rejected by his own people on account of Jedda not being from the correct skin group. Both Jedda and Marbuck die after the latter pulls the former over a cliff. A tragic tale, then, the film arguably suggests that assimilation is not possible—while also being the object (at least in hindsight) of criticism for its intended sympathetic portrayal of everyday settler racism.
Indeed, celebrated Aboriginal filmmakers Tracey Moffatt and Warwick Thornton both revisit Jedda in their work, with the latter producing Rosalie’s Journey (2003), which follows Kunoth-Monks, now in her mid-sixties, as she recalls how Chauvel’s film required her to go against the traditional values of her Arrernte and Anmatyerre people. Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), meanwhile, is often touted as an imaginary sequel to Jedda, only now with the Aboriginal girl (Marcia Langton) growing up to look after her aging white adoptive mother (Elizabeth Gentle). In its portrayal of the Aboriginal daughter’s bondage to the white mother, Night Cries produces a scathing critique of exploitative whiteness, which experiences seemingly everlasting, if ever more decrepit, life at the expense of the labor (and thus to some extent the living death) of the non-white other.
Rosalie’s Journey’s and Night Cries’ critiques of Jedda are illustrated by a scene in Chauvel’s film in which, shortly after we see Jedda transition from a little girl to a young woman, Joe and Jedda take a ride before lying down to drink water from a pond. As they turn on to their backs and look up towards the sky, Joe declares his love for her.
Joe: Jedda, I want to marry you. I want to build a little house for you and me.
Jedda: With walls and a roof?
Joe: With windows and doors.
Jedda: But you can’t see the stars through a roof.
Joe responds by laughing, at which Jedda insists: “You can’t.” The film then cuts from a high-angle two-shot of the couple by the rippling water to a close-up of Jedda, who rests her head on Joe’s arm, the water still in frame above her head: “You know, Joe, I like best the night we all go to the buffalo camp and I sleep on the ground. I look up and up and see the stars dancing a big corroboree [Aboriginal dancing ceremony]. It must be fun to dance a corroboree, real wild fella one. No shoes, and,” coyly turning her head away from Joe, “not too much dress.” The film then cuts back to the two-shot as Joe promises that Jedda will be able to dance a corroboree for him every night if they get married, only for Jedda to lament that she does not know how, since she has not been raised in the Aboriginal manner.
The scene ends with Jedda joking that even if she cannot dance, she can ride, and that she’ll beat Joe home, at which point Jedda dissolves to Marbuck arriving at the cattle station. While this transition positions Marbuck as the person to teach Jedda how to “dance a corroboree,” it is other elements of the scene upon which I should like to linger—in particular Jedda’s attachment to the night sky. It is not (just) that the dance of the stars is conflated here with mating rituals and being a “real wild fella,” nor simply that a roof, and thus by extension the domestic spaces constructed by heteronormative settler society, prevent one from seeing the night sky. Nor is it solely that the presence of water, lapping the top of the frame, is graphically crucial to this confession of “Aboriginal” urges on Jedda’s part. It is also how the darkness of the night sky is here posited as Indigenous knowledge, with this darkness standing in contrast with the brightness, or light, of the day.
As written by settler filmmakers Charles and Elsa Chauvel, the screenplay to Jedda cannot necessarilybe said to reflect anything other than an imagined Aboriginality/Indigeneity, with the film staging, as a supposed insight into Aboriginal lives, an exploitation of Aboriginal otherness for white enlightenment that Rosalie’s Journey and Night Cries both draw into clear relief. All the same, Jedda, in its very whiteness, does give us accurate insight into precisely the white settler mindset. In this sense, Jedda, through the assignation to Aboriginality of darkness, physicality, and desire in the sequence described above, reveals how white knowledge is linked to light. More to the point, it can help us to consider how light-as-knowledge and knowledge-as-light are crucial to the construction of whiteness as a condition of power.
The relationship between light and knowledge is long established, with Plato serving as a foundational figure in Western thought in the construction of this connection. The metaphor of the cave, for example, involves humans mistaking for reality the shadows playing on the wall of a cave—until, that is, they step out into the light and thus acquire true knowledge. The relationship between this latter metaphor and cinema is to be explored imminently. But of equal importance to the shadows that the cave dwellers see is the wall upon which they see it. While Western philosophy generally gets caught up in the darkness/light dichotomy (darkness is a state of ignorance; light/enlightenment is a state of knowledge), perhaps it is the wall that signifies ignorance. Jedda’s assertion about walls and the roof preventing her from seeing the night sky conveys as much: The architecture that the settler takes to be a symbol of civilization in fact separates them off from reality, thus limiting its knowledge. The English title of Jedda, Jedda the Uncivilised, encapsulates how wrong Westerners have it: They believe that the creation of conditions of ignorance (walls, roofs, the construction of an inside) is civilization itself, while those who expose themselves and are exposed to a world without walls (outside) are uncivilized.
A similar if paradoxical logic can be found in relation, I might contend, to daylight itself. The light of our sun turns our sky into a blue limit beyond which we find it hard to see (beyond the occasional sighting of the moon during the day). While Westerners dream of blue skies and sunshine as conditions of possibility, then, the blue sky is in fact a veil that demarcates a very clear limit on our knowledge. It is a “roof,” while the night sky—which exposes us to darkness—conveys to us the infinite, or what I here would like to suggest is knowledge itself. Westerners love the blue sky and light as “knowledge,” much as they love the house as an indicator of civilization. For, light and the inside allow lightness and whiteness to construct themselves as “human”—even as this “human’ is in fact a chosen condition, both of ignorance and of power, relegating those outside and in darkness, as well as those with dark skin, as “uncivilized.” Western modernity is not so much about the exit from Plato’s cave as the deliberate construction and entrance into it.
Considering the implied critique of Jedda offered by Tracey Moffatt in Night Cries, then, not only gives us a sense of how the construction of the inside, light, civilization, and perhaps knowledge itself is a racial construction (whiteness as empowered, subjecting the non-white other to laboring endlessly for its own maintenance), but it also deliberately stages its drama within an obvious film set. This stands in stark contrast to the otherwise magnificent locations of Jedda. For, in deliberately showing to us sets as constructions, Night Cries deconstructs how cinema itself is the construction of Plato’s racial(izing) cave: it pretends to present to us an “outside” (nature!) that is in fact an “inside” (nature controlled and reduced to the white settler colony known as Australia). There is, of course, a paradox here. Just as to exit Plato’s cave is in fact to exit into a daylight that is also a roof, a limit, or a second “cave” (blue-sky thinking as a metaphor for the limits of white thought/thought-as-whiteness as limit), so is cinema capable, when self-consciously false, of giving us a sense of what I might, with echoes of psychoanalytic language, call the “limitless Black Real.” Not the racial other as ontologically (i.e., truly) a measure of the infinite (Jedda’s desire for the sky at night is, in this sense, absolutely a white fantasy); but the construction of the racial other as “infinite” as a means for bringing finitude (being) and power to whiteness (as “knowledge”). Blackness (Black human beings) is (are) not ontologically infinite, even if we all live in a multiverse of endless darkness; whiteness constructs Blackness as infinite to give itself power and meaning. Plato’s cave and cinema both serve this purpose; dragging non-western bodies into the ignorant cave of whiteness leads to (non-white) filmmakers who necessarily seek to tear that cave down. In this way, Night Cries offers not just a critique of Jedda but also of cinema and its role in constructing a Platonic and racial(izing) cave as a whole.
