Indigenous Australia and the Archive Effect: Frances Calvert’s Talking Broken as Essay Film

Abstract

This chapter focuses on strategic combinations of some of the ‘building blocks’ of the essay film in the directorial output of Frances Calvert, a non-Indigenous Australian documentary filmmaker, who worked poetically and collaboratively with themes that bear upon Australia’s ‘other’ Indigenous community, Torres Strait Islanders. Despite differences in approach, her films pay heed to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s injunction to ‘speak nearby’ and/or in collaboration with, rather than on behalf of. They make extensive use of historical archival material, and they eschew the merely evidential in their use of such material. Providing a close reading of Calvert’s debut film Talking Broken (1990), Peter Kilroy argues that the use of archival material constitutes a type of citational practice, analogous to the citational practices of the literary essayist, which in turn forms a core performative element of the reflexive process of the essay film.