'A New Kind of Film': Performing Aboriginality in James Cant's Wirritt Wirritt (1957)

Abstract

Wirritt Wirritt (1957) is a hitherto-unexamined short film by the Australian modernist artist James Cant (1911-82) in collaboration with the filmmaker Malcolm Otton (b. 1917) and the poet, writer, and collector of Aboriginal legends, Roland Robinson (1912-92). The film's experimental aspects included Cant 'performing Aboriginality' by painting imitations of Aboriginal motifs directly onto the walls of coastal sandstone cliffs in Sydney. This article reveals how the hybrid artefacts of Cant's paintings were produced at the intersection of modernism, anthropology and commercialisation, at a time of increasing popular interest in Aboriginal art in the 1950s, and how they were facilitated by the postwar circulation of film, photographs and audio recordings that brought Aboriginal rock art and performance from remote regions into the purview of a group of white, urban-based bohemians.