The filmmaker, the cult, and the dead who govern

The old man walks along the line of people waiting to receive him, leaning heavily on a cane. He shakes each proffered hand, moving closer, filling more and more of the frame. He looks to camera, and says, “Will I shake your hand too?” For a moment, it seems as though the question has been put to the viewer. But a voice off screen answers in the affirmative, and a hand emerges from beneath the camera, taking the old man’s and shaking it firmly.

This instance, which blurs the line between viewer and film, filmmaker and subject, is typical of the documentary Koriam’s Law – and the dead who govern. This is the story of the Kivung in the village of Pomio, an influential religious and political movement, called by some a ‘cargo cult’, on the island of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The powerful film is the work of Gary Kildea, an internationally respected documentary maker based at the Ethnographic Film Unit at ANU, along with American filmmaker Andrea Simon and Australian anthropologist Andrew Lattas.

The feature-length documentary was recently chosen as the film of the year by the Royal Anthropological Institute in the UK, and has been receiving positive reviews at screenings around Europe. But what is the Kivung, or, for that matter, a cargo cult? As Kildea explains, it has little to do with simplistic images of people waiting for manna to descend.

“The term ‘cargo cult’ carries pejorative, misleading connotations, which anthropologists – in this case Andrew Lattas – are at pains to correct. The term covers a huge variety of indigenous Pacific movements, but rather than being seen as social pathologies they’re now understood as collective responses to the impact of sudden colonialism on local beliefs. That is, on the vital system of ideas that connects all cultures – their stories, their ancestors, their gods, their identity, their place in the world – to the infinite universe.”

Kildea’s association with PNG stretches back to the early 1970s, when he went to live in Australia’s one-time colony to work for the Department of Information’s Film Unit. He says even though colonial control of PNG was established, by and large, without military conquest, the damage done to native identity amounted to collective psychological trauma. As a consequence, some of the 700 distinct cultures in PNG have adapted their belief systems to cope with the cosmological inconsistencies thrown up by contact with Europeans.

The Pomio Kivung takes aspects of Christianity, some forms of western bureaucratic practice, and traditional beliefs, to create a new religion wherein participants strive for a lost knowledge. The Kivung holds that westerners, who have privileged access to the world of the dead, possess this knowledge and thus enjoy an ideal lifestyle. It also believes that westerners selfishly withhold their knowledge in order to subjugate black people. The point of the Kivung’s sacred practice is to find a way back to this knowledge, thus ending the humiliation arising out of cultural inequality.

Like other Millenarian religious movements, including Christianity, the Kivung tells of a time in the future when an ideal state shall come into being, where the living and dead live together in material and spiritual perfection. Although stressing he is not an anthropologist, Kildea says he has observed and read enough to believe that this melding of traditional beliefs with ideas adopted from colonial encounter is a way for societies to maintain a sense of the universe and their place within it.

“Years ago, I worked with another anthropologist, Jerry Leach, on a documentary called Trobriand Cricket – an ingenious response to colonialism. This is about the way the people of the Trobriand Islands (just 300 km south of Pomio) transformed the game of cricket into an elaborate and spectacular new ritual. It was a means of maintaining aspects of local culture that had been forbidden by the newly imposed white administration. Most importantly it was a way of continuing with some kind of ritualised warfare.

“The formal competitive structures of cricket seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Again, it’s as if the culture itself, more so than specific individuals, invented this creative adaptation as a way somehow to survive. So I like to think that Koriam’s Law might equally have been subtitled: ‘another ingenious response
to colonialism’.

Koriam’s Law conveys a sense of such a culture by relating to the viewer through characters and events, rather than through the authorial narration and expert commentary typical of the documentary genre.

Another technique that reveals the constructed nature of filmic roles is the use of lingering camera shots, which reveal the humour and humanity of the people being interviewed.

“Those little moments can be very revealing,” Kildea says. “Sometimes, what plays on the face of someone after they’ve said something is as revealing as the thing they just said.”

But turning these series of little moments into a cohesive narrative was no easy feat. The complex ideas underpinning the Kivung beliefs are related with clarity, but Kildea says it was a struggle in the cutting room to find coherence in the material without resorting to a lot of added explanation. He says there was as much good luck as good management involved in it finally coming together.

“This project was perhaps the most difficult film I’ve ever had to edit. There were around 50 hours of rushes and most of that content was of the same density and complexity that you see on the screen, idea after idea after idea. When I faced this editing job, I had no idea how it could be done. It has turned out a lot better than it ever deserved to be, given that Andrea and I were not entirely on top of what it was we were filming.”

Although he has earned respect worldwide for a series of documentaries, each revealing aspects of humankind’s variety while emphasising universal impulses, Kildea remains humble. He admits to being part of that drive within Western thinking that insists on knowing other cultures, but he is also aware of the problems that arise for any observer in the act of observation. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, he describes the making of Koriam’s Law as having been contingent on the happiest of accidents.

“I wouldn’t have thought it possible to bring off a decent film on the subject of ‘cargo-cults’. I’m grateful to Andrea and Andrew for getting me involved. It turned out that this was exactly the kind of challenge I needed to grapple with at this point in my career. Whether or not Koriam’s Law helps others broaden their minds, the making of it vastly improved my own thinking about the intricate world of ideas we all construct and inhabit.”

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