Images of Dignity Barry Barclay and Four PDF

Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema
ImagesDignityBarclay_d200408.indd 1 20/04/2008 1:13:42 p.m.

Images of Dignity:
Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema
Stuart Murray
HUIA

First published in 2008 by Huia Publishers
39 Pipitea Street, PO Box 17–335
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
www.huia.co.nz
ISBN 978-1-869693-28-2
Copyright © Stuart Murray 2008

Cover design: Jo Duff
Typesetting: Ahi Text Solutions
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Murray, Stuart, 1967–
Images of dignity: Barry Barclay and fourth cinema /
Stuart Murray.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-869693-28-2
1. Barclay, Barry—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Motion pictures—Production and direction—New Zealand.
3. Documentary television programmes—Production and direction—New Zealand.
4. Documentary films—Production and direction—New Zealand.
5. Documentary-style films—Production and direction—New Zealand.
6. Mäori (New Zealand people) in motion pictures.
7. Mäori (New Zealand people)—Ethnic identity.
8. Motion picture producers and directors—New Zealand.
I. Title.
791.43092—dc 22
Published with the support of

This book is for Yann, who deserves a million books and more.

Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Poroporoaki xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: Images of Dignity 1
1. Indigenous Self-Expression: Outlining Fourth Cinema 11
2. Tangata Whenua and Documentary 31
3. Communities and Reciprocity: Ngati and The Neglected Miracle 53
4. The Politics of Engagement: Te Rua, The Feathers of Peace
and The Kaipara Affair 71
Conclusion: Living Knowledges 93
Filmography 97
Bibliography 99
Index 105
vii

List of Illustrations
1. Barclay in his office at Visicom Films in Masterton, late 1960s. Barry Barclay private
collection.
2. Barclay (second from left), directing his first film, a promotional piece for Ashley wallpapers,
late 1960s. The male actor to the left is Michael Morrissey. Barry Barclay private collection.
3. Barclay (right) with director William Doherty in 1968. Barry Barclay private collection.
4. Early days at Pacific films. Barclay (right) in conversation with director Owen Hughes
during the making of Towards 2020: The East Coast Project (1970). Barclay worked as
an assistant cameraman on a number of Pacific documentaries in the early 1970s. Barry
Barclay private collection.
5. Barclay during a poetry reading in Masterton in the late 1960s. Barry Barclay private
collection.
6. In discussion over the making of Tangata Whenua on a marae in the Waikato. Barclay
(right) is in conversation Michael King, with Piri Poutapu (left) and Dave Manehere
(second from left) listening on, 1974. Barry Barclay private collection.
7. Making Tangata Whenua. Barclay (second from left) looks on as Michael King talks to
Tuhoe during the filming of the fourth episode of the series, 1974. Barry Barclay private
collection.
8. The Neglected Miracle: Barclay’s study of the complex issues surrounding Indigenous
ownership of natural resources. Stuart Murray private collection.
9. Left to right: John O’Shea,Wi Kuki Kaa, Barry Barclay and Tama Poata in Cannes for the
Festival Screening of Ngati, 1987. Barry Barclay private collection.
10. Barclay (left), in Hawai’i for the film festival screenings of Ngati, 1987. Barry Barclay private
collection.
11. Ngati: ‘It’s a determined attempt to say what it’s like being Mäori’. Stuart Murray private
collection.
12. Wi Kuki Kaa (left) and Peter Kaa (right), protagonists from different generations brought
together in Te Rua. Stuart Murray private collection.
13. The Feathers of Peace: History that lives in the present. Stuart Murray private collection.
14. Barclay, waiting to be interviewed on camera, near Wellington Harbour, 2007. Barry
Barclay private collection.
ix

15. In conversation with Graeme Tucket, director of a documentary on Barclay’s work, 2007.
Barry Barclay private collection.
16. Barclay being interviewed, 2007. Graeme Tucket is on the right. Barry Barclay private
collection.
17. Barclay with the author James George, presenting awards at the Pikihuia Awards for Mäori
Writers, Wellington, 2007. Barclay was an enthusiastic judge of the New Zealand film
Commission Award for best script for a short film. Huia NZ Ltd.
18. Barclay with Heather Randerson at the New Zealand Order of Merit investiture
ceremony, 2007. Barry Barclay private collection.

Poroporoaki
E moe …
E moe e koro i tö moenga roa
E moe e Bazz te huru mä te huru roa
E ngongo ai au i te puna roimata

E tangi ai au i a Hinekatakata
Sleep good sir that long sleep

Sleep Bazz and rest your frosty locks
I quaff from a pool of tears

And weep while the goddess of death laughs
B arry Barclay was born in 1944. He died in 2008.

He was a Mäori filmmaker. He existed to serve the Mäori people, and
serve them well he did: for decades. He delighted in life’s variety and forged
bonds with iwi all over the world. He became an éminence grise before his
time. With his television documentaries and his films he truly opened our
eyes, minds and hearts to worlds beyond that which we know.
Barry was indeed a piece of work. He was noble in reason and infinite in
faculty. He was an intellectual and a poet of the soul. He knew his God.
Of all his great gifts as a storyteller he will be remembered and felt most
because of the impact of his ideas. He divined the future by mining the past.
He infused his stories with a human spirit in Mäori garb. His imagination was
relentless.
xi

And yes this man is the very quintessence of dust. He sprang from
Papatüänuku, he moved among us, he left his mark. He now lies buried with
his Ngäti Apa kin.
Heoi.
Tainui Stephens
Te Rarawa
xii

Acknowledgements
M y chief debt in completing this book is to Barry Barclay himself, who

over a number of years was a generous and supportive correspondent,
was patient in responding to all my various enquiries, and always made
himself available for conversation. His death in February 2008, as this book
was entering production, was a huge loss. He was a rare spirit and a great
teacher, and New Zealand and the wider worlds of filmmaking and Indigenous
activism are the poorer now because of his absence. I am also indebted to a
number of other Indigenous filmmakers, and would like to thank Jeff Bear and
Alanis Obomsawin in particular for their help. In New Zealand I was greatly
assisted by staff at both the New Zealand Film Archive and the New Zealand
Film Commission, by Pauline Burgwin and Raewyn Macdonald in bringing
together the images for the book, and by Brian Bargh and Gemma Freeman
at Huia, who deserve special thanks for believing in the project. I would also
want to again register my gratitude to Jane Stafford, Lydia Wevers and Mark
Williams for their continued friendship and for all the discussions we have
had about New Zealand for over a decade now, and to Stephen Turner for the
example he provides in his own commitment to working with Indigenous
cultures. In the U.K., I am grateful to Ian Conrich for sharing his knowledge
of New Zealand cinema, Michelle Keown for her continued camaraderie,
and to many colleagues in the School of English at Leeds for their support
and insight. The entire postcolonial team at Leeds has provided a wonderful
environment in which to work; I am indebted to Brendon Nicholls for his
enthusiasm for Barclay and for his careful reading of the manuscript, and to
Ananya Jahanara Kabir for her wisdom and friendship. I am also grateful to
Bridget Bennett, Denis Flannery and Katy Mullin for supplying many of the
things that are needed when work is pressing.
The British Academy twice funded research visits to New Zealand in
connection with this study, and also made Barry Barclay a Visiting Professor and
sponsored his visit to Leeds in 2005. I am extremely grateful to the Academy
xiii

for such support, and also to all those who made the research workshop on
Indigenous cinema in October 2005 such a success. Special thanks must go
to the Leeds Humanities Research Institute, the Institute for Colonial and
Postcolonial Studies, and the University’s Centre for Canadian Studies for
supporting this event. Throughout my time writing on New Zealand cinema,
I have been lucky enough to work with some exceptional students, and I want
to record my thanks to both Clare Barker and Kirsty Bennett in particular
for all the conversations we have had on the topic. Writing this book would
not have been possible without the leave provided by the School of English at
Leeds and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and I am very grateful
to both for such support. My thanks to Meg, and to the boys, are above and
beyond all the others. One way or another, they make all books possible.
Stuart Murray
Leeds, 2008
xiv

Introduction
Images of Dignity
‘How can we take that maverick yet fond friend of ours – the camera – into
the Maori community and be confident it will act with dignity?’
Barry Barclay, Our Own Image (p. 9).
I n 2005, Barry Barclay released his fifth feature length film, the
documentary The Kaipara Affair, and published his second book, Mana
Tuturu, a wide-ranging discussion of Mäori taonga and intellectual property
rights. The two events were the latest productions from a figure who first
rose to national prominence with his direction of the hugely influential
Tangata Whenua television series in 1974, and who has maintained a strong
public position ever since. In particular, Barclay’s direction of Ngati in 1987,
widely credited as being the first fiction feature film made by a member of
an Indigenous community, assured him of an international reputation that
augmented his standing in New Zealand. Both The Kaipara Affair and Mana
Tuturu are productions typically representative of Barclay’s working practice.
They are eloquent and innovative works that feature a sharp activist and
political engagement with key questions of community and belonging in
New Zealand. In their concerns and methods, they reflect upon the nature of
national and communal cultures and provoke debates as to why those cultures
take the forms that they do. In that sense they are a testament to everything
Barclay has done as a film-maker and social commentator.
The Kaipara Affair documents the ways in which a community responds
to a dispute over fishing rights; Mana Tuturu articulates Barclay’s increasing
unease with the status of the law in New Zealand and its relation to Mäori
culture. Both share the strong sense that society in New Zealand remains
contested, and that such contestation revolves around the many unresolved
issues of Indigenous presence and its consequences for a wider idea of national
‘integration’. Throughout his career Barclay has remained an activist in this

Images of Dignity
regard, refusing to subscribe to any quietist assumption that cultural relations

in New Zealand are on an unproblematic path to happy cohabitation. Whether
in thinking about fishing quotas or copyright law, he sees division and its
potential to create conflict. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that
from such a position Barclay is only interested in arguments or in exacerbating
communal tensions. As both The Kaipara Affair and Mana Tuturu display, his
work contains programmes for what he sees to be positive change, and it is the
possibilities inherent in such change that drive his sense of the future. Such a
future, it should be stressed, is not an essentialist one that seeks only to outline
what he believes to be an appropriate idea of Mäori society; rather, as we shall
see, Barclay’s films and writing envisage ideas of inclusive community that
are, he feels, capable of acting at a national level.
This study has, at its core, a focus on all of Barclay’s film and television
work to date, starting in the early 1970s and ending with The Kaipara Affair.
Though he has written about his own work (most noticeably in his 1990 book
Our Own Image), it is Barclay’s visual creativity that offers the best guide to any
reading of his films. Their use of narrative, structure and technique, and their
representation and performance of culture, constitute the best methodology
through which to approach and understand his politics and activism. As
a consequence, chapters two, three and four of this book offer detailed
commentary on Barclay’s major works, especially the Tangata Whenua series,
Ngati, the documentary features The Neglected Miracle (1985), The Feathers of
Peace (2000), and The Kaipara Affair, and his other fiction feature, Te Rua
(1992).
The opening chapter, however, seeks to provide a context for Barclay’s
films. From the making of The Feathers of Peace onwards, Barclay’s thoughts
have increasingly turned towards a situating of Mäori film-making, and
culture more widely, in the context of a global indigeneity. Picking up on
the classic division of world cinema into First, Second and Third models, he
has termed Indigenous cinema a Fourth Cinema, a practice and expression
that works beyond the current theorisations of global cinematic practice.
In speaking of Fourth Cinema, Barclay outlines an umbrella term that he
feels can contain the multiple forms of Indigenous cinema as it operates on
an international level, yet one that can still reflect the specifics of individual
cultural formations and iterations. Correspondingly, in chapter one I consider
what a Fourth World context, and a Fourth Cinema practice, might entail
and how Barclay’s own work fits these parameters. The expression of any
global dimension to indigeneity is a fraught process, due to the difficulties
in articulating similarities across such a wide range of cultures, and Barclay’s
attempt necessarily has to negotiate the problems that have dogged others in
the past. What emerges as especially productive from such considerations,

Introduction
however, is the opportunity to appreciate Barclay’s films within the context

of other Indigenous film-makers, and not only within the parameters of a
generalised idea of ‘Mäori culture’ or a nation-bound sense of New Zealand’s
film output. For all that he is a detailed intervener in New Zealand’s cultural
politics, Barclay’s range of reference is frequently international in its scope.
At the heart of Barclay’s work is a concentration on community. Time
and again, it is ideas of the communal to which his films return. Often this
is, as might be expected, in terms of iwi and whänau; but it can also be a
focus on other examples of minority community or, indeed, as an idea that
constitutes a model for the very processes of film-making itself. In Our Own
Image, Barclay first fully outlined his idea that a successful film operates as a
hui, as a ‘gathering on film’ as he terms it.1 His comments on this reveal a
sense of his own film-making method:
Any worthwhile film involves a certain arrogance – the arrogance to call a hui,
especially as a young person (under 50). If you are not brave enough to call a
hui, you do not have much right to be handling the extraordinary resources it
takes to make a film. Then again, the process involves humility, the humility
to bend the technology to the rules of the hui – to allow the people, the whole
people, to speak.2
This mixture of arrogance and humility, the processes of provocation and

reflection, is a good description of how Barclay operates. He has the arrogance
to enter into disputes, to offer contentious arguments, and the humility to
listen to those who respond knowledgeably. Possibly more important in the
above quote though is the sense of an adaptation of technique in order to
allow the required story to be told. As we shall see, such a process is the
very core of Barclay’s documentary method that informs all of his best work,
whether non-fiction or fiction. The desired end product of ‘the whole people’
speaking is equally paramount as a principle across all his films. The idea
of ‘talking in’, a term again used in Our Own Image, or of film-making and
communications in general as a marae, a meeting of equals, emerges from all
of his features.3 Ultimately, each of these concepts represents part of Barclay’s
central belief in the power of community. The communal operates not only in
the content of his films – as the unit of democracy and activism, of production,
of support, of resolution – but also as the organising principle under which his
films are made. As we shall see, part of Barclay’s innovative sense of Fourth
Cinema is precisely the idea of a communally-made film. It is working with
such a production base, he argues, that it becomes easiest to do justice to the
community that is itself being filmed.
1. Barclay, Our Own Image, p. 12.

2. Ibid., p. 13.
3. Ibid., pp. 74-80.

Images of Dignity
Barclay is well aware that his films operate in the contested arena of cultural
identities. When those identities are Indigenous, much of the discussion that
surrounds them becomes fixed upon ideas of authenticity and belonging, and
bound up in arguments of claim and rights. In post-settler New Zealand,
such ideas have taken multiple forms in the modern period. As a film-maker
who came to an initial maturity in the mid 1970s, Barclay has worked within
the contexts of a civil rights movement and then a liberal biculturalism that
has become increasingly market-oriented. This historical trajectory has a
particular New Zealand inflection of course, but it is also a progression that
has, loosely, operated globally. In both the workings of civil rights arguments
and the machinations of cultural identity formation processes, Indigenous
identities are often pressurised markers of belonging. As chapter one explores,
the activist movements of the late 1960s and 1970s saw culture in terms of
rights and assertions, and Indigenous identities came to have certain specific
credentials as a consequence. In the more recent period of state-sponsored and
directed ideas of culture, Indigenous identities are both defined and forced to
inhabit a varied cultural scene that has national and global parameters. In The
Cunning of Recognition, her exploration of the relationship between Indigenous
presence and Australian multiculturalism, Elizabeth Povinelli notes how what
she terms ‘multicultural domination’ needs to work by ‘inspiring subaltern
and minority subjects to identify with the impossible object of an authentic
self-identity’. She goes on:
As the nation stretches out its hands to ancient Aboriginal laws (as long as they
are not “repugnant”), indigenous subjects are called on to perform an authentic
difference in exchange for the good feeling of the nation and the reparative
legislation of the state. But this call does not simply produce good theater, rather
it inspires impossible desires: to be this impossible object and to transport its
ancient prenational meanings and practices to the present in whatever language
and moral framework prevails at the time of enunciation.4
Povinelli’s articulation of ‘impossible’ desires and objects offers a useful

lens through which to look at Barclay’s films and to gauge his sense of the
Indigenous presence they contain. When, in the February 2003 issue of
Onfilm, the trade newspaper for the New Zealand film industry, Barclay
wrote an open letter condemning the representation of Mäori culture in Niki
Caro’s hugely successful feature Whale Rider (2002), it was easy to see his
position in terms of stereotypes, as the self-appointed guardian of cultural
stewardship remonstrating with the practitioners of what he felt to be false
representation. ‘Above all’ Barclay wrote in the letter to the film’s producer
John Barnett, ‘don’t tell us that we, as Mäori, must like this film. It is every
4. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, p. 6.

Introduction
People’s right to make their minds up on that, particularly when it is their

own world being shown up there on the screen’.5 In fact, Barclay’s protest
against Whale Rider (and he is similarly critical of Sam Pillsbury’s 2001
feature Crooked Earth) revolves around the ideas of the kinds of ‘impossible’
Indigenous agency that Povinelli discusses. Whale Rider’s marketing strategy,
identifying the film as an ‘international’ story of generational conflict between
patriarchal grandfather and headstrong granddaughter, uses Mäori culture as
a series of reference points that inform the personal conflict. It is precisely the
kind of ‘performed’ culture of which Povinelli speaks that is on display in
the film, a constructed artefact (all the more so because of the strong visual
dimension provided by its status as a film) in which all sorts of ‘impossibilities’
are on show. Barclay’s anger over Whale Rider was less a trumpeting of his
own ideas of authenticity than a recognition of such a contemporary form of
misrepresentation. Aware as he is of the new pressures and demands placed
on and made of Indigenous identities, Barclay is not interested in reverting to
claim the uncontested legitimacy of an inflexible authentic tradition. Rather
he demands that the processes by which contemporary Indigenous cultures
and societies are portrayed – in the media, in law, in discourses of the national,
and in popular conceptions and ideologies – are understood.
In his own work, Barclay is very much interested in the ‘possibilities’ of
depicting Mäori culture. His is a film-making that lays a claim to truth, both
a truth of the nature of community and of the rights of community to make
activist claims and seek reparation with regard to historical misrepresentation.
But he is certainly no cultural essentialist. No one interested in a conservative
fixing of culture could start a book, as Barclay starts Mana Tuturu, with a
series of conjectures on what would have happened had James Cook had
a documentary film crew with him when he first arrived in New Zealand
aboard the Endeavour in 1769. As the following chapters show, his sense of
what constitutes Mäori culture is complex, and his depiction of such culture
is consistently interwoven with ideas taken from his natural abilities as an
image maker. As a figure who is not fluent in te reo, and who did not have
a childhood structured around iwi protocols and practices, Barclay’s sense of
cultural tradition is to some degree learned. But the ways in which he came to
an understanding of the workings of tradition is consistent with other figures
of his age who were inspired by the civil rights movement that started in
the late 1960s. For Barclay, Mäori culture is not a uniform concept with a
5. Barclay, ‘An open letter to John Barnett from Barry Barclay’, p. 14. (The letter actually says: ‘It is every
People’s right to make up their minds up on that’, but I have corrected what seems to be an obvious
printing error). Barclay’s letter was, in part, a response to an interview Barnett gave in Onfilm 19,
no. 12, 2002, pp. 2-3, and there was a subsequent correspondence involving film-makers Alan Brasch
and Carey Carter about the issues raised by the letter. See Onfilm 20, no. 3, 2003, p. 11.; 20, no. 4,
2003, p. 11; 20, no. 5, 2003, p. 11.

Images of Dignity
single form of expression. His films acknowledge the often radically different
practices that exist across and between hapü and iwi, and he makes it clear that
it is only through proper consultation and protocol that experiences that are
different from his own can be communicated within his work. At the same
time, he is aware that in a national and international framework it is often
essential to discuss ‘Mäori’ or ‘Indigenous’ collectives in order for voices to be
heard and arguments to be made. As we shall see, the complexities of being
seen as a spokesman for Mäori culture create issues that Barclay had to wrestle
with throughout his career.
In the light of the work done by Anne Salmond and Chadwick Allen, this
study as a whole conceives of Mäori culture in terms of ‘occasions’. In Blood
Narrative, his comparative analysis of Mäori and American Indian texts and
contexts, Allen extends Salmond’s famous idea of the necessity of adopting an
‘occasional’ idea to the workings of Mäori culture, instead of any concentration
on that culture as a unified totality. Making his claim to develop Salmond’s
ideas away from a consideration of formal Mäori culture alone and into the
arena of texts, Allen notes:
[I]t is useful to conceive of indigenous minority texts as “occasions” for the
performance of indigeneity, as “episodes” in the ongoing negotiation of
contemporary indigenous minority identities. An occasional and episodic
approach invites us to read particular literary and activist texts as responses to
the multiple motivations for their creation and, potentially, as co-creators of the
multiple contexts of their reception – local, national and global – rather than to
focus on their conformity or lack of conformity to a given set of standards for
authenticity or aesthetic excellence.6
Such terms work well for Barclay’s films. As we shall see, the idea of his
features and television work offering ‘negotiations’ within contemporary
debates surrounding Mäori and national identities fits both the activism that
often prompts the film and the narrative forms with which the productions
are made. Equally, the idea of ‘multiple motivations’ and contexts for his work
is useful in considering the totality with which Barclay viewed the film-
making process. In keeping with his developing ideas about Fourth Cinema,
Barclay saw all of his features as comprising multiple elements – from the
pre-production consultation with the communities to be filmed, to the actual
detail of the shooting, and on to the questions of distribution, reception and
film use.
Similarly, Allen’s highlighting of an idea of numerous ‘responses’ helps
in an understanding of how Barclay can be seen to have adopted multiple
positions in his attitude towards any of his given projects. He was a major
Indigenous film-maker when he was present at an international film festival,
6. Allen, Blood Narrative, p. 12.

Introduction
but was a member like any other of the local community when it came to
the specific detail of activist work. His letter to John Barnett about Whale
Rider operates within the terms of his being a participant at a national level in
the New Zealand film industry, and draws force from that position, whereas
his initial participation in the events surrounding the making of The Kaipara
Affair came as a resident in the community where the action was taking place.
All his films are multiple occasions, negotiations and responses in this sense,
and the idea of culture that emerges from them has to be seen as performative
and fluid, even as it asserts its base in traditional practices.
It is impossible not to think of Barclay’s works in terms of culture. It is
the single category that most obviously asserts itself when any consideration
is given to his films. Cultural practice and cultural value dominate the ways
his work is often seen, and that will be true of the chapters that follow here.
At the same time, however, this study makes the claim that there are other
animating principles to his film-making, principles often overlooked because
of the concentration given to cultural readings of his films. Foremost among
these is that Barclay was, in key respects, a religious film-maker. From the
age of fifteen onwards, in the early 1960s, he spent six years in Redemptorist
monasteries in Australia, first in Galong in New South Wales and then, after
taking temporary vows, in Ballarat in Victoria, where he began formal studies
for the priesthood. Although he failed to complete his training, leaving after
eighteen months, these experiences were crucial in forming his ideas about
the value of community, and they also imparted a sense of religion that can
be read in his own conception of aesthetics. Barclay has commented upon
this in some interviews, noting how his ideas of communal values and even
the acting in some of his films could be termed ‘religious’, though it is not a
dimension to his work that he chooses to stress significantly when talking. It
does, nevertheless, identify what might be understood as a core value in his
work, chiefly because of the ways in which it informs his use of images.
Barclay’s images rely on a necessary process of transcendence, and even if
the actual nature of such transcendence may be seen to be secular in its final
effect, its impulse might be usefully viewed within the terms of his own
religiosity. In his films, the image, or story, or local issue is only meaningful
because of that which it points towards. It is the question and debates his films
unlock in their detail that, he suggests, are really substantial. In this sense, his
work operates a process of revival, a mobilisation of foundational thoughts
and ideas in the audiences that experience his films. Such a revivalist impulse
is consistent with the work Barclay undertook in the monastery, where the
principle in the community was to revive God through contemplation and
community.7 Even acknowledging the transfer of emphasis onto questions of
7. Barclay, körero/personal interview, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington, July 26 2006.

Images of Dignity
culture as opposed to what we might think of as orthodox religious issues, the

catalyst behind the idea of what the image can do in Barclay’s films has to be
seen to have a religious dimension.
Equally, Barclay has acknowledged that he grew up surrounded by sermons,
and it is fitting to see in his own activism aspects of the sermoniser or preacher.8
Barclay’s childhood was spent on farms in the steep open limestone country
of the areas around Martinborough and Masterton in Wairarapa, where his
father was a farm manager, and he was exposed to religion at home and at St.
Joseph’s College in Masterton, a secondary school run by Marist brothers. His
interventions in cultural debates often are made with the force of a preaching
mentality, and though his films usually disguise such moments, especially in
their use of documentary methods, they constitute an important part of his
film-making practice. In chapter three I discuss how Ngati can be read as
operating a process of ventriloquism, by which certain radical ideas about iwi
and community are contained within a narrative that appears to suggest more
conformist opinions. This idea of Barclay as a subtle ventriloquist is useful
more widely in thinking about his work however, and especially so when
considering the religious context of his films. It is a context that is more covert
than overt, but it is undoubtedly present.
It is also the religious impulse in his conception of images that explains
Barclay’s sense of his own films as being poetic. All of his films, especially
Ngati, The Feathers of Peace and The Kaipara Affair, contain evocative and poetic
use of images; but Barclay’s idea of the poetic is wider than that contained
within his manipulation of imagery. It is more a process of the connection
between image and subject matter, an appropriately clear communicative link
made between the picture on the screen and the issue being portrayed. This
is a nebulous and to some degree subjective effect, but for Barclay it is rooted
in an idea of the ordinary and the mundane. As the following chapters show,
Barclay’s film-making is at its most powerful when there is a transparency in
the scene being watched and an unobstructed connection between the screen
moment and the wider issues it depicts. It is here that his films find both the
religious and the poetic in the workings of ordinary lives. Such ideas are
wrapped up in his overall concentration on issues of culture, but they deserve
to be seen as elements in their own right.
In structuring this book I have been mindful of a number of things. The first
is that not all of Barclay’s work is readily available to view. Ngati remains a
popular film, screened at festivals and for key anniversaries in New Zealand’s
film culture, while The Feathers of Peace and The Kaipara Affair have both
been screened on television in New Zealand (though, as I recount in chapter
8. Ibid.

Introduction
four, the showing of the latter film was surrounded by controversy).9 But on
the whole, outside of festivals and archives Barclay’s films remain difficult
to see. As a consequence I have sought to give as much detail as I can of the
narrative of individual films and not to work on the presumption that they are
necessarily well known. Secondly, I feel it is vital to understand Barclay’s films
in terms of the cultural and historical contexts that prevailed at the time of
their making. I have therefore sought to always keep my analysis informed by
the cultural politics that surrounded Barclay as he developed his film-making
techniques. First and foremost, such contexts are local and national – issues
specific to New Zealand. In turn, however, these concerns also belong within
the international frame of the rise of both Indigenous activist politics and
cultural production since the 1970s, and this study uses this frame to further
contextualise Barclay’s film-making.
I have deliberately placed an examination of Barclay’s documentary method,

with a specific focus on the Tangata Whenua series, at the start of the detailed
analysis of his work. Barclay’s film-making has evolved in the complexity
with which he presents issues, but it is still the use of the documentary mode
that is key to understanding the core values of his work, and Tangata Whenua
remains the touchstone for the films he made since the screening of the series
in 1974. Chapter two contains a detailed account of the six episodes and the
way in which they introduced the central methods and themes that resonate
through his film-making. The chapter also considers Barclay’s other, less well-
known, documentaries made in the 1970s, in part to set in relief the techniques
of Tangata Whenua itself, and in part to see how he managed other approaches
to his key concerns of giving individuals and communities space to talk.
Chapter three offers an analysis of Barclay’s 1980s work specifically in
terms of contemporary formations of community. Both his first two features,
The Neglected Miracle and Ngati, posit the communal as the pivotal category of
Indigenous agency, vital in terms of self-representation and activist activity.
To understand Barclay’s films it is necessary to understand what he thinks
community is and how it works. Ngati, in particular, is a film that has communal
values at its core, and I look at it in depth both as an account of how such
beliefs animate a fiction on the screen and how the very process of the film’s
own production became an illustration of the kind of community Barclay
wanted the feature to express. For its part, The Neglected Miracle is a film with
multiple locations across different continents where individual Indigenous
communities battle against the dominant forms of world agribusiness. The
questions of The Neglected Miracle are global in scope, and anticipated the kinds
9. Te Rua has not been screened on mainstream television in New Zealand, but was shown on Mäori
television in 2006.

Images of Dignity
of intellectual formations Barclay produced with regard to Fourth Cinema

over a decade later.
Chapter four analyses Barclay’s last three feature films in order to understand
the way that the end of his career produced a specific engagement with cultural
and political debates within New Zealand. Te Rua, The Feathers of Peace and
The Kaipara Affair all have at their heart a strong sense of the contested ground
that Barclay feels the modern nation has become. They also display how his
concerns have extended from ideas of community self-representation to focus
more specifically on questions of law and governance. All three films are
direct interventions into discussions about, and examinations of, the very
national fabric of New Zealand, seen through the differing optic produced by
Mäori presence and comment. All are also films that point to conflict within
Mäori communities themselves, signalling Barclay’s continued provocative
commitment to a debate on the nature and effectiveness of Mäori public
organisation.
This last point is worth stressing. During his lifetime, Barclay was a major
cultural practitioner in New Zealand and has been recognised as such. In
2004 he was made a national Arts Foundation Laureate, he was given the
New Zealand Order of Merit in 2007, and he has been widely celebrated
within Mäori communities and the institutions that produce films within
New Zealand for his role in bringing those communities to the screen. If he
had wanted, it would have been perfectly possible for him to play the role of
the elder statesman to a national cultural audience. Yet his engagement with
all of his various constituencies was often one of contestation and, frequently,
argument. A tohunga in film, he nevertheless reserved sharp criticism for
some of the methods by which films are made in New Zealand. A figure who
commanded great respect within the Mäori world, he still angered many of
those operating at the levels of iwi leadership and was prepared to intervene
and argue with them. And, of course, in the national community as a whole
he was to some a ‘native radical’, a troublemaker who raised issues that many
feel have been resolved and now belong to the past. Barclay’s films encompass
all these dimensions of his activism and provide, through their own visual
languages, additional forms of commentary and inquiry. The chapters that
follow show Barclay as a high-profile provocateur and a covert storyteller,
and the films he made carry the full sense of New Zealand as a multiple and
complex culture.
10

Chapter One
Indigenous Self-Expression: Outlining Fourth Cinema
Fourth Worlds
A rticulating any sense of a global Indigenous self-expression is an

inherently complicated process, one plagued by the potential pitfalls
and contradictions that accompany any attempt to describe so many different
peoples. The multiple range of cultures, languages, societies, knowledge
systems and cosmologies that make up the worldwide Indigenous presence
seem, in their diversity, to present insurmountable barriers to the notion that
it might be possible to talk of Indigenous peoples as a global collective. Yet,
at the same time, there are strong political and social arguments for the need
to develop an idea of indigeneity that can span geographies and cultures.
Dispossessed by colonisation and the practices of the nation state, and further
threatened by the forces of globalisation in the contemporary era, Indigenous
communities see obvious benefits from acting in unison, especially in
international contexts. When dealing with questions of international law,
or seeking to bring the issues of reparation over land to the widest possible
audiences, collective action is vital. That such action might force very different
cultures into potentially uniform modes of representation is, however, a clear
challenge to those who work to express Indigenous identities, especially in
the arena of minority rights activism where discussion is frequently contested
at every level. Barclay’s desire to promote an idea of Fourth Cinema, a subject
that contains both a politics and methodology of Indigenous film-making, is
in part a cultural equivalent of the various political processes that have seen
Indigenous communities come together to campaign for rights and reparation
over the last three decades in particular. As with the political processes it
parallels, Fourth Cinema carries the opportunities and challenges of thinking
through a global Indigenous presence.
Internationally and in New Zealand, the 1970s was the key decade in which
social activist movements and diplomatic pressure groups were formed with a
11

Images of Dignity
view towards organising coherent strategies for the representation of the rights
of Indigenous peoples. On a global level, 1975 saw the formation of the World
Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), an organisation that sought to define
an international sense of the Fourth World that might work effectively as a
campaigning bloc on a global stage.1 Within the United Nations (UN), the
declaration of a decade against racism in 1973 was followed by the organisation
granting non-governmental organisation (NGO) observer status to a number
of North American and international Indigenous collectives, including the
National Indian Brotherhood in 1974 and the International Indian Treaty
Council in 1975, paving the way for the more structured establishment of
the UN’s Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982. In the United
States, key activist organisations founded in the late 1960s, such as the American
Indian Movement, increased demonstrations and called for injustices to be
heard as the decade progressed; in a similar vein in New Zealand the activist
association Ngä Tamatoa became what Ranginui Walker has termed the ‘public
face’ of ‘rising political consciousness among urban Maori’ in the early 1970s.2
Such consciousness led to an increase in the kind of direct action exemplified
in marches and sit ins and also the increased diplomatic and political lobbying
that resulted in the formation of state bodies to investigate Indigenous claims.
For example, in 1977 an international group of Indigenous peoples disrupted a
UN Sub-Commission hearing to demand discussion of rights, and the period
saw major protests across North America, including the highly symbolic
occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota for 71 days by Oglala Sioux
and supporters.3 In New Zealand 1975 and 1976 saw, respectively, the Mäori
Land March/Te Matakite o Aotearoa to Parliament in Wellington, and the
506-day occupation of land at Bastion Point, Auckland, by Ngäti Whätua in
a protest over land claims. Equally, 1975 also saw the establishment, through
the Treaty of Waitangi Act, of the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand, a body
that allowed, in the words of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, ‘a very concrete focus
for recovering and/or representing Maori versions of colonial history, and for
situating the impact of colonialism in Maori world views and value systems’.4
The globalisation of Indigenous protest in the 1970s, with events like those
outlined above also taking place in Australia, Canada, across South America
and parts of South-East Asia, was in many ways founded upon an idea of the
comprehensive and shared world view such communities adopted.
It is the conception of Fourth World ‘world views and value systems’, to
1. The first General Assembly of the WCIP was held in October 1975 at Port Alberni, British Columbia.
For a discussion of the ways in which the WCIP sought to negotiate the fraught issue of defining a
collective Indigenous identity, see Allen, Blood Narrative, pp. 195–215.
2. Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou/Struggle Without End¸ p. 210.
3. See Allen, Blood Narrative, pp. 121–3.
4. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, p. 168.
12

Indigenous Self-Expression
use Tuhiwai Smith’s words, and an idea of their legitimacy and worth in
a contemporary era dominated by beliefs and practices often antithetical to
Indigenous peoples, that drove a figure like Barclay in the making of his
films. Central to such concerns is the vexed and contested notion of Fourth
World ‘difference’ and the view that the lived experiences of Indigenous
lives encompass social, cultural and individual acts that differ widely from
those of their non-Indigenous counterparts. These differences, the argument
runs, are fundamental and go beyond the fact that Indigenous peoples share a
common history of dispossession in the modern period. Rather they involve
ideas of cosmology, land use, social organisation, family and community, and
of narrative and language, all of which often cannot be approximated outside
of Indigenous contexts. Equally, though Indigenous communities clearly vary
across the globe, central to the theoretical underpinnings of Fourth World
cultural practice is the assertion that a general matrix of the above pertains
to all Indigenous contexts and that this difference can be constructively
quantified as the basis for the discussion of shared experiences.
In Blood Narrative, his comparative analysis of Indigenous writing and
activism in American Indian and Mäori texts, Chadwick Allen proposes that
we think of Indigenous identities within a frame characterised by three terms
– blood, land and memory. For Chadwick the words ‘name primary and
interrelated sites in the struggle over defining indigenous minority identities in
Aotearoa/New Zealand and in the United States; they also name three primary
and interrelated tropes or emblematic figures that contemporary indigenous
minority writers and activists have developed in their works… to counter and,
potentially, to subvert dominant settler discourses’.5 The terms are, I might add,
provocative in the way that they raise issues of history and belonging and their
place in the contemporary world of settler societies. As Allen notes, ‘blood’ in
particular raises ‘disturbing issues of essentialism, racism and genocide’.6 The
three words are markers of Indigenous agency and claim. They act as umbrella
terms for the complexities of social and cultural structures, but also inform
the detail of such issues in specific Indigenous contexts. As such they allow for
discussions of (to give an example) the intersection between cosmology, land
and community in Tühoe country in the Ureweras – the subject of a television
documentary Barclay made in 1987.
But at the same time as Allen’s terms point to the detailed sociology of
Indigenous life, they also, in the manner in which they are controversial,
make it clear that they implicate themselves as part of the ongoing claims
of contemporary Indigenous activism. ‘Blood’ draws attention to the ways
in which Mäori constitute themselves in modern New Zealand through its
5. Allen, Blood Narrative, p. 15.

6. Ibid., p. 15.
13

Images of Dignity
suggestion of the possibilities of filiation, even if that filiation actually involves

an idea of community that is bounded by culture or geography. Equally, ‘land’
immediately recalls not just the processes of dispossession in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, but the political and legal mechanisms though which
Mäori have sought redress on this topic in the last three decades in particular.
For its part, ‘memory’ is a vital term for a cultural practitioner such as Barclay.
It demands we think of how the past is carried in the present, how narratives
and images tell stories, but also how the past may well be seen to be a contested
terrain. The legitimacy and validity of accounts of the ‘historical’ in New
Zealand still point towards the disparities that exist between Indigenous and
settler communities, and Barclay’s work offers continual reminders of how the
contemporary memory of cultural relations in the nation’s past is the site of a
power struggle that inflects those same relations in the present.
Allen’s terminology, and its use when applied to specific events or texts,
allows for a consideration of the vexed and contested idea of Indigenous
difference and the authenticity of Indigenous culture. Within majority New
Zealand culture, there is often a degree of resistance and resentment towards
the articulation of any notion of an authentic Mäori culture. A suspicion exists
that the forms of Mäori culture that are claimed as authentic are actually
constructions, that they designate not a genuine sense of tradition but rather
a re-membering of the past that is a misrepresentation of the contact era and the
period of settlement, and that they always function in the service of a narrative
that claims to be virtuous in the ways in which it operates in the contemporary.
In addition, such arguments run, the privileging of an authentic Mäoridom at
the heart of New Zealand society increasingly fails to do justice to the make-
up of the modern nation, with the presence of other communities from the
Pacific, Asia and beyond complicating a strictly bicultural model. Ultimately,
the suspicion of Indigenous difference sees the processes of modern Mäori
claims as being self-serving in their creation of an essentialist idea of culture
and utilisation of the past.7
Such claims should be seen to belong to the unavoidable present of any
settler society, but they are possibly more marked in New Zealand than other
such societies because of the relatively high percentage of Mäori in the total
population. They are complex debates and can be read in a number of ways.
They speak of the continued fear of illegitimacy that haunts sectors of the
Päkehä majority in New Zealand, but also of a strand of legal and academic
cultural revisionism that has re-examined key periods of contact (in the
nineteenth century in particular) with a view to outlining them in greater
7. For more on the discussion of such issues, see Webster, Patrons of Maori Culture. See also Greg Durkin,
‘Portrayal of Tikanga Maori or Perpetuation of Cultural Myths: The Role of Film’.
14

historical detail.8 Discourses of New Zealand history and culture, whether

official or popular, have always constructed the nation’s Indigenous population
in forms that simplify its presence. The idea that such simplification has been
inherited, unwillingly or otherwise, by certain Mäori activists is a provocative
one that can be articulated with clarity. Equally, the validity of Indigenous
difference has been critiqued from other critical standpoints; many theorists of
the cultural forms of the contemporary era are loath to admit to the possibility
of essential or fixed traditions in cultural narratives, preferring to see them as
continually flexible sites of construction and contested meaning. From such a
viewpoint an idea such as that of Mäoritanga is to be viewed with the utmost
suspicion.
But, as we shall see, such opinions are a misreading of the ways in which
some contemporary Mäori activism, such as that displayed by Barclay’s
films, utilises its understanding of legacy and tradition. There is no doubt
that key values and concepts, such as whänau, iwi, mana, aroha and tüpuna
(among others), underpinned Barclay’s concept of his Mäori identity. They
provided him with a way of articulating his relationship with a past with
which he chooses to connect, and to a present in which he felt compelled to
act as a practitioner of culture. Equally, he never hid his opinion that such
cultural values are of use to contemporary Mäori, and that they can and
should function as a base for Mäori cultural activities. But such beliefs do not
necessitate a conception of Mäori society as being static and inflexible, and
Barclay cannot be categorised as a conservative on such matters. In addition,
any idea that Indigenous societies themselves lack flexibility in the capacity
for change in their organising principles is in itself erroneous. As Tuhiwai
Smith has noted, ‘The idea of contested stories and multiple discourses about
the past, by different communities, is closely linked to the politics of everyday
contemporary indigenous life. It is very much part of the fabric of communities
that value oral ways of knowing’.9
Through his films and his interactions with cultural institutions, Barclay
articulates precisely this sense of contestation. His work often advances radical
forms of cultural arguments that have drawn criticism from Mäori. As we
shall see, a film such as The Feathers of Peace makes a strong intervention in the
debates surrounding contemporary Mäori identity, and does so in ways that
do not make all Mäori feel comfortable. Equally, Barclay had no problems in
being provocative when dealing with majority culture in New Zealand. His
insistence on using the term ‘invader’, as opposed to the more usual ‘settler’,
when discussing Päkehä society is partly derived from his reading of history,
but it was also a calculated act of engagement with the present. If Barclay’s
8. See the discussion of such topics in Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, Maoriland.
15

Images of Dignity
actions made some in New Zealand’s majority culture feel uncomfortable, he

made no apologies for it. What is clear is that his activism is often iconoclastic,
and his idea of what constitutes Mäori identity is as radical in its conception of
the present and future as it can be traditional in its evocation of the past.
The global events of the 1970s and the forms of Indigenous difference
they helped shape formed part of the backdrop to the development of
Barclay’s developing career as a documentary film-maker. They are vital to
a consideration of all of his work because the combination of national and
international perspectives that marked Indigenous activism in the 1970s,
and the sense of cultural distinctiveness they contained, can be seen to be
a precursor to the kind of methodology Barclay developed in outlining
Fourth Cinema some 30 years later. The kind of community-based film-
making practice, and especially the ideas of reciprocity, which characterised
the filming of the Tangata Whenua series and became integral to Barclay’s
developing idea of documentary during the 1970s partly have their origins
in the social movements, such as Ngä Tamatoa, that he was associated with
at the time. Barclay has described his involvement with Ngä Tamatoa as a
‘grounding on many levels’ in his thinking through of his relationship with
Mäori culture.10 Writing in 1992 he noted: ‘Through Nga Tamatoa, I was
shaken out of a smug view of the Maori situation… The subtext of the Tangata
Whenua series is straight from Nga Tamatoa… The message is, of course,
that people must have cultural sovereignty at every level’.11 For Barclay, there
is no break between the issues of such sovereignty conceived of at a level of
cultural politics and the demands that come with film-making in the Mäori
community. His status as a member of an Indigenous community reminds
him at all times that such concerns are seamless, that to seek to represent
Indigenous presence is to necessarily engage with the place such communities
occupy in the world at a number of interconnected levels.
For many Indigenous activists attempting to work on a global scale in
the 1970s and 1980s, the processes of establishing a collective voice created
difficulties, and a number of initiatives (such as the WCIP and Working Group
on Indigenous Populations) have struggled because of the challenges posed
by trying to incorporate a multitude of viewpoints into a single expression.
Barclay is well aware of such dangers, yet his idea of a Fourth World aesthetic
is grounded in the idea that there is a shared experience of being Indigenous
in the contemporary world. Indigenous cultures ‘are outside the national
outlook by definition’ he wrote in 200312, and it is precisely this idea of an
outside or parallel logic to any modern national orthodoxy that can unite
10. Barclay, email to author, 24 June 2004.

11. Barclay, ‘Amongst Landscapes’, in Dennis and Bieringa (eds.) Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, pp. 123–24.
12. Barclay, ‘Celebrating Fourth Cinema’, p. 9.
16

different cultures, because of a shared sense of exclusion, of what Barclay

has termed ‘a profound sorrow, a profound hurt’ that is the consequence of a
history of dispossession.13 Equally, the need to record such feelings, to reclaim
their meaning in terms of the communities where they are produced, is also
a potentially global shared sensation. For the Indigenous documentary film-
maker especially, the sovereignty of the community and the requirement of a
method of portraying that community with respect become one and the same,
and it is for these reasons that we can see the key affinities that link Barclay’s
work not only to other New Zealand film-makers such as Merata Mita, but
also to documentary makers such as Abenaki Canadian Alanis Obomsawin
and Metis Canadian Marjorie Beaucage.
A key moment in Barclay’s outlining of Fourth Cinema came in a talk,
entitled ‘Celebrating Fourth Cinema’, given to the Centre for Film, TV and
Media Studies at the University of Auckland in September 2002. The lecture,
later published in the journal Illusions, is a typically direct and yet intelligently
oblique rumination on what the term and category might mean. On one
level, Fourth Cinema is for Barclay, straightforwardly, the production of films
by Indigenous film-makers, and in discussing the canon of the category he
lists titles made by, among others: Tracey Moffat, Nils Gaup, Chris Eyre,
Zacharias Kunuk, Merata Mita and Lee Tamahori.14 At the same time, Barclay
wants to avoid an over-deterministic sense of origins in putting forward such
an idea of cultural practice. While he writes that there is a ‘temptation to
analyze Fourth Cinema’ in terms of ‘surface features: the rituals, the language,
the posturing, the décor, the use of elders, the presence of children, attitudes
to land, the rituals of a spirit world’, he also notes that ‘in Fourth Cinema, at
its best, something else is being asserted which is not easy to access’.15 This
‘something else’ is, fundamentally, what Barclay thinks of as a ‘reworking’
of the ‘ancient core values’ of Indigenous cultures. In New Zealand, Barclay
asserts, such values might include whanaungatanga, manaakitanga and
wairua, and by implication he imagines culturally specific values operating
in a similar vein in other Indigenous societies worldwide. What is key here
(and was what central to Barclay’s objections to Whale Rider) is the proposal
that Fourth Cinema is informed at a conceptual level by the guiding principles
of Indigenous cultures, and does not only present spectacles of Indigenous
presence – productions dominated by the ‘surface features’ that Indigenous
cultures can provide.
In making such an assertion, Barclay implicitly recognised the damage
13. Barclay, Mana Tuturu, p. 149.
14. Barclay ‘Celebrating Fourth Cinema’, p. 7. The list deals with what Barclay terms ‘dramatic feature films’
(thus excluding documentary) but even so, it is not complete. Arrernte/Kalkadoon filmmaker Rachel
Perkins’ two features Radiance (1998) and One Night The Moon (2001) are not listed, for example.
17

Images of Dignity
done to Indigenous societies worldwide by the ethnographic impulse in

documentary film and photography and the legacy provided by such film-
making. Such images fixed their subjects as being little more than the product
of their various surfaces. By way of contrast, Barclay asserts in ‘Celebrating
Fourth Cinema’, there is within the depth of Indigenous cultural, and
especially narrative, formations the material that can inspire more faithful
representations. As he puts it in thinking through his own New Zealand
context: ‘My very strong hunch is… that if we as Maori look closely enough
and through the right pair of spectacles, we will find examples at every turn
of how the old principles have been reworked to give vitality and richness to
the way we conceive, develop, manufacture and present our films.’16
Barclay was well aware of the implications of such reasoning. His sense of
Fourth Cinema disavows any idea of multiple readings of films based around
a sense of some inherently flexible or playful notion of narrative. In effect, the
logic continues, to understand Fourth Cinema you need to understand the
cultures from which it comes, and that it is aimed at these cultures first and
foremost in terms of its audience. It is impossible to engage with the films only
at the level of the image, or through critical readings that seek to approximate
the filmic content by way of analogy to non-Indigenous narratives. In this
way, for example, those viewers who see in the rich colours and rural setting
of Ngati a film that is only nostalgic or pastoral miss its complex layering of
community politics, and the ways in which the historical base of the film
interacts with the contemporary issues prevalent at the time of its making.
Equally, Barclay does not consider any film directed by an Indigenous film-
maker as being part of the canon of Fourth Cinema. As he says: ‘It seems likely
to me that some Indigenous film artists will be interested in shaping films that
sit confidently within the First, Second and Third Cinema Framework’, and
we might think of Lee Tamahori’s career following his directing of Once Were
Warriors (1994) in such a light.17 Fourth Cinema is, then, a point of address,
an attitude towards film in its totality – production, screening, distribution,
use – that constitutes the use of the camera by Indigenous film-makers on
their own terms.
As such, Barclay’s idea of Indigenous film-making constitutes an
intervention into the debates of cultural authenticity and commodification
that surround the contemporary presence of Indigenous peoples in a
globalised world. In her study of Indigenous responses to modern global
formations, Makere Stewart-Harawira has noted that ‘indigenous people
are invisible’ in nearly all Western analyses of the formation of the current
16. Ibid., p. 11.

17. Since the release of Once Were Warriors, Tamahori has made a number of Hollywood features,
including The Edge (1997), Die Another Day (2002) and xXx: State of the Union (2005).
18

world order.18 Rather, she goes on to assert, ‘indigenous cultures and

identities are being increasingly threatened by the commodification of
indigenous culture that is occurring at multiple levels’ as a consequence
of globalisation.19 Working in a medium as institutionally international as
film, Barclay recognises the pressures on any film-maker to conform to
the idea of narratives that offer themselves for the widest possible public
consumption; indeed, the commercial drive of any even moderately-sized
film industry should be taken as its given baseline. The tendency such a
system possesses to commodify its images is obvious, and the consequent
evacuation of cultural specificity is exactly the threat a film-maker such as
Barclay sees in the packaging of Indigenous images for a global audience
which, for obvious reasons, has no real knowledge of the specific culture
being represented. The threat of appropriation here is obvious, and clearly
anathema to a film-maker whose concept of film as hui includes the crucial
sense of ‘modesty’ when filming in Indigenous communities.20
Barclay’s stress on the detailed understanding of community traditions and
protocols as a base for Fourth Cinema is at odds not only with the threat of
the commodified image that haunts all representations of Indigenous peoples,
it is also removed from the increased corporatisation that has come to define
Indigenous communities, including those in New Zealand, in the last 20
years. As Stewart-Harawira notes:
Indigenous peoples’ demands for juridical recognition of indigenous customary
rights and sovereignty over their lands and resources have given rise to new or
renegotiated treaties between states and indigenous nations and a redefining
of the parameters of relationships between states and indigenous peoples. In
other cases, pre-existing treaties are acknowledged (although not without
protracted struggle and contention) through negotiated settlements involving
land, resources and financial compensation.21
It is in the business of financial settlements for outstanding claims that the

corporate nature of some modern Indigenous identities becomes clear.
What Stewart-Harawira calls ‘the co-optation of tribal elites’22 in the
commodification of treaty claims has created within Mäori societies (to
cite the specific New Zealand context) a sense of the financial packaging of
cultures and communities. Working with ideas of mana motuhake defined
through an appreciation of the living knowledge he finds in Mäori culture,
Barclay found little to celebrate in these new definitions of Mäori identity. As
18. Stewart-Harawira, The New Imperial Order, p. 16.
19. Ibid., p. 18.
20. See Barclay, Our Own Image, p. 18.
21. Stewart-Harawira, The New Imperial Order, p. 178.
22. Ibid,. On pp. 196–98 Stewart-Harawira offers an analysis of the 1999 Ngäi Tahu Settlement Act in
precisely these terms.
19

Images of Dignity
we shall see, Te Rua is, in part a commentary on the tensions between ideas
of corporate and traditional culture and the potential for friction it creates
within Mäori communal identities.
One result of such tensions is that, for all of his acknowledged status as a
tohunga in film and one of the key figures who has presented Mäori through
the moving image, it would be a mistake to see Barclay as someone who ever
exemplified or represented a unified sense of Mäori collective cultural practice.
His arguments were often within the Mäori community as well as without,
and from his 1970s work to The Kaipara Affair there is a continuing critique of
a number of aspects of Mäori society. Frequently the targets of his disapproval
here are those figures in positions of power who exercise authority without
consultation with the communities they represent. In Barclay’s working
scheme of an essential reciprocity, this is the ultimate sin. A contested place
within the Mäori world, however, in no way disqualifies Barclay’s articulations
concerning Fourth Cinema. It is precisely an argument for cultural complexity
and depth that characterises his arguments in this arena, arguments that seek
to overturn ideas of Indigenous cultures as being static and uniform. In such a
context, contestation – arguments and debate – is simply part of the fabric of
daily life and itself a product of social sophistication.
For many in the Indigenous world this necessity to stress the real complexity
of society and culture, in the face of majority viewpoints that only see
simplicity, is a daily routine. This is a process that is political at heart, and
one that in the contemporary era spans a range of activity from the local to
the global. For Barclay, the medium through which he can best express his
personal version of such activism is image making. It is through images, and
the stories that they tell and allow, that he finds access to the peoples he wishes
to represent, and it is in the concept of ‘our own image’ that his particular
expression of Fourth World agency finds its specific form.

Fourth Images
Steven Leuthold starts Indigenous Aesthetics, his 1998 study of Indigenous art
forms and identity politics in Native American media, with the assertion that
‘Aesthetic expression and assumptions about the aesthetic help keep native
communities together’. ‘Aesthetic behavior’, he notes, ‘is a set of social practices
in the same way that political, economic, or judicial systems are sets of social
practices’, and although his concentration is on such issues in the United States,
there are many points of contact between his observations and equivalent
practices in Mäori societies. 23 Like Allen’s notion of ‘occasions’ in the study of
23. Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics, p. 1 and p. 6.
20

Indigenous culture, Leuthold’s advocacy of a ‘systems’ approach to the study

of aesthetics in Indigenous contexts enables the consideration of connections
between the art forms produced by Indigenous cultural practitioners and the
aesthetics that exist in the community in what might be thought to be ‘non-
artistic’ practices. When, for example, he asserts that ‘Aesthetic systems might
encompass aspects of daily life, from habits of greeting to food preparation,
the communal organization of space, and religious rituals that are much
broader than the term “art” is usually thought to encompass’, he suggests
parameters and details that offer explicit parallels with the ways in which
Barclay’s filmic aesthetic interacts with the aesthetic systems at the heart of
iwi life.24 As we shall see in the discussion of Barclay’s documentary method
in the next chapter, the aesthetic base for much of his work is drawn directly
from communal practices, and it is vital to understand that this inspiration
constitutes a grounding in the daily events of Mäori social and cultural life.
The importance of such a base needs to be stressed. As Leuthold notes,
terms like ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’ can seem to be ‘imposed on native expression’,
since their status within a European-derived tradition can appear at times
overwhelming.25 Yet the workings of Indigenous cultures produce concepts of
aesthetics and art that challenge Eurocentric formations of the terms. Barclay’s
films, with their continual stress on issues of community, offer alternatives to
both the autonomist and commercial aesthetics that dominate much global
film production. The films come from the communities they depict, even as
they might be overlaid with political argument or fictional dramatisation. At
its best, Barclay’s work produces an aesthetic that connects the image to the
ethics of Mäori communal life, and unites the processes of image making
with the aesthetics that already exist in practices found on the marae. It is
in such unity that his films produce the kind of aesthetic that is unique to
contemporary Fourth Cinema.
There is another context for Barclay’s discussion of a global Indigenous
film-making practice that requires exploration. In deliberately choosing the
term Fourth Cinema for his categorisation of an emerging body of work made
by Indigenous film-makers, he necessarily engaged with the contentious
model of Third Cinema that developed from the late 1960s onwards into
the 1980s. In its earliest formulations, Third Cinema was associated with the
cinema of Latin America and practitioners such Argentina’s Fernando Solanas
and Octavio Getino, before spreading to encompass cinema in Africa and, to
a lesser degree, Asia. Film-makers such as Ousmane Sembene from Senegal
and Nelson Pereira dos Santos in Brazil came to be especially associated
with its ideas and methods. Although some of its theorists strongly resisted
24. Ibid., p. 9.
25. Ibid., p. 9.
21

Images of Dignity
the association between Third Cinema and film production from the Third
World, seeking to point to a general sense of a situated historicism as its major
effects, for others it was precisely the idea of resistance and struggle implied
in such a link that made the cinema distinctive. Teshome H. Gabriel, the
author of the 1982 volume Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics
of Liberation and the 1985 article ‘Towards a critical theory of Third World
films’, explicitly utilised the canonically postcolonial theories of Algerian
psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in his assessment of the work Third Cinema can
undertake. For Gabriel, Fanon – ‘this ardent proponent of liberation’ as he
calls him 26 – provides a model for Third Cinema practice with his ‘phased’
model of resistance to colonial rule, in which cultural practitioners move from
a phase of assimilating the methods and values of colonial logic to a fighting
phase (Gabriel calls it ‘combative’), in which an artist seeks a cultural form
that, in its maturity, truly expresses the struggle of the people in a search
towards self-determination. As Gabriel says: ‘A Phase III [combative] film-
maker is one who is perceptive of and knowledgeable about the pulse of the
Third World masses. Such a film-maker is truly in search of a Third World
cinema – a cinema that has respect for Third World peoples…. The industry
in this phase is not only owned by the nation and/or the government, it is
also managed, operated and run for and by the people. It can also be called a
cinema of mass participation’.27
With the benefit of hindsight, Gabriel’s theorisation seems both prescriptive
and utopian, and it is difficult to see exactly how a methodology of film-
making could be extracted from such an approach that could help explain
Barclay’s own practice. In a similar way, even those film theorists – such as
Paul Willemen – who saw Gabriel’s work as problematic in its search for a
unifying aesthetic of Third Cinema production, were nevertheless themselves
stressing specific ideological underpinnings that spoke of political battles
germane to the 1960s and 1970s. ‘It is’, says Willemen of Latin American
Third Cinema, ‘a cinema made by intellectuals who, for political and artistic
reasons at one and the same time, assume their responsibilities as socialist
intellectuals and seek to achieve through their work the production of social
intelligibility’.28 By the time Barclay came to conceive of the global nature of
Indigenous film in the early twenty-first century, the place of the ‘socialist
intellectual’ carried far less weight than it did some thirty years earlier, and
the response to globalisation inherent in the kind of contemporary Indigenous
sociology practised by Tuhiwai Smith and Stewart-Harawira draws more on
26. Gabriel, ‘Towards a critical theory of Third World films’, in Pines and Willeman (eds.) Questions of
Third Cinema, p. 31.
27. Ibid., p. 34 and p. 33.
28. Willemen, ‘The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections’, in Pines and Willeman (eds.)
Questions of Third Cinema, p. 27.
22

ideas of culture than on the political frame of Marxism. Viewed through this
frame, Third Cinema, with its stress on the importance of socialist politics, its
emphasis on the place of nationalism, and its particular articulation of 1970s
cultural theory, seems to belong to a different historical period, one associated
with the end of political decolonisation and the rise of resistance to newly
independent neocolonial regimes.
And yet, at the same time, there are numerous traces of ideas surrounding
Third Cinema that can be seen to link directly to Barclay’s attempts to
conceive of an inclusive category for Indigenous film-making. In one of the
early manifestos of Third Cinema’s methods and ideals Solanas noted: ‘Third
Cinema gives an account of reality and history… Third Cinema is an open
category, unfinished, incomplete. It is a research category’,29 and this sense
of an ongoing commitment to the historical detail of filming a community
with legitimacy allows for a sense of continuity between the work of Brazilian
film-makers in the 1960s and Indigenous practitioners decades later. Equally,
the various manifestos of Third Cinema on the whole refrained from seeing
the movement as one that contained a singular set of aesthetics, preferring to
see a diversity of forms emerging from and conditioned by the specifics of
differing historical conditions. In a similar way, Barclay’s inclusion of film-
makers as diverse as Merata Mita, Tracey Moffat and Sherman Alexie in the
Fourth Cinema canon mirrors this sense of an essential variety of practice.
As he realised, with such differences existing between global Indigenous
communities, any proposed blueprint outlining the form of Fourth Cinema
runs the risk of simplification and misrepresentation.
There are also issues relating to the potential techniques used in Indigenous
film-making, and in the reception and audience make-up of the films, which
suggest continuities between Third and Fourth Cinema. In drawing up
comparisons of what he terms ‘Filmic Conventions’ between Western and
non-Western cinemas, Gabriel points to differences in the use of lighting,
camera angle, placement and movement, set design and acting, amongst others,
as technical markers of an ideological disparity between the two systems.
In discussing camera placement in Western cinema for example, he notes:
‘Distance varies according to the emotional content of the scene. Emotion,
e.g. anger, is portrayed in close-up’. By way of contrast, non-Western cinema’s
camera placements, Gabriel asserts, involve ‘minimal use of the convention
of close-up shots’. Likewise, Western cinema utilises studio locations, often
working to ‘enhance fictional reality’ whereas location shooting is more
common in non-Western film-making, a fact that consequently ‘enhances
documentary reality’.30
29. Solanas, quoted in Willemen, ‘The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections’, p. 9.
30. Gabriel, ‘Towards a critical theory of Third World films’, pp. 46–7.
23

Images of Dignity
While it is easy to accuse Gabriel of over-generalisation in the construction

of his typographies, it is nevertheless instructive to view Barclay’s own
comments about his early film-making practice within the frame laid out
above. Writing in Our Own Image in 1990, and describing his documentary
making in the 1970s (in such productions as the Tangata Whenua series and
Aku Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of Mäori Weaving), Barclay asserts:
Perhaps the challenge is to seek out techniques that can put people back on
the screen. I believe one of the first steps is to get rid of the camera… On my
documentaries we have used the long zoom a great deal, and more recently we
have turned to the 300mm and 600mm lenses, which can put the camera 15 to
50 metres from the subject. We have organised simple, inexpensive sound rigs
so that the cameraman, director and, when needed, a translator can hear the
conversation from a distance... The crew is invisible and people are left free to
chat.31
Such a non-intrusive approach to filming in the community has been a

consistent feature of Barclay’s practice over the last three decades. The
consistency between this method and the scheme laid out by Gabriel is best
thought of in terms of a respect for those being filmed and the narratives
that result from this, particularly in documentary. In such settings, the over-
intrusive camera is a reminder of an ethnographic cinema that takes images but
gives nothing back in return. As a consequence, Indigenous documentary is
extremely wary of any invasive filming techniques. Asked about the technical
issues that frame the way she makes her documentaries, Alanis Obomsawin’s
immediate reply was ‘No close-ups’.32
It is also possible to find in Gabriel’s observations on the reception of Third
Cinema films parallels with the idea of audience for his work that Barclay has
constructed since the 1980s. As Gabriel notes:
The Western experience of film viewing – dominance of the big screen and
the sitting situation – has naturalised a spectator conditioning so that any
communication of a film plays on such values of exhibition and reception. The
Third World experience of film viewing and exhibition suggests an altogether
different route and different value system… How the system of perceptual
patterns and viewing situation varies with conditions of reception from one
culture to another, or how the changes in the rules of the grammar affect
spectator viewing habits, is part of a larger question which solidifies and confirms
the issue of cultural relativism and identity.33
Barclay’s stress on the reciprocity of the film-making process meant that,

from Tangata Whenua onwards, he had particular concerns surrounding the
31. Barclay, Our Own Image, pp. 15–6.

32. Obomsawin, personal interview, 24 April 2006.
33. Gabriel, ‘Towards a critical theory of Third World films’, p. 39.
24

exhibition and distribution of his films. Because the images within the films
are, as he sees it, given to the film-maker, it is appropriate that any initial
screening is for those who have contributed to the making of the final film.
Thus the first screening of Ngati was held in 1987 as a special event for Ngäti
Porou at Iritekura marae in Waipiro Bay, one of the locations where the film
was shot. Similarly, for Barclay the most important audience for The Kaipara
Affair was the community at Tinopai, which had been the centre of the fishing
rights dispute that forms the core narrative of the film. In both cases, the idea
of reception is one that is fundamentally different from a commercial film
system that seeks to gather maximum publicity, and early profit, from any
premiere and opening period following a film’s release. As Kirsty Bennett
has said of the films that constitute the Fourth Cinema canon, ‘they crucially
speak to the people they represent’.34
Indeed, as his career progressed, Barclay extended his ideas about the
screening and audience for his films to a point that challenged the very structure
of what we might think of as orthodox film reception. The international
success of Ngati led to a high profile critical reception at the Cannes Film
Festival, but within months of this Barclay was arranging screenings of the
film for small Indigenous audiences in the Hawai’ian islands of Oahu, Kauai
and Maui. The discrepancy between the settings and the very different nature
of the audiences caused him to examine what the film itself might be for.35
Increasingly Barclay came to promote the idea that the finished film is most
valuable when seen as a resource, an educational product that can help people.
Such a belief has replaced the traditional commercial dynamic as the kind
of outcome Barclay desires for his films. The fact that The Kaipara Affair can
provide a model to communities that, like Tinopai, are engaged in complex
disputes over rights and resources, that it can become a guiding text, is exactly
the sort of use he wishes his films to have.
Thus the differences between Third and Fourth Cinema might not be as
stark as they first appear. That much said, it is important to register the ways in
which Indigenous film-making does depart from the earlier movement. When,
at a British Film Institute conference on African cinema in 1996, film-maker
John Akomfrah announced that Third Cinema was dead, he was reflecting
an idea that a certain kind of political cinema, one aligned with a socialist,
decolonising impulse, no longer pertained. In itself, this is perhaps debatable,
and scholarship has continued to attempt to keep the category as a meaningful
mode of explanation for some cinema practice. In his 2001 study Political
Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, for example, Mike Wayne argues for the
relevance of the term, noting that it articulates ‘a body of theory and film-
34. Bennett, ‘Fourth Cinema and the Politics of Staring’, p. 23.

35. Barclay, personal interview, October 2005.
25

Images of Dignity
making practice committed to social and cultural emancipation’.36 This is a

broad statement, and one that can easily be applied to Barclay’s films. But, as
Wayne’s subtitle implies, his is a critique still heavily rooted in terms derived
from cultural Marxism. Fanon still features as an animating intellectual for
Wayne’s thesis (the book has an epigraph from The Wretched of the Earth), and the
heavy use of the dialectic throughout the study creates a focus on class, radical
change and the masses that, while definitely emancipatory in its approach,
often fails to observe the kind of specific detail vital to an understanding of the
concerns of contemporary Indigenous communities. As Tuhiwai Smith has
noted, Indigenous activism in the 1960s and 1970s was driven by ‘a sense of
outrage and injustice about the failure of education, democracy and research to
deliver social change for people who were oppressed’, and in such a statement
we can see a clear parallel with Marxist politics. At the same time, however, she
observes that there was often a clear differentiation between Indigenous and
Marxist positions.37 Marxism, with its roots in the specifics of European history,
retained an ‘evolutionary and teleological’ approach to an idea of progress that
did not and does not map onto much Indigenous theorising.38
Third Cinema remains then an idea of film-making practice that has
strong associations with Marxist cultural theory, yet the differences we can
see between its methods and those of Fourth Cinema are not only to be found
in the shades of the categories’ politics. More fundamental is an idea of the
world view expressed in Indigenous film-making. In asserting the validity
of such concepts as hui, tikanga, mana tüturu and taonga in the discussion
of film, and in seeing other Indigenous cultures as working with their own
specific versions of such ideas, Barclay is clearly grounding his cinema within
the terms of lived Mäori experience as he knows it. These are not values, he
would assert, that necessarily have meaning outside of Indigenous communities
(although they can), and they are values that change many of the assumptions
as to how cinema might function at the level of community and nation and
more broadly in the global sphere.
As an example, at its heart Mana Tuturu is concerned with the workings of
law and the vexed question of ‘property’. It is precisely a conception of how
an idea of property might be constituted, how ownership and responsibility
might be articulated, that animates Barclay’s argument in the book. These
concerns might seem to surpass issues relating to film-making, and on one
level that is the case, but Barclay arrived at his consideration of them through
his career of making and thinking about images of Mäori. Inherent in such a
36. Wayne, Political Film, p. 5. See also the essays collected in Guneratne and Dissanayake (eds), Rethinking
Third Cinema, especially that by Robert Stam.
38. Ibid., p. 55.
26

process is obviously a necessary knowledge of a history of representation and

a desire to tell contemporary stories; but it also involves complex issues raised
by the conjunction of image culture and cultural practice.
Barclay’s idea of ‘archiving-in-the-present’, first mentioned in Our Own
Image and developed in Mana Tuturu, is a response to the challenges of holding
images of Mäori responsibly, and of respecting the presence of individuals on
film and the legacy those images automatically create simply through their
existence.39 To grasp this fully is to understand that the business of recording
images of Indigenous peoples is not a neutral process. As he has documented
when outlining the making of the 1987 documentary Te Urewera among the
Tühoe, Barclay thought it vital to invite trained Mäori technicians onto the
crew, to seek Tühoe approval for the filming and (crucially) to assert that
the images made will be returned to the community following the editing
process. Describing this last aspect of the programme in Our Own Image,
Barclay wrote: ‘Handing those tapes across one by one to each elder became
some of the most special moments I have ever had in film-making. Part of
it was knowing that I was keeping the trust… and part of it was seeing the
pride in those old people’s eyes… [T]hey were holding their own image in
their own hands’.40 The idea of reciprocity contained within such a process
is more than a simple idea of a return. It embodies notions of guardianship,
ownership, rights and retention, all terms that have status with Western/New
Zealand law but terms that, conceived through a Mäori frame of reference,
encompass differing meanings. It is these meanings that constitute tikanga, a
customary law that Barclay believes should have greater legal status within the
nation state. Increasingly Barclay’s work moved towards a consideration of the
legal status of Indigenous practices. As well being the subject matter for Mana
Tuturu, it is also at the heart of The Kaipara Affair.
After finishing Mana Tuturu, Barclay developed the idea of rangiwhakaoma,
a process by which, through appropriate training in the use of technology, iwi
can practice a very real archiving-in-the-present and establish a living resource
for future members of the community. The plan, to record and archive daily
iwi life and key figures with cameras and facilities controlled from within
iwi, and then to make this into a digital resource with controlled access, is
potentially as democratic a form of local film-making as can be imagined. In
the initial workshops for the project, run in the Wairarapa in October 2006,
Barclay aimed to get the participants ‘used to thinking as crew handling tribal
treasures, rather than hero directors getting material for a story’.41 This kind
of work is Fourth Cinema in action as Barclay conceived it.

40. Ibid., p. 93.
41. Barclay, email to author, 11 October 2006.
27

Images of Dignity
What needs to be understood is that these kinds of conception of film offer

the same kind of irruptive force within orthodox cinema that, on a wider scale,
an Indigenous presence presents to any national community. In his current
practice, Barclay offers an idea of cinema that bears little resemblance to the
commercial industry that dominates the public realm of film production,
distribution and use. Indeed, his evolving sense of cinema is set directly
against such processes, as he sees the pressures of commerce invariably leading
to misrepresentation. It is his sense of such misrepresentation of Indigenous
narratives that has prompted such criticism of features such as Whale Rider and
Crooked Earth, fearing that one consequence of his own success with Ngati in
the 1980s has been the licensing of Indigenous narratives as ‘story material’ for
a wider commercial cinema that lacks an appropriate knowledge of the issues
such films raise. The irony here is that the establishment of a viable Indigenous
cinema that overturned the prejudices of earlier ethnographic film-making
has been succeeded by contemporary images of Indigenous peoples that are
in danger of again enacting damaging representations of their subjects. The
struggle to ensure that this did not remain the case was central to Barclay’s
work in film throughout his career.
Conclusion
For Barclay, the move to consider an idea of Fourth Cinema came as an organic
development of the work he has done with Mäori and other communities
since the 1970s. As his films became successful in the 1980s and 1990s he
found himself travelling to other Indigenous cultures (especially in Canada and
Hawai’i) where he had the opportunity to contextualise his own knowledge
derived from within New Zealand and compare film-making approaches
and methods. The parallels he found in the experiences of Indigenous film-
makers and activists lent evidence for his idea of a cinema that shares common
concerns. All Indigenous film-makers have to negotiate the difficult boundary
between achieving a fidelity to the culture being represented and the demands
of funding authorities and majority audiences; all have to work in an industry
where the participation of Indigenous peoples is still a rarity; many feel the
need to adapt the orthodox practices of fiction or documentary film-making
in order to properly express their stories; and all produce films knowing
that their work constitutes a challenge to the numerous examples of films
that presented racist stereotypes of ‘the Indian’ or ‘the native’, films that still
represent a strong idea of what Indigenous culture is for many consumers in
the global public sphere.
In many ways Barclay’s attempts to describe Fourth Cinema carried the
same challenges faced by those political practitioners advocating a worldwide
28

Indigenous presence in the 1970s. The tensions between the local and global
are still real and immediate, and the methods by which he sought to practice
Fourth Cinema offered a dramatic revision of an institutional system – in this
case film production – that already had what is to many a clear international
and commercial logic. But Barclay’s sense of the unifying aspects of Indigenous
film-making was not one that sprang from a desired or gestural wish for some
loose and uninformed commonality. Rather it derived from his own film-
making experiences as a figure at the forefront of Indigenous film production
in New Zealand. Barclay arrived at the point whereby he could begin to
theorise Fourth Cinema after years as a seasoned practitioner able to reflect
upon his own methods, and it is in a consideration of those methods and
achievements that we can appreciate how his films exemplify the core values
such cinema seeks to express.
29

Chapter 2
Tangata Whenua and Documentary
Indigenous Documentary
B arclay’s career as a film-maker spanned a variety of genres. The Tangata

Whenua series and the features The Neglected Miracle and The Kaipara Affair
are documentaries with especial emphases on ideas of community. Ngati and
Te Rua are identifiably fiction features, while a film such as The Feathers of
Peace, and some of Barclay’s 1970s work (such as the short television films
Ashes and Autumn Fires) blur the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction in
their methods. Part of Barclay’s political commitment to the representation of
Indigenous communities involved a knowing narrative flexibility, particularly
in the depiction of history, and the inventiveness his work displays in such cases
provides provocative questions as to how visual narratives illustrate cultural
relations and the past. At the same time however, it is the documentary format
that acts as the base of Barclay’s films, especially as it orients their portrayal
of communal complexities. His ideas of an inclusive mode of film-making, a
method that involves listening to the voices of all the people involved in any
given story, come in part from his documentary training, in that it provided
the formal context for the idea of talking to a community. Such inclusiveness is
also, however, a reflection of what he felt to be an appropriate ethical approach
towards the subjects of his films, a desire to be a faithful and just recorder of
lives and narratives. Even a clear fiction film such as Ngati is overlaid with
concerns that stem from a documentary and communal impulse.
Barclay’s initial training in film came from working on short documentaries.
After leaving the monastery in the mid 1960s he returned to New Zealand,
working firstly in radio and then for Visicom films, a small independent
company based in Masterton making trade films. Reflecting on this early
work, he noted:
In New Zealand at that time, Visicom Films was a rare beast indeed: an
independent film production house making education [sic], promotional, tourist
31

Images of Dignity
and public service films from 10 to 50 minutes duration, shot on 16mm colour
using a mute hand-wound Bolex, with music and commentary overlaid in the
edit…. As sole camera and lighting man, I got to shoot a big range of set-ups
– landscape, table-top, aerials, small studio scenes, action coverage. I was privy
to producer, writer, director, and editor decision-making processes as well, and
this education later proved invaluable. Visicom storytelling was direct and clear,
and there was always a client with expectations and a target audience to win
over.1
In 1969, Visicom Films folded, and Barclay joined Pacific Films (which bought
part of the business) and became, in his own terms, a ‘jobbing director’ of
television commercials and short documentaries.2 At the end of the 1960s
Pacific Films, under the guidance of John O’Shea, was the pre-eminent
production company in New Zealand and the training ground for a number
of film-makers, such as Barclay and Gaylene Preston, who would come to
have a high profile in the national film industry in the next two decades. As
with a number of other English speaking countries, New Zealand’s tradition
of documentary making was shaped by the legacy of John Grierson, the British
film-maker who visited New Zealand in 1940 and advised the government
on the development of film culture. The Griersonian method worked, in
the words of Bill Nichols, ‘to stress the role of the documentary film-maker
as orator’, with films ‘designed to enter into the arena of social policy and
to orient or predispose public opinion to preferred solutions’, usually those
associated with the central organs of the state.3 Such a philosophy had a clear
fit with the post-1945 desire within New Zealand to properly delineate an
idea of national community. Grierson’s stress on the contemporary issues
of nation and community, as opposed to the more romantic and mythic
traditions developed by other documentary makers in the first half of the
twentieth century, matched the focus on nation-building that characterised
New Zealand both politically and culturally in the 1950s and 1960s. During
these decades Pacific Films (and O’Shea’s own career) was marked by the
making of significant number of documentaries that displayed New Zealand
communities, especially rural communities, at work, or informational films
that detailed issues such as road safety.4
Barclay’s work is more interested in challenging any national consensus
than reinforcing it of course, but there is still a clear line of continuity that can
1. Barclay, email to author, 24 January 2008.

2. Ibid. Also in this communication, Barclay noted that ‘What I then considered to be my first real break
into the world I most wanted to work in came with The Town That Lost a Miracle’, the film he made
for Pacific Films in 1972.
3. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, p. 146.
4. See Laurence Simmons, ‘John O’Shea: A Poetics of Documentary’, in Conrich and Murray (eds.) New
Zealand Filmmakers, pp. 54–71.
32

be traced between Grierson’s emphasis on the communal and the kind of films
Barclay would come to produce.5 This stress is also true of the early careers of
film-makers such as Merata Mita and Gaylene Preston, both of whom worked
with the inheritance of such a documentary tradition, although both (as with
Barclay) produced films that depicted agitation for change, often in the face
of government policy. All three figures find the notion of community vital,
and it is best to see this as a focus that has a particularly contentious, but
nevertheless strong, relationship with the wider idea of national community
that has marked New Zealand so strongly. The Griersonian tradition of film-
making has been the subject of much criticism, with its methods and legacy
seen to be ultimately conservative, but in his advocation of a non-commercial
cinema and his belief that a film is necessarily something that has to be used
(especially in terms of education), Grierson laid down a template that we
can see at work in a number of Barclay’s films right up to The Kaipara Affair.
Pacific Films, with its tradition of social documentary film-making shaped by
Griersonian ideas, formed one of the building blocks for the kind of radical
practice Barclay came to exhibit.
The specific context of a documentary film method that moves beyond ideas
of nationalism and government-supported education should be, however,
properly understood in thinking about Barclay’s work. The decade in which
his own film-making began to take on its mature shape – the 1970s – was
also that which saw a global manifestation of documentary film-making that
sought to tell the stories of lives and communities that were often absent from
mainstream national narratives. So feminist, gay and lesbian, ethnic minority
and Indigenous documentaries all appeared in the 1970s in ways they had not
before. These productions sought to represent, and often celebrate, histories
that had been largely neglected if not actually suppressed – both in film-
making and in culture more generally – up to this point. Barclay’s 1977
documentary Aku Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of Mäori Weaving, concerning
mother and daughter Rangimärie Hetet and Rangituatahi Te Kanawa and
their weaving skills, is a classic film of this kind. The use of the personal
pronoun in the title points clearly to the documentary’s focus on the skills
of the individuals portrayed as agents, and the way in which the film offers a
window on a world and a practice most viewers would be ignorant of (it is,
at times, almost an instructional film in the techniques of weaving) is both
informative and a display of deep respect towards its subjects. In this sense it
is typical of a new type of avant-garde documentary film-making produced
5. In a similar way, despite all the clear anti-government impulses in Alanis Obomsawin documentaries,
Jerry White can suggest that her films ‘embody the very essence of a Griersonian ethic of filmmaking’.
White, ‘Alanis Obomsawin, Documentary Form, and the Canadian Nation(s)’, in Beard and White
(eds.) North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, pp. 364-75
33

Images of Dignity
during the 1970s, even as it is a film that could only have been produced from
within Mäori culture.
Such connections to other film-makers and modes of film-making are
important. It is a mistake to imagine that a figure such as Barclay simply
transferred his knowledge of Mäori culture into a practice of production
as if this were a hermetically sealed process with no contexts wider than
New Zealand’s particular form of cultural relations. And it is Indigenous
documentary making especially that, with its combination of method, aesthetics
and accountability, aids in an understanding of the power of Barclay’s films.
In Indigenous Aesthetics, Steven Leuthold points out that antecedents existed for
documentary making within the visual cultures of Indigenous communities
prior to contact with Europeans. As he notes:
Problems on interpretation arise when a construct like “traditional
documentary”, used to refer to the Western documentary tradition, is applied
in non-Western contexts. Even if native-produced films and videos initially
appear to be “traditional” in their documentary structure, this application
of a construct does not take into account traditional Indian forms of cultural
and historical documentation that serve as a source of contemporary media
documentaries. Indians documented and expressed their own lives through
winter counts on hides, pictographs and petroglyphs on cliff walls or boulders,
quill- and beadwork, and ledger drawings. The evolution of some of these forms,
such as ledger drawings, beadwork, and so on, resulted from cross-cultural
contact and conflict; nevertheless these forms helped constitute indigenous
visual “languages”.6
Though the specific cultural forms are different, this observation is as true
of Mäori artistic practice as it is of Native American. Weaving is but one
example of an art form that can be seen to ‘document’ social experiences, while
Leuthold’s observation here about ledger drawings (the artwork produced by
captive Indians who worked in books provided to them by their captors) allows
for the understanding of the production of images and narratives originating
from between two cultures. It is exactly such a process that sees a Mäori film-
maker such as Barclay pick up and use a camera, one of the most modern
story-telling technologies, with all the pressures that this brings. As Barclay
writes in Our Own Image: ‘As a Mäori technician, the film-maker is faced
with the challenge of how to respect [the] age-old process of discussion and
decision–making while using the technology within a climate which so often
demands precision and answers’.7
It is productive to see Barclay’s work in the Tangata Whenua series and Aku
Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of Mäori Weaving in the light of such complexities.
6. Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics, p. 78.

34

Even as Barclay brought his film-making methods to the different communities

he and his production team visited for these films, and even as he was necessarily
working to a timetable produced by those funding and organising the films,
he was also engaged in recording cultural forms that are already a mode of
documentary in themselves and contain meaning that might not be easily
apprehended through the logic and demands of late twentieth-century film-
making. It is details such as these that begin to give a sense of the difference
inherent within Indigenous documentary. The formal hybridity in the film-
making method, aligned with the specific ethical concerns of accountability
to the people being filmed and the frequent political and historical content
of the productions, create unique images. For Barclay, the complexities of
the process are all part of the necessary challenge to record and keep Mäori
images and stories. It is his sense of the need for such a record that maintains his
commitment to his work and the strong sense of ideological positioning that
underpins it. The first full manifestation of such a position came in the making
of Tangata Whenua, and the procedures developed here became foundational
for much of the film-making Barclay would come to practice.
People and Place: Tangata Whenua

The Tangata Whenua series was a milestone in the history of television in New
Zealand, bringing images of Mäori communities and practices to a national
audience that was, up to that point, largely ignorant that such worlds existed.
Starting in 1973, the series took eighteen months to research and film (on 16
mm), and screened between November and December 1974. The working
methods that Barclay developed in Tangata Whenua would not only serve as a
base for much of his own subsequent film-making; they would also provide
a framework and inspiration for other films made by Mäori in the 1970s and
1980s, including those of Merata Mita, and parallel aspects of Indigenous
film-making worldwide during the same period. Barclay’s central concerns
of respect and reciprocity for the community giving the images to the film-
maker were first given real shape in the series, and the consequences of this
were not just a formal approach to the demands of documentary film-making
but also a political stance on what these images might mean and how they
should be used. Barclay’s career is remarkable for the consistency of his address
towards his subject matter, and the subtle intelligence on display in later films
such as The Neglected Miracle, Ngati and The Kaipara Affair has a clear source in
the Tangata Whenua project. It is the specific inflection of the documentary
impulse at work here, the desire to listen and record, and the belief in the
inherent value of what is being said and shown, that was the vital development
in his working practice.
35

Images of Dignity
Barclay’s career up to the making of the series was not untypical of other
film-makers who would emerge to become part of New Zealand’s new wave
of film production in the 1970s. His work at Pacific Films on documentaries
and his subsequent move to direct commercials parallels figures such as
Tony Williams and Roger Donaldson. At the same time, other aspects of
Barclay’s background meant he displayed a particular affinity with the kind of
film-making he would practice in Tangata Whenua. This is not, as might be
supposed, because of any upbringing in an iwi context. Growing up in rural
Wairarapa, Barclay has noted that, other than some members of the shearing
gangs engaged in seasonal work, his mother was the only Mäori he saw during
his childhood. Nevertheless, it was this period of his life that, as he wrote in
1984, ‘gave me a touchstone for every single major film I have made. It gave
me a deep respect for rural people’.8 This sense of a respect for the day-to-day
lives inherent in a community is mirrored, albeit in different ways, by the
time Barclay spent with the Redemptorists in Australia, where, as he notes,
‘I met and worked with people who had the capacity to dedicate themselves
to a community ideal without putting themselves first’. It was, he observes, a
process he also ‘learned much… later on a marae’.9
A sense of the communal structures Tangata Whenua in that the six pro
grammes are mainly defined in terms of iwi and geographical area, even
as individual episodes address themes such as mana, türangawaewae and
rangatiratanga. The third episode, for example, portraying the evolution of
the King movement, is firmly located within the Waikato, and the fourth –
dealing with Te Kooti and the Ringatü church – is mainly concerned with
Tühoe. The production team (with John O’Shea producing and Michael
King writing the script and working as the series’ front person and Barclay’s
collaborator) made the decision to cover the issues of each episode through
approaches to specific iwi. In this sense the whole series presents not so much a
picture of a national Mäoritanga as a number of different communities within
the Mäori world displaying different practices. John Rangihau, discussing
Tühoe life in the fourth episode of the series, ‘The Prophet’, is explicit about
this, noting that he cannot know and share the detail of life within Ngäti
Porou (the example he chooses), and would not expect an outsider to Tühoe
to be able to partake in the culture he knows. He posits Tühoetanga as a term
that accurately describes the world in which he lives, noting that Mäoritanga
can operate as a Päkehä construction, useful for purposes of ‘ruling’ in seeming
to unite iwi under a common heading.
This idea of differences within Mäoridom clearly appeals to Barclay.
8. Barclay, quoted in Horrocks, programme notes to New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art
Gallery, n.p.
9. Ibid.
36

It allows for a presentation of complexity, and for the kind of ‘talking in’
process he stressed in Our Own Image, wherein a community is allowed to be
seen on its own terms and not offered up in simplistic or stylised terms for
consumption by a majority audience.10 Both King and Barclay have stressed
that the working method of Tangata Whenua was through conversations and
not interviews, and those conversations captured on film are themselves only
a small part of the overall dialogue that included the pre-production approach
to iwi to consult about the possibility of making the programme, and the
part of the on-location talk that was not recorded. Such an approach is, at
heart, cultural and social – an understanding that people (especially Mäori
who have a history of being the subjects of ethnographic ‘research’ in previous
film productions) will only feel comfortable discussing issues if the context of
the discussion is appropriate – but it also presents clear technical challenges.
In order to be as unobtrusive as possible, Barclay had to devise positions for
camera, sound and lighting rigs, and also to coordinate the sequencing of
shooting, in a manner that allowed those talking to continue without feeling
the presence of the production crew. This involved the use of long zoom
lenses and, as he refined the practice in the decades after Tangata Whenua, 300
mm and 600 mm lenses, which allowed the camera to be situated at some
distance from the subject. As he later put it, reflecting on the making of the
series, the consequence was that the film crew was ‘disciplined… to search for
ways to make the technology of film making subordinate to what people had
an urgency to say’.11
This stress on creating the conditions for speech results in the presentation of
a cultural and social interiority that reverses the heritage by which Indigenous
cultures were ‘fixed’ by the processes of outside representation. In place of
the ethnographic gaze common to many images of Mäori produced in the
twentieth century, the details that emerge out of the conversations in Tangata
Whenua highlight innumerable intricacies of lived experience, the sense of
which can only be fully understood by listening to the logic through which they
are produced: as Russell Campbell has noted, the programmes ‘were the closest
New Zealand documentary had ever come to a discourse originating from
within the Maori community’.12 Whether speaking in Mäori or in English,
the participants illuminate the ways in which rural Mäori in particular live
lives that connect to the stories of the past yet also are automatically implicated
in the demands of the present. In this sense, Tangata Whenua presents what
many viewers (especially non-Mäori) would understand as ‘traditional’ culture

11. Barclay, quoted in Horrocks, programme notes to New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art
Gallery, n.p.
12. Campbell, ‘Eight Documentaries’, in Dennis and Bieringa (eds.) Film in Aotearoa/NewZealand, p. 107.
37

Images of Dignity
– whether that is the discussion of moko in the first episode of the series ‘The
Spirits and the Times will Teach’, or the legacy of the King movement in the
Waikato episode – but even as this sense of the cultural is registered it is obvious
that part of the series’ historical importance lies in its stress upon the challenge
facing Mäori in the contemporary era. For example, the second episode, ‘The
Great Trees’, which focuses upon rangatiratanga, juxtaposes its historical
accounts of leadership with a clear outline of the demands of 1970s modernity
and change. As the episode emphasises the role played by Äpirana Ngata in
leading Ngäti Porou, it also points to the lack of community leadership in the
present at a time when changing employment patterns have resulted in great
changes for the prospects of Ngäti Porou youth. The society presented here is
anything but static. Rather it is caught in the flux of the contemporary, where
the competing demands of tradition and change present unique and specific
examples of the tensions inherent within the community at a particular time.
The method of Tangata Whenua is itself a certain form of documentary.
The emphasis on conversations means that there is relatively little use of the
voice-over, a convention common to documentary film-making (it is one
Obomsawin uses frequently in her films for example, and in part structures
Mita’s Patu!). Tangata Whenua’s voice-overs work to provide basic information
(such as translations) that lead into the process that is at the heart of the series,
listening to those who are on screen. Equally, the editing of the conversations
continually works to remove King from a speaking role as much as is possible
– often the conversations are between the subjects themselves, with one figure
translating for the other. For the most part King is in the frame as a listener,
and it is rare that the viewer actually hears any of his questions or points. The
emphasis on those King is speaking with, or those he has helped facilitate in
the conversation process, is clear, and this is a foundational privileging of
Mäori which is central to the method of the series as a whole.
At heart this is, of course, a political point – the need to see and hear
Mäori telling their own versions of their lives on terms with which they feel
comfortable. But it also has clear consequences in terms of film form and
image. As they talk, the participants in the Tangata Whenua programmes fill
the screen with the detail of Mäori life, and as they do so it becomes clear the
role of the film-maker here is to offer the viewer clear access to a potential
understanding of the content of the talk. The talk is meaningful because of
the way it carries the detail of cultural and social practices. As such, as with so
much of Barclay’s film-making, the image becomes necessarily the vehicle for
a process of transcendence. That which is on the screen is valuable precisely
because of the connections that can be made between what is being said and
the specifics that are under discussion. So – for example – the Ringatü church
service images in ‘The Prophet’, exploring the relationship between Tühoe
38

and Te Kooti, are consequential in that they clearly present both the rich
detail of one specific of Tühoe life and connect to the question of how such
traditions might persist in a contemporary period. This level of connectivity
was vital for Barclay. If it was not happening, then the film is, he felt, failing
in its responsibility. Film-making that was not interested in the widest issues
was, Barclay has said, work that failed to interest him because it lacked the
kinds of associations that he deemed vital in the business of making any film.13
It is in moments such as these, Barclay’s films suggest, that the ordinary lives
of Mäori connect to the religious and the poetic, and enact moments of great
cultural sophistication.
These ideas of association and connection are not simply versions of docu
mentary realism, in which the film-maker seeks to portray a community
truthfully through images. Barclay was interested in truth in his documentaries,
but the formal nature of his films actually revises any standard notion of such
realism. The emphasis on talking in the Tangata Whenua programmes means
that there are a high number of fixed camera shots, and less recording of the
programmes’ participants in action, specially enacting cultural practices, than
might be expected. In part, this is because of the stress the series has on the
abstracted ideas (leadership, citizenship etc.) that are the focus of individual
episodes. It is also a desire not to repeat the logic of ethnographic film with
its emphasis on the surface features of cultural practice as being indicative of
a communal totality. But it is also due to a specific respect for the value of
talk and speech as the conveyors of meaning. It is true that such a method has
clear connections with the oral base of many Indigenous cultures, and this is
an important dimension to the series, but Barclay’s method here still differs
from the techniques of other Indigenous film-makers interested in communal
issues. Mita’s Bastion Point – Day 507 and Patu!, or Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake:
270 Years of Resistance are documentaries that detail specific moments of
conflict, and do so through the presentation of often dramatic action. By way
of contrast, Barclay’s films privilege talk over such depictions, to the point
where in The Kaipara Affair the film is almost entirely structured through
conversations, though its subject matter deals with disputes that reached levels
of near violence.
The effect of this is that, for all the clear stress upon transparency and
connectivity in Barclay’s filming of Mäori communities, the images that
result eschew a clear realism because they become mediated through talk,
and subsequently it is speech that carries the truth of social and cultural detail.
Thus, for example in ‘The Great Trees’, we listen to figures such as Eruera
Manuera and Eruera Stirling speaking about leadership rather than have any
form of direct filming that displays leadership in action. This kind of film-
39

Images of Dignity
making is actually more reminiscent of recent developments in communal

Indigenous use of video than of much documentary practice found in the
1970s. A film-maker such as Metis Canadian Marjorie Beaucage, a video
activist who works to present Indigenous communities speaking on their
own terms and who trains community members to themselves become the
film-makers who record their own stories, has clear parallels with Barclay’s
method. As with Barclay, Beaucage, who came to prominence in Canada
through her work in the 1990s, meets and consults with all members of the
community she is working with, and these in turn become the first audience
for the footage produced. This sense of recorded conversations acting as an
archive for the community is increasingly a focus of contemporary film-
making in Indigenous societies following the advent of, firstly, video and
now digitalised technology. It is behind Barclay’s projected rangiwhakaoma
development as well, in which iwi come to control the recording and storing
of their own images. But we can see a source of such developments in the
focus on conversations, and on the idea of talking as a vital medium of self-
expression and exchange, which dominate the Tangata Whenua programmes.
The series challenged certain standard conventions of documentary making
then, as recording the specifics of Mäori culture led to the revision of formal
procedures in the film-making process. Equally, Barclay’s own participation
in the programmes established a working method that he would continue
throughout his career and that again refines some of the expected practices
of activist documentary making. Involved as co-writer and director, Barclay
is nevertheless absent from the image and sound track himself, and King’s
position as the interlocutor in the majority of the conversations is the first
example of the process by which Barclay’s films use a front person in the
establishment of conversations. The role occupied by King in Tangata Whenua
is taken by Tilly Reedy in Aku Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of Mäori Weaving,
by Dairne Shanahan in Women in Power – Indira Gandhi, by James McNeish
in both The Town that Lost a Miracle and the Hunting Horns series of interviews
with James Bertram, by Peter Hayden and Täwiri Rangihau in Te Urewera
and by Helen Smyth in The Kaipara Affair. Not all of these productions have
the same formal origins (Barclay is not credited as a writer on any of these
films other than Tangata Whenua and The Kaipara Affair, though he did adapt
and revise aspects of them, excluding Indira Gandhi and Hunting Horns), but
the consistency of using a front person in this fashion gives a sense of unity to
much of Barclay’s documentary work. The main consequence of the technique
is to signal the removal of the film-maker from the material being recorded.
Unlike other activist documentary makers whose presence is sometimes part
of the fabric of the overall film, especially if it deals with conflict, Barclay
withdraws and, by so doing, stresses non-intervention as much as possible. In
40

this way the desired effect of subjects talking for themselves is emphasised.
The process needs to be understood as an effective sleight of hand however,
for Barclay’s absence from the talking taking place does not mean his films lack
a strong sense of his presence. Especially in their political emphases, Barclay’s
films are remarkably consistent, and his sympathies for the portrayal of what
we might term a radical legitimacy of Indigenous/Mäori culture and society
are clear. For Barclay, listening is a vital part of his film-making – it is a point
about method, and more crucially, respect – but his own commitment as an
activist in New Zealand culture more widely meant that he understood the
need for his films to move beyond the process of recording. An engagement
with the contested issues of culture in the country is vital if the films are to
succeed as objects that can reach out and influence an audience.
The results of such structuring and sympathies in the Tangata Whenua series
are that the episodes offer profound insight into the cultural politics of 1970s
New Zealand even as they work to foreground the material detail of Mäori
life seen in terms of legacy and heritage. The tone and form are set in ‘The
Spirit and the Times will Teach’, the first programme in the series. The initial
concentration on moko, presented in the programme as ‘the life essence of a
person’ and ‘the only connection with the past’, works to stress both a process
of cultural tradition and a philosophical outlining of the qualities of mauri.
Herepo Rongo, the kuia on whom the episode moves to focus, is seen to be ‘a
link with another world’. But once such agency and continuity is established,
this tradition is grounded in the contemporary as the episode moves towards a
consideration of ‘Herepo’s place’ (the title of a section of the programme) and
her account of the ways in which the land on which she lived has progressively
been depopulated through the processes of state dispossession. In a powerful
scene, Herepo talks to King and members of her whänau (including Eva
Rickard) as she walks on ancestral land at the Poihakena marae that was
taken during the Second World War under the War Emergency Act and was
subsequently converted into a golf course. The intercutting between Herepo,
with her articulation of the meaning of the lost marae and land for local iwi,
and the golfers, for whom the land has been transformed into a leisure product,
provides compelling images of a schism in New Zealand society. The validity
of Mäori claim with regard to land appears clear in this scene, but equally
striking is the palpable distance that exists between the two communities
being filmed. The images are a testament to Herepo’s presence as a kuia, but
their editing and place in the episode construct an argument that is political
at heart. Barclay’s arguments about the use of tradition and the past extend to
the ways in which they necessarily exist in the present.
So, in a manner similar to the portrayal of Herepo in ‘The Spirits and the
41

Images of Dignity
Times will Teach’, the Waikato episode moves through a detailed account of
the history of the King movement and the establishment of the Türangawaewae
marae at Ngäruawähia, but concludes with the debates surrounding attempts
to found a Mäori Studies Centre at the University of Waikato, where the
claim is advanced that government agencies in the late 1960s were reluctant to
fund such a development. The trajectory of the episode as a whole thus takes
on a clear political agenda, and the images early in the programme become,
during the viewer’s subsequent contemplation, refracted through the details
of contemporary education and activism given at the end. Seeing Piri Poutapu
teaching carving at Türangawaewae marae is a priceless image of a master
craftsman, and offers a valuable record of a skill at a time when such activities
were not broadcast on the national media. At the same time, this particular
scene – seen in the light of the programme’s conclusion – becomes more than
an account of an individual figure or practice. It comes to exemplify the fabric
of Mäori society that was itself the base of the arguments advanced by those
campaigning for the Mäori Studies Centre. In this way the images of Poutapu’s
work are evidence of the kind of transcendence discussed earlier; through the
methods by which Barclay structured his film-making they connect to the
increasingly politicised climate, and a rejuvenated sense of cultural practice,
that he encountered in urban Mäori communities in the early 1970s.
The Tangata Whenua series is thus clearly ideological and political in the
ways in which it intervenes into the political climate of the period. Barclay
has talked of how, like others involved with Ngä Tamatoa at the time, he
read and internalised the speeches of Malcolm X and found concepts such as
institutionalised racism in the New Zealand society in which he lived in the early
1970s.14 As Mäori communities became increasingly urbanised in the 1960s,
there was a twofold process that created the base for the kind of politicisation
that a figure such as Barclay underwent. Firstly, in the words of Ranginui
Walker: ‘One of the consequences of urbanisation is the increased knowledge
of the alienating culture of metropolitan society and its techniques for the
maintenance of the structural of Pakeha dominance and Maori subjection’.15
Secondly, the metropolitan nature of these communities provided access to
the kind of resources, such as the literature of the civil rights movements in
the United States, that enabled activists to contextualise and find languages
for their own experiences. The combination of the two events created an
intellectualised and politicised layer of Mäori society in a form that simply had
not existed before.
14. Barclay, quoted in Horrocks, programme notes to New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City
Art Gallery, n.p. This was also a point Barclay stressed in conversation with me. Körero/personal
interview, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington, July 26 2006.
15. Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou/Struggle Without End, p. 209.
42

Tangata Whenua addresses this phenomenon directly in the fifth episode,

‘Türangawaewae’. It starts with the Ngäti Porou Päkirikiri marae at Tokomaru
Bay on the east coast of the North Island, where the closure of local industry,
and the subsequent migration to the cities, has left the area underpopulated
and the marae increasingly unable to meet the needs of the surrounding
community. ‘We are rich in land but not in people’ remarks Ngoi Pëwhairangi
as she surveys a largely deserted shoreline. The people who have left are to
be found in places such as the Wellington suburbs, and the episode moves to
show how different iwi have come together to use the Ngäti Toa marae in
Porirua in an attempt to maintain traditions and customs. Here too, however,
there is a strong sense that iwi structures are in danger of collapse. ‘We’re
just onlookers now’ observes one Ngäti Toa elder, discussing the loss of land
caused by the growth of the city, while another laments the passing of a kuia
who has recently died.
It is into this vacuum that Barclay introduces the work of Ngä Tamatoa, and
the language of its leaders and activists as portrayed here is very much that of
black pride and the inheritance of a wider international civil rights movement.
As Ted Nia, one of the founders of Ngä Tamatoa, speaks of the need to
establish identity through a knowledge of tribe and language, he is articulating
a politics of Indigenous location that was global in the early 1970s. ‘It is the
spirit that is missing’ observes one Ngä Tamatoa member, and the episode
displays the organisation’s commitment to the processes that will regain such
an idea of spirit. Ngä Tamatoa organises a return to the Tokomaru Bay marae
in an attempt to revitalise iwi presence there. It also aids in the building of a
new, cross-iwi marae in Porirua for those who feel that they cannot fully utilise
that of Ngäti Toa as they come from different iwi. The episode’s final images,
of the new marae buildings being moved into place, signal regeneration and
hope, the reactivation of cultural traditions possibly thought lost because of the
migration from rural tribal communities like those at Tokomaru Bay.
‘Turangawaewae’ clearly explores the very contemporary history of the
early 1970s. It is a tribute to communal flexibility and individual commitment,
and a powerful statement of how Mäori communities will survive. Central to
the episode’s effect is the idea of a continuity between iwi practices and the
new forms of activism to be found in the cities. Although the latter might
appear a departure from the former, with its policies of direct address to the
institutions of government and use of an international language of protest,
Barclay makes it clear that the specifics of Ngä Tamatoa’s work involve a
focus upon the necessity of keeping linguistic and cultural traditions and
of maintaining the processes of Mäori agency in the new environments in
which many Mäori found themselves in the early 1970s (the organisation was
also itself a community, and thus enacted many of values Barclay deems most
43

Images of Dignity
important). And of course it becomes apparent that although such activism

was to some extent reactive, in that it responded to the fundamentally
market-driven migration of Mäori to the city, it eventually fostered a strongly
proactive dimension to Mäori political life in particular, as the presence of
pressure groups in urban centres allowed for access and representation to the
institutions of both government and the national economy. For Barclay, this
was clearly vital, and it is an aspect of Mäori presence he continued to use
throughout his career in his many representations to authority.
The content of the ‘Turangawaewae’ episode helps in an understanding of
the structure of Tangata Whenua as a whole. With its focus on the immediate
demands of life in new urban communities in the early 1970s, it might be
expected that this would be the final programme in the series. This would
make sense in any understanding of the series as a portrayal of key elements in
Mäori history – the episodes on the Waikato, Te Kooti and Äpirana Ngata’s
leadership leading to a representation of contemporary Mäori concerns at the
series’ end. But such a historical trajectory, important though it is for the space
it gives to the discussion of these issues and figures, is of limited interest to
Barclay. By focusing in the final episode, ‘The Carving Cries’, on ideas of
citizenship, he and King leave Tangata Whenua as a document that is ultimately
a provocation in its questioning of the ideas of national unity and cohesion
that would have been commonplace in much Päkehä political discourse in
the 1970s. The issue of how one might be both Mäori and a New Zealander
is explored here, as with so much in the series, through a continuum that
includes individual and collective opinions and responses. As John Rangihau
talks with passion how he clearly feels he occupies a subject position as both
Tühoe and part of a wider, national community, we are made aware again
of the oratorical power of specific figures and the value of the conversation;
but the episode offers a constitutional challenge as well, and one that Barclay
would pursue right up to his rumination on the idea of ‘one country, two
laws’ that lies at the heart of The Kaipara Affair and his writing in Mana Tuturu.
Indigenous presence is, in and of itself, a challenge to the organisation of those
societies where such presence has now become an ethnic minority. As Tangata
Whenua ends, it does so with a direct wero towards the institutions of the state
that would attempt to construct citizenship without due recognition of the
historical legacies and contemporary claims of its Mäori population.
‘The Carving Cries’ identifies many of the central tenets of Mäori citizenship
in terms of fixed cultural identity. Writer Witi Ihimaera discusses the need to
recognise land, spirit, community and belonging in any formation of identity,
and John Rangihau gives examples of Tühoe carving practices, including
discussions of tapu, that are deeply rooted in tradition and legacy. If it might
have been imagined that the ‘Turangawaewae’ episode possibly could point
44

towards an idea of Mäori identities that could be conceived of as fluid and

mobile due to the multiple nature of urban life, the ‘The Carving Cries’ seems
to forcibly reassert iwi structures and an idea of cultural heritage as the base
of citizenship. This should not be read in any simple terms as an assertion of
conservatism. The emerging cultural politics of the period were precisely those
that celebrated the material forms of (so termed) minority cultures, and Barclay
knew that part of the value and legacy of the series would lie not only in the
way it showcased these forms, but in the methods through which it mobilised
them as part of an argument with the majority culture. The stress in Tangata
Whenua’s conclusion in linking Mäori citizenship to a strong sense of the past
is part of a provocative position the series takes. It is a strategic (to use Gayatri
Spivak’s famous formation) use of the culture for the purposes of the present,
even as it acknowledges that such culture is real and lasting. In the time in
which it was made, the series had a clear function to fulfil in increasing the
exposure of Mäori to a wider national public. That it succeeded is clear, and it
did so on both the levels with which it engaged its audience. Those ignorant
of the workings of Mäori society and culture were granted access to see and
listen to the subjects and agents of a range of Indigenous communities, and
those who wished to extend or engage with the struggle for civil rights in
New Zealand were strengthened by the sheer existence of the programmes.
In particular, the series proved to be the catalyst for Mäori film-making, in
much the same way that Ihimaera’s publication of Pounamu, Pounamu in 1972
served to inspire a generation of Mäori fiction writers. The end result may not
have been a succession of feature productions made by Mäori, with only Mita
emerging to parallel Barclay’s career, but it did lead to the possibility of training
and subsequently work in film and television for Mäori technicians and writers,
albeit on an initially small scale. The effect of Tangata Whenua was, however,
profound. Debra Reweti, writing on the history of Mäori broadcasting into the
twenty-first century, has noted how the series was ‘remarkable’ for its ‘intensity
and relevance’ at a time when ‘the general attitude was that Mäori programmes
were of high nuisance value and minimal importance’.16 The groundwork
created by Tangata Whenua would inspire developments within Mäori media at
a national level, and would ultimately lead to Ngati and the attempt to produce
a wholly Indigenous feature film.
Politics and Possible Poetries: Other Documentaries

Barclay left New Zealand in 1978 to travel in Asia, Europe and South America,
working on material that contributed to the unfinished fiction feature film
16. Reweti, ‘Mäori and Broadcasting’, in Malcolm Mulholland (ed.) State of the Mäori Nation: twenty first
century issues, p. 182.
45

Images of Dignity
Mahaweli (about a peasant couple who move from the Sri Lankan hills to
the plains in order to benefit from the government-sponsored scheme which
planned to divert the Mahaweli river), and the later documentary The Neglected
Miracle. Before his departure he made Aku Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of Mäori
Weaving, documenting one of the last examples of old-style cloak weaving
in New Zealand. The film was initially commissioned by the Arts Council
who, conscious of the success of Tangata Whenua, wanted a significant 35 mm
production that could be used as a cultural product to be shown in embassies
overseas. Barclay felt such an approach would be inappropriate however,
believing 16 mm to be more in keeping with the pace of life and harsh winter
conditions he found on location. The resulting film has none of the gloss
that appeared to be intention of the original Arts Council remit. Rather
than functioning as a showcase of an ‘Indigenous artistry’, it was screened
to women’s workshops and educational establishments. As such, it is a classic
example of Barclay’s revisionist method and commitment to the integrity of
those being filmed.
The Tangata Whenua series and Aku Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of Mäori
Weaving stand out as the highlights of Barclay’s 1970s work, but he made
other documentaries during the decade that serve as contrasts to those centred
on Mäori communal issues and provide greater insight into the particular
methods and forms that were so successful in Tangata Whenua. Made in 1976,
Women in Power – Indira Gandhi was initially envisaged as part of a six-part
documentary series for television that would feature interviews conducted
by Dairne Shanahan with six women in positions of global authority (one
prospective interviewee was the Empress of Iran, another was Margaret
Thatcher). It became a Pacific Films project with John Barnett as the producer
and Barclay as director, but the Gandhi film was ultimately the only one that
was made. The documentary is structured around the interview Shanahan
conducts with Gandhi, in which she gives a fundamentally biographical
and chronological account of her rise to becoming the prime minister of
India. It is appropriate to term this an ‘interview’ as opposed to the kind of
‘conversation’ produced in Tangata Whenua, as the method of film-making
here is an example of a far more standard documentary practice than that of
the earlier work. The camera is in a fixed position in the room in which the
talk takes place and Shanahan asks Gandhi questions (which we hear) from an
off-camera position. There is none of the feel of having access to the kind of
intimate and revealing conversation that characterises Barclay’s documentary
work with Mäori, although in part this was due to the constraints placed upon
the crew by the Indian authorities.
Other aspects of the film are also typical of a generic documentary
style intended to create a portrait of an individual. The interview is spaced
46

throughout the documentary as a whole, and is intercut with a number of

images of Indian society – city and rural scenes, people at prayer etc. – as
well other interviews with those who know Gandhi or are her political
followers. The film also employs a voice-over that gives more structure to
the chronology of Gandhi’s life story. The shots of life on city streets or in
the fields function as stock images, visual examples of the world that the non-
Indian audience for the film understands Gandhi to have authority over. But it
is interesting to compare such communal images to those in Tangata Whenua.
Where the former documentary makes it clear that the communal scenes
exemplified rich and complex cultural life, this kind of depth is clearly lacking
from the Gandhi film. In contrast, the scenes of Indian society work only at a
surface level, adding a general idea of a visual ‘context’ to the main narrative
of Gandhi’s own life and work.
The reasons for this are straightforward of course. Barclay could not
claim the knowledge of Indian culture that he did of its Mäori equivalent,
but – this obvious truth being recognised – it is nevertheless revealing to
see the consequences of this for the method of the film. As with subjects in
other Barclay documentaries, Gandhi is largely free to tell her own story;
she extemporises freely in the spaces given by Shanahan’s questions. The
idea, Barclay has said, was ‘simply to record what she said’.17 Put in this way,
the structure of the film appears largely consistent with Barclay’s work with
Mäori in the 1970s. Yet the result of this here is that, combined with the
difficulties in fully apprehending the context in which the filming took place,
the documentary fails to operate the kind of connectivity that is central to
the success of Tangata Whenua. When Gandhi talks of ‘the Indian people’ of
‘Indian life’, there is nothing the film can offer to establish a sense of what
this might be. Beyond the stock footage of life on the streets, or interviews
with those who stress Gandhi’s qualities and abilities, there is no sense of any
community, the subject that is at the heart of Barclay’s best work.
The consequences of this are made all the more pressing by the fact that
the film was made during the Indian Emergency, when Gandhi suspended
elections, arrested opposition politicians and assumed authoritarian control of
the nation in response to a perceived social and political crisis.18 The film clearly
alludes to this – it is mentioned in the voice-over, Shanahan questions Gandhi
about it and there are images of Gandhi’s key slogans of the period, such as
‘The Need of the Hour is Discipline’, in cities and on the sides of buses – but
there is no point in the film at which we receive any version of the political
17. Barclay, körero/personal interview, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington, 26 July 2006.
18. Barclay claims that they were the only Western film crew to have access to Gandhi during the
Emergency. Barclay, körero/personal interview, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington, 26 July
2006.
47

Images of Dignity
situation other than that of Gandhi herself. Barclay has said: ‘Who were we to
decide on the politics of the Emergency after just a few weeks in the country?’,
and such a statement is typical of his non-interventionist style of documentary
making.19 It is also the case that Barclay and Shanahan felt that, with so much
media concentration on the politics of the Emergency, there was an inherent
value in a film that sought to explore Gandhi’s personal life and background,
as a parallel text to all the reportage.20 At the same time however, the result in
Women in Power – Indira Gandhi is that the film effectively becomes a platform
for Gandhi. Her ‘speaking for herself ’ in this case allows for an uncontested
account of the necessity for repressive political power. That such an account is
contextualised by the film’s wider narrative of her abilities and rise to power
only gives it more legitimacy. Interestingly, the ideology the film appears to
wish to espouse is a version of 1970s feminism, and the nexus of successful
women and power that was the originating idea behind the conception of the
series. But by so doing it misses being able to have any real interrogation of the
consequences of that power at the moment of filming. For a political figure
such as Barclay, with his commitment to frequently challenging the power of
the state, it is a curiously quietist offering.
The structure and method of Women in Power – Indira Gandhi illuminate
what makes Barclay’s documentary work with Mäori so successful. Clearly,
for all the power of the conversations that are at the heart of his non-fiction
film-making, there is more to his films than simple processes by which
people speak for themselves. Rather, the subject matter is filtered through an
animating intelligence that, in the specific manipulation of the image and the
way the film is structured as a whole, positions the individuals and culture
within a wider argument. For Barclay that argument is a commitment to an
idea of social justice and equality that goes beyond film-making. Ideologically,
this is, at heart, a political argument and one that operates in every sphere of
public culture, but formally it also gives a technical cohesion to his work. It
is precisely an idea of this cohesion and its disruption that, as we shall see,
lay behind the conflict over the editing of The Kaipara Affair for its television
screening.
Also in 1976 Barclay directed the six-part television series Hunting Horns,
which focused on James Bertram recalling his time as a journalist in China and
Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. Bertram, in conversation with James McNeish,
ranges across the political issues that made the period such a compelling era,
and the films supplement his reminiscences through the use of maps and still
photographs. It is a curious format, as the programmes are less about the politics
of the period than about Bertram himself and his reflections upon them. He
19. Ibid.
20. Barclay, email to author, 24 September 2006.
48

emerges as a kind of living treasure, a fund of stories and experiences, and the
various episodes of the series constitute a form of oral history, in contrast to
a more generic documentary method that might have worked to establish a
less subjective narrative of the material under discussion. The camerawork is,
again, unostentatious, with a series of fixed positions recording Bertram and
McNeish, and the overall technical presentation of the films is clearly in service
to the fundamental idea that the value of the programmes lies in listening to
Bertram speaking. Hunting Horns is, on one level, an example of a relatively
standard television product, with Barclay working as a jobbing director (to a
degree the same can be said of the Gandhi documentary), but it is still the case
that the conversations between Bertram and McNeish do constitute a classic
illustration of Barclay’s non-interventionist working method.
The 1977 television documentary Autumn Fires, another Pacific Films
production, is a different sort of film altogether. Described in the opening
credits as ‘a documentary shot in the Hokianga’, it nevertheless contains
fictional strands that complicate its documentary status and speak of another
impulse in Barclay’s film-making. This interweaving of fiction and non-
fiction is typical of some of Barclay’s lesser-known work of the 1970s, and
is in part a desire to test the boundaries of film’s generic forms, and in part a
concern for a concept of a lyrical aesthetic that is less obviously apparent in
his work after the decade. The 1975 television drama Ashes is a self-conscious
rumination on the sacred nature of daily lives and mixes the use of actors
(Sam Neill plays a Catholic priest) with real people who recount their own
stories; it also is explicit in displaying the technical dimension to film-making,
as camera and sound equipment frequently encroach into the frame as the
audience witnesses the set up of a number of conversations that are filmed.
Even Barclay’s first film, the 1972 extended short drama All That We Need,
uses a fictional mode (it describes itself as ‘A Fable in Masks’ in the opening
credits) to discuss the then very contemporary (and non-fictional) issue of
energy renewal and conservation.
Autumn Fires records a journey undertaken by actor Martyn Sanderson to
visit his aunt, Olive Bracey, who lives in the Hokianga. It is an intimate
film, lacking the kind of overt public narrative more usually associated with
Barclay’s documentaries, but the intimacy allows for a conversational method
between the two protagonists. Their talk ranges from family reminiscences to
memories of the Hokianga’s past – an account of kauri logging is supplemented
by the use of archival photographs – and the film also contains a voice-over
by Sanderson reflecting on the area and his association with it. The fictional
strand to the film comes from Bracey’s fiction. She wrote short stories, and
the documentary as a whole is intercut with dramatised examples from them,
often filmed in soft focus and accompanied by a lush, romantic score. The
49

Images of Dignity
result is a film exploring multiple avenues. In the mid 1970s, Sanderson was
well known enough as an actor for an audience to be potentially interested
in his background and particular opinions, and Autumn Fires is anchored by
Sanderson’s presence and commentary – his ‘search’ for a past is a recognisable
narrative. Bracey’s fiction is not easily placed within such a narrative however.
It revolves around letters written between confidantes that speak of distance
and the possibly of connection. These can be read in a biographical frame, as
an indication of Bracey’s possible isolation, but the film as a whole resists an
easy conflation of its differing methods.
For some Indigenous documentary makers, the employment of fictional
narratives works to counter the sense of ethnographic ‘fixing’ that can be
seen to be inherent in the documentary method. Cree/Canadian film-maker
Loretta Todd has talked of how, being Indigenous, she felt subject to a climate
of what she calls ‘inspection’:
You have to remember that when you grow up Native, you grow up with
constant inspection – checking your hair for lice, welfare workers looking in on
you, the dentist yanking your teeth out. It feels like you are constantly peered
at, interrogated, under surveillance. I was conscious of wanting to deconstruct
that.21
In her 1991 documentary The Learning Path, focused upon the experiences
of native children in Canadian residential schools, Todd added scenes that
recreate and dramatise aspects of the often horrific material that made the
subject matter of the film. ‘I wanted [the viewers] to see these stories in ways
they hadn’t seen them before’, she has noted, ‘and I think that poetry and
lyricism and art have a way of affecting the way people experience things’.22
Barclay’s mix of fiction and non-fiction in his documentaries doesn’t
quite function in this way. Autumn Fires does not have an especial focus on
Mäori (and, indeed, it would be intriguing to imagine an investigation of
Sanderson’s family history in the Hokianga in terms of settler arrival and
dispossession) and he appears not to feel the need to react to the ethnographic
legacy of certain documentary film-making in the same way as Todd; but it
is undoubtedly the case that Todd’s comments about poetry and lyricism help
unveil a dimension of Barclay’s own approach to the subject of his films. The
forms of lyricism in a film such as Autumn Fires (and indeed in Ashes) become
less apparent in his film-making after the 1970s, but an idea of poetry is still
to be found in his work since. Barclay has said that he has always thought of
his work as being ‘poetic’.23 To a degree this reflects his strong desire not to be
21. Todd, quoted in Jason Silverman, ‘Uncommon Visions: The Films of Loretta Todd’, in Beard and
White (eds.) North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, p. 379.
22. Ibid., p. 382.
50

seen as a film-maker who deals with current affairs, that – for all the fact that
his films often deal with pressing contemporary issues – he does not film news
stories. The subject matter, he believes, needs to be seen in connection to
wider themes and narratives, and it is in the way in which such a belief works
in terms of the image that we can productively talk of a lyricism in his work.
Barclay’s images, though always concerned with a fidelity to their subject, are
nevertheless engaged in a constant transcendence of their immediate contexts,
and it is here that we can locate his ideas of the lyrical and the poetic. This is
most obviously true of a fiction film such as Ngati, with its strong evocation
of a particular sense of time and place (and it explains why a documentary
maker like Barclay wanted to turn to fiction film-making), but it also operates
in his documentaries as well. Even if a film such as The Kaipara Affair appears
to lack the kind of overt lyricism found in Autumn Fires, it still – as we shall
see – operates with an inherent lyric and poetic method in the power of its
imagery.
Conclusion
If, to return to Nichols’ definition of a documentary maker working in the
Griersonian tradition, Barclay is an ‘orator’, then it is clear that his oratory
works in subtle ways. Anchored in a tradition of letting his participants speak
for themselves, Barclay’s films organise such speaking acts into powerful
images of presence and dignity. Such filming may not be the kind of activist
or direct film-making that records conflict or confrontation, but it is no less
confrontational for that. It is precisely through the detail of filming Mäori
presence that Barclay’s documentary method in a series such as Tangata
Whenua illuminates lives, communities and systems that inherently challenge
the structures and practices of majority New Zealand culture and society.
In terms of such detail, Barclay’s documentaries work with more
participatory interaction than might seem immediately obvious, and his
productions revise many of the standard practices of documentary making.
The collaborative nature of the films is established long before filming itself
starts, with dialogue between film-maker and subjects establishing the ways
in which the production will work and the reciprocity that lies at the heart
of the film-making process. Such consultation extends to the film-making
itself, with the camera only rolling when everyone is comfortable with its
presence (in Our Own Image Barclay notes that he allowed up to ‘half a day’
to record such conversations, although the ‘actual talk… may take anything
from 40 to 90 minutes’).24 Though the end result for the viewer can feel as if
51

Images of Dignity
we are eavesdropping on private talk, such a sensation is, in fact, a tribute to

Barclay’s craft. His method is subtle to the point of desiring invisibility, but it
should be understood as a form of community participation. Above all, such
participation stresses the need for understanding on the part of all elements
of the production. Such understanding, and the respect that goes with it,
is the ethical cornerstone of Barclay’s documentary method. From it comes
the power of lived experience that he knows exists in Mäori communities.
Making this experience available to an audience allows for those communities
to be seen and for a proper integrity to be accorded to their practices; but it
also presents a clear political and ideological challenge precisely because the
practices in question are not those of the majority audience. Barclay is well
aware of such a double move in his work. Its inception in the 1970s saw, in the
Tangata Whenua series, a radically important series of films. It was a process
he would carry forward, with greater refinement and detail, into his work in
subsequent decades.
52

Chapter 3
Communities and Reciprocity: Ngati and

The Neglected Miracle
W idely credited with being the first fiction feature film made by
a member of an Indigenous community, Ngati is a film of global
importance and the production that gave Barclay an international reputation.
It is a film that is part of, and yet also distinct from, the resurgence of film-
making in New Zealand that followed increased government support for film
production, especially the founding of the New Zealand Film Commission
(NZFC), in the late 1970s. Films such as Sleeping Dogs (1977), Goodbye Pork Pie
(1980), Smash Palace (1981) and Vigil (1984) proved to domestic and international
audiences that New Zealand could sustain a film culture, and part of Ngati’s
success is due to it being seen as a feature emerging from a country that had,
by the mid 1980s, caught the critical eye of a global film community. At
the same time however, Ngati is a film that emerges directly out of the work
Barclay had undertaken on Tangata Whenua over a decade before, and has
roots in the Ngä Tamatoa activism and revisionist documentary method he
pioneered in the 1970s.
Both Ngati and The Neglected Miracle refine and extend the idea of
reciprocity that Barclay had developed in his 1970s work. Ngati became an
experiment in involving the community in film-making that went beyond
the methods of Tangata Whenua. Where the former series used consultation
and conversations as entries into the communities depicted, the film in effect
located the entire production within the community where filming took place.
From the use of locals as acting extras to the provision of the catering for the
shoot through the marae, Ngati developed a model of valuable dependence
and communication that Barclay saw as vital for the film’s narratives to
function effectively. The Neglected Miracle possessed too many locations for this
specific kind of engagement to be a viable practice, but Barclay’s technique
here is to stress reciprocity as a vital historical and thematic element in the
relationships between global Indigenous communities and the majority
societies with which they work. Central to the film’s analysis of the issues
53

Images of Dignity
surrounding genetic plant resources is an idea of the appropriate reciprocal

transactions that should exist in such dealings, especially when something as
central and vital as food is under discussion. As the film displays, however,
the possibility of mutuality is one frequently abused, with the majority of
European agribusinesses shown manifesting no sense of any respect for an idea
of guardianship or common heritage. Though Ngati and The Neglected Miracle
are films that differ in many ways, they are united by the core concerns of
legitimacy and self-determination, and by a strong sense of the need to protect
the validity of ways of life that are pressurised by outside forces.
Communal Legitimacy: Ngati

Ngati is a highly subtle film that is easily misread. Set in the fictional town of
Kapua on the East Coast of the North Island in the late 1940s, it celebrates
an idea of rural community, especially seen in terms of acceptance and
integration. With its powerful images of a bountiful Pacific coastline and
its warmly lit indoor scenes, Ngati can be seen as a nostalgic remembrance
of a pastoral era before many Mäori migrated to the cities, in which iwi
affiliation and communal cohesion offered holistic support to individual and
collective Mäori alike. It can also be seen as a film that offers a benign version
of bicultural relations to a 1980s audience that, within New Zealand, was
increasingly searching for such narratives. These readings are not wholly
erroneous, and indeed I will explore them here, but to view them as the
ways in which the film predominantly works is to miss a series of levels at
which Ngati operates: levels consistent with the kinds of activist concern for
communities and culture that Barclay developed during his 1970s work.
Crucial to any interpretation of the film is a full understanding of the
processes and circumstances through which it was made. For Barclay, the fact
that the film should be as ‘wholly Mäori’ as possible was vital, a point which
meant not only recruiting as many Mäori cast and crew as was feasible, but
also that the production itself should operate in accordance with iwi protocols
and the full collaboration of the Ngäti Porou community at Iritekura marae
in Waipiro Bay, one of the locations where the film was shot. As Barclay said
as the film neared completion, Ngati is ‘about being Mäori…It’s a determined
attempt to say what it’s like being Mäori’.1 In a similar (though more overtly
political) fashion, screenwriter Tama Poata described his script as ‘a statement
of struggle from the indigenous people of New Zealand’.2 Such desire
1. Barclay, quoted in Rongotai Lomas, ‘A First for the Maori: Ngati’, p. 4. In the same interview Barclay
notes that, at the time of the film’s making, it was difficult to find qualified Mäori to work as producers
or directors of photography, so the ideal of ‘100% Mäori crew’ was still some way off (ibid., 4).
2. Tama Poata, quoted in Christina Thompson, ‘Ngati’, p. 28.
54

Communities and Reciprocity
involved a series of complex negotiations with a variety of bodies, and the

implementation of a revisionist film-making practice, that mark Ngati as a
unique instance of film production in New Zealand.
Barclay had brought out of his documentary work of the 1970s a
strong commitment to the idea of an ethical reciprocity in filming Mäori
communities, as well as a desire to involve (and train) Mäori in the production
process in order to create a practice of Indigenous film-making that could
adapt itself to its subjects. It was this desire that was behind his part in the
1986 formation of Te Manu Aute, a national organisation of Mäori workers
in media and communications. As Barclay writes of the collective in Our
Own Image: ‘Te Manu Aute’s attitude to Mäori training is that the only really
effective climate in which to train Mäori people is where Mäori are trained
by other Mäori, in a Mäori environment, in Mäori projects, and with the
explicit expectation of being able to work on Mäori projects in the future’.3 In
the case of Ngati this meant establishing a four-week pre-production training
course, organised with financial and logistical support from the NZFC, the
Labour Department, the National Film Unit and Kodak, held at Hawke’s
Bay Polytechnic at Taradale in November 1985. The rationale behind the
wänanga, to instruct a predominantly Mäori group in the details of film-
making, is a classic example of the evolution of Barclay’s principles since the
making of the Tangata Whenua series. Successful trainees would be used firstly
on a 30-minute drama, Kamate! Kamate!, a two-week production which was
to serve as further training for Ngati, and then on the feature itself. Barclay
has written in detail in Our Own Image of the Taradale wänanga and how
his attempts to create a ‘Mäori environment’ (specifically concerning the
preparation and eating of food and the use of the Polytechnic’s facilities) led
to a number of disputes with authorities.4 Inherent in the difficult relationship
he encountered here is a clear sense of cultural difference over the specifics
of daily life. The communal base Barclay established with his training group
countered the idea of ‘use’ that dominated a public authority sense of the
training space; but it was precisely an understanding of such difference that
Barclay wanted on the set of Ngati. The kind of immersion in Mäoritanga that
he felt the film needed required trained technical practitioners who were at
ease with the conditions the production would encounter.
It is over-simplistic to generalise this kind of pre-production as a form of
‘Mäori only’ essentialism. The training course included non-Mäori, and its
funding origins within different government-supported agencies highlight
3. Barclay, Our Own Image, p. 39. Work undertaken by Te Manu Aute, in turn, led to the formation
of Ngä Aho Whakaari, which works specifically to support Mäori working in film, television and
video.
55

Images of Dignity
a set of interrelationships that complicate the notion of any straightforward

cultural separatism. Certainly Barclay acknowledges that the pre-production
for Ngati needed to base itself in Mäoritanga and to exhibit mana motuhake. The
storylines of the film itself demanded such an approach, as it is unimaginable
that the finished feature, with its fidelity to the values depicted, could have
resulted without such guidance. But, at the same time, Ngati would ultimately
receive a screening at Cannes, which Barclay, along with producer John
O’Shea, writer Poata, and lead actor Wi Kuki Kaa, would attend. In so doing
Barclay was participating in part of the distribution and marketing strategy
that the NZFC required for its major funded films. From this standpoint,
Ngati’s success at Cannes worked to benefit the New Zealand film industry as a
whole, both in commercial and critical terms. The collective nature of feature
film production, its various demands from a variety of interested parties,
means that an Indigenous cinema seeking a substantial audience faces real
difficulties when trying to maintain an existence free from the infrastructure
that comes with any major film industry. It is precisely the challenges of such
a position, whether at the level of debates over funding or in organising cast
and crew for a single shot, which Barclay engages with in the making of all
his most significant films.
The six-week shooting of Ngati followed the Taradale wänanga, the making
of Kamate! Kamate! and extensive consultation with Ngäti Porou over the
script by Barclay, Poata and associate producer Craig Walters. Tokomaru Bay
(which had also figured in the ‘Turangawaewae’ episode of Tangata Whenua)
was specifically chosen as a location because it was Poata’s childhood home,
as well as being an area of natural beauty and suitably remote. Filming took
place here and at neighbouring Anaura and Waipiro Bays, with the production
crew based at the latter. The processes of consultation and choosing locations
were, in the words of producer John O’Shea, an attempt to ‘infuse a Maori
attitude into films about Maori… a slow and spasmodic replacement of brown
for hitherto white attitudes’.5 On 19 January 1986, the day before shooting
began, the production team was formally welcomed as manuhiri on to the
Iritekura marae. This event opened a formal association between the film
and the area, and later received its reciprocal conclusion when the feature’s
premiere was held at the marae in 1987.
Ngati revolves around issues associated with tikanga: inclusiveness, dialogue,
self-determination. It is a communally-made film about community, in which
much of the narrative and thematic dimensions matches and develops the
organisational and technical aspects of film-making Barclay had developed in
his documentary work. The film elaborates three separate narrative strands
that fuse in its overall presentation of society and culture in Kapua. It opens
5. John O’Shea, ‘Brown for White’, p. 42.
56

with the community gathering around the bedside of terminally ill Röpata
(Oliver Jones), who is dying of leukaemia and whose illness is the context for
a discussion of Mäori and Päkehä approaches to medicine. At the same time,
young doctor Greg Shaw (Ross Girven) arrives in Kapua from Australia,
sent by his father who had previously worked as a doctor in the community.
Initially Greg is brash and insensitive to those he visits, but the film reveals
that, born in Kapua to a mother who died shortly after his birth, Greg is in
fact Mäori, although unaware of the fact until his visit. The third narrative
strand, which arches over the whole community to provide a more obviously
social theme, concerns the threatened closure of the local freezing works,
the major employer in the region, due to the lack of business caused by some
Mäori farmers sending livestock to other abattoirs. In this narrative, Röpata’s
father Iwi (Wi Kuki Kaa) agrees at the film’s conclusion to take over the
management of the local livestock station, and thus ensure the supply of stock
to the freezing works.
The issues of control central to Iwi’s employment as station manager have
clear parallels with the various statements Barclay has made about the necessity
for Mäori to be in control of the ways in which images of Mäori are produced,
disseminated and stored (it is worth recalling that the year of its making is
also that of the founding of Te Manu Aute).6 This is only the most obvious
way in which Ngati, for all the tranquil, rural nature of its setting, is a political
film. At the hui called to discuss the threat to the freezing works, the key
speech by Iwi’s daughter Sally (Connie Pëwhairangi) stresses the capability of
the community to manage its own affairs: ‘Our people stick together when
times are hard. We’ve done it in the past – we’ll do it again. Let us run our
own freezing works, our own farms, our own fisheries. Let us run them
ourselves’. Sally, only recently returned to Kapua from an unnamed city, is at
first frustrated by her perception of the restrictions of the community, but the
clear communal self-determination she articulates here is indicative of what
Barclay clearly wants to suggest is a reactivation of whänau and iwi loyalties
in a younger generation. Her ultimate decision to stay, like that of Greg who
agrees to work in the local medical practice as a partner, is a sign of the final
strength of communal bonds. Such strength is, though, as much a political
point for the 1980s as a narrative development in the film’s 1940s storyline.
The neo-liberal economical and educational reforms that began in 1984 with
the election of David Lange’s Labour Government presented new models of
social inclusion and community, and therefore offered specific challenges to
Mäori status as tangata whenua. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith has noted: ‘In the
neo-liberal conceptualisation of the individual, Mäori people in the 1980s
presented a potential risk to the legitimacy of the new vision because Mäori
6. See Barclay, Our Own Image, pp. 63–64.
57

Images of Dignity
aspirations were deeply located in history, in cultural differences and in the

value of the collectivity. Even the Mäori concept of family or whänau seemed
threatening’.7 The clear political dimension of Sally’s speech at the hui, as well
as that of the ultimate control of labour and employment as portrayed in the
film, is an intervention in such debates, and an assertion of tribal legitimacy in
the face of the government’s changing economic and social policies.
At an obvious level Ngati is a clear celebration of Mäori community. The
scenes set amidst core communal activities – sheep shearing, gathering kina
in the shallows, food preparation at the wharenui, evenings in the pub –
are filmed with sunlit colours and warm indoor tones, and are edited and
accompanied by the score to achieve a narrative pace that signifies a quality
of ease and familiarity. There is a clear documentary dimension to this – the
community as focus, the absence of an orthodox fiction film narrative pacing
– but it is important to stress that Barclay employs clear aesthetic devices to
supplement the documentary base. The film’s opening scenes emphasise the
natural beauty of the East Coast setting through a stress on primary colours,
and the strong colour tones are picked up throughout by the use of key motifs
and designs. The red bus on which Greg arrives and leaves, the blue, green and
yellow hats of the protagonists, the bright white shirts of many of the Kapua
residents – all are juxtaposed with the blue ocean and green fields in a visual
palette that underscores the splendours of the location and, crucially, the link
between people and place. The landscape and idea of the social as they are
figured in Ngati are a world away from similar issues in a film such as Vincent
Ward’s Vigil, where the overt focus on the trauma of Päkehä settlement is
conveyed through harsh images of fracture and dislocation, and where the
farm that is the film’s focus is lashed by wind and rain.8 Ngati is a film that
wishes to capture the familiarity in the relationship between a community and
its türangawaewae, and to stress a notion of bounty in the landscape itself. It
does this through ideas of the social, but also clearly through the manipulation
of visual techniques that are unique to film as a medium.
For a Mäori audience (and Barclay has stressed that Ngati has a primal
relationship with the Ngäti Porou tribe of the film’s North Island’s East Coast
setting, and then with other tribal communities)9 the figuring of children
and elders, of the land and sea, and of the day-to-day activities of social life,
constitute an aesthetic and politics of image that stresses the contemporaneity
of iwi culture. At the heart of this sense of the film are principles central to
7. Smith, ‘Fourteen lessons of resistance to exclusion: learning from the Mäori experience in New Zealand
over the last two decades of neo-liberal reform’, in Mulholland (ed.) State of the Maori Nation, p. 249.
8. Barclay has commented that he finds Vigil ‘a disturbing film…it’s disturbing to see the depth of
alienation in the invader and to know that having undergone many hardships, the invader is so lost in
the country of his new-found possession’. Read, ‘The Feathers of Peace’, p. 6.
9. Barclay, email to author, 17 January 2002.
58

Barclay’s conception of Fourth Cinema, namely a commitment to narratives

conceived within the logic of Indigenous communities, and a refusal to only
present Indigenous issues for non-Indigenous audiences. Where a majority
audience might only see a form of idyllic rural collectivity, the codes of
Ngati as seen through an understanding of tikanga present a different film.
For example, the stress on communality and focus on self-determination had
specific relevance to the members of Ngäti Porou and the state of the Waipiro
and Tokomaru Bay communities at the time of the film’s making. These
are issues that Barclay has claimed belong fully within an iwi discussion, but
it is the case that tensions in the area amongst locals and with the police
before and during Ngati’s production give the film’s narrative conclusion a
particular inflection. This was an aspect of the film’s reception that will be
lost on virtually all of its audience, but for Barclay it was a crucial dimension
of the narrative.
In this sense, Ngati operates – as do all of Barclay’s films – on a variety of
levels. It possesses, for example, a standard (if very low key) romantic narrative
in which Greg and local schoolteacher Jenny Bennett (Judy McIntosh),
initially antagonistic towards one another, move towards the possibility of a
relationship as the film progresses. When, at the conclusion, Greg announces
his decision to stay in Kapua to Jenny and Sally, and Jenny leans forward to
kiss him, part of the force of the ending undoubtedly lies in the prospect of
a union between two of the central characters. We can presume that such a
narrative would be familiar to the majority of Ngati’s audience given its status
within a wider tradition of filmic storytelling; indeed it is not unreasonable to
posit the supposition that, for many viewers, this conclusion might be the most
significant aspect of the film’s ending. But for Barclay it is clear that this is not
central to the conception of Ngati expressing a sense of ‘being Mäori’, given
the focus on the collective that he believes central to such an idea. Rather it
becomes apparent that the film’s multiple codes play to differing aspects of its
audience, from the detail that would be only intelligible to Ngäti Porou to the
more generic narratives that concentrate on the maturation of an individual
character such as Greg or the development of the romantic storyline.
Recognising this idea of multiple codes allows for a potentially radical
reading of Ngati, in which Barclay can be seen to offer certain mainstream
narratives in a manner which would generate a wide audience appeal while
actually privileging the iwi element of the film’s content. Seen in this way,
Ngati emerges as a film that operates a strategic exercise we can discuss in
terms of ventriloquism or concealment; subtle manoeuvres through which
arguments rooted in Mäoritanga are placed within more conventional film
storytelling techniques but are readily available to those who know how to
read them. While a Ngäti Porou audience might understand and interpret
59

Images of Dignity
specific dimensions of the film’s narrative that have very local resonances,
other Mäori spectators may choose to privilege Sally’s storyline, or that of
Iwi’s family generally, above the seemingly more central narrative of Greg.
Equally, some of the non-narrative moments of the film, such as shots of
children gathering shellfish or the details of Röpata’s conversations with
his friend Tione (Michael Tibble), may well carry more resonance with an
Indigenous audience than the revelation that Greg is Mäori. It is impossible to
be precise about such readings, but there is no doubt that Barclay sees them as
being viable and that we might see in their very possibility a form of textual
dynamics specific to Fourth Cinema.10
Ngati makes a clear case for the validity and legitimacy of Mäori culture,
conceived on its own terms and (crucially) seen and heard in local images and
te reo. Characters alternate between speaking Mäori and English, and while
much of the Mäori is subtitled, the use of subtitles is not comprehensive.
A speech delivered by an elder (Manare Tatare) at the hui, for example, is
not subtitled and so while a non-Mäori speaking audience might be able to
appreciate a visual sense of the oratory being displayed, the actual meaning
of the words remains unintelligible. This and other moments like it allow
for certain linguistic spaces that can only be accessed by Mäori language
speakers. At the same time, the alternation between languages is also a device
that signals a recognition of the film’s overall audience. The majority of
conversations between Mäori in the film are in English, and clearly this offers
an accommodation for a majority audience both nationally and internationally.
Such a strategy works as an invitation for the film’s audience, though at the
same time the prioritising of the Indigenous narrative, as Barclay conceives it,
remains undiminished.
Ngati’s accommodation and invitations are, however, not issues we should
understand principally as points about narrative. Throughout his career,
Barclay has been aware of the constraints placed on Mäori film-making by
the industry in which he has worked. As he noted in Our Own Image in a
discussion of Ngati, either the Mäori film-maker has to justify that the film
is suitably Indigenous – ‘It is as if you have to prove to the majority culture
that your project will be genuinely Maori (in the eyes of the majority culture)
before you can gain support to make a Maori film’ – or the production will,
in the script development and funding phases, slowly migrate to become a
non-Indigenous feature.11 In part then, we should see Ngati’s positioning
with respect to a majority audience as a necessary element in getting the film
10. For example, Barclay has noted that ‘for me at least, the encapsulating final image for a Mäori audience
is not the romantic storyline so much as the very last shot, Iwi going off past Tione, passing him some
sweets as he goes (from generation to generation)’. Barclay, email to author, 6 November 2006.
60

made. As a production that received an international distribution through

its relationship with the NZFC, it had to offer storylines that would engage
with majority, non-Indigenous, viewers. It is worth noting that, following
Ngati, Barclay decreased his use of this kind of accommodation. As we shall
see, part of the mixed reception that greeted Te Rua can be attributed to
that film’s firm location of its cultural politics within an Indigenous logic
and argument. And Barclay’s last film, The Kaipara Affair, is dominated by a
narrative positioning within the community in Tinopai most affected by the
events that took place there.
As a result, Ngati’s representation of Mäori community and values can be
seen to involve those scenes in which Mäori are the focus, but also those that
function as a consequence of the ventriloquism that takes place during the
narratives that appeal to the majority audience. Whilst Greg is Mäori in terms
of the film’s storyline, the actor who plays him is not, and thus a distinction
exists between him and the other Mäori characters who are acted by Mäori, an
especially important point given the desire of the production team to recruit
as many Mäori cast and crew as was possible. It is instructive that there is
no actual scene is which Greg is informed of his mother’s identity and his
Mäori whakapapa. Instead of such a revelatory moment, we simply cut to a
meditative Greg reflecting on the news after he has been told by Paul Bennett
(Norman Fletcher). ‘So I’m a Mäori’ he says softly, and the fait accompli itself
suggests a reading in which Greg’s status as Mäori, though vital for the film’s
overall narrative development, is possibly of less importance to Barclay than
the representation of those in the film who actually are Mäori. Certainly a
scene in which Greg and Paul Bennett discuss the details of Greg’s Indigenous
identity would have been anomalous in terms of the remainder of the film,
and its absence points, in a coded way, to its actual impossibility in terms of
Barclay’s core representational concerns.
At the same time as it preserves its Indigenous focus, however, Ngati does
contain two narrative strands – those surrounding Röpata and Greg – that invite
readings of New Zealand’s bicultural relations in the mid 1980s. Suspicious of
the Päkehä medicine of local doctor Bennett, Iwi attributes Röpata’s illness to
mate Mäori or ‘Mäori sickness’ and prefers to use the local tohunga Eru (Tuta
Ngärimu Tämati). Yet neither method can save Röpata, and both Bennett
and Eru come together at his tangi as equals whose knowledge and expertise
can clearly benefit the community as a whole. In a similar vein, Eru identifies
Tione as the young figure who will potentially inherit the knowledge and
narratives carried within the tribal sense of community, and it is Tione who at
the film’s close begins the process of instructing Greg in taha Mäori. As Greg
leaves the urupä in which his mother is buried he finds Tione watching him.
Tione tells him that he has to clear the tapu following the visit and proceeds
61

Images of Dignity
to demonstrate how this is done as Greg observes, clearly ignorant of the act
and its meaning. ‘You should do this if you’re a Mäori’ Tione says. ‘But I’m
only a new Mäori’ Greg replies, a phrase deeply significant in a mid 1980s
national context of increasing biculturalism and a Päkehä desire to identify
with Mäori as a mechanism for dealing with the heritage of the guilt associated
with a colonial history. Through Greg, Ngati can be seen to offer the Päkehä
majority within New Zealand the opportunity to connect to the processes of
tikanga and therefore to the possibility of an appropriate model of settlement.
In this reading, Greg’s status as Mäori can be seen as an extension of the
liberalism displayed by Jenny and Paul Bennett, characters who throughout
the film are included in Kapua’s community and who are deeply sensitive
to and understanding of Mäoritanga, although Greg’s ‘conversion’ displays
greater force given his initial hostility to Kapua. The bigot who discovers his
Indigenous roots is here a utopian gesture towards a greater sense of national
inclusion.
Such a reading might seem to cut across Barclay’s commitment to the film’s
central representation of ‘being Mäori’, but it is more profitable to see it in
terms of the kinds of multiple codes discussed previously. Though he places
less emphasis on his Päkehä heritage than on his whakapapa, it is not a context
Barclay denies. For all of the success of Tangata Whenua Barclay has noted
that ‘during the 1970s, I came to be comfortable filming in the Maori and
Pakeha worlds. I had a Pakeha background as much as I had a Maori one, and
I enjoyed working in that Pakeha world too’.12 Ngati’s exploration of bicultural
possibilities can be seen to function in terms of such ‘backgrounds’, though it is
worth stressing that, as a model for national unity, the film makes a prominent
case for a society informed largely by Mäori structures. Like Keri Hulme’s
1983 novel the bone people – equally a key text in the decade’s cultural debates
– Ngati advocates an idea of a bicultural New Zealand that is fundamentally
Mäori in spirit.
Ngati was a major critical success and found an audience both nationally
and internationally. Winning awards for best film, best script, best actor and
best actress at the 1988 national Film and Television Awards, the film also won
Best Film at the 1987 Taormina Film Festival in Sicily and was one of eight
features selected for Critics Week at Cannes in 1987. But, in keeping with
Barclay’s ideas of communal inclusiveness, Ngati’s special screening for Ngäti
Porou at Iritekura marae in 1987 was, for all involved with the production,
the necessary first showing of the film.13 The notion that, having given the
images to the film-makers, the community should be the first recipients
of it as a finished product, completed the cycle of consultation, production
12. Barclay, email to author, 24 September 2006. Original emphasis.

13. See Ann Simpson, ‘Haere Mai Homecoming’, pp. 3–4.
62

and reciprocity that Barclay would later outline as a key strength of Fourth
Cinema.
The screening itself was held in the marae dining room which had once
been, when the region’s population was greater, the community’s local cinema,
before being moved on to the marae to function as an eating space. In a twist
that seems appropriate for the status of the event as the film’s premiere, the
cinema had been the first owned by Robert Kerridge, who would go on
to become one of New Zealand’s major film distributors and own cinemas
nationwide. The response to the film, so crucial to Barclay and others on the
production team, was positive, and Barclay has said that comments made to
him that night after the screening constitute ‘what I still consider the finest
award I have ever had in my years in film-making’.14
Reviewers of Ngati tended to stress its quiet dignity, some noting that
Barclay’s training in documentary training explained the pace of the film
and its stress on inclusive image-making as opposed to a concentration on
linear plot development. Leigh Paatsch, writing in the Australian In Press
magazine, valued the ways in which Barclay ‘ignores the tight formatting and
pacing of modern cinema’ and was ‘content to let the film meander along its
many paths’.15 For others, however, such methods proved confusing. In the
Melbourne Age, Neil Jillett complained: ‘The film is so gently paced that it
often comes to a standstill. The dialogue is heavily expository or completely
opaque and is often delivered as if the actors were reading from idiot cards’.
Jillett’s expectations are possibly best summarised in his comments on the film’s
title. Noting that it means ‘tribe’, he then adds in parentheses ‘a translation
I do not recall being given in the film itself ’.16 The clear need for a sense
of display being signalled here, for Ngati’s Mäori to signal their Indigenous
credentials and offer themselves up for consumption, is typical of the kinds
of cultural fixing inherent within the traditions of ethnographic inquiry and
majority culture ‘research’ on Indigenous peoples. Refuting the force of such
methods was one of the reasons that the film was made in the first place.
In New Zealand the reception to the film was almost uniformly favourable.
‘New Zealand’s finest’ proclaimed Peter Calder in the New Zealand Herald,
while the Sunday Star heralded it as the ‘first born’ feature of a new Indigenous
presence and potential national bicultural sensibility, a phrase (again) startlingly
similar to Joy Cowley’s Listener review of the bone people in which the novel
was seen as a ‘flowering of talent which had not been transported from the
northern hemisphere’, a text that had emerged ‘seeds, shoots, roots and all –
14. Barclay, email to author, 11 October 2006.

15. Leigh Paatsch, ‘Ngati’, In Press, 2 November 1988, n.p. New Zealand Film Commission pressbook
16. Neil Jillett, ‘Irritations and a warm glow from Maori tale,’ The Age, 3 November 1988, n.p.New
Zealand Film Commission pressbook.
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Images of Dignity
from the breast of Papa’.17 If the reaction within New Zealand saw the film as
exemplifying Mäori culture, however, it did so (as the parallel with Hulme’s
novel suggests) in a context of a Päkehä desire for bicultural identification.
To this degree, those narrative strands within Ngati that suggested such
accommodation possibly received more interest than ideas of iwi and whänau
developed from Barclay’s method in Tangata Whenua.
For Barclay himself however, the accolades bestowed upon the film, while
welcome, were of less importance than the impact it had on Indigenous
communities, both within New Zealand and internationally. In both Our Own
Image and Mana Tuturu Barclay sets up a subtle contrast between his feelings
when taking Ngati to international film festivals in 1987 and the response he
received from native Hawai’ians when the film screened there. For all of the
critical success of the film, the European festivals sessions were, he writes, ‘a
little traumatic – at least for me – because, among the queries we were up there
on our own having to field, there were frequently quite probing questions on
the role of indigenous communicators working within a majority culture’.18
As well as a possible personal self-consciousness, this comment signals Barclay’s
awareness of an unease in being seen as a spokesperson, some figure able to
encapsulate a Mäori ‘experience’. He was the first Indigenous figure to fully
direct an Indigenous feature film; as such the expectations were that he would
be able to pronounce on the case of Indigenous peoples worldwide. Instead,
he notes, ‘I felt very naked… there were no research notes to refer to, no
papers from which we could pluck quotes. We had only our own experience
in communications and politics in our own country to draw upon’.19
In contrast, the screenings to Indigenous audiences in Hawai’i were,
ostensibly, to those who ‘don’t know nothin’ about anythin’’, as a schoolteacher
put it to Barclay on the island of Mäui. Part of the traditions surrounding the
Hawai’i International Film Festival in Honolulu involves a selection of the
festival’s films touring the smaller Hawai’ian islands, and it was precisely in
these communities, often of disadvantaged individuals a world away from the
tourism so associated with the islands, that Barclay found affinities with the
Mäori societies he had worked to record, document and represent.20 As he
put it: ‘I had the experience – for the first time – of introducing a film from
our own world to an Indigenous audience and seeing what an impact it made.
Their own people were up there on the screen’.21 At a moment such as this it is
Barclay’s Griersonian impulses that dominate his thinking about the reception
of his films. The educational value of the film within the kind of community
17. Cowley, ‘We are the bone people’, p. 60.
19. Ibid., p. 5.
20. Ibid., pp. 81–3.
64

it depicts far outweighs even the most enlightened critical response. It was
experiences such as this in Hawai’i that led to the development of the ideas of
a non-commercial cinema Barclay would propose in his ‘Celebrating Fourth
Cinema’ article in 2003. As he noted there:
It could be, though, that we will be led astray if we keep taking stock of the
progress of this new cinema by using the definitions and expectations already
so firmly fixed with respect to the other Cinema categories. One thing they all
have in common is that features are expected to at least meet their costs and even
make a profit. This is achieved, by and large, via a system of charging a fee to
each person who sits in the cinema to watch the film. With First, Second and
Third Cinemas, it is unthinkable that the owners and the makers would actually
pay people to come and watch the film, pay, for example, for their transport,
pay for the venue and the print and the projectionist, and pay for a celebratory
communal meal afterwards, at which speeches are made far into the night…
For such a radically new type of cinema to blossom, there would have to be
some alternative base firmly set in the customs and laws of the community that
conceived and manufactured the film. Such a base is not only possible but also
usual within Indigenous frameworks.22
Lest it be thought that such thinking is only utopian, it is worth remembering

that this kind of experience is precisely something Barclay had during the
project of making Ngati. It is a view of film-making that sees it in an umbilical
link to the community from which the images come. Conceived as such, the
idea of a film as a predominantly commercial product becomes an impossibility,
for all that this is the baseline of cinema worldwide. Barclay is even ambivalent
about such initiatives as the Native Festivals put on at the annual Sundance
Film Festival in the United States. While he appreciates the desire to support
Indigenous film-making, and the exposure such festivals give to the work
of Indigenous film-makers, he sees it as an increasingly commodified and
commercialised route towards majority audience acceptance.23 Such views are
less about the value of getting global audiences to see Indigenous films than
about the processes by which the major studios use events such as Sundance to
identify Indigenous ‘talent’. The danger is, Barclay believes, that such policies,
for all their seeming support for Indigenous media, might actually remove the
film-makers from their communities and stories.
Ngati not only presented Mäori in a fiction feature film, under Mäori control,
for the first time, it also established procedures and protocols pertaining to
all aspects of the production that constituted a radical new approach to the
processes of obtaining Indigenous images and telling Indigenous stories. It
was the production that brought Barclay international recognition and that,
in turn, allowed him to make further experiments with his film-making. But
22. Barclay, ‘Celebrating Fourth Cinema’, p. 11. See also Mana Tuturu, p. 237.
23. Barclay, körero/personal interview, University of Leeds, 24 October 2005.
65

Images of Dignity
even as it signalled new opportunities and initiatives, Ngati is also a continuance

of the core values seen in Barclay’s work since the early 1970s. His faith in the
value of community, and his need to work in an appropriate dialogue with it,
remained unchanged from the 1970s through to the time of Ngati’s making.
The film’s central theme of self-determination – ‘let us run them ourselves’ –
was as true of the production as it was of the fictional narrative. Such concerns
are also at the heart of Barclay’s other major feature made in the 1980s, The
Neglected Miracle.
Natural Inequalities: The Neglected Miracle

Barclay’s first feature-length documentary was the product of several years
work across a number of continents in the early 1980s. As he notes in Mana
Tuturu, it was inspired by his reading Pat Roy Mooney’s 1979 book, Seeds of
the Earth: a Public or Private Resource?, a volume Barclay describes as a book that
‘consumed me for half a decade’.24 Barclay was working for a non-government
action group, the International Coalition for Development Action (ICDA)
in London when he first read Mooney’s study of plant genetic resources. For
Mooney, an Indigenous Canadian, the evolving use of gene control and patents
in agribusiness in the 1970s centralised power in the global development of
staple food products in an alarming manner. Historically, the genetic bases
for a number of major food crops are located in specific geographical areas
– the Andes for the potato, Central Asia for peas – and most of these are in
regions of the South or so-called ‘developing world’. With the development
of standardised crop varieties, often as a result of genetic manipulation in
Europe or the United States, the natural biodiversity inherent in certain key
plants comes under threat and can easily be lost. Equally, many of the new
genetically modified crop strains are patented to protect their commercial
value. A resulting irony, as The Neglected Miracle notes, is that farmers in poor
regions that are the natural origins of certain foods, and contain extensive
diversity of types, are often forced to pay for modified versions of crops,
developed in the West, that have their genetic base in the very locations in
which they are subsequently sold.
For Barclay the topic was a version of the kinds of relationship between
Indigenous and majority communities that he had explored in some of his
1970s documentaries and his activist work in Sri Lanka and London in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, and that he would go on to fictionalise (in part) in
Ngati. Writing about The Neglected Miracle in 1992 he was explicit about the
film’s link to the core issues of all his work: ‘It’s a metaphor. To have power
66

over the plants you use for food, for dyes, for fibre, for medicines and so on, is
to have the dignity of sovereignty’.25 ‘The dignity of sovereignty’, here applied
to growers in Peru, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Australia, is also a phrase
utterly central to all of Barclay’s New Zealand work as well. In terms of the
connections between The Neglected Miracle and his 1970s work with Mäori,
Barclay has written of the film’s method that in order to ‘draw together such
diverse strands, we used a story-telling approach which we evolved during
the Tangata Whenua series. It was what these days I call a marae approach… I
sought to have all voices heard’.26
‘Hearing all the voices’ is of course central to Barclay’s film-making practice,
but the internationalist dimension of The Neglected Miracle gives the idea a
subtle new direction. In his documentary work with Mäori, Barclay’s even-
handedness with regards to voices is real enough, but the intelligence and local
knowledge behind the filming often steers the material in a certain activist
direction – for example in his admission that Tangata Whenua was heavily
influenced by Ngä Tamatoa’s political orientation. Working across differing
cultural and linguistic contexts on The Neglected Miracle, the production
team used interpreters and individual contacts in their conversations with a
variety of growers, activists and figures involved in the business of plant gene
modification. However, while the technique of talking and listening is similar
to that of Tangata Whenua, the range of locations in the film meant that Barclay
was unable to access the kind of depth of location-specific information that he
brings to Mäori contexts. The result is that film relies even more than usual
on the force of the juxtaposition of images and statements, as Nicaraguan
farmers angered by the control of their nation’s maize seed banks by the
United States and Mexico are placed alongside Dutch plant breeders talking
of the competition involved in developing new genetic strains, with no use of
voiceover or authorial comment at all. The Neglected Miracle is very much a film
in which the meaning is inherently produced in the viewing process. There
is no doubting the power of the film in its portrayal of the exploitation of
communities and resources, but its faith in the audience’s ability to recognise
the human and political consequences of such actions is unusual even for an
activist documentary production.
For all of the lack of directorial comment, The Neglected Miracle is clearly a
political film. ‘Clients want uniformity’ observes one Dutch tulip grower when
discussing his business, and the costs of such a drive towards standardisation
are clear for the poor farmers of the South attempting to continue traditional
agricultural methods in the face of the multinational firms who control the
world’s agricultural trade. As the film makes clear, the original rationale for
25. Barclay, ‘Amongst Landscapes’ in Dennis and Bieringa, Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, p. 118.
26. Ibid., p. 119.
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Images of Dignity
the United States and Europe taking and preserving genetic samples from
Latin America was ostensibly for conservation purposes, but the consequences
of such actions have become resolutely commercial, with the patented new
genetic forms being ‘owned’ by the firms which have developed them. For
Barclay, the link between such practices and the historical theft of taonga is
clear and explicit and, though it might not seem at first obvious, there is a
foundational link between the processes documented in The Neglected Miracle
and the issues he went on to explore surrounding the guardianship of treasures
and the heritage of colonial history in Te Rua. It is still a question of the
‘dignity of sovereignty’.
In The Neglected Miracle the left-wing liberationist politics of a global
Marxism meet the details of Fourth World Indigenous claim. It is arguably the
one film made by Barclay that fits the criteria of Third Cinema, though even
here it promotes a certain difference, being unusual in its lack of a didactic
commentary. Barclay recounts that during a screening for the New Zealand
government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) at
Lincoln a number of scientists hissed ‘communist’ and left before the film had
completed its first five minutes. Yet for all that the links between resource
control and political agency are clear in the film, Barclay’s conception of
sovereignty evokes other, possibly more complex, dimensions of human
activity. The Neglected Miracle is not a film with any Mäori or even New
Zealand content but it is, in fact, animated by a working idea of mana. When
the film focuses upon a local Peruvian market in which potatoes are not sold,
but rather kept for ceremonial purposes or to be given as gifts, there is a real
sense that it is a notion of cultural and personal dignity and presence – in
the individuals, the act of giving or saving, the idea of community – that
dominates how these products are used in the world. Such an approach to
film-making, with the use of Indigenous value systems as formational and
methodological principles, is central to what Barclay would later outline as
part of the working practice of Fourth Cinema.
It is precisely an absence of any kind of real reciprocity in The Neglected
Miracle’s representation of the use of plant resources that is so striking when
placed in the context of Barclay’s overall film-making, where the idea is so
important. When in the film Dutch breeders and growers argue that it takes
no skill to have or find a gene type, but it does to breed a new variety, they
advance an argument that disavows the need for a reciprocal connection
between poor and rich communities or any acknowledgement that the
location of the wild gene constitutes a site of genuine origin. Instead it is
the logic of the market that comes to dominate the relationship, with a legal
definition of ownership (under the idea of patent) replacing an older idea of
guardianship as the organising principle of the association between primary
68

growers in the South and large corporations in the North. For Barclay, such
terms are tantamount to a form of abuse. In a New Zealand context, the
notions of kaitiaki and mana tüturu are concepts that Barclay came to see as
increasingly important – they are vital to both Te Rua and The Kaipara Affair
for example, as well as the dealings he had with the Film Archive over the
deposit and archiving agreement. He uses them to suggest ways in which
meaningful reciprocity within Mäori communities, and between Mäori and
Päkehä, might continue to evolve. Some of the ways in which these ideas have
developed are clearly found in The Neglected Miracle.
The film makes it clear that Europe and North America need plant types
from the developing world because they are resistant to the diseases that have
eroded the gene pool of European and American agriculture. The ‘wild’
plants of the South offer the opportunity to develop commercial cultivations,
such as, for example, Dutch maize and potatoes (developed from Bolivian and
Peruvian sources respectively). For Barclay, the ironies of such a situation in
terms of global power relations are not lost. But at the same time there is a
potential model of reciprocity in this relationship that might establish more
equitable working relationships between North and South, were it allowed
to evolve. The fact that it does not evolve, that the patenting system rather
creates a new form of ownership and thus a new relationship between the two
communities, becomes another marker of the inequalities between Indigenous
and majority populations. For Barclay, as he made The Neglected Miracle in the
first half of the 1980s, it was a new version of an old story.
Conclusion
Barclay’s two major productions of the 1980s further emphasise the place of
communities and the workings of the communal at the heart of his films.
If Tangata Whenua and the documentary work of the 1970s established the
origins of community consultation in his film-making, by Ngati such concerns
had expanded to take in virtually all aspects of the production process. In
addition, in their content, both Ngati and The Neglected Miracle equally stress
this core belief in the need for communal dialogue, and the consequences
when it is absent. In following what he perceived as the need for community
involvement in all stages of the film-making process, Barclay had developed
a radical form of cinema by the end of the 1980s. His emphasis on körero, on
protocols, and on ensuring that the end product was appropriately returned
to those who had given it, had established a notion of total film-making, an
inclusive process of discussion and advice.
Maintaining these principles in the wake of the success of Ngati posed its
own challenges. Barclay was offered greater opportunities and bigger budgets,
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Images of Dignity
with a wider audience now anticipating his next feature, but in his major
post-Ngati projects his commitment to an engagement with the Mäori world
intensified. At a time in New Zealand when the iwi dimension of Mäori
life was undergoing a transformation with the increasing corporatisation of
collective Indigenous identities, Barclay emerged in the 1990s to challenge
certain new formations of Mäori identities even as he continued his focus upon
the nature of the bicultural nation. If the impact of Ngati might have suggested
that Barclay would take his place as a spokesman for Mäori in the development
of an increasingly post-national New Zealand, his own inclinations led him
away from the potential comforts of such a position. His work subsequent to
the film was as confrontational and provocative as ever.
70

Chapter 4
The Politics of Engagement: Te Rua,

The Feathers of Peace and The Kaipara Affair
T he genesis of Te Rua, Barclay’s second fiction feature film, lay in part in

the interest generated by the global success of Ngati. Representatives of a
public German co-production fund (the Berlin Senate and Film Commission)
saw the film in Cannes and approached Barclay and John O’Shea with the
idea of producing a feature jointly funded by the German investors and the
NZFC. Under the terms of the investment, part of the film had to be set in
Berlin and it also would have to deal with issues pertaining to Mäori. Such
a project was a clear case of the benefits of the breakthrough provided by
Ngati, but for Barclay it was not entirely what he had envisaged following the
completion of the first film. With Ngati and Merata Mita’s Mauri having been
made, and having been successful, by the end of the 1980s, there seemed to
be the possibility of a genuine public Indigenous cinema emerging in New
Zealand, a cinema that would be part of the wider national industry but also
have its own specific characteristics. The NZFC had helped in getting Ngati
to Cannes, and supported Te Rua, but there is some irony in the fact that it
was a European funding source that kick-started the idea of the new film.
As he entered the 1990s, Barclay found that the acclaim awarded to Ngati
hadn’t removed the need to again have the debates, and make the demands,
over the rights to depict Mäori identities and societies. Te Rua, the making
of which was, in Barclay’s words, ‘almost a fluke’, would be a re-engagement
over the contested terrain of Mäori representation, both in its content and in
the context of its production.1
At the heart of this debate for Barclay was the need for access to the support
available for film-makers in New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s. The
existence of the NZFC, as a source of public money for both aspiring and
established film-makers, had been behind much of the success of the nation’s
new wave of film-making from the late 1970s onwards. Barclay’s hope was
1. Barclay, email to author, 6 November 2006.
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Images of Dignity
that, with the success of Ngati and Mauri, a clear Indigenous dimension would
be given to the NZFC’s processes of funding and film development. In fact, he
and other film-makers had to fight for such a presence throughout the 1990s,
and the struggle expanded to include the issues of depositing and archiving at
the NZFA as well. Intriguingly, in its content and thematics Te Rua is itself a
film that deals with an idea of struggle over representation and control, and
it shadows and talks to the concerns Barclay had with the development of the
national film culture during the period. If Ngati did provide Barclay with a
degree of confidence that allowed him to speak out more vigorously, he found
he still had to speak – and indeed make his films – on topics that were familiar
from his documentaries in the 1970s and the pre-production work on Ngati.
That film contained elements of a celebrated rural past, but his subsequent
features have been more sharply politically engaged with both the changing
nature of the Mäori world and the wider politics of biculturalism in New
Zealand.
Spiritual Guardianship: Te Rua

Te Rua addresses issues of rights, ownership and guardianship directly, with a
central narrative focus on the claim made by a group of Mäori on a collection
of tribal carvings held in a Berlin museum. The film is explicitly bound up with
a number of the concerns that surrounded Barclay, as both a film-maker and
as Mäori, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The debates over film funding and
the negotiations, specially those Barclay and other film-makers conducted with
the NZFA with regard to the issues of the kaitiaki status of any Mäori images
offered to the archive for long-term holding, shadow the film’s exploration of
ideas of ownership and activism.2 When, shortly after work on Te Rua was
finished, the archive agreed to introduce a deposit agreement based on the
principle of mana tüturu, Barclay felt that a significant achievement had been
made. Equally, the consequences of negotiations between government and iwi
over Waitangi Tribunal claims raised real questions concerning the methods
through which Mäori might represent their communities in any processes of
claim and arbitration. In its account of how various characters act in relation to
the status of taonga, Te Rua parallels debates within Mäori societies, and in the
nation as a whole, that explored the changing nature of the details of Mäori
political activism at the time of the film’s production.
The film itself revolves around the quest for the return of three carvings
(pou in the flat style of classic Tühoe work) taken from a wharenui by a
member of the fictional Uritoto hapü and subsequently sold to a German in
2. See Barclay, ‘Housing Our Image Destiny’, pp. 39–42.
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The Politics of Engagement
the late nineteenth century, before being moved to Europe to be kept in the
basement holdings of a Berlin museum. Largely set in Berlin, it is framed
overall by a series of marae scenes shot in a self-consciously theatrical manner
(with characters speaking to camera, and the camera itself figured in a reverse
shot) and also contains scenes shot at Cape Palliser on the Wairarapa coast, the
location of the original theft and setting for the return of the central characters
travelling back to New Zealand from Germany. Peter Huaka (Peter Kaa), a
performance poet on tour in Berlin, is drawn into a political movement to
campaign for the return of the carvings and, in an increasingly militant mode,
returns to the Uritoto to organise a group of young Mäori to visit the museum
with a view to reclaiming the carvings by force. Peter’s uncle Rewi Marangai
(Wi Kuki Kaa), a successful patent lawyer in Europe, but a figure who is seen
to be divorced from his Uritoto origins, becomes engaged in the struggle as
well, for both familial and cultural reasons (as his return trip to New Zealand
makes clear). The attempt to reclaim the carvings fails, but Peter’s group,
aided by Rewi, instead take three valuable busts from the museum. Following
a stand-off with the police, both Peter and Rewi are arrested (Peter having
been shot), but the public response to the incident forces the head of the
museum’s Board of Trustees, Professor Biederstedt (Günter Meisner), to sign
a document releasing the spiritual guardianship of the carvings back to the
Uritoto.3
Te Rua is first and foremost an angry film, and one that is as concerned
with ideas of responsibility as it is with issues of justice. The fact that the
carvings are held in Berlin is the source of an immediate anger, and one
that the film expresses fully. On this contentious issue the production itself
encountered controversy – Barclay and his crew were denied permission
(after it had initially been granted) to film at the Dahlem Museum in the
west of the city and eventually shot the museum scenes in the Naturkunde
Museum in east Berlin, a change that Barclay attributes to the worries the
script created for the Dahlem authorities.4 In the film itself, the presence of the
carvings prompt strong reactions in both Peter and Rewi. Physically affected
by their proximity when he first encounters the panels, Peter performs a
formal whakaaraara address in front of them, while for Rewi the presence
of the carvings reanimates the sense of wairua that it is implied he has lost
through his work. There is no doubt that the film fully records Barclay’s
3. It is important to note that Rewi expressly rejects the museum’s offer for the physical return of the
carvings, because the offer is only made on the condition that there is no publicity attached to the
return. A number of commentators on the film miss this, for example Helen Martin in her discussion
of the film in New Zealand Film 1912–1996, but it is vital in an understanding of Barclay’s notion of
mana tüturu (Martin, ‘Te Rua’, p. 154).
4. ‘Guards and Resources’, p. 28. Interestingly, Barclay notes during this interview that he was also
denied permission to shoot a scene on the steps of the National Museum in Wellington.
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Images of Dignity
sense of injustice inherent in the status of the carvings as ethnographic objects

removed from their proper home.
But the principles of mana tüturu involve more than only the physical
possession of the taonga. Key to the film is that it was an Uritoto man who
originally aided in the 1880s theft of the carvings, and it is made clear that
everyone living in the region is related in some way to that one man. The
film asserts that the responsibility for proper care of the taonga lies as much
with admitting to the past in New Zealand as it does with the museum
authorities in Berlin. The family narrative of the tensions between Peter and
Rewi (the young activist and the older lawyer, the one concerned with a
dynamic version of culture, the other working with a system – patenting –
that legalises ownership) thus becomes part of a wider thematic in which the
claim for the return of the carvings is contextualised within the presentation
of an appropriate understanding of the cultural logic of that claim. The idea
of any return of taonga based purely upon a conception of their material
value is anathema to Barclay, and the national context for Te Rua is best
seen to be the increasing corporatisation of elements of Mäori culture in the
early 1990s as negotiations with government concerning the return of land
became embedded in materialist concerns and the language of the market.
The Uritoto scenes in Te Rua, especially those revolving around the presence
of kuia Nanny Matai (Nissie Herewini) and her conviction of the need for the
carvings to be returned, make it clear that the issues of spiritual guardianship
must not be motivated by a sense of material justice alone; that the knowledge
needed to house the carvings is itself the responsibility of the people, and that
it needs to be learned if it has been forgotten.5 Rewi’s trajectory in the film, as
a capitalistic figure forced to confront elements of a culture he has left behind,
makes this clear. Equally, when Biederstedt signs the release form in Berlin,
Nanny Matai in the Uritoto immediately acknowledges that the taonga have
‘come back’, even though they will not be physically returned. Her status
as kuia provides a focal point for the Uritoto Mäori, acting to ground the
community in the core values of the iwi and collective accountability.
Barclay has commented that ‘for many people’ Te Rua is ‘not accessible’.6 In
part, this is clearly (as with the relationship with Ngäti Porou and the details
of tikanga in Ngati) because the primary frame of reference for the film is
within cultural models intrinsic to Mäori communities within New Zealand.
5. The idea of ‘housing’ the carvings is vital to the film. ‘Te Rua’ means ‘the Storehouse’, and is the
location for the carvings in the Uritoto following their original theft. What Te Rua makes clear is that
such a location is as inappropriate for the works as the basement of the Berlin museum (the storehouse
is destroyed during the film), and that, to be living, working elements of culture, the carvings need
to be placed in a social context in which they are understood. A similar idea of how images of Mäori
should be treated is clearly behind Barclay’s argument in ‘Housing Our Image Destiny’.
6. Read, ‘The Feathers of Peace,’ 6.
74

The ideas of value contained within the film might not be apprehended by
those unable or unwilling to work to comprehend them. To this degree, the
film is not as ‘international’ as it might seem, with its focus on the reclamation
of artefacts that seemingly could include any culture in which such theft has
taken place. For Barclay, while this wider context does exist in relation to
the narrative, it is clear that the issues at work are fundamentally located as
questions for Mäori. In Ngati the relationship with Ngäti Porou protocols was
expanded out to suggest an idea of self-determination more widely, and in Te
Rua this sense of a coordinated dimension to the political issues facing Mäori is
further underscored. Having the Uritoto community as a fictional iwi reduces
the connections to a specific location and rather emphasises the film’s ideas of
guardianship and action in terms of a more general organised and politicised
response. As with Barclay’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, the film is continually
shadowed by the actualities of the period’s cultural politics.
In the light of this, Rewi’s return to New Zealand provides an idea of
Barclay’s sense of the need for a corrective to the increasing corporate ethic
of much iwi organisation. In contrast to the hotel rooms, business meetings
and cocktail parties in which he has been seen in Berlin, in the Uritoto
Rewi is contextualised within a number of rural scenes (sheep shearing, the
community gathering at his house, eating in the wharekai) reminiscent of
Ngati, and it is clearly suggested that he needs to re-embrace the core values
of community to offset the moral vacuum that his life as a patent lawyer has
become. Such a move is an explicit rejection of a form of capitalism, but the
stress upon patenting and copyright is, following on from the political stance
of The Neglected Miracle, a specific target because of the manner in which it
potentially turns taonga into commodities. As Barclay writes on this topic in
Mana Tuturu, ‘to re-name Indigenous living treasures as tradable property’
can too often ‘represent an assault on the spiritual foundations of at least some
Indigenous communities and contribute in some way to an unravelling of the
context of their lives and cultures and eventually to the extinction of those
peoples’.7 As a character who comes to realise such logic, Rewi is prepared to
destroy his career and go to jail in order to protect such ‘contexts’. This aspect
of Te Rua is consistent with the global politics of Indigenous self-determination
in the early 1990s, but its inflection is specifically Mäori. Barclay’s unease at
the increasingly capitalistic nature of both iwi in general, and the relationship
between Mäori and Päkehä, is clearly discernible here.
At the same time, the question of the film’s ‘accessibility’ to which Barclay
refers has to be seen in the light of its technical aspects and the structural
nature of its narrative. Te Rua can be a confusing film to watch. Many of
the scenes are unusually short, and there is much cross-cutting that attempts
75

Images of Dignity
to keep the various narratives in play. As a result certain key plot details and
thematics lack a degree of depth in their development. For example, there is
a clear attempt to widen the ideas of political affiliation presented in the film
beyond an Indigenous context alone: a Turkish cleaner (Ozay Fecht) in the
museum identifies with the actions of Peter’s group and helps by copying
keys to allow the activists into the building; much of the actual debate
with the museum’s senior figures over the issues of guardianship is carried
out by African Ambassador Arnold Mboya (Bubacar Jammeh); and in the
siege at the film’s end the police are attacked by anti-authoritarian groups as
immigrant communities watch on. All these narrative elements point to the
ways in which Te Rua suggests a federation of the poor, marginalised and the
Indigenous in its political stance. Yet these links are not always pursued (we
find no real motivations for the cleaner’s actions for example) and the viewer
is left with the impression that the connections are ambitions as opposed to
realised examples of solidarity.
With this in mind however, there is no doubt that some of the feeling of a
disjointed narrative produced by Te Rua is due to Barclay’s refusal to engage
with the orthodoxies of narrative film-making. The self-conscious figuring of
the camera in some of the Uritoto scenes (‘Are you rolling?’ asks Taki Rumu
[Matiu Märeikura] to camera as the film opens) echoes similar usage in some
of Barclay’s 1970s work, such as Ashes. It suggests a desire for an aestheticised
element to the narrative and its politics. Unlike Ngati, which is a deceptive film
in terms of its technical aspects, with many of the revolutionary techniques
prompted by considerations of tikanga not automatically obvious on an initial
viewing, Te Rua carries its narrative and technical difference in an upfront and
obvious manner. The editing is frequently abrupt, the overlapping storylines
place demands on the viewer not common in fiction feature films and the
pacing of the film is equally unorthodox. Such difference parallels the political
points the film wishes to convey, and can be seen as a product of Barclay’s own
commitment to a necessary radicalism. Nevertheless, there are discontinuities
between the different film-making styles in Te Rua, and it is not easy to tell the
relationship between the self-consciousness such as that displayed in the film’s
opening and the more orthodox narrative Berlin scenes. Barclay and producer
John O’Shea argued over the editing of the film, a conflict that might have
owed something to the ways in which its narrative is presented.8 For all of its
engagement with contemporary cultural politics, the fact that the film is the
one major feature that Barclay has made that doesn’t have a firm documentary
base possibly influences its overall style. It lacks the grounding common to his
other work and such difference shows in the overall structure.
Te Rua continues the expression of the issues surrounding rights of
8. For details of the dispute over the final edit of the film, see Barclay, A pistol on the table, p. 6.
76

ownership and guardianship that had dominated The Neglected Miracle and
would occupy Barclay right up to the publication of Mana Tuturu in 2005.
Importantly, however, the film is the first account of these topics in Barclay’s
work that has a specific focus on New Zealand, reflecting his increased sense
of the interdependence of all areas of film-making and cultural activity –
producing, funding, archiving, with political and social activism as well – in
the country at the time. There is no doubt that the film was not as successful
as Ngati, and to some it may have seemed a curious production with which
to follow the breakthrough of the previous film (Barclay claims the film
was ‘universally loathed outside Maoridom’ and that, as a consequence of its
making, he was ‘seriously offside with many of my old friends and supporters
in the Pakeha world’9); but Barclay’s observations about the difficulties for
Mäori in getting films made should be remembered here. Though a more
high profile figure, and a more confident one, than in the period before Ngati,
he still was not free to make whatever film he wanted. In addition, it can be
seen that Te Rua does continue a number of the concerns of Ngati, though it
lacks the processes of ventriloquism that marked the earlier film and to some
degree disguised its activism. Both films advocate the need for appropriate
tribal protocol and self-determination, for an engagement with majority
culture, and for individuals to come together to act as a community. Both also
refuse to follow the standard codes of narrative film-making. Te Rua does not
carry a packaged idea of Indigenous culture however, an idea that can come
from a (mis)reading of Ngati; rather it is a film that makes its politics overt. If
there were any commentators who imagined that Ngati’s success would lead
to Barclay moving away from an activist commitment to the representation of
Mäori, Te Rua proved that he was, if anything, more concerned with the issues
involved in the depiction of Indigenous community.
History and the Present: The Feathers of Peace

The commitment to the cultural politics of contemporary New Zealand, and
especially the sense of accountability, that was central to Te Rua became more
pronounced in Barclay’s fourth major film, the documentary feature The
Feathers of Peace. The film recounts the historical events that almost obliterated
the Moriori people of Rëkohu/the Chatham Islands (an island group some
870 kilometres east of mainland New Zealand) from the 1790s to the 1870s,
and was a topic Barclay came to in the early 1990s after seeing Bill Saunders’s
1980 television documentary Moriori, and especially upon reading Michael
King’s book Moriori: A People Rediscovered (1989). The first British visit to the
9. Barclay, quoted in ‘Present tense, future perfect’, New Zealand Herald, n.p. The second quote is
contained in an email to the author, 24 January 2008.
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Images of Dignity
islands was that of a Royal Navy Brig, the Chatham, blown off course en route
to Tahiti from New Zealand, in 1791, but the key contact that determined the
history of the Moriori was not the arrival of the British but rather the 1835
invasion of the islands by the Mäori Ngäti Tama and Ngäti Mutunga tribes,
who were pushed out from mainland New Zealand following a succession of
conflicts in the Taranaki region of the North Island. Upon arrival, the tribes
asserted their right to ‘walk the land’ and claim the island as conquerors,
enslaving and killing the Moriori, the original inhabitants, and leaving them
to live on small areas of poor land. Following an appeal to George Grey,
the Governor-General of New Zealand, a survey of the islands was carried
out and a Native Land Court established to adjudicate on the claims of land
ownership. Despite the fact that many of the Mäori returned to Taranaki in
the 1860s, the court ruled in 1870 that Ngäti Tama and Ngäti Mutunga were
the rightful owners of the land, by virtue of conquest, and awarded them
97.3% of the islands. The Moriori were given the remaining 2.7%, largely
rugged forest or wetlands.
In an innovative method that is consistent with Barclay’s continual revision
of filmic realism since Tangata Whenua, The Feathers of Peace captures all these
historical events as news. The film’s key intervention in the telling of Moriori
history is the presence of cameras and an interviewer (Alan de Malmanche)
that render the past as viewing for the present (‘I see history as less about the
past and more as a contest in the present’ Barclay has said)10. Using detail
from historical records, participants from the Moriori, Mäori and British
communities involved either talk to the camera, are interviewed, or are filmed
engaged in the specifics of arrival and conquest. In the light of the historical
record that is the Land Court’s decision, The Feathers of Peace offers its own
cinematic narrative as a counter-history, a space for Moriori in particular to
articulate their version of events, and to lay a claim for an idea of justice.11
In terms of its film-making methods, the film’s techniques of interviews,
created newsreels and the use of actual written records in the process of
recounting history has predecessors in Peter Watkins’ 1964 BBC documentary
series Culloden, and the Cuban feature La Primera Carga al Machete/The First
Charge of the Machete, made by Manuel Octavio Gómez in 1969. In the mid
1990s, Barclay had considered making a film, consisting entirely of still
photographs, based on the journals of James Cook’s Endeavour visit to New
Zealand in 1769.12 The ideas persist in The Feathers of Peace, in which the moving
image is frequently interrupted by the use of stills and where the majority of
the words spoken are taken from contemporary records such as letters, journal
10. Barclay, interviewed by Peter Calder, ‘The Feathers of Peace’, p. 8.

11. See Stephen Turner, ‘Cinema of Justice: The Feathers of Peace’, pp. 9–11.
12. See ‘Endeavour beyond the still’, p. 24.
78

entries and court testimonies. Such techniques are a continuation of the

basic idea of ‘hearing all the voices’ that is central to Barclay’s documentary
practice, but they carry a special poignancy given their original status as part
of the historical accounts of the ways in which Moriori culture and society
was devastated.
For Barclay, the project of The Feathers of Peace articulated a number of
key unsettling conundrums that ran alongside his desire to present the story
of Moriori dispossession. Passionately concerned with the effect on Mäori
society and culture of white settlement and colonial history in mainland New
Zealand, he was only too aware of the complexities that come with an analogous
narrative of invasion in which it is the Mäori who are the aggressors. In part
the film is clearly a product of Barclay’s unease at the rise in the 1990s of a
reworked, and largely constructed, idea of ‘warriordom’ within Mäori culture.
The careful cultural intricacies of knowledge and responsibility vital to his
work, from Tangata Whenua to Ngati and Te Rua, outline a full and complex
idea of Mäori society, but the success of Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors,
with its emphasis on urban deprivation and competing versions of masculine
behaviour, promoted to both a national and international audience a vastly
different portrayal of Mäori life. Keenly aware that both Tamahori’s film and
the 1990 novel by Alan Duff on which it was based were being discussed by
some within New Zealand as social documents that purported to depict the
reality of contemporary Mäori existence, Barclay created in The Feathers of
Peace a portrayal of what ‘warrior’ activity might be. As he commented in an
interview following the first screenings of the film: ‘Our tolerance of violence
is that we have Jake the Muss [the central character of Once Were Warriors]
hanging in rugby league clubrooms as a hero. We have a whole generation of
Maori that have accepted Once Were Warriors as part of their culture and very
few have spoken out about whether it’s accurate or the effect it might have’.13
Within The Feathers of Peace, the idea of the ‘tolerance of violence’ is explicit
in Moriori responses to outside contact. Following an initial landfall conflict
with the British in 1791 in which one of the Moriori was killed, the people
of the Chatham Islands resolved never again to greet visitors with any activity
that could be deemed as provocation. It is this law, Nunuku’s law (named after
Nunuku Whenua, the elder who argued most powerfully for its adoption),
that proscribed any Moriori attempt to resist the Mäori invasion, with the
result that both Ngäti Tama and Ngäti Mutunga violence went unopposed.
Warrior status, Barclay shows here, led to the slaughter of innocents.
The film conveys this consequence of conflict most powerfully through
the interviews with Moriori. In an opening scene Riwai (Sonny Kirikiri), a
Moriori spokesman, stress the people’s philosophy of peace: ‘Killing is not our
13. Read, ‘The Feathers of Peace’, p. 5.
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Images of Dignity
way. It is forbidden’. The feathers he wears in his beard are the symbols of the
society’s commitment to non-violence. Following the first visit by the British,
the early nineteenth-century development of trading and sealing brought
more Europeans to the islands. Waiteka (Star Gossage) is a local woman
who married trader Richard Freeman (John Callen). For her, this initial
development of inter-cultural relations is profitable and non-problematic:
‘We’re well off really. We have our shellfish, eels, we have our berries, and
the ships are coming in more and more’. But following the Ngäti Tama and
Ngäti Mutunga invasions, the film returns again to interview Waiteka, now
finding her a slave following Freeman’s pragmatic remarriage to Moemoe
(Herena Wood), a Ngäti Tama woman. Physically broken by her new life of
servitude that is typical of the effect on Moriori following the arrival of the
Taranaki Mäori tribes, Waiteka remembers the Ngäti Tama landfall: ‘They
just appeared with their muskets and tomahawks. They did not speak. Their
eyes were fixed ahead of them and they rode straight through. And these were
the people we directed to food, water and clearings to plant’. Moemoe, when
interviewed, is asked whether she took part in any of the Ngäti Tama killing
of the Moriori. Initially reticent, she ultimately replies: ‘Yes, what would you
expect? It’s part of our custom’.
The power of the interviews is the way in which they offer what Stephen
Turner has termed ‘a sense of justice or truth-to-history that the positive facts,
considered alone, denied the Moriori in courts of law’.14 Thus it is actually
within its cinematic qualities, its ‘visceral visual affect’, that The Feathers of
Peace articulates ‘historical truth’ and demands a reconsideration of events
in terms of a wider idea of justice.15 The irony is that it is precisely because
the Moriori were prepared to share the island with the Mäori tribes that the
Land Court, using the protocol of occupation at work on the New Zealand
mainland, decided in favour of the Mäori. This is one thing in the historical
record, but as seen in the dramatised submissions to the Land Court from Te
Wetini (Piripi Daniels) and Hiriwanu Tapu (Calvin Tuteao), two of the last
surviving Moriori, it displays a power that is entirely the product of cinematic
construction. The traumatised nature of Hiriwanu Tapu’s account in particular
is haunting in its presentation of loss. There is a logical connection here to
the technical aspects of interviewing that characterised Barclay’s work on the
Tangata Whenua series, and the extension of these techniques in Ngati. For all
the obvious ‘fiction’ of the film, the wilful suspension of belief in the empirical
nature of historical accountability, in The Feathers of Peace the concerns of the
community, and the consequences of those concerns in the present, are still
paramount. Discussing the acting in the film, Barclay’s comments could have
14. Turner, ‘Cinema of Justice’, p. 9.

15. Ibid.,p. 9.
80

been true of his work on Ngati: ‘That type of drama is deeply religious but
it’s also secular in the sense that it’s dealing with the here and now. I think
that the communal dramatic process, which has some religious overtones, is
what’s going on in the making of something like Feathers. So when I’m trying
to figure out why those performances feel apt I think it’s somewhere in that
area’.16 As with so much of his work, the religious dimension is foundational
to an understanding of its effect.
At the same time as such issues of community stress the continuity of
The Feathers of Peace with Barclay’s previous work, the film’s commentary
on the issues of conquest and peace continue the analysis of Mäori/Päkehä
relations inherent in his film-making. It is precisely because the Land Court
ruling against the Moriori borrowed the working law of mainland New
Zealand that, for all the specifics of the Mäori invasion dealt with in the
film, its deliberation upon the nature of conquest and occupation refracts
back on to the dynamics of the European settlement of New Zealand. As
Turner notes, the legal arguments in the film are ‘inevitably understood in
terms of the conflict of white settler and Maori’.17 This parallel narrative is
a constant shadow throughout the film (as with Ngati it functions as a form
of ventriloquism), especially in the nuanced accounts of how elements of the
Church, trading communities and the Court colluded with the exploitation
of the Moriori. For Barclay, the violence in the film is the violence of the
invader, because invasion and violence become synonymous. In contrast, the
decision of the Moriori to stress their pacifism is a point about dignity and
Barclay has stressed what he terms the Moriori ‘gift of peace’ was his ‘primary
motive’ in making the film.18 Even as it uses the historical record to point to
a too-easily forgotten moment of near cultural erasure, and even as it gathers
together the material that demands a reconsideration of justice, The Feathers of
Peace is a film that pays testament to that dignity.
Activism, Community and Governance: The Kaipara Affair

If Te Rua and The Feathers of Peace portrayed Barclay’s intervention in specific
moments – the commercialisation of iwi and the place in the national
imagination of Moriori – of contemporary New Zealand history, then his last
feature The Kaipara Affair, ostensibly an understated film about fishing rights,
constitutes another representation of local politics that is at the same time his
most sophisticated engagement with the wider national context of government
and bicultural relations. The film is also his most poetic, particularly in the
16. Read, ‘The Feathers of Peace,’ pp. 5–6.
17. Turner, ‘Cinema of Justice’, p. 10.
18. Read, ‘The Feathers of Peace’, p. 4.
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Images of Dignity
complexity of its structure and the methods through which it delivers its
narrative. Finally, it is, in the way it marshals its activism and suggests ideas of
community, the film that most exemplifies Barclay’s emerging definition of
Fourth Cinema. It also became a film with an afterlife that offers a provocative
parallel to its own central themes, when an edited version of the feature was
produced for television in July 2006 without Barclay’s consent and screened
despite his opposition. The arguments that raged over the recut of The Kaipara
Affair spoke of issues of ownership, guardianship, protocols, collaboration and
use in ways that the film itself recorded and debated with regard to fishing
rights.
In its subject matter, The Kaipara Affair presents a central topic that is
consistent both with Barclay’s career up to the time of its making and with
the ideas of cultural production and its legal contexts that lie behind his
thoughts exploring Fourth Cinema and in Mana Tuturu, both projects he
was working on during the feature’s production. The film revolves around
contested claims for fishing rights in the Kaipara Harbour, north of Auckland,
in particular between fishermen local to the area and commercial fishermen
who travel to the harbour from other parts of New Zealand. As such it enacts
the opposition between community and commerce, between what Barclay
himself terms the ‘fringe’ and the ‘centre’, which typifies much Indigenous
activism on a global level, activism that has in turn led to the production of a
number of key Indigenous cultural texts.19 Patricia Grace’s 1986 novel Potiki
explores exactly such themes, with a coastal North Island community resisting
property development, while Alanis Obomsawin’s 2002 film Is the Crown at
War with Us? is even more explicitly suggestive of Barclay’s film, centred as it
is on a conflict over fishing rights in New Brunswick between authorities and
Indigenous Mi’gmaq. Disputes over the sea parallel the many land claims that
have marked Indigenous activism globally throughout post-settler history.
For Barclay, at the heart of the Kaipara dispute are issues of law, rights
and governance (he had initially thought of calling the film The Governed).20
The film, which began shooting in July 2004, explores the tension that exists
between customary law, or lore, and the common law that dominates New
Zealand society and correspondingly frames much commercial fishing activity.
It also questions the processes by which small communities are governed
by state regulations that emanate from a political centre. The Kaipara Affair
documents how a local activist, Mikaera Miru, and other community activists
based in the small town of Tinopai placed a rähui on a section of the Kaipara
Harbour in 1997 as a mechanism to protect fish stocks from over-exploitation
by commercial fishermen. Despite pressure from the commercial fishing
19. Barclay, quoted in Masters, ‘Harbouring resentment in a place of beauty’, n.p.

20. Barclay, email to author, 15 December 2006.
82

sector, the rähui was recognised by the Ministry of Fisheries in 1999 and
lasted until 2001 when it then lapsed. Through a variety of conversations with
those involved in the community activism, and with other opinions voiced
by experts on fishing and the status of the law, The Kaipara Affair presents the
dispute over the harbour as a paradigmatic example of the contested issue of
government in New Zealand.
On one level The Kaipara Affair is, like all of Barclay’s other films, about
the rights of Indigenous sovereignty. ‘We still have sovereignty on our land’
Miru asserts during a powerful statement recounting the settlement history
of the area and the attempts to dispossess local iwi. However, the film is
noticeably less focused on iwi than Barclay’s other features. Though Miru
clearly had many communications with iwi and kaumätua (especially from
Ngäti Whätua) during the dispute, and it was iwi protocols that framed the
customary use of the land, it is not these conversations that are recorded.
Rather the film presents the core community opposing the activities of the
commercial fishermen as noticeably bicultural, made up of Päkehä and Mäori
both involved in fishing and not, and comprising those who have lived in
the Kaipara all their lives and others who have moved to the harbour. The
composition of the activist group is important, since (as with Ngati in the
1980s) its representation posits an idea of bicultural community based upon
Indigenous principles. Päkehä in the film, such as Graeme Withers, a key
local activist and organiser, openly identify with Mäori values but stresses the
need for collective communal action: ‘this is an issue for us all’ he asserts at a
hui near the film’s start, ‘I would like to not think that I couldn’t get in my
waka and catch me a fish’. But more important than this is the assertion that
the appropriate governance of the harbour and its resources, the model way of
conserving fish stocks, is based in Indigenous practices that are recognised by
all sections of the community, Indigenous or not (the point is made by fisheries
experts in the film that, in the Pacific, Indigenous conservation practices have
traditionally proved to be very successful in maintaining fish numbers). The
rähui emerges as a traditional method of coping with a contemporary situation,
and the power and relevance of Indigenous forms of governance and control
are emphasised and underscored as a result.
For Barclay, the consequences of this are fundamentally more governmental
and legal than cultural. In the same way that The Neglected Miracle and Te Rua
explored the methods by which Indigenous resources become commodified
and subject to regulation because of their perceived status as ‘property’, The
Kaipara Affair notes that the common law base of New Zealand similarly
codifies the issues and areas that come under its jurisdiction. The ways in
which the law protects the commercial fisherman when Miru threatens them
(he recounts how, in 1991, he fired shots over some boats in order to scare
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Images of Dignity
them away and was subsequently taken to court) enacts an idea of protection
that is not accorded to the Indigenous knowledge of the harbour or the iwi
who have traditionally used it. Equally, the backdrop to the over-fishing itself
is the tension created by the 1986 introduction of the quota management
system in the commercial fishing sector, a piece of legislation that effectively
operated a method of property rights over the sea and one that iwi challenged
in the High Court in the late 1980s because of the way it excluded Mäori
customary rights.21 In both these instances the performance of the law creates
whenua as property, and fails to accommodate any idea of customary land. It
is no coincidence that the final third of The Kaipara Affair includes a number
of conversations with estate agents who discuss how valuable the land around
the harbour has become because of buyers from Auckland seeking to develop
holiday homes there. ‘It’s got everything people really want’ Helen Smyth is
told. ‘People from Auckland want to get away from the pressure and they want
their privacy. That is their number one priority’. The Kaipara emerges here as
some kind of vacation terra nullius, a peculiarly contemporary phenomenon
that nevertheless is an ironic return to the initial processes of nineteenth-
century settlement.
In terms of its depiction of governance, the film is full of accounts of
activist meetings and the discussion of reports produced to be presented to
the Ministry of Fisheries in Wellington, but – as Miru wryly observes – his
firing of a single shot in anger created far more of an effect than any number
of diplomatic representations (when a wider Kaipara study group replaced
that organised in Tinopai, many of the activists became disillusioned, feeling
that their initial concerns had become lost in bureaucracy). The feeling that
life on the Kaipara is controlled by those in Wellington is central to Barclay’s
investigation of the difficulties of community sovereignty. In its second half,
the film provocatively intercuts conversations about fishing with dramatisations
of selections from Plato’s Republic, performed by local college drama students
and their teacher. Plato’s ideas of what constitutes citizenship and of how
certain sections of society might be ‘cast out’ because they present the wrong
collection of attributes offer telling insights into the power relations inherent
in the governing of the Kaipara.
Even more provocative, however, is the film’s use of Iraqi poet Emad Jabber.
Jabber, living in exile in New Zealand, engages in a series of conversations
with Smyth and Miru that juxtapose issues of governance in Iraq and New
Zealand. When Jabber talks of the questions that can now be asked of
central government in the post Saddam Hussein regime, questions that were
21. See Matanuku Mahuika, ‘Mäori Fishing’ in Mulholland (ed), State of the Mäori Nation, p. 237. The
claims over fishing rights continued and led to the 1989 Mäori Fisheries Act, the 1992 Treaty of
Waitangi Fisheries Claims Settlement Act, and finally the 2004 Mäori Fisheries Act.
84

impossible under dictatorial rule, the film establishes parallels with a New
Zealand context in terms of the rights of individuals and communities to
challenge the institutions of centralised power. Barclay is well aware that, to
some, such a link may seem absurd, given the marked differences between the
two countries. It is, however, part of the confrontational style of film-making
that he has practised since the making of Tangata Whenua, and consistent with
the kind of activism his films promote. It also fits elements of Miru’s own
protest in the Kaipara dispute. When he extends the issues surrounding the
Kaipara into a discussion of sovereignty in New Zealand, Miru immediately
links his sense of the situation with that of the American presence in Iraq. It
is a radical moment in the film, but by no means one that lacks legitimacy.
The film closes with Jabber reciting a poem in Arabic that exhorts its listeners
to ‘stand firm’ and practice resistance, and the intercutting of his reading it
with images of those Tinopai residents central to the dispute establishes an
equivalence that is both artistic and understated.
These debates concerning community and citizenship place The Kaipara
Affair firmly within Barclay’s core concerns throughout his film-making. He
lived in Tinopai for the three years prior to commencing the filming and as
such could represent his plans for the film to the people it would depict not as
an outsider, but as the project of one who came from their midst. The genesis of
The Kaipara Affair thus exemplifies the ideas of community connection central
to mana tüturu principles, though here those principles apply to a collectivity
wider than iwi alone. Ultimately this sense of inclusion runs centrally through
the film, with Miru’s passion matched by those of Päkehä figures such as
Christine and Peter Yardley, who speak eloquently of the tensions caused by
the dispute. For all that he might be perceived as an activist who focuses on
Mäori issues alone, Barclay is a film-maker for whom common cause between
cultural communities is undoubtedly attainable. Central to such a possibility
however, is a necessary recognition of what he sees to be the primacy of
Indigenous claim. As the film asserts though, the fact that Mäori forms of
governance offer a working model for a society that extends beyond Mäori
alone is a testament to their appropriateness for community in New Zealand
in a wider sense, and is not any kind of essentialist conclusion limited only
to those who are Indigenous. Barclay may well agree that the fish in the
Kaipara Harbour are for ‘all New Zealanders’ (an argument advanced in press
coverage of the dispute),22 but he will argue that this is only possible if they
are protected through protocols based in methods that have safeguarded the
stocks for generations.
All the above observations of The Kaipara Affair’s representation of
22. See the comments made by Fisheries Minister David Benson-Pope in Masters, ‘Harbouring resentment
in a place of beauty’, n.p.
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Images of Dignity
activism and politics could have been made were it a traditional example
of documentary realism, but it is in the structure and form of the film that
Barclay achieves a subtlety and sophistication that makes it his outstanding
feature. A number of the core details common to his other documentary work
– the use of an interlocutor, the focus on conversations, the anti-narrative
method – are equally present here, but their organisation and juxtaposition
present an intricacy of narrative development that extends Barclay’s ideas of
hui and ‘talking in’ to new levels of complexity. As an example, the placing
of the rähui is arguably the single most significant narrative ‘event’ covered
by the film. It is the rähui that stands as a marker both of the community’s
defiance and of its organisation and mobilisation of the traditions of customary
law; in many way it exemplifies the issues the film depicts. Yet there is no
introduction to the processes by which the ban was laid down, no description
of the immediate contexts through which it came to be used, and no initial
sense of its importance. Rather the first mention of the rahui itself actually
comes in some reflections from Raewyn McDonald about the hängï called to
celebrate the event. It emerges as a tangential reflection during a conversation
about something else, before then moving to become more obviously central
to the issues of the film itself. This kind of narrative flexibility is typical of the
production.
Within the traditions of activist documentary, it might be expected that
The Kaipara Affair will offer a clear linear account of the details of the dispute,
possibly through the use of a voice-over. Merata Mita and Alanis Obomsawin
both use such techniques in their documentaries dealing with conflict, and
such clarity of presentation adds considerable weight to the depiction of the
events represented. But Barclay’s method in the film is altogether more open
and fluid. Much time is spent discussing incidents that have no direct relation to
the dispute itself; at one point local residents Gwen and Bill Miller discuss how
a shark was caught close to the shore, and the whole story is illustrated with
photographs now kept in a family album. All these scenes work, however,
to stress a sense of community and communication through a broadening of
what is, in effect, the characterisation of those involved (in discussing her initial
involvement with the film’s development, Smyth refers to reading the synopsis
and calls those involved ‘characters’). Thus Miru emerges as a maverick figure,
the central player in the activism and one who uses the context of nineteenth-
century land dispossession to frame his part in the dispute. Others, such as Nan
Worthington, Stella Clyde and Raewyn McDonald, have quieter roles but are
seen to be vital participants in the overall community struggle. The manner
in which the film records the wider stories of all these figures deepens the
texture of communal involvement. Barclay refers to this process as a ‘sleight
of hand’ which produces a ‘contexting’, noting that ‘things which would
86

likely not have survived the first hour of the edit in a top-rate current affairs
programme are left in. Perversely, extra space is made for them. We can place
them as people; we are given time to listen to what they have to say’.23 The
people of the Kaipara, the film asserts, are more than simply the parts they
play in the dispute. As such, the relevance of the idea of self-governance to all
aspects of daily life on the harbour receives greater emphasis. The method is
an extension of the ‘marae approach’ to film-making Barclay had identified
with his making of The Neglected Miracle; again all the voices are to be heard.
Images at the end of the film, where many of the central protagonists are seen
in slow motion and the film colour changes to sepia, stress this sense of the
centrality of the ordinary people at the heart of the dispute.
In terms of ‘hearing all the voices’ however, The Kaipara Affair introduces
a new technique, resulting in a process of listening that differs from that of
Barclay’s previous films. From Tangata Whenua onwards, Barclay’s core method
for presenting speakers has been to keep a fixed camera on the figure talking,
recording their speech with a minimum of intervention. In The Kaipara Affair,
however, there are long passages of speech in which the speaker is not figured;
rather the images accompanying the words are seemingly disconnected – rain
on the windscreen of a car, water currents in the harbour, vistas of landscape,
birds circling in the sky. The shots themselves create a feeling of impressionistic
abstraction – they are often of the whenua, but certainly not inviting any
kind of ethnographic gaze, offering visual patterns rather than stressing the
camera’s claim to record. Barclay nearly always cuts to the speaker at some
point during the speech, but this linking of sound and image may only take
up some ten percent of the total talk itself. The result of such camera use and
editing practices emphasise the principal sense of difference that Barclay has
stressed as being integral to Fourth Cinema practice – ‘The camera, cut loose
from First Cinema constraints and in the hands of the natives does not work
anything like as well… The First Cinema enterprise is likely to be greatly
deflated if there is a camera ashore, a camera outside First Cinema, a camera
with a life of its own’.24 Barclay’s camera has always had ‘a life of its own’, but
in The Kaipara Affair this idea is extended to achieve a greater sophistication of
image and theme. Possibly counter-intuitively, the abstraction of the visuals
makes the viewer concentrate more on what is being said. The spoken word
achieves greater resonance, while the effect of the combination of word and
image creates an aesthetic effect, a sense of what Barclay always thought of as
‘poetry’ in his work, that further underscores the film’s central thematics. In
the ways it relies on the audience to work to construct meaning by holding
the different strands of the narrative in play, The Kaipara Affair is reminiscent
23. Barclay, A pistol on the table, p. 3.

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Images of Dignity
of the structural complexities of The Neglected Miracle. In both films Barclay

places a large degree of trust in the viewer, having a faith that the intricacies
of the issues involved will be comprehended.
In March 2005, a 133-minute edit of the film was produced and subsequently
shown on the New Zealand Film Festival circuit, premiering in Auckland
on 10 July 2005. As the production had been funded by NZ On Air and
TVNZ, negotiations were opened to produce a recut of the film that could
be screened on television. Anticipating that this would be the case, Barclay
wrote a ‘director’s report’ on the film following the first edit. In the report,
written for the production company He Taonga Films and the film’s producer
Don Selwyn, he noted:
A ‘long-version’ of this documentary is now complete. It runs at 2 hours 13
minutes. While this version will in due course be valuable for festival and
community use and release and DVD, it is likely longer than TVNZ’s expectation
of what is screenable on the network. Once an executive decision is made about
just what length is going to be best for TVNZ’s purposes, we are geared to
cut the long-version down to length in a single day in the editing suite. The
asymmetrical construction of the documentary makes this possible.25
The report gives further thoughts on the nature of any potential edit. ‘The
more minutes are removed from the existing edit’, Barclay writes, ‘the more
the context will be diminished, and, as context is removed, the more our
core cast will be turned into “spokespersons” on issues… In the case of this
documentary, duration, contexting, cultural probity and core cast safety are
intimately linked’.26
Barclay is unsure if this report ever reached anyone at TVNZ, but in
September 2005 the network communicated with He Taonga Films that it
was expecting the production company to honour the delivery of ‘a cut of the
film at the contracted duration of 70 mins’.27 For Barclay, the 70-minute cut
was news. His original working running-time was a real time of 90 minutes,
which had been subsequently overrun. In February 2006, Barclay found out
that Selwyn and film editor Davorin Fahn had produced a 70 minute version,
without his knowledge, which had been submitted to TVNZ. Despite a series
of negotiations with NZ On Air, and Barclay publishing his own report on
the matter (entitled A pistol on the table) in May 2006, the recut was screened
on TV One in July of the same year. At his insistence, Barclay’s name was
removed from the credits of the televised version in the week prior to the
film’s showing.28

26. Ibid., p. 2.
27. Phillippa Mossman, email to Don Selwyn, 12 September 2005, quoted in Barclay, A pistol on the table, p. 3.
28. See Calder, ‘Cut to the quick’, p. B3.
88

For Barclay, there are two issues involved in the dispute over the recut. The
first is the failure of the system to deliver the film as was originally planned,
a failure that he ascribes to the power of centralised government and state
institutions. The revised version is, he says, ‘not just somebody having a bit of
a play with somebody else’s images in a back room; it is a political recut’.29 The
second issue, more important to Barclay, is that the residents of Tinopai are
grossly misrepresented in the television version. For a film and film-maker in
which concepts such as mana tüturu and guardianship are so important, such
an outcome is, in his words, ‘hurtful and abusive’.30
Barclay describes Selwyn’s edit as being ‘old fashioned and issues-driven…
The issues/issues/issues style of the edit has turned strong local characters into
spokesmen, into village characters by a well, if you like, jabbing their fingers
in the air as they let it be known to all and sundry (but mostly to men of
their own age and ilk) how the world should be run’.31 In particular, the recut
reorganises the fluidity of the long version of the film into a more linear,
argument-based narrative, making certain elements of the film – such as the
presence of Emad Jabber or the dramatisation of Plato – incomprehensible.
It also, as the above quote suggests, removes the presence of the women of
Tinopai who played such an important role in the activism. In Barclay’s mind,
part of the power of the Kaipara dispute came in the alliance between Miru
and Raewyn McDonald, figures who would appear to have little in common.
He calls the pair ‘a completely unlikely couple, one “radical” Maori, one
an “ordinary” Pakeha grandmother, joining hands in common cause’.32 In
The Kaipara Affair’s marae approach to notions of community and citizenship,
this partnership exemplifies Barclay’s sense of a possible kinship that could
operate at a wider level. But Raewyn McDonald is almost completely absent
from the televised version of the film. During the small screen time she is
given, her comments that are used represent her as, in Barclay’s words, ‘a
mildly-racist Pakeha granny spooked out by a bit of local Maori protest’.33
For someone who has made protocol central to his relationship with those he
has filmed, this misrepresentation breaks all the rules of the kind of cinema
Barclay has worked to practice. As he wrote in A pistol on the table of those who
participated in The Kaipara Affair: ‘They did not have to go before the camera.
We made them promises’.34
Barclay has never acted as producer of his own films. Were he to have done
so for The Kaipara Affair it is likely that the problems over editing would not
29. Barclay, A pistol on the table, pp. 15–16.

30. Barclay, quoted in Calder, ‘Cut to the quick’, p. B3.
31. Barclay, A pistol on the table, pp. 8–9.
32. Ibid., p. 10.
33. Ibid., p. 11.
34. Ibid., p. 11.
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Images of Dignity
have arisen. The dispute over the recut not only echoes the issues of governance
and control central to The Kaipara Affair, it also re-enacts the debate over
intellectual and property rights that are at the heart of The Neglected Miracle
and Te Rua. It was He Taonga Films, and not Barclay, that was responsible for
the delivery of the edited film to TVNZ. As such, and despite being director,
copyright meant that he could have no say in the final version screened.
During the process of raising funds for the production, Barclay had passed
full authority under tikanga (specifically using the concept of mana tuturu)
to Selwyn.35 In the end, however, the contractual obligations between He
Taonga Films, NZ On Air and TVNZ became the dominant agreement that
shaped the version of the film that has now been seen by most viewers.
If the long version of The Kaipara Affair can only be seen at film festivals,
there is one further space in which the original edit has received an audience.
In keeping with his Fourth Cinema principles, Barclay made DVDs of the
film available to communities engaged in the kinds of struggles similar to
those that took place in Tinopai and on the Kaipara Harbour. For the film to
have such clear functional and educational uses fits Barclay’s preferred idea of
the post-production life for his features. It is in such contexts that he felt The
Kaipara Affair could do its best work.
Conclusion
The Kaipara Affair began as a film that intended to use a singular dispute
to examine the issues of governance in the wider national community. It
ended as itself part of a conflict that ranged across a variety of state and other
institutions and went to the very heart of broadcasting policy in New Zealand.
This kind of engagement has characterised Barclay’s last three feature films,
all of which have sought to interrogate issues central to the functioning of the
nation’s civil society. All three have also been provocative interventions in
these social questions, interventions that have outraged some and stimulated
others. Each therefore performs that central process of the necessary connection
between image and the subject matter those images present that Barclay sees as
being vital in responsible film-making. As activist films, all three are serious
participations in the cultural fabric of the modern nation.
If the success of Ngati was welcomed by all New Zealanders, that reception
was for a number of reasons. For some, it marked a genuine breakthrough in
terms of representing the country’s Indigenous population. In part, however,
the film also worked on a national level because it fitted the desired image
of cultural cohabitation of the time and because it could be read in terms of
90

a non-threatening pastoral nostalgia. Te Rua, The Feathers of Peace and The

Kaipara Affair make for more unsettling viewing for a national audience. Their
questioning of a number of orthodoxies, whether these be Päkehä or Mäori
in origin, refuse to assent to the logic of either a one-nation rhetoric or an
assumed normativity of Mäori experience. All three films show that Barclay
still saw social division and prejudice, and that increasingly such prejudice has
been institutionalised in many of the post-1985 (i.e. following the extension
of the powers of the Waitangi Tribunal) negotiations and formations that
characterise contemporary New Zealand.
The other observation to be made about all three features is they display a
progression of formal innovation, and a developing aesthetic sense, that mark
Barclay out as a genuinely revolutionary film-maker. At heart he is a political
film-maker, but the politics of Barclay’s films are contained within narrative
and visual structures that greatly enhance their overall impact. If Te Rua is
a less than successful film in terms of its narrative coherence, then both The
Feathers of Peace and The Kaipara Affair are radical and challenging in narrative
terms. It is in the formal nature of both – the ideas of history and fiction
in the former and the impressionistic construction of the latter – that the
political arguments made become realised in cinematic terms. It is precisely
the absence of a documented record of Moriori in the nineteenth century
that makes The Feathers of Peace’s representation of a fictionalised, cinematic
history such a powerful indicator of Indigenous presence. Equally, the range
of talk and stories central to The Kaipara Affair, and the openness of the film
when listening to its protagonists, provides the film’s ideas about national
community and governance within a complex structure that suggests new
methods of affiliation. Barclay’s innovation here presents filmic narratives
that have no equal within New Zealand, either as political texts, structured
narratives or visual tapestries.
91

Conclusion
Living Knowledges
A t the time of writing, the most recent major commercial cinematic

release depicting Indigenous peoples is Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006).
Gibson’s film portrays the last throes of pre-contact Mayan civilisation before
the onset of Spanish arrival in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is, as
suggested by its title, publicity and even tagline (‘when the end comes, not
everyone is ready to go’), a production focused on an idea of ending. In all
its big-budget glory and sumptuous visuals, Apocalypto presents a community
beset by violence and conflict collapsing in upon itself. For all of its seeming
concentration on the detail of Mayan life (its use of Mayan language
throughout, for example), it is also a film that carries continually the shadow
of European arrival. It is dominated by the absence that is about to become a
presence, the ship that is just over the horizon.
In Apocalypto, indigeneity equals barbarism. The virtues shown by the
central protagonist, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), in his personal ties to
family and village, are all but swept aside by a larger community that has
descended into violence and exploitation of its own people.1 The film is a
portrayal of horror and an absolute irrationality of action. Whatever one might
think about the arrival of Europeans, the film suggests, this was a civilisation
about to consume itself. Its destruction was, the thesis might extend to say,
internally driven and self-inflicted.
Apocalypto takes its place as the latest in a long line of high-profile films that
have found narrative and commercial appeal in the representations of Indigenous
peoples, and have done so with scant regard to the actual complexities of those
peoples and their cultures. From innumerable westerns, including Kevin
Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), to modern ‘culture contact’ films such as
Crocodile Dundee (1986) or historical re-tellings like Disney’s Pocahontas (1995),
natives – in one form or another – have become the material of successful
1. It is noticeable that many of the actors in Apocalypto, Youngblood included, are Native American and
come from cultures very different from the Mayan communities portrayed in the film.
93

Images of Dignity
storylines that have built up a picture of what constitutes indigeneity for a

global audience. In New Zealand, the process has been more complex due
to the different nature of audience for most of the national film culture’s
history. Rudall Hayward’s My Lady of the Cave (1922), The Te Kooti Trail
(1927) and both the silent and sound versions of Rewi’s Last Stand (1925 and
1940 respectively), all promoted narratives of desired and appropriate Päkehä
settlement through an engagement with a Mäori presence that ranged from
benign helpers to hostile aggressors.2 John O’Shea and Roger Mirams’ Broken
Barrier (1952) explored the consequences of a bicultural love story somewhat
uneasily within the tradition of a Griersonian ethnographic documentary
method, but nevertheless the film constitutes a genuine attempt to explore
the contested ground of cultural relations at a time when such narratives were
largely non-existent. In the new wave of film-making produced from the
1970s onwards, Geoff Murphy’s Utu (1983) and The Quiet Earth (1985) offered
similar national introspection, albeit here within the context of the emergence
of an official state biculturalism in the 1980s. Even allowing for the decades
between them, all these films are united by a subtextual anxiety about cultural
relations, a somewhat relentless fear concerning legitimacy, that renders their
portrayal of Mäori tenuous and unsure. Ironically, the representation of Mäori
in Whale Rider is less insecure in terms of its narrative, largely due to its
removal from any actualities of cultural debate within New Zealand.
Barclay was always aware that his work necessarily has a relation to both
of these discourses: the global apprehension of the filmic ‘native’, and the
national settlement angst specific to New Zealand. His films seek to undo
the normative logic of both traditions, and to uncover the stories that these
traditions refuse to, or cannot, tell. He knew that, in doing this, he ran the
risk of always working within the parameters dictated by such processes of
representation. Equally, he was aware that such a situation is common to all
Indigenous cultural practitioners, where stereotypes need to be overturned
so that other narratives can be put forward. Even as he acknowledged this
however, Barclay produced a body of film work that has as its central principle
a fidelity to codes, protocols, lives and events that emerge from within the
communities he films. These communities are predominantly, though not
exclusively, Mäori, and certainly it is Mäori values as he understood them
that shaped the work he produced. Putting Mäori values at the heart of
representation of Mäori does not always mean that the narratives concerned
will be communicable to all sections of national or international communities;
but, desirable though it may be, such communication was not the most urgent
issue for a practitioner such as Barclay. As the stark and straightforward nature
2. For more on Hayward’s work, see Sam Edwards and Stuart Murray, ‘A Rough Island Story: The Film
Life of Rudall Charles Hayward’, in Conrich and Murray (eds.) New Zealand Filmmakers, pp. 35–54.
94

Conclusion: Living Knowledges
of some of his film and book titles – Tangata Whenua, Ngati, Our Own Image
– suggest, it is the possession and belonging inherent in the lives of the people
that dictated how he made his films. It is these stories that he felt were the
most important to tell.
In New Zealand, Barclay worked not only behind the camera, but also
across the range of issues connected to film production. For any film-maker,
finance, training, copyright and the archiving of images are as much of a part
of what constitutes film culture as is the content of any given production, but
this is more true of the film-maker who faces potential systemic exclusion
from the institutions that decide which films are made. In part, Barclay’s
idea of Fourth Cinema is a response to the totality and inclusion of such a
view, particularly given that these are processes he sees in other Indigenous
film-making cultures as well. The Kaipara Affair, Barclay noted, was still a
‘quota’ film. It is highly unlikely that it would have been made had Mäori not
campaigned for the need to have a structural commitment within the New
Zealand film industry to the making of Mäori stories.
Of course, Barclay never made a film that will receive the kind of distribution
and publicity that Gibson has achieved with Apocalypto. His success with Ngati,
and his knowledge of the career paths of other New Zealand directors who
have moved to Hollywood, gave him enough of an insight into the processes
by which mainstream films are produced. It is clear that his ideas of audience
and film use, to say nothing of his sense of protocol over production issues
themselves, did not translate to a commercial majority film-making context.
He is, nevertheless, a figure whose work has created images that will last, that
capture peoples and stories that otherwise might well have been lost. Such
images also aid in the critical readings of films such as Gibson’s, providing
counternarratives to portrayals that could go uncontested. In addition, the films
now emerging from within Indigenous contexts, such as Vilsoni Hereniko’s
Pear ta ma ‘on maf (2004) or Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr’s Ten Canoes
(2006), films that now constitute a second wave of Indigenous film-making,
point to a continuing need for such stories to be expressed. Arguably features
such as these could not have been made had Barclay not committed himself to
Mäori cinematic self-expression in the 1970s. In themselves, Barclay’s films are
individual achievements that present or document images of vital importance.
Taken together, they prompt the most crucial of debates about the necessities
of cultural belonging and agency.
95

Barry Barclay: Filmography
1968 A Matter of Taste (NZ short documentary: cinematographer)

1971 Spinning a Yarn (NZ short documentary: cinematographer)
1972 All That We Need (NZ extended short film: director, writer)
1972 There’s a Problem Here (NZ short documentary: director)
1972 The Town that Lost a Miracle (NZ television documentary in the Survey series: director)
1972 In the Company of Trees (NZ documentary: director)
1974 Tangata Whenua (NZ television documentary six-part series: director, co-writer)
1975 Ashes (NZ television documentary: director, writer)
1976 Hunting Horns (NZ television six-part series: director)
1976 Women in Power: Indira Gandhi (NZ television documentary: director)
1977 Autumn Fires aka In Search of Pakehatanga – Autumn Fires (NZ television documentary
with drama elements, in the Scene series: director)
1977 Aku Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of Mäori Weaving (NZ documentary: director, writer)
1979 Mahaweli (unfinished feature film: director, writer)
1985 The Neglected Miracle (NZ [multiple financed] documentary feature: director, writer)
1987 Kamate! Kamate! (NZ extended short film – training film for crew involved with Ngati:
director)
1987 Ngati (NZ feature film: director)
1987 Te Urewera (NZ television documentary: director)
1991 Te Rua aka The Storehouse aka The Pit (NZ/Germany feature film: director, writer)
2000 The Feathers of Peace (NZ documentary feature: director, writer)
2005 The Kaipara Affair (NZ documentary feature: director)
97

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103

Index
Bold page numbers are those of the major passages on films and programmes.
Numbers following the term plates and the abbreviation pl are those of photographs
in sequence on un-numbered pages.
A mixing of fiction and non-fiction 31,

activist movements 4, 11–12, 42–44 49–50
aesthetics 20–21 multiple roles 6–7
Akomfrah, John 25 Päkehä, challenges/messages to 15–16, 44,
Aku Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of Mäori 52, 62, 81, 91
Weaving 24, 33–34, 34–35, 40, 46 Päkehä heritage 62
Alexie, Sherman 23 photographs plates 1-7, 9-10, 14-18
All That We Need 49 religion in life and work 7–8, 81
Allen, Chadwick 6, 13 revisionist/revolutionary methods 46, 53,
Arts Council 46 55, 65, 69, 76, 78, 91
Arts Foundation Laureate 10 techniques 24, 37–41, 49, 58, 63, 67,
Ashes 31, 49, 76 75–76, 78–80, 86–88
audiences 18, 24–25, 40, 62–63, 64–65 unease over ‘warrior’ culture 79
global 19, 93–94 visual creativity 2, 58
Australia, Barclay’s years in 7, 36 Barnett, John 4, 5 fn, 46
Autumn Fires 31, 49–51 Beaucage, Marjorie 17, 40
Bertram, James 40, 48–49
Bracey, Olive 49–50
B Broken Barrier 94
Barclay, Barry
aesthetic 21, 49; Fourth World 16–17
awards 10, 62 C
childhood and teenage years 7–8, 36 Callen, John 80
commercial constraints 60–61, 71–72, Canadian film-makers 17
77, 95 see also Beaucage, Marjorie; Obomsawin,
departure from New Zealand in 1978 Alanis; Todd, Loretta
45–46 Cannes Film Festival 25, 56, 62, 71, pl 9
early career 31–32, 36 Caro, Niki 4
history, reading and depiction of 15, 17, Chatham Islands 77–81
31, 77–81 civil rights movements see activist movements
inclusive approach 3, 16, 27, 31, 37, 51, Clyde, Stella 86
55–56, 63, 69, 85, 87; let down in commercialisation 28, 65
television recut 89 commodification see corporatisation
influence of 1970s global events 16 community, Barclay’s emphasis on 3, 9, 27,
lyricism in 1970s work 49–51 53–59, 62–63, 69, 82–87, 94–95
Mäori culture and leadership, approach to absence in Women in Power – Indira Gandhi 47
5–6, 10, 15–16, 19–20, 36–37, 70 aesthetic element 21
105

Images of Dignity
community, Barclay’s emphasis on, continued Gibson, Mel 93, 95

affinity with other Indigenous film-makers Girven, Ross 57
17 Goodbye Pork Pie 53
continuity from Grierson 33 Gossage, Star 80
corporatisation of indigenous communities Grace, Patricia 82
19, 70, 74–75 Grierson, John 32–33, 51, 64, 94
Costner, Kevin 93
Crooked Earth 5, 28 H
culture
Hawai’i 25, 64, pl 10
in Barclay’s work 7, 10, 62
Hayden, Peter 40
Mäori 14, 34, 60
Hayward, Rudall 94
He Taonga Films 88, 90
D Hereniko, Vilsoni 95
Daniels, Piripi 80 Herewini, Nissie 74
de Heer, Rolf 95 Hetet, Rängimarie 33
Djigirr, Peter 95 history
Doherty, William pl 3 Barclay’s reading of 15, 17
Donaldson, Roger 36 depiction of 31, 77–81
Duff, Alan 79 Hughes, Owen pl 4
Hulme, Keri 62
E Hunting Horns 40, 48–49
ethnographic film-making 18, 19, 28, 37, 50,
63, 94 I
Eyre, Chris 17 identity (cultural) 4–6, 44
Ihimaera, Witi 44, 45
F images 26–27, 35, 51, 63, 67
informed by religion 7
Fahn, Davorin 88
rights over 72
Fanon, Frantz 22, 26
indigeneity and indigenous movements
Feathers of Peace, The 8, 15, 77–81, 91, pl 13
66–69
Film Commission see New Zealand Film
commercial depiction 93–94
Commission (NZFC)
global context 2, 11–13, 16–17, 82
films see Aku Mahi Whatu Mäori/My Art of
Indigenous film-making 2, 17, 21–29, 35
Mäori Weaving; All That We Need; Feathers
Barclay’s views on 64–65, 65, 94
of Peace, The; Kaipara Affair, The; Kamate!
use of fiction in documentaries 50
Kamate!; Mahaweli; Neglected Miracle, The;
visual antecedents 34
Ngäti; Te Rua
International Coalition for Development
films, availability of 8–9, 90
Action (ICDA) 66
Fletcher, Norman 61
Fourth Cinema 2–3, 11
Barclay’s implementation of 6, 27, 60, 68, J
82, 87, 90 Jabber, Emad 84
Barclay’s philosophy of 17–20, 26, 28–29, Jones, Oliver 57
59, 63, 65, 95
presaged in The Neglected Miracle 9–10 K
relationship to Third Cinema 23–27
Kaa, Peter 73, pl 12
Kaa, Wi Kuki 56, 57, 73, plates 9, 12
G Kaipara Affair, The 1–2, 25, 27, 44, 61, 81–91, 95
Gabriel, Teshome H. 22, 23–24 mentioned 35, 40, 48, 68
Gandhi, Indira 46–48 recut for television 82, 88–90
Gaup, Nils 17 structured through conversations 39, 86–87
George, James pl 17 use of images 8, 51, 87
German funding for Te Rua 71 Kamate! Kamate! 55, 56
Getino, Octavio 21 King, Michael 36, 37, 40, 77, plates 6, 7
106

Index
Kirikiri, Sonny 79 Ngäti Tama 78–80

Kodak 55 Ngäti Toa 43
Kunuk, Zacharias 17 North American indigenous movements 12
L O
Labour Department 55 Obomsawin, Alanis 17, 24, 33 fn, 38, 39,
language 5, 60 82, 86
Latin American film-making 21, 22 Once Were Warriors 18, 79
Leuthold, Stephen 20–21 oral traditions 39
Order of Merit 10, pl 18
M O’Shea, John 32, 36, 56, 71, 76, 94, pl 9
Our Own Image 3, 24, 27, 60
McDonald, Raewyn 86, 89
McIntosh, Judy 59
McNeish, James 40, 48–49 P
Mahaweli 46 Pacific Films 32–33, 36, 46, 49, pl 4
Mana Tuturu 1–2, 5, 26–27, 44, 82 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson 21
Manehere, Dave pl 6 Perkins, Rachel 17 fn
Manuera, Eruera 39 Pëwhairangi, Connie 57
Mäori personnel in film-making 27, 45, Pëwhairangi, Ngoi 43
54–55, 61 Pillsbury, Sam 5
Märeikura, Matiu 76 Poata, Tama 54, 56, pl 9
Marxism see socialist film-making political contexts 10, 11–16, 42, 66–67,
Miller, Gwen and Bill 86 74–75, 81–86
Mirams, Roger 94 political messages 41, 42, 48, 54, 57–58,
Miru, Mikaera 82–83, 85, 86, 89 67–69, 90–91
Mita, Merata 17, 23, 33, 35, 38, 39, 45, 71, Poutapu, Piri 42, pl 6
86 Povinelli, Elizabeth 4–5
Moffat, Tracey 17, 23 Preston, Gaylene 32, 33
Mooney, Pat Roy 66
Moriori 77–81 Q
Morrissey, Michael pl 2
Quiet Earth, The 94
Murphy, Geoff 94
My Lady of the Cave 94
R
N Randerson, Heather pl 18
Rangihau, John 36, 44
National Film Unit 55
Rangihau, Täwiri 40
Neglected Miracle, The 9–10, 53–54, 66–69,
rangiwhakaoma 27, 40
pl 8
Reedy, Tilly 40
mentioned 35, 46, 88
Rewi’s Last Stand 94
Neill, Sam 49
Rongo, Herepo 41
New Zealand Film Archive (NZFA) 72
New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) 53,
55, 56, 61, 71 S
New Zealand On Air 88, 90 St. Joseph’s College, Masterton 8
Ngä Aho Whakaari 55 fn Salmond, Anne 6
Ngä Tamatoa 12, 16, 42, 43, 53 Sanderson, Martyn 49–50
Ngäti 35, 53–66, pl 11 Saunders, Bill 77
communal values in 9, 25, 31, 61–63 Seeds of the Earth (book) 66
complexity of 18, 76 Selwyn, Don 88–90
international success 1, 25, 28, 53, 56, 63, 71 Sembene, Ousmane 21
use of images 8, 51, 58 Shanahan, Dairne 40, 46–48
Ngäti Mutunga 78–80 Sleeping Dogs 53
Ngäti Porou 25, 38, 43, 54, 56, 58–59, 62 Smash Palace 53
107

Images of Dignity
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 12–13, 15, 22, 26, W

57–58
Wairarapa, childhood in 8
Smyth, Helen 40, 84
Waitangi Tribunal 12, 91
socialist film-making 22–23, 25–26
Walters, Craig 56
Solanas, Fernando 21
Ward, Vincent 58
Stewart-Harawira, Makere 18–19, 22
Whale Rider 94
Stirling, Eruera 39
Barclay’s criticism of 4–5, 17, 28
Sundance Film Festival 65
Willemen, Paul 22
Williams, Tony 36
T Withers, Graeme 83
Tamahori, Lee 17, 18, 79 Women in Power – Indira Gandhi 40, 46–48
Tämati, Ngärimu 61 Wood, Herena 80
Tangata Whenua 35–45, 51, plates 6, 7 Working Group on Indigenous Populations
community-based practice in 16, 37, 51 12, 16
cultural context 34–35 World Council of Indigenous Peoples
place in career 1, 52, 53 (WCIP) 12, 16
strengths absent in Women in Power – Indira Worthington, Nan 86
Gandhi 47
techniques used 24, 37, 67, 80 Y
Tatare, Manare 60
Yardley, Christine and Peter 85
Te Kanawa, Rangituatahi 33
Te Kooti Trail, The 94
Te Manu Aute 55, 57
Te Rua 20, 61, 68, 71–77, 91
Te Urewera 27
techniques
in Third and Fourth Cinema 23
used by Barclay 24, 37–41, 49, 58, 63, 67,
75–76, 78–80, 86–88
television programmes see Ashes; Autumn
Fires; Hunting Horns; Kaipara Affair, The;
Tangata Whenua; Te Urewera; Town that
Lost a Miracle, The; Women in Power –
Indira Gandhi
Third Cinema 21–26, 68
Tibble, Michael 60
Todd, Loretta 50
Town that Lost a Miracle, The 40
Tucket, Graeme plates 14, 16
Tühoe 13, 27, 36, 38–39, 44, pl 7
Tuteao, Calvin 80
TVNZ 88, 90
U
United Nations (UN) 12
United States, indigenous activities in 12
Utu 94
V
Vigil 53, 58
Visicom Films 31–32, pl 1
108

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Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema

ImagesDignityBarclay_d200408.indd 1 20/04/2008 1:13:42 p.m.

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Copyright © Stuart Murray 2008

National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Published with the support of

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E ngongo ai au i te puna roimata

Sleep good sir that long sleep

I quaff from a pool of tears

B arry Barclay was born in 1944. He died in 2008.

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M y chief debt in completing this book is to Barry Barclay himself, who

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regard, refusing to subscribe to any quietist assumption that cultural relations

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however, is the opportunity to appreciate Barclay’s films within the context

This mixture of arrogance and humility, the processes of provocation and

1. Barclay, Our Own Image, p. 12.

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Povinelli’s articulation of ‘impossible’ desires and objects offers a useful

4. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, p. 6.

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People’s right to make their minds up on that, particularly when it is their

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culture as opposed to what we might think of as orthodox religious issues, the

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I have deliberately placed an examination of Barclay’s documentary method,

ImagesDignityBarclay_d200408.indd 9 20/04/2008 1:13:44 p.m.

of intellectual formations Barclay produced with regard to Fourth Cinema

ImagesDignityBarclay_d200408.indd 10 20/04/2008 1:13:44 p.m.

Indigenous Self-Expression: Outlining Fourth Cinema

A rticulating any sense of a global Indigenous self-expression is an

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5. Allen, Blood Narrative, p. 15.

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suggestion of the possibilities of filiation, even if that filiation actually involves

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historical detail.8 Discourses of New Zealand history and culture, whether

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actions made some in New Zealand’s majority culture feel uncomfortable, he

10. Barclay, email to author, 24 June 2004.

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different cultures, because of a shared sense of exclusion, of what Barclay

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done to Indigenous societies worldwide by the ethnographic impulse in

16. Ibid., p. 11.

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world order.18 Rather, she goes on to assert, ‘indigenous cultures and

It is in the business of financial settlements for outstanding claims that the

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23. Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics, p. 1 and p. 6.

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