Black River

Contemporary Traces of the Modern Soundtrack

Developed for RMIT Media Arts

Close analysis

1. Opening – camera cruises along the river. The still water mirrors the land and sky. No music here, but just natural environmental sounds. Occasional sound effects are heard – chains/keys rattling, and the momentary disembodied female voice. These are key aural elements which will figure prominently in the forthcoming narrative.

2. The Indigenous National flag is laid over the open graves: harsh percussive orchestral bursts blast the screen. A male ocker voice septically recites the Lord’s Prayer. A grieving family mourns, with the mother Miriam most audibly. Her cries are operatic in tone. The match between the atonal orchestral bursts and these images of indigenous ground is deliberately forced and ill-fitting. This is a scene that forecasts a type of audio-visual tension and irresolution which typifies the film.

3. Miriam in the cabin, sifting through the past memories of her deceased son. She holds a smoking stick and moves through the space, honouring her son and looking at his various photos and artefacts. The music is tentative and not yet formed; it is emerging like the spiritual energy of the space she senses.

4. Flashback of the pub brawl from Miriam: the music rises in crescendo. Upset by this experience, her memory calls the spirits of the dead as she clutches a necklace (we discover later that it belongs to her grandfather). Horns, trumpets, woodwinds scale up in a series of clarion calls. Miriam stands on the front porch of the cabin and holds the bracelet as the storms gather.

5. Mud-covered dancers with the earth: the music incrementally grows and tonally emerges as their bodies become less camouflaged with the earth. They are the spirit of the land coming alive.

6. The orchestral swells as the river rises. Rain ours down on the fresh graves of the two boys.

7. Agitated choppy music matches the policeman directing a car stranded by the rising river to go back another way: this is the entrances of rhythmic contrapuntal elements in the score.

8. Miriam at the police station: we hear thunder outside as she wanders like a ghost through the space, looking at its museum-like specimens of native animals. It is like she has been transported there to experience the space of where Mick died. She senses evil in the space, and continually hisses “Serpent!”. Her slow voices murmurs additional tones, then she wails when she has a vision of his body hanging in his cell.

9. The man – a high court judge investigating the racial conflict in outback towns – and his Asian wife Anna take refuge in the police station: the introduction of the libretto as sung by white performers. They declaim hysterically: at times they sing monotonal sentences; other times their melodic arcs jump wildly. Internal tension mounts between the judge and Anna as she becomes panicky while he attempts to rational and calm her; the music backs their overlapping argument, generating dissonance. Tension mounts further as they realise the flooding waters are entering the police stations (the policeman has gone to search for anyone else who might have been stranded.) They eventually calm down; their singing becomes subdued and complimentary.

10. Meanwhile, the bodies from the Black River continue to rise.

11. In the jail cell, the judge and Anna suddenly see Miriam, and frantically ask questions of her; the orchestra becomes complex and knotted . But all Miriam does is sing “essssssss”, referencing the snake presence in the jail: she views them as serpents. When she sings, she intones single notes in a soft sustained tone.

12. Violins and cellos commence a series of chattering bowed taps when Miriam starts singing: “This place is bad, but you cannot know how bad. I know it in my bones, in my soul.”

13. Miriam embarks on a seething tirade against oppressive white culture. Her long half-sung oratorio accompanies a montage of flashbacks from her childhood past, detailing a litany of injustices perpetrated against black culture. Finally she sings: “And you wonder why we despise you”.

14. Les the policeman cuts down the body of Mick hanging in his cell: low bull-roarer-style trombone rumblings are heard.

15. Miriam remembers back to stories of the land and river told to her by her grandfather when she was young. He then witnesses her being taken away: he shakes the bracelet at her as she is driven away in the caged Ute, his damaged eye suggesting his curse upon those responsible for breaking apart his family. The music hangs in the air, marking the moment: for this is the bracelet she uses to summon the spirits of the land which cause the flooding of Black River.

16. Back in the jail cell, the judge and Anna debate the situation of black/white conflict in a terse dialogue. The orchestra is busy and rattling, signifying their squawking yak. Miriam observes them, and continues seething long sustained notes: she is not part of their argument, as they are missing the point of what it is like to have lived through these travesties of justice.

17. Suddenly the white drunkard appears. His higher-pitched song voices the unfettered racism of white Australia.

18. The policeman returns; a dialogue section is heard. Then he sings of the weather’s force in a series of beats counterpointed with the pulsing orchestra – it’s like panting breath. Anna senses this unnatural aspect of the rain, and sings: “This is not just rain – it’s the land telling us”.

19. Then a quartet of grid-locked arguing develops. The policeman chants: “You’ll get used to it”; the wife chants: “Can’t you feel it?”; the judge chants “It is indeed”. Their phrases cascade upon each other, but their individual pitches remain unchanged, symbolizing how they are locked into their firm views, incapable of change, harmony or resolution. Anna: “Terrible things have been done in here”. Suddenly Miriam intones in monotone: “Much evil has been done in this place –you are right to feel it.” This hysterical scene uses all the voices to collide with one another to symbolise the looped-arguments that get no-one anywhere. Meanwhile, the spirits of the land continue to come alive. The general dissonance of the score is employed to stress the irresolution and conflict between these characters.

20. Suddenly, those dancers are transposed as ghosts into the cell with Miriam. The music and other voices cease: the score devolves into a series of singular tones, like held-breaths underscored with didgeridoo-like ground swells of horns and voices. A solo voice maintains a kettle-whistle tone with combined trumpet. Everyone is exhausted.

21. In the space opened up by this pause, Miriam tells the back-story of her grandfather and her father, and his involvement in the war, and how he – as a product of mixed cultural experience – returned and ended up being a figure in the local community looking after the youngsters who got caught up on the wrong side of the law. Miriam’s tale of woe is expressed like a mournful elegy.

22. The chopper arrives, blasting its search light through the window – but at the same time the blinding light as personified lightning erupts into the prison. This is the apparition of black retribution: the dancing figure – visible only to Miriam – is painted with a luminous lightning bolt across his body.

23. To calm the judge and his wife as they are transported out of the jail by the helicopter, Les urges “You’ll have to learn to forget”. But Miriam knows that forgetting is impossible for black culture.

24. Miriam looks at the spirit of her song hanging; a low rumble and occasional high flutes are heard as she cries her lament in front of his body. The lighting spirit appears and takes down Mick’s body, to return him to the land. The orchestra is a series of overlapping vocal tones and instrumental voices, swelling like an eddy of cycling tonal currents.

25. Miriam intones: “I know your ways – you’ll never know me”. The earth dancers move around Mick’s body: the cycling tones return. They symbolise the swirling encasement of his body by the land. The orchestra sounds Miriam’s grief as she confronts her loss, witnessing Mick’s final departure from this mortal plane. Mick’s body is dropped into the river. The cycling tones return one more time.

26. The tone peaks and ends, as Miriam witnesses Mick being transported to ‘the other side’ from the river, where he happily meets his father and grandfather. Miriam has now accepted that he truly has passed on.

27. Miriam seethes to the camera one last time: “Serpent!”. It’s directed to the audience.

28. The river scenery returns from the opening. Silence has returned, but the ‘land’ silently embodies all the fury of sound and noise which we have just experienced. Miriam appears in the daylight on a bank, refreshed, calmed. She has one last look at the camera. Silence. The sounds of nature continues unabated. Within the paradigms narratively, musically and symbolically set up throughout the film, silence is – for black culture – how the land bears witness to all that occurs within its domain; for white culture, silence is the act of denying, forgetting or simply not knowing of those occurrences. The film has used deafening, demanding and fatiguing peaks of atonal music, sound and noise to who what precisely is hidden in those silences.

Text © Philip Brophy.