ABSTRACT
In the 1970s many places in Paris were screening experimental films, from the birth of cinema, with Russian futurists and French Dada. In the 1970s, some alternative or “underground” media, like the French magazine Actuel, were promoting a postmodern collusion between indigenous tribes and high tech science fiction. The writer and ethnographer Steve Muecke proposes to define as experimental the documentary Two Laws shot in the Northern Territory Aboriginal community of Boroloola at a time of the Indigenous Australians’ struggle for land rights. He considers experimental the way the film-makers Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan followed visual and meaningful existential priorities as expressed by Aboriginal people after they saw the first footage. It is still a challenge to suggest through image—fixed or animated—the presence of the Dreaming involved in the performances of Aboriginal ritual, as well as the content and affects of any dream, spiritual, or mental experiences.
