Gurrumul

Blind Aboriginal musician Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is the subject of Paul Damien Williams’s documentary, which explores not only his subject’s brief and unusual career but also the cultural differences between his Yolngu people of Australia’s extreme northeastern Arnhem Land and the outside world. The film is structured in terms of the relationship between Gurrumul and his collaborators: musician Michael Hohnen, who discovered him in Galiwin’ku, Gurrumul’s hometown on Elcho Island, and Mark Grose, who joined Hohnen to start a record label and became the manager of Saltwater Band, in which Gurrumul was lead singer. The purity of his voice stunned listeners, leading to success on disc sales and in live performances. But his disconnect from the commercial music scene, however, was intense, as evidenced in his obvious incomprehension doing a duet with a patronizing Sting, and his abrupt disappearance at the beginning of a proposed American tour (a later one on a more intimate scale was a triumph, however). A sense of the cultural divide that Gurrumul experienced is provided by comments from his parents and other relatives, particularly an aunt who talks not only about her nephew’s childhood but also of the emphasis on community over the individual that characterizes Yolngu society. According to Yolngu norms, visual and aural representations of a dead person should be erased from public exhibition because that individual has become part of a continuum with his ancestors, so special dispensation had to be granted by family elders after Gurrumul’s untimely death in 2017 to allow for his image and voice to be preserved in this film. A fascinating ethnographic profile, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)