(ISSN: 1038-2909)
A NEW TRADITION - Titus Tilly and the Development of Music Video in Papua New Guinea
PHILIP HAYWARD
Television is too important a topic, too powerful a medium, too much a destructive force, for us to sit back and do nothing... We cannot [build a strong dynamic cultural identity amongst our youth] if we allow a type of television programming that will lead our youth to mimic foreign societies that have nothing to offer our people. Times of Papua New Guinea (8.8.86)(1)
Fears of a population gorged on Coca Cola culture to the exclusion of its own heritage are probably unfounded... most island cultures are vital and dynamic and probably well able to recover from the initial shock of broadcast television. They are not, as some people fear, unable to look after their traditions. Pacific Islands Monthly (Editorial) October 1986
In the mid 1980s there was considerable debate in Papua New Guinea (henceforth PNG) about the introduction of commercial television broadcasting(2). One of the major concerns was the likely impact of foreign programs (and the broader 'culture' of commercial television) upon the indigenous culture(s) of the country. A second and associated theme was whether Western (and specifically in this case, Australian-owned) television companies could be trusted to produce material which reflected PNG culture. These views are summarised in the quote from the Times of Papua New Guinea reproduced above. Some eight years after this statement, and the broader debates which took place in PNG at the time, critics such as Julianne Stewart (1993) have argued that the fears of many appear to have been justified with regard to the type of material screened on PNG television. PNG's national broadcaster EM-TV has developed as a highly commercial service with close similarities to its Australian parent company, Channel Nine. Although it has recently produced a series of impressive station 'idents' (short non-narrative sequences ending with the EM-TV station logo), showing scenes of PNG culture and landscapes; it otherwise produces and shows little in the way of locally produced material and has not supported the production of local TV drama.
The impact of such programming upon the local population is more difficult to gauge. Although Western culture, social values and economics are rapidly changing the perceptions and life styles of all but the most remote tribal communities in PNG, this does not necessarily imply incipient cultural collapse. Similarly, there is, as yet, little evidence to demonstrate that this represents a simple and unequivocal Westernisation of PNG culture. In this regard, the editorial quote from Pacific Islands Monthly which opens this piece appears to have been prescient. It is possible to argue that PNG culture continues to show signs of diversity, development and accomplishment both in the face of, and - more significantly - through the agencies of its 'modernisation'. As Malcolm Philpott outlines elsewhere in this issue, this is nowhere so obvious as in the case of popular music, which has thrived over the last decade. Local music has also been culturally significant in another sense too, as it has come to constitute a powerful presence amidst the (foreign dominated) schedules of EM-TV. Somewhat ironically, given the emphasis of the Pacific Islands Monthly editorial, this enclave of local culture has established itself within the heart of Coca (and Pepsi) Cola culture itself, the TV music video show. This irony illustrates the complexities and contradictions of the 'internationalisation' of the Western music industry, commercial television and popular culture itself.
Since its development as a marketing tool in Britain and the USA in the late 1970s and early 1980s, music video has developed into an international form(3). Western, and primarily Anglo-American videos, are now widely broadcast in European, North American and Australasian markets and in parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa. Many of the countries in these regions have also begun to produce their own music videos, usually intended to promote locally produced music tracks in local or regional (as opposed to global) markets. Since the introduction of television broadcasting in 1987, PNG has followed this model by both becoming a consumer of Western music videos and, more recently, a producer of its own.
This article addresses the development of music video in Papua New Guinea with particular regard to the role of video director Titus Tilly; the nature of the styles of video he produces; the cultural motivation and project of his work; and the pivotal role of Tilly's company Pacific View Productions in providing the (post-) production base for the video production sector in PNG. It does not however simply represent an attempt to identify and elevate Tilly as the auteur of an emergent field of media practice (although the analyses advanced in this study could be seen to support such a characterisation)(4). It rather attempts to analyse how Tilly's initiation and development of music video production in PNG reflects a conscious perception of the medium as a strategic site for the development of contemporary forms of PNG culture. The article thereby also analyses how Tilly - and, to a lesser extent, other PNG video makers - have interpreted and inflected the standard styles and approaches to music video popularised by Western producers. In this way, the concerns of this paper parallel those of Nancy Sullivan's discussion of the emergence of film and television production in PNG (Sullivan, 1993); looking at the way production has been used as a tool for local cultural development and "for casting the local in terms of the national and even the international... 'indigenizing' television as they 'naturalize' its mode of production"; and examining the extent to which local production has "been subject to innovation along local patterns of social organization and local empowerment" (533).
I. Context
As Malcolm Philpott outlines elsewhere in this issue, the PNG music industry began to take off in 1977, when NBC (the National Broadcasting Corporation) began to release cassettes of locally produced pop music. In 1980 the first two commercial labels were set up, Chin H Meen (henceforth CHM), now the largest PNG label, and Soundstream (which folded two years later). In 1983 the Pacific Gold label also entered the market and is now CHM's main commercial competitor. Television broadcasting followed in January 1987, with the launch of the short-lived NTN (Niugini Television Network)(5), and became more firmly established in July 1987 when EM-TV began transmitting. In the period 1989-90, the only regular TV pop music show broadcast in PNG was the Australian franchised MTV program. This mixed Australian and Anglo-American material with MTV USA 'stings' and packaging, was produced in Sydney and compered by expatriate New Zealander Richard Wilkins(6). The first locally produced music show, Mekim Musik, closely modelled on the MTV format, was introduced in October 1989. Packaged by EM-TV at Boroko ( a suburb of the capital Port Moresby), and sponsored by Coca Cola, the show is compered by a local VJ in the standard MTV style. For its first two years of operation it broadcast a selection of Australian and Anglo-American videos and later added locally produced clips - when they began to come on stream - and a selection of South African videos. Music video production in PNG was initiated in 1989 by local independent video maker Titus Tilly and encouraged by the readiness of EM-TV and its director, John Taylor, to broadcast early clips(7). The increasing availability of PNG clips in 1991-92, financed by the two major PNG recording companies, lead EM-TV to introduce a second music video program in February 1993, showing entirely local material. The prime mover behind this program was CHM managing director Raymond Chin(8). Prior to the introduction of this second program - entitled Fizz in allusion to its sponsor, Pepsi Cola - CHM had paid EM-TV for airtime to run music videos (as extended adverts for CHM music cassettes). Fizz both gave CHM (and its competitors) access to broadcast air time and a regular and identifiable TV slot for PNG music(9).
One element which differentiates PNG music video from its Euro-American antecedents is the conscious national-cultural project which has informed it from its early days. In a similar manner to that of the PNG music industry - which was initially set up as an initiative to preserve and promote PNG music - music video production was also conceived of as a way of boosting local music and breaking the dominance of foreign product on the screens of EM-TV. In the hands of Tilly, at least, it was also conceived as a means of preserving and re-presenting traditional music(s) and local customs in the era and arena of broadcast television. Tilly's key role in this narrative reflects his generation and the significance of that generation in the establishment of cultural identity and the culture industries following independence. Tilly was born in 1958, in Pum on the island of Yela (formerly known as Rossel Island) in the far east of the Louisiade archipelago in Milne Bay province. Tilly was educated in mission schools before going on to join the first generation of students to undertake higher education courses at the National Art School in Port Moresby (henceforth the NAS), following independence. His diploma in visual arts course included work with drawing, painting and photography. The new NAS diploma courses in subjects such as music and visual arts taught at this time had a strong orientation to traditional PNG culture and emphasised the virtues of preserving that culture, rather than simply attempting to reproduce displaced western models and aesthetics. Art students were, for instance, required to go on field trips to examine and work with ideas from traditional local cultures and music students were encouraged to learn traditional instruments and become familiar with the diversity of PNG's musics.
Tilly's fellow students at the NAS at this time included Tony Subam, who founded the "pan-traditional rock band" Sanguma (Webb: 61) while still a student. As Michael Webb has detailed, Sanguma were not simply group who drew on (various and diverse) PNG traditions as part of their musical and visual appeal but rather an ensemble which consciously attempted to develop and promote a new PNG identity which drew on and perpetuated traditional culture whilst embracing western influences (Webb: 61-65). Although Sanguma were never as popular in PNG as acts such as George Telek or Painim Wok, they toured internationally in the 1970s, before breaking up, and acquired a reputation as the "official music representative of Papua New Guinea"(10).Don Niles has emphasised their importance in terms of their bringing
attention to traditional music in the light of the fact that many young people are turning their back on traditional music and are more interested in either imitating western music or composing their own western-type music. Sanguma demonstrated... that there are a lot of interesting things to be found in traditional music that may be used as a basis for popular music within the country.
(11) The band reformed in 1993, playing a highly successful support slot to Yothu Yindi at a major concert in Port Moresby(12), and are currently recording an album for Pacific Gold, scheduled to be the company's first CD release. Pacific Gold managing director Greg Seeto believes that they were "ahead of their time" in the 1970s and that - with the success of World Music as a marketing category and the regional popularity of bands such as Yothu Yindi - Sanguma may now have the chance of achieving international success through the fusion of traditional and Western styles that Tony Subam has pursued since his days as a student at the NAS(13).
II. The Emergence of PNG Music Video
During the 1980s, when the PNG music industry began to take off, Tilly worked on government sponsored radio projects and as a press photographer before moving into video production with the short-lived NTN in 1987. After working for EM-TV, Tilly left the organisation in late 1989 to join the independent company Pacific View Productions, set up by former NTN production manager Craig Marshall. During his time at EM-TV Tilly became convinced that PNG should produce music videos to counter the monopoly that Anglo-American-Australian products had via their presence on the MTV show. In order to convince PNG record companies and audiences of the potential of local 'indigenous' music video production, Tilly produced a demonstration piece which became PNG's first music video.
The music for the video was produced by former NAS students and members of the band Tambaran Culture, Pius Wasi and Jeff Chalson. Their only brief was that it should be "traditional... in a new style" [This, and all other quotations are taken from interviews with Titus Tilly conducted by he author in Sydney and Adelaide in February 1994]. The track, entitled Kame , opens with a gentle flute and keyboard passage which fades to a keyboard and bass interlude before moving into the song's main form - a choppy, syncopated, mid-tempo instrumental groove over which the two vocalists sing unison melody lines. To this soundtrack Tilly shot both traditional and modern images, illustrating the 'two worlds' of PNG music and culture. After an opening sequence showing a landscape of lakes and hills - complementing the delicate flute introduction - the video mixes sequences of Wasi and Chalson on location in the forest (wearing traditional garb), withequences of the musicians working in the studios and miming the vocals wearing 'sharp', city-style clothes. The video also makes extensive use of Fairlight effects, creating gentle patterns in the traditional scenes and dynamic background graphics for the mimed studio sequences. Unconsciously adopting an approach pursued by both what is commonly regarded as the first Western music video, David Mallet's 1976 clip for Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, and a whole series of subsequent videos (discussed in detail in Hayward, 1991); Tilly used the Fairlight effects to "excite the audience... excite them with some magical images that they wouldn't be used to".
Tilly completed the clip in July 1990 and showed it to EM-TV boss Taylor, who he remembers being "very excited and very pleased" by it. Rather than show the video as an isolated item, Taylor agreed to Tilly's suggestion that the video should be dropped (unannounced) into Mekim Musik (which, until then, comprised entirely foreign produced material). According to Tilly, "viewers were so excited that they called the station immediately asking about the clip and asking to see it again... it stayed ery popular and was shown many times over the next year" (despite the fact that the music was not released on audio cassette to 'support' the video). The publicity and public 'buzz' over the video, which far exceeded Tilly's expectations, was sufficient to convince CHM and Pacific Gold to begin to produce videos for their own artists' releases and, as might be expected, Tilly was an immediate beneficiary of their commissions. Since this first production Tilly has worked exclusively for CHM (shooting, directing and editing in excess of 130 videos)(14); with Pacific Gold shooting most of their footage in-house and editing it at Pacific View Productions(15). Average budgets for video production are currently around 5OO kina(16) - a tiny sum by Australian standards but one which must be considered against the markedly smaller size of the PNG music market.
Following Tilly's initiative, film maker Albert Toro - who co-directed and starred in the first feature film to be directed by a Papua New Guinean Tukana: Husat i Asua ? (1982)(17) - began to produce music videos through his company Tukana Media, (see Sullivan: 537-539 for further discussion of Toro's film work). Reflecting Toro's interest in drama, his video clips usually feature (skeletal) enactments of the song's emotional themes and/or mini-scenarios, performed by the singer and other band members or 'extras', in a mode similar to, if not derived from, mainstream Anglo-American music videos. This tendency is also evident in the small body of videos produced from the National Art School's video unit (as a commercial sideline) and several videos produced by Vanessa Daure for Pacific Gold prior to her death in 1992(18).
Although a number of Tilly's videos also use this approach, his conviction that
We in PNG do not yet have the skills in our actors and singers to do these types of dramas, this 'song acting', in a convincing way - we might in the future but I don't think it works very well for the kind of productions we can do now... on our budgets and our limited shooting times
as led him to explore other approaches to music video production. Several of his videos eschew pseudo-realist set pieces and instead demonstrate an attempt to develop synchronic, 'poetic' uses of images to illustrate and complement the lyrical themes of songs. This is perhaps most marked in the traditionally orientated Ronnie Galama trilogy, with its emphases on traditional dance (discussed in section IIIb below) but is also explored in videos for more contemporary songs such as Lamaika's Baba (1993).
Dismissing arguments that music video is a form over-determined by its Western origins, styles and applications, Tilly explains his work in the music video medium as strategic and functional, arguing that:
You've got to capture and have some kind of archival history of your culture - and TV and music video are one medium for doing this, for capturing movement, sound, image and colours... music videos are one means of recording history.
While such claims for the importance of music video as a form may appear unusual and over-stated to those familiar with Western media, they have to be understood in the context of PNG and its media environment. Given the almost complete dearth of indigenous drama (filmic or televisual)(19), music video (together with television advertising and station idents) has become the prime televisual site for the representation of PNG culture. The textual practices of music video, however prescribed by their promotional function, can be understood as 'enabled' audio-visual spaces and thus, strategic sites for expression.
III. Productions
a. Kerema
Following the popularity of Kame with audiences, which, as previously discussed, Tilly attributes to the mix of traditional style music and the technological 'magic' of the video, he attempted to develop this style further in his 1991 clip for Hollie Maea's song Kerema. The song was already one of the most popular off the band's 1990 cassette album, and had been played widely on radio for 4-5 months before CHM decided to re-promote the song and cassette with a video. Unlike Kame, Kerema was an assertive, up-tempo, "funky-poppy" PNG song, with prominent lead guitar lines, sung in pidgin. The song's principal theme is the government's neglect of the Kerema region (in the Gulf of Papua). Aspects of the song's lyrics are directly visualised in the video, most notably when the names of other ('favoured') cities such as Rabaul, Madang and Goroka appear as graphic backdrops at appropriate points in the verses. Reflecting the considerable amount of post-production time his ideas for the clip required, Tilly secured a budget of 750 kina for the video. Unlike many of his later location videos, Tilly decided to shoot Hollie Maea performing the song in a high-tech chromakeyed visual environment - whose 'development' was thereby far more marked than the Kerema region itself. After shooting the lead singer Robert, his back-up singers and dancers in the studio against a blue-screen, Tilly produced the rest of the images using the Fairlight. The final video featured vibrant swirling effects backgrounds behind the male members of the band lip-synching the lyrics, intercut with four female dancers, either shot in group formation or solo.
Like Kame , the video was a major success with audiences - who responded to the technological 'wow' factor - and re-promoted the Hollie Maea cassette so successfully that it sold out in Port Moresby after the video's first broadcasts, requiring a new batch to be manufactured. The success of the video prompted a number of bands to request similar videos from Tilly, a move he resisted on the grounds that:
Particular songs need different treatments, ones appropriate to their music, their song themes and their atmosphere. The chromakey and Fairlight suit some songs not others... I had to educate the [musical] artists and try and get them to think creatively about it.
While this statement is obviously one based on the director's own taste rather than any objective criteria, it reflects Tilly's attempts to interpret music tracks creatively rather than simply packaging them in the most obvious or demanded styles.
b. The Ronnie Galama Trilogy (1991-93)
In a similar fashion to some Western video makes(20), Tilly differentiates his video productions into standard commissions and those he regards as special creative projects, "artistic videos which I make as an artist". Although Tilly is at pains to point out that he takes all his video production seriously and perceives it as an "important view on PNG's cultures for its audiences"; he sees projects such as the trilogy of clips he produced for Ronnie Galama in 1991-93 as his "most important work". Galama, also, like Tilly and Subam, a former NAS student, has recorded three cassette albums for CHM to date - Ronnie Galama Volume One: Saidi (1991), Volume Two: Saidi - Very Best (1992) and Volume Three: The Legend of Naviu Marona (1993). These feature traditional songs from Maopa in Central Province, arranged in various styles(21), alongside more syncretic PNG pop. In a manner similar to that of Australian band Yothu Yindi's use of traditional Gumatj material, Galama's use of traditional Maopa songs and dances has been sanctioned and encouraged by clan elders. As Galama explains, the elders see his music as one way of ensuring that the traditions can "stay alive" and appeal to young people who otherwise "only listen to contemporary PNG pop or overseas music" [This, and all other statements attributed to Galama in this section, are taken from an interview conducted by the author in Boroko (PNG) in September 1994].
As house director for CHM, Tilly was commissioned to make a video of one of the tracks off Ronnie Galama's first cassette album as a standard production commission. Upon listening to the album Tilly was struck by a 'traditional' style track called Rinunu , a vocal chant sung over a slow, emphatic, bass guitar riff (with continuing, faster-paced percussion 'filling in' the rhythm spaces) and chose this to work with in preference to the several more pop orientated pieces on the album. Although Galama was not seen by CHM as a potential major selling artist in PNG, due to the traditional orientation of much of his music, Tilly was encouraged to submit an imaginative treatment for the song and, on acceptance of the treatment, was awarded an unusually high production budget for the video. CHM director Raymond Chin describes the budget of 1500 kina as a "gamble" on his part(22) ; one which was based on both Tilly's ambitious proposal for the video and CHM's interest in developing Galama as an artist who might have international appeal (with the video therefore also intended to function as a potential promo for international record companies).
The video picked up on one of the strands of the Kame video by featuring the singer and dancers in traditional clothes, performing traditional dances. Rinunu was however more complex in style than Kame. Completed in October 1991, it blends the singer's lip-synch miming with dance sequences (featuring Galama and a group of female dancers) and brief narrative vignettes. The song's narrative tells the story of a proud young man who is driven out of his village, speared by his uncle, then flees to the sea where he meets three beautiful mysterious women. He marries them and eventually returns to his village as a 'big man'. The story of the lyrics is interpreted by Tilly in a series of brief visual motifs; sequences which do not lend themselves to easy linear interpretation. This was a conscious move on the director's part since, as he explains:
I try not to just tell a story from A-Z by following the vocals on the soundtrack. I like to mix the story up, select and juggle it around. The story lines are there but they are in themes, images... It's my artistic interpretation and the audience is able to interpret the images in the way they want... maybe differently. In this way I try through my videos to add levels to the song .
The video opens with the image of a face and chest rising up out the sand and then cuts to a spearing and shots of a young man running away and falling exhausted on a beach. Three women come and turn him over and the vocals begin, lip synched by Galama and the female dancers. Galama features as vocal performer and/or actor in the arrative and shots of the spearing and the rise from the sand recur throughout the video as the video's narrative develops elliptically (and does not reach the [lyrical] conclusion of the hero's return to his community). Alongside these sequences are images of the women's slow group dance, sequences where they are shown as if planting crops and images of their faces and bodies. Three of the women appear both as dancers/ members of the vocal chorus and as the women in the narrative who restore the hero to health. Overall the video works thematically and atmospherically rather as conventional narrative.
The role and prominence of the dance and dancers in the Rinunu video is particularly significant in the light of Galama and Tilly's conscious cultural project. In traditional PNG cultures, songs, music costume, dance and ritual are not separate, semi-autonomous practices but part of an 'organic' social practice. As Anne Gee has emphasised "traditional music in Papua New Guinea, with very few exceptions... always involves singing, dancing and musical accompaniment..."(Gee: 38). The dances associated with songs have ritual and/or symbolic meanings and, if separated from the songs and dispensed with in 'modernised' musical versions, diminish the re-representation of the traditional form. The inclusion and prominence of the dance in the Rinunu (and other) videos thereby retains at least a trace of the basic symbolism and significance of the live dance accompanying traditional performances of the songs. In this manner, the sequences of the dance in the Rinunu clip serve to reinforce (one of) the 'messages' of the song (which Galama summarises as "not hating each other while we are alive because we can't say sorry when we are dead") - with the linked arms and unison movement of the dancers symbolising clan bonding and friendship. Despite the obvious contrasts between music video (and the broadcast context of EM-TV) and forms of traditional Maopa culture, Galama's community were keen to participate in the production of the Rinunu, Goruna and Uana videos. As Galama recalls,
My people were happy to appear in the videos before they passed away - they wanted to keep their image alive so that they would be there after, in the future, for their children and those that come after.
This enthusiasm also extended to their subsequent broadcast,
My people liked the videos a lot when they saw them on TV. They made their memories come, made them sad as the songs and dancers made them remember their ancestors who passed away.
Along with Tilly's video for the Helgas' Pore Vavine , shot on location in the Central Province in September 1991, Rinunu was the first PNG clip to feature vocalists and dancers in traditional costumes and the first to feature images of female performers appearing in traditional bare-breasted style. Illustrating the differences in notions of 'decency' in public media between PNG, with its dual cultures, and Western countries; the video attracted no comment or censorship from the Censor's Office(23). This is in direct contrast to the heavy restrictions on more explicit Western-style representations of sexuality which were introduced by the Censor's Office shortly after Rinunu was first broadcast. Following controversy over the screening of explicit material featuring Madonna on EM-TV in early 1993, the Censor's office introduced new guidelines requiring all foreign music videos to be submitted for assessment in advance of intended broadcast(24) (with an estimated 33-50% of these now being deemed unsuitable for screening on PNG television(25)). Local videos which are perceived to adopt similar approaches are also subject to censorship. Tilly's video for Nokondi Nama's Olei Olei (1992) for instance, a song with lyrics concerning the deployment of the female posterior in dance, was banned by the PNG Censor's Office, after several screenings on Mekim Musik, on account of its focus on the (clothed) rumps of female dancers(26).
The stylistic approach developed by Tilly for Rinunu was continued in his video for Goruna (first screened in February 1993) a song off Galama's Volume Two cassette. Although credited to Galama alone, Goruna principally comprises a female vocal chorus singing over a mid-tempo kundu drum pattern. Made on a similar budget to its predecessor, the song is performed on screen by Galama and the dancers who appeared in Rinunu (and two other male percussionists). Like the Rinunu clip, the video's scenario is based on the song's lyrics. These tell the story of a chief's sister who breaks her brother's magic wooden charm. He tries to punish her by spearing her but misses and turns her into an eagle instead. This story is visualised through a fleeting and fragmentary introductory sequence and subsequently through an exchange of looks between Galama (as the chief) and a dancer (as his sister), images of a spear and images of an eagle's face and claws. Much of the video's effect comes from the slow, repetitive (collective) motions of three groups of dancers on the beach; movements that create an intense, trance-like visualisation of the vocal performance. This atmosphere is further heightened by shots of a mysterious, processed, ghostly image of a male face.
The video for Uana , a track off Volume Three, made in October 1993, differs from the Rinunu and Goruna videos in its choreography (with dancers ranked in several parallel lines); its more literal visual depiction of a specific event; and its high 3000 kina budget(27). The video mixes two strands: the performance of a traditional Maopa song, sung by Galama and the Vali Pakuna Clan girls, and images of fire and destruction. The latter sequences illustrate the song, whose lyrics mourn and commemorate the accidental burning down of a village in the 1920s, bringing them to life through re-enacted scenes staged for the clip. These re-enactments involved the construction of a replica set close to the site of the original village, which was then set on fire, with Tilly shooting footage of village members running through the smoke and burning wood. In this manner, the aural-linguistic and melodic record of a traumatic community event became re-enacted, reinscribed and perpetuated by another non-literary medium, video.
In complete contrast to videos such as Kame and Kerema (and much Anglo-American production) Rinunu, Goruna and Uana have a slow stately, sparingly edited, visual 'ambience' which makes them resemble particular styles of video art rather than standard industry rock clips(28). Video art, understood as a western art practice with its own histories, genres and contexts, is of course alien to PNG, which is currently at a point of emergence into the video-filmic era. In this manner, the Galama videos can perhaps be better understood as examples of a nascent indigenous 'music-video-art' which circulates, paradoxically, within a highly commercial TV system primarily reliant on Western programming.
c. Lei Polo
Despite Tilly's emphasis on the Ronnie Galama trilogy as a conscious attempt to represent traditional PNG culture in a modern medium - and thus attempt to preserve and renew it - much of what he regards as his 'standard' video production also provides valuable, accomplished and effective cultural records of the context of the music tracks. Indeed, it is possible to argue that some of these have a composed documentary relevance and immediacy that is equally as important as a cultural record than the more complex and traditionally referential work of the Galama trilogy. Tilly's video for PS II's Lei Polo , made in March 1993, is a case in point. PS II (Paramana Strangers II) are an offshoot of the successful Paramana Strangers band, formed by younger brothers and cousins of the original members. The 'Paramana' in the band's name refers to their village, in the Cental Province, and the song is sung by PSII's lead singer Navo (like Galama, an Aroma speaker). The track is a up-tempo song based around a jaunty keyboard riff and bass guitar line.
The Lei Polo video was shot on Paramana beach and features three main performative levels:
a. The singer's lip synched mime to the vocal track alongside the female dancers' rehearsed 'hula' style dance routine
b. The performance of locals, who are incorporated into the video as either spectators, passively observing the shoot; or as (impromptu) participants, improvising dance moves which are cut rhythmically into the video
c. The non-participatory performance of those fishermen who arrive on the beach and disembarked with their catches only to find themselves - and their customers - (unexpectedly) in the middle of a video shot. Their 'performances' have a documentary aspect and take place despite the shoot - occasionally intruding, as when two figures casually carry baskets across the rear of the screen during a lip-synch vocal sequence
Level a. comprises specifically rehearsed routines. The singer's lip-synch performance draws on conventions of live music performance and music video mime and expresses these within a range of physical gestures which are also drawn from both local performance traditions and broader PNG pop conventions. The dancers' routine, and costumes, are more strongly derived from traditional dances from the region, but are presented in the video as a performance-for-camera (rather than performance for live audience), with the dancers orientated to a central visual point (ie the camera). Level b. represents an incorporation of members of the band's community into the video, where they are not simply featured as 'spectators' in the Western model (ie as fans, audiences or puzzled locals stumbling across a shoot) but rather as social participants attending what becomes a social occasion. Level c. involves the fishermen as participants in the video who perform both the function of 'real people' (as opposed to participant performers) shot in casual documentary style; and as 'authentic' visual signs which illustrate the song's theme of fishing. The three levels are also linked in sequences such as the scene where a female member of the crowd humorously improvises during the singers' mime by presenting him with a fish, which he then flourishes as he mimes. The referent of the song - a real fish - becomes inserted into the visualisation of a song about fishing, in the precise location the song is addressed to.
The mere combination of these levels a-c. is not of course necessarily profound, complex or significant. Indeed, b. and c. in particular might well be seen as accidental intrusions in another video. Yet the Lei Polo video can be seen to operate with considerable subtlety and complexity if read with attention to the song's lyrical address and the 'embeddedness' of the song, performer and band with their community and the location in which the video is shot. These aspects provide more complex levels of textual operation than clips such as Tilly's video for Steve Lahui's Tura Lalokau (1993), which also feature similar lip synch and dance routines on a beach. Due to its contextualising elements, Lei Polo becomes a video which not only represents the representation of the community in song but also represents it within what it seeks to represent - inscribing the artifice of the cultural product within the 'organic' of the social and its specific geographical point of origin. In this way, the Lei Polo video fulfils the archival function Tilly envisages for his work but goes further by situating its representation within the scene of what it represents.
V. Local and International Contexts and Exposure
For all its accomplishment, some aspects of Tilly's work are somewhat problematic within its originating cultural context. One of the problems faced by producers emerging in a new medium such as PNG music video (let alone more self-consciously artistic versions of this), concerns issues of audiences and critical responses. Tilly can be seen to have been both a key agent in the establishment of music video as a form in PNG and a producer who has attempted to produce more complex, traditionally orientated versions of that form. There is a sense in which the direction (and velocity) of his trajectory has been premised on a cultural project that is both outside the standard operation of music video (both in PNG and internationally) and the nature of EM-TV's standard (commercial, import dominated) programming. Although Tilly - and, significantly EM-TV boss John Taylor(29) - have emphasised the Galama trilogy as significant and culturally innovative works, Tilly has himself pointed out that some of his most popular videos with audiences were the early 'technology heavy' ones such as Kame and Kerema - videos made in a style which Tilly was reluctant to repeat. In this manner, the Galama videos are exceptional in address and orientation (as well as accomplishment), being made, in many ways, without an audience in mind. Viewed as a kind of indigenous music-video-art, as discussed earlier, they can be seen to be out of context when broadcast on the Fizz show with its repeated and heavily-emphasised adverts and plugs for Pepsi Cola and its upbeat style of VJ presentation. As Galama himself has commented:
Old people and people who like the traditional ways like the videos [ie the Galama trilogy] best - the young people don't like them so much, they are not all 'fast', they are not the kind of stuff they like today.
As outlined in this article, videos such as the Galama trilogy require more reflective readings than either the broadcast context or the target audience for TV music shows conventionally provide. This is not however an attempt to simply characterise PNG viewers, PNG youth or the international audience for music videos as innately deficient or superficial in their viewing; but rather to point to the manner in which broadcast material is a form watched contextually by all but its most academic audiences. The industrial logic which invariably relegates unusually subtle, complex or experimental TV programming to ghetto slots is not simply one of conservative over-caution on the part of broadcasters but rather one which acknowledges audience expectations and schedular context and flow.
As big budget videos produced for an artist who sells significantly less than major PNG acts such as George Telek or Henry Kuskus, the Galama trilogy is also exceptional. The explanation for the nature of this investment is, in part, that CHM see Galama as a possible international act, a local entry into the potentially lucrative world music market(30). In this manner, the difference between the Galama trilogy and other PNG music videos (whether produced by Tilly or other video makers) is in their attempts to begin to commodify Galama in terms of his traditional ethnicity and cultural identity. Such approaches are far from standard in the PNG music industry but are part of the standard (Western) packaging and promotion of world music and the Womad Festival circuit (which now includes Australia's Womadelaide(31)). This approach parallels the manner in which George Telek was presented and promoted in his collaboration with the Australian band Not Drowning, Waving. During the band's 1991 tour of Australia, Telek appeared on stage with a traditional head-dress, singing traditionally orientated Tolai songs - rather than the country ballad and rock and roll songs he is better known for in PNG. (As NDW vocalist David Bridie has emphasised, "if Telek had come down here [ie Australia] playing Painim Wok... PNG rock, he'd have been on a hiding to nothing"(32)).
In this sense, Galama can be understood to have been groomed for an international market (in advance of CHM's gaining access to that market); and the videos represent a kind of speculative 'research and development project' which, in the curious logic of world music, involves a move towards traditional local cultures in its attempt to access the inter-national. Yet, specific cultural codes complicate matters further. The few international screenings the Galama trilogy have had to date - principally at Adelaide Festival in February and at a public seminar at the University of Southern Queensland(33) in March (both 1994) - have been marked not by sustained engagements with the general project of the videos but rather by concern over an incidental aspect, the representations of the bare breasts of the (female) dancers. One member of the audience at Adelaide summed up a common response by characterising the videos as "dodgy"; a comment solely addressed to the (perceived) politics of representation of the bodies involved. This both prioritises one element of the video as its key issue and ignores a whole range of other considerations, such as Galama's own physical representation (and the camera's prolonged dwelling on his physique and bare torso); and the PNG context which produced such images (without similar controversy). Although there are obviously issues to do with the politics of gender representation in PNG which are relevant for these videos, Australian responses have, so far, principally served as another instance of Western culture's expectation that non-Western forms should be acceptably 'other' rather than being challenging - or even merely (and incidentally) awkward - to their own localised cultural values, their specific concepts of 'political correctness'.
In this regard it is significant to note that in March 1994 there was also another controversy in Australia over the nature of images produced by two contemporary PNG artists from the Sepik region - Nawi Saunambui and Apkwini Asanambui - for a sculptural commission outside the University of Technology, in Sydney(34). The furore involved complaints about the sexually and anatomically explicit imagery of one of the panels of their sandstone sculpture, which comprises an image of (heterosexual) congress, by members of the university staff. The controversy was subsequently picked up on by the student magazine Vertigo and the Sydney daily press(35). The similarity between the two perceived mis-matches of cultural codes, and the two agencies involved, is that both the Adelaide Festival's Artists' Week (which Tilly's presentation formed part) and factions within the University of Technology (or at least its Humanities Department from where the complaints arose) are highly 'politically correct' (in the sense of being anti-sexist, anti hetero-sexist, pro-environmental and [somewhat contradictorily] pro-indigenous and ethnic peoples). Given the sexual conservatism evident in Papua New Guinean public culture, it is curious that cultural artefacts from this country should be the cause of such disquiet. The message seems to be that, even if originating from another cultural milieu with its own traditions, culturally 'informed' Western audiences need foreign commodities to be filtered and represented in acceptable fashions that do not disturb their (specific and shifting) sensibilities. As (another) member of the audience for Tilly's Adelaide presentation argued, citing a Western representational and mediating agency as his comparison, (Festival) "audiences don't want National Geographic style images thrust in their faces"(36).
In this manner, and solely on this level, the Galama videos are - perversely - too authentic for the Western sector of their (envisaged) international audience; and would undoubtedly have been better received if their female dancers had followed the dress codes of the Paramana dancers featured in Tilly's Lei Polo video (and worn bikini style tops and leis ) or else had not followed tradition and had dressed themselves within Western concepts of decorum. The screening of the Galama trilogy at the South Pacific Commission in Suva in June 1994, along with other clips directed by Tilly, to a predominantly Fijian audience(37) (only their third foreign exhibition) met with a significantly different response - "enthusiasm, joy and excitement"(38). According to Malcolm Philpott, this positive response had several components. On a basic level the Fijian audience enjoyed the videos both in themselves and for their cross-cultural identifications with the material. On another, arguably more significant level, their enjoyment was enhanced by the videos' demonstration of the potential of local production in Fiji; a country experiencing the introduction of broadcast TV and pre-occupied with similar issues and anxieties to those outlined in the introductory section to this article (with specific regard to PNG)(39).
The nature of both the production of the Galama videos and the responses to them in Australia and Fiji can be seen as indicative of the paradoxical nature of world music, its commodifying tendencies, local attempts to pre-package for such markets and the highly specific taste judgements of western consumers. However limited their potential circulation in the West, the grooming of Galama for an international market has, at least in part, enabled the budget and production of a body of work which constitutes a new direction in PNG audio-visual culture. Whatever the nature of Western perceptions, the Fijian response to screenings of the videos (and their subsequent broadcast by Samoan TV in August 1994), indicates their potential to appeal to a pan-national Pacific island audience - one which might prove a more readily available, albeit markedly smaller, market than the more fickle, volatile and Western- dominated World Music scene(40).
[Thanks to Marion Jackson and the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby, Steven Feld, Ronnie Galama, Craig Marshall, Sarah Miller, Don Niles, Malcolm Philpott, John Taylor, Titus Tilly and Mark Worth for their various assistances with this piece.]
Bibliography
Gee, A (1991) 'Contact, Change and the Church' (unpublished) M.A. Honours dissertation, University of New England (NSW)
Hayward, P (1990) 'Industrial Light and Magic - Style, Technology and Special Effects in Music Video and Music Television' in Hayward, P (ed) Culture, Technology and Creativity, London: John Libbey Press
----------- (1993) 'After The Record- Tabaran, Television and the Politics of Collaboration', Perfect Beat v1 n3, July
Horsfield, J et al (1988) 'Australia Penetrates The South Pacific: A Comparative Analysis of the Introduction of Commercial Television Into Fiji and Papua New Guinea' paper presented to the 1988 International Television Studies Conference, University of London Institute of Education July 1988
Stewart, J (1993) 'EM-TV: The First Six years of Broadcast Television in Papua New Guinea" Pacific Islands Communication Journal v16 n1
Sullivan, N (1993) 'Film and Television Production in Papua New Guinea: How the Medium Became the Message', Public Culture n11
Webb, M (1993) Lokal Musik - Lingua Franca Song and Identity in Papua New Guinea , Boroko (PNG): National Research Institute
Wild, M (1993) 'The Growth and Direction of the PNG Music Video Industry', paper given at the PNG Ethnomusicology Conference, July
Videography
A wide selection of Tilly's works (though not Kame) can be found on CHM's 'PNG Supersound Video Clip' compilation series (begun in 1992, and currently at Volume 16). There are, at present, no dedicated compilations of Tilly's video work available.
Discographic Note
All Tilly's videos (with the exception of Kame) have been made to promote material released (in cassette only form) on CHM Records - details of the release dates of relevant cassettes are included in the many body of the text.
End Notes
1 Cited in Horsfield, J. et al: 17.
2 See Horsfield, J. et al for further discussion
3 Music video, or 'film clips' as they were more usually known, were also produced in other countries - such as Australia and New Zealand - at this time but the international form can be seen to have developed more specifically out of the UK and USA.
4 In this regard it should be noted that Tilly himself has acknowledged and emphasised the influence of Australian director Craig Marshall, who he began working with at NTN, and video editor Tahirih Homerang, who edited several of his early clips, on the development of his style. (Personal correspondence with the author, August 1994).
5 NTN shut down in March 1988, due to financial difficulties experienced by its Australian owner Kevin Parry. Shortly before going off-air, production manager Craig Marshall had gained approval for NTN to begin production of a weekly PNG music magazine show - a format which EM-TV did not develop until Fizz in 1993 (interview with Craig Marshall, Boroko, September 1994).
6 MTV ceased being produced in 1993 when its Australian franchise expired. For further discussion of MTV (Australia) see, Stockbridge, S (1992) 'From Six O'Clock Rock to Bandstand' in Hayward, P (ed) From Pop to Punk to Postmodernism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin); also see Mitchell, T (1992) 'World Music, Indigenous Music and Music Television in Australia' in Perfect Beat v1 n1.
7 EM-TV's enthusiasm for PNG video material derives from both Fizz's ability to deliver cheap local programming (on a network dominated by Australian and US product) and the interest of Australian-born director John Taylor in local music and culture.
8 CHM's association with EM-TV began in 1989 when they began providing EM-TV with background music for EM-TV's test pattern broadcasts (cited in Niles, D [comp.] [1993] Commercial Recordings of Papua New Guinea Music - 1989 Supplement, Boroko [PNG]: National Research Institute: Cultural Studies Division : 7)
9 Though CHM also continues to buy airtime for video screenings of new releases in a five minute prime-time evening slot, broadcast on EMTV on Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Saturday, entitled Chin H Meen Supersound New Release.
10 A description given them by PNG ambassador to the USA, Renagi Lohia - cited in Webb: 62.
11 (Unpublished) interview with Mark Worth, Institute of PNG Studies, Boroko. 28.2.91. It should be noted, as Niles also emphasised in the same interview, that "Sanguma's experiments did not [at the time] ignite the country into wanting to do similar things".
12 Impressing the headliners so much that they subsequently invited Sanguma's keyboard player Buruka Tau and drummer (and former Not Drowning, Waving collaborator) Ben Hakalits to join them - leaving Sanguma bereft of two of their key members.
13 Interview with the author, Port Moresby, October 1994.
14 And also working on other documentary projects for PVP, including shooting items for ABC TV Australia's Foreign Correspondent program.
15 For further discussion of Pacific Gold's music video production see Wild, M (1993).
16 At time of writing (September 1994), the PNG kina was valued at roughly $1.3 Australian - $1.15 US.
17 The first feature film usually credited as a local production was Oliver Howes' Wokabut Bilong Tonten (1973).
18 Thanks to Nancy Sullivan for information on Daure - also see PNG Made 1992: 41 for further discussion.
19 See Philpott, M, this issue, for further discussion of EM-TV's policies in this regard.
20 Such as the Sydney based video production group Axolotl who claim to have financially subsidised (and lost money on) particular productions they felt a strong artistic attraction to (interview with the author, Sydney, March 1989) and the leading New Zealand video maker Bruce Sheridan who recalls loosing $3000 NZ when his production of the video for These Wilding Way's Set Love Assail (1993) exceeded his $8000 budget. Despite this, he recalls that "in terms of achievement and recognition [it] more than repaid the efforts of musicians and film makers to get it made" (cited in Sheridan, B and Hayward, P 'Let's go to Frenzy - A Brief History of New Zealand Music TV and Music Video" in Hayward, P. et al (eds) (1994) North Meets South, Umina (NSW): Perfect Beat Publications: 119
21 Galama has characterised Maopa music as "songs of our place, we don't have harsh sounds, singing... rhythms. Our songs are soft like the soft southerly wind that blows on our place... With the songs they have a tune, a flow - people are not so excited by song melodies but the lyrics... what they mean, the poems we sing... what the songs give you a feeling of" - interview with the author in Boroko (PNG) September 1994
22 In an interview with Malcolm Philpott, Boroko, June 1994.
23 Similarly, the PNG national press also run similar images in news stories about cultural events (rather than as pin-up titillation) - see for instance the colour photo spread coverage of the 1994 Port Moresby Hiri Moale Festival in The National newspaper 19.9.94 :18-19.
24 See Hayward, P (1993): 80-81 for further discussion.
25 Tilly's rough estimate, precise figures on this are unavailable.
26 Cited by Tilly in interview.
27 Chin identifies the extra costs on Uana compared to its two predecessors as being due to factors such as vehicle and driver hire to travel to the location; (unspecified) payments to the village community to ensure their collaboration and participation in making the video; and the cost of constructing the structures built for (and burnt down in) the video. (Interview with Malcolm Philpott, Boroko, June 1994).
28 And it was in this context, as a 'video artist',that Tilly was introduced to an overseas audience for the first time at the 1994 Adelaide festival when he spoke in a forum on 'Video As Open Form' organised as part of the Festival's Artists' Week.
29 Taylor, in phone conversation with the author, November 1993.
30 In this manner, CHM can be seen to be approaching Galama as another possible Sanguma, since Sanguma's international reputation was not matched by their local sales.
31 And events such as the Adelaide Festival's 'substitute' Womadelaide world music event in 1994.
32 Interview with the author, Sydney, 2.3.94.
33 As part of a public Arts seminar presented by Malcolm Philpott entitled 'Tilly, Tradition and EM-TV: PNG Video to the Rescue ?', University of Southern Queensland, 25.3.94.
34 The artists were invited to Australia in 1987 to execute a commission for the University of Technology in Sydney. The sculpture has been located outside the University's Broadway building since 1986, without apparent controversy. The controversy over the sculpture began when a member of the University staff complained to the University's Equal Opportunities and Affirmative Action Unit that the image was offensive and attempted to get the statue removed from public view.
35 See, Hutak, M (1994) 'Creating Discomfort', Sydney Morning Herald July 14 and Cale, J (1994) 'Art Porn Outrage Shock' Vertigo (UTS student magazine) n4, May.
36 In conversation with the author following Tilly's seminar.
37 Comprising members, staff and friends of the SPC.
38 Malcolm Philpott, organiser of the screening, in conversation with the author, Lismore NSW July 1994.
39 ibid.
40 So far (as of July 1994) CHM's most likely lead for breaking Galama (and other CHM artists) into an international market is through a link-up with the Los Angeles based WMR (West Maui Recordings) label, which has links with Fijian musicians such as Daniel Rae Costello. (See Derby and Wilson, elsewhere in this issue, for further discussion of WMR and Pacific recording companies)
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