Gurrumul (PG). Director: Paul Damien Williams. Starring: Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. 97 minutes
At the time of his death in July last year, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was the most commercially successful Aboriginal Australian musician to ever grace this world. Anyone expecting Gurrumul — the film about Gurrumul's career, on which he signed off prior to his death at 46 — to resemble anything like your typical popular music documentary will be quickly dissuaded. After all Gurrumul was a far cry from your typical popular musician.
The film's opening sees the former Yothu Yindi and Saltwater Band fringe-player Gurrumul sitting mum, as a radio interviewer rattles off the most predictable of questions (how does his blindness enhance his musical abilities?). Inevitably, longtime friend Michael Hohnen, co-manager of Gurrumul's Skinnyfish label, steps in. Throughout Gurrumul's career, Michael's is often the voice that connects his art to the crasser requirements of a commercial career.
When it comes to publicity Gurrumul is reticent, but when he sings he is limitless. The film transitions to the studio where we hear his vocals isolated from instrumental tracks, his raw technical ability exalted alongside a depth of soul that, as one family member notes, taps deeply into the songlines of his people. The multi-instrumentalist Gurrumul sings in language, in a form that connects his traditional culture to a mainstream, global audience.
This building of bridges between Aboriginal and white Australia, and between an ancient local culture that exalts family and tradition and a contemporary global one where fame and commercial success are hallmarks of worth, is a recurrent, fraught theme. It's laid bare in an excruciating sequence where Gurrumul is co-opted to perform on a French TV program with Sting a cover, in language, of Sting's hit ‘Every Breath You Take'. Gurrumul has no idea who Sting is.
We see it, too, in the disaster of Gurrumul's first mooted tour of the US. On the eve of the tour, Gurrumul is a no-show at Darwin airport, having stayed behind in his Elcho Island community on family business. The next day, Michael mans the phone to US promoters, trying to explain why the star attraction has bailed. Even the sympathetic Michael has to admit that after this, he can never book Gurrumul for a major international tour again.
This is a salient moment for Michael and for his Skinnyfish accomplice Mark Grose. Both these white men are palpably humiliated and disappointed by the turn of