Word: blacksmith
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THROUGHOUT the opening of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith director Fred Schepisi continually dissects static tableaus. The camera suddenly cuts from the scene at hand to a minute corner of the picture: In the lapse of conversation suddenly one is looking at a swarm of termites on a windowsill. A domestic portrait gives way to an extreme closeup of a rusty knife cutting through bread--the sound suddenly amplified and grating. Idyllic farm panoramas are interrupted with scenes of chicken roosters being slaughtered, huge shears go through sheep's wool, the camera slowly absents itself from a sermon and creeps...
...film follows Jimmie Blacksmith, a half-caste Aborigine, as he tries to make a success of himself in the white world of which he is nominally a member. This was a time of uneasy alliances in Australia, a time of head-on collisions between races and cultures, between Britishers and colonists, Blacks and settlers. The Boer war was beginning in Europe and Australians were caught between fighting for the Crown and supporting a Confederacy at home. Sometimes these alliances held, but more often than not they didn't. When they did it seemed more an accident of fate, and when...
Caught in the middle of these conflicts, Jimmie Blacksmith is routinely abused and cheated by the white farmers he worked for, at the same time he is contemptuous of the half-drunken mysticism of the Aborigines, now to be forever kept on the outskirts of a completely foreign civilization. Blacksmith seems at first to be the deferential pragmatist, the smiling farmhand, somehow above the almost ludicrous racism of his employers. When he's cheated he laughs his strange Aborigine laugh and goes on--he seems to sense the irony. One sees his opportunism as he silently smiles through an uncomfortable...
...that reason the audience approves of Jimmie Blacksmith's opportunism--a way of getting up and beyond the social constraints of white Australia. Tommy Lewis presents a fascinating character, and yet there's something wrong in his eyes. It's nearly impossible to pin down his expression. He is pleasant to his "boss", and yet maybe there's something else there. English is not his language, and hence there is an impenetrable distance, a profound gap in comprehension. It is all pleasantly surreal, this place Australia, so vast and so unnaturally quiet. The Aborigine customs fit it well, the strange...
Thus Schepisi lulls the audience into the colonists' state of mind. They are sympathetic to Jimmie Blacksmith's plight, and yet they want him to defeat this system on its own terms. He finally finds decent employment and marries, he shuts himself off from his Aborigme heritage, and yet' there's that impenetrable look in his eyes...