Seeing the Invisible: Yolngu Video as Revelatory Ritual

This paper describes a video conceived and codirected by a first-time Yolngu video-maker, Bangana Wunungmurra. Made in local languages and in accordance with indigenous protocols and priorities, the video, Gularri: That Brings Unity, works to reproduce the potent, socially constitutive effects of highly restricted revelatory ritual—for an unrestricted television audience. The paper explores how, under Yolngu direction, the video camera becomes a powerful technology for mediating the relationship between the inside and outside of things, the sacred and the public, the invisible and the visible, thereby challenging conventional Western understandings of image-making and spectatorship, representation, and “cultural resistance.”1