Gurrumul documentary builds portrait of artist behind the moving music

The director of Gurrumul sifted through 20 years of footage and “beautiful” recordings to build a moving portrait.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu in a scene from Paul Damien Williams’s documentary.

In August last year, a feature-length documentary about a well-known indigenous Australian musician screened on the closing night of the Melbourne International Film Festival. It depicted the extraordinary creative life of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, who had released three solo albums before he died at the age of 46 from liver and kidney diseases less than a month earlier.

The film’s writer and director, Paul Damien Will­iams, was asked to say a few words before the sold-out screening.

“Just getting my speech out without bursting into tears was tricky enough,” says Williams. “I had mixed feelings about it because I was really close to Gurrumul, and so I was still reeling from his passing.

“There was all of the very complex Yolngu cultural protocols to navigate, as well as the fact that some of his family came down (for the screening). It was a very emotional night for us all.”

After his spoken introduction, Williams sat in the middle of the packed theatre, unsure of how his work would be received.

“It was a virgin audience — no one had seen it at all,” he recalls. “It’s interesting from a creative point of view: you work on something for four years and you really labour over every detail. The editing of this film took us half a year.

“You wonder how certain things are going to play; you wonder if you’ve got the balance between levity and pathos right. But on that first screening I just felt intuitively that we did. And that’s a good feeling.”

In national release from today, Gurrumul offers a moving portrait of a musician who achieved global renown for his unique talents, despite minimal participation in the traditional machinations of the music industry, where artists are expected to explain themselves and their art ad nauseam.

Plainly, Gurrumul didn’t go in for that sort of thing, as can be seen during the opening scenes when he is queried by an ABC television reporter. “Interview” isn’t quite the word for it, as he chooses to stay silent throughout.

The film tells the story of his early life growing up blind on Elcho Island, through to performing and touring with Yothu Yindi and Saltwater Band, then meeting Michael Hohnen and Mark Grose.

They had formed a record label in Darwin called Skinnyfish Music, which became the vehicle for sharing Gurrumul’s extraordinary music with the world.

The film arrives a fortnight after the release of Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow), a posthumous fourth studio album that ­marries Western orchestral arrangements with traditional songs and chants from northeast Arnhem Land. The album made its debut at No 1 on the ARIA album charts last week — a landmark achievement considering that it is sung entirely in Yolngu Matha, Gurrumul’s native language.

“The film is once removed from us, but they are so complementary,” says Hohnen, creative director at Skinnyfish Music and Gurrumul’s long-time collaborator and producer. “Because of the almost synchronised releases, you can come out of the film and you can understand this album — or you can take in this album, then go and see the film and get the whole backstory.

“Which is really great,” Hohnen continues, “because everyone wants to know more of an artist after they hear their music, and we were never really able to give people any story because for people to understand him as an artist after the first record (2008’s Gurrumul) basically meant you had to go learn Yolngu, and learn a lot about that culture, to get more than you already could from the emotional response to the record.”

Hohnen and Grose had the foresight to document much of the artist’s transition from being a member of Saltwater Band to his first tentative steps as a solo recording artist. For this, Williams was grateful for the chance to explore a trove of material that totalled about 250 hours.

“We had excellent footage, I had a box to go through of virtually every (film) format in the last 20 years,” says the director. “We had to search for new cameras for some of these now-obsolete formats, so we could actually have a look at it. But more to the point, we had the studio recordings. There’s an old filmmaking adage: you can forgive bad pictures but you can’t forgive bad sound. We had the most beautiful recordings of his voice at that stage that we were able to utilise.”

That material includes an ­extended scene that captures Gurrumul on Taratata, a French television show, where Sting had asked him to duet on Every Breath You Take.

For that booking, the Skinnyfish team were instructed that Gurrumul would sing the chorus in English with Sting, and the verses in his native tongue.

“Something that I learned in the time I was making this film — I don’t think a word exists for it, but I call it ‘untranslatability’,” says Williams. “In that scene, the request is for G to harmonise with Sting in a meaningful way, by translating the lyrics from Every Breath You Take. The stalking sentiment of unrequited love expressed in that song doesn’t really exist in that same way in those languages — so the request, in a way, was impossible to achieve.”

Backstage, the film shows the Taratata producers clearly frustrated after the first rehearsal when it becomes apparent that Gurrumul doesn’t know the song. There are threats to scrap the shoot entirely. Hohnen says to the camera: “He doesn’t even know who Sting is. Gurrumul keeps saying to me, ‘Is Sting a big name?’ ”

It’s only after hearing a last-minute audio message from his uncle that Gurrumul gains a context for the song and its songwriter, and goes on to record a live duet that is spine-tingling in its ineffable beauty. Strumming an acoustic guitar and clad in a black leather jacket, the man from northeast Arnhem Land sits across from one of the pop world’s most familiar faces, and the pair receive a standing ovation.

Hohnen recalls a postscript to that performance that doesn’t feature in the film.

“The Black Eyed Peas had a shoot straight after us,” he says. “So he was down there on the floor, oblivious to how big or small it had just all been, having a ball listening to I Gotta Feeling with his girlfriend — while we’re all collapsed on the couch going, ‘Thank goodness that came off!’ ”

That idea of “untranslatability” stuck with Williams during the four years he and his team worked on Gurrumul.

“One of the early ideas that we had was that any time we see G singing, that we have an English translation up on the screen,” he says. “But that proved impossible because a lot of the songs are not translatable in a direct, one-to-one way that you have in lang­uages like English, French and German, where the concepts that you’re talking about are essentially the same but the lexicon and the syntax is different.

“I found that idea really remarkable when it dawned on me.

“Ultimately, it’s at the heart of this film, and the heart of where we’re at in Australia in terms of our difficult race relationships that we have,” Williams continues. “We’re not on the same page, and one side’s not taking enough effort to understand the other.

“That’s the balanda side, the whitefella side. So what happens, then, if that side really does try to fundamentally understand what is going on in that other world? That, I suppose, is Michael’s and Mark’s journey in the film, and it is the genesis of the new album (Djarimirri).”

This concept is underlined halfway through this remarkable documentary, during a dramatic turning point in Gurrumul’s career. Despite being in the midst of coping with an enormous business disappointment that has significant financial and reputational repercussions for Skinnyfish, Grose, the label’s managing director, imparts some thoughtful words.

“What you saw is a clash of culture; there was clash of a world view that we don’t fully understand, I think,” he says. “We just have a different understanding of time … We worry about the future endlessly; they worry about now, they don’t worry about tomorrow.

“We have to learn to live with that, more than he has to learn to live with us.”

Gurrumul is screening nationally from today.