Bruce Lee as you’ve never heard him in Fist of Fury Noongar Daa
Nothing is lost in translation in a new Noongar language dub of a Hong Kong classic Fist of Fury.
For an Aboriginal kid in the 1970s or ’80s, action hero Bruce Lee’s films were a call to step outside the wider “Anglo Empire”, says actor Kyle J Morrison. Growing up in Western Australia’s Pilbara, Morrison and his cousins began their Kung Fu education with the television series Monkey, “the only thing on television that wasn’t just white people”.
“We would be running around cracking each other on the head with the broomstick and as we got older we wanted to cut that broomstick into nunchucks so we could be Bruce Lee,” Morrison says. While Enter the Dragon has long been one of his favourite films, until recently he hadn’t seen the 1972 Hong Kong classic Fist of Fury, written and directed by Lo Wei.
“I turned off all the subtitles and all the English dub and watched it completely in Cantonese, a language I didn’t understand,” says Morrison. “What the culture was dealing with made me cry a number of times.”
Morrison, 38, is voicing the role of Lee’s character Chen Zhen in a new Noongar language dub of the film, Fist of Fury Noongar Daa, for Perth Festival. Noongar belongs to the Indigenous people of the southwest corner of Western Australia, Morrison’s grandmother among them. And while there are roughly 40,000 Noongar people, the language is spoken by less than 400.
“There’s going to be a lot more use of Noongar in the next five years because of Fist of Fury,” Morrison says. “This visual document will give us a better sense of how to use Noongar going forward.”
The film takes place in 1930’s Shanghai during Japanese occupation of the city and opens as Chen and his fellow students at the Jingwu School of martial arts are mourning the death of their teacher. Into the school swagger members from a Japanese dojo who belittle the Chinese as “weaklings”. The Japanese present a tongue-in-cheek gift of a framed sign reading, “Sick man of East Asia”. The Chinese decline the invitation to fight but Chen later returns the message to the dojo. The moment his jacket comes off we know it’s all over. Grossly outnumbered, he defeats the Japanese students, rips the sign in half and prompts two students to eat it telling them, in one of the film’s most quotable moments: “This time you’re eating paper. The next time it’s going to be glass.”
The Japanese want him dead and he is faced with an impossible decision; leave Jingwu, the woman you love and your culture, or place everyone in danger. When he learns that Suzuki, the dojo master, organised to have his teacher poisoned by a biscuit, he vows to avenge the death and leaves Jingwu to covertly pick off his enemies.
“It triggered so many things I thought I’d dealt with in terms of the colonisation and the dispossession of our languages and cultures,” says Morrison on the phone from Perth. “And then the decisions we make every day as Noongar people to fight or to just live. You want to fight every day. You can’t keep fighting. It’s unsustainable. Accessing some of those emotions was really hard.”
Fist of Fury Noongar Daa is the latest project directed by Kylie Bracknell, who has made several productions with Morrison centred on revitalising the Noongar language. As part of their Noongar Shakespeare Project with Perth-based Indigenous theatre company Yirra Yaakin, of which Morrison was artistic director from 2009-19, they presented Hecate at the 2020 Perth Festival, the first full-scale production of a Shakespeare play in an Indigenous language in Australia. Their first project together was a translation of the Bard’s Sonnets which showed as part of the Globe Theatre’s Cultural Olympiad in 2012. Up until that project Morrison didn’t speak a lot of Noongar because the language had effectively been erased from his family, his grandmother a member of the Stolen Generations and raised in the mission system.
“My grandmother was beaten if she spoke her language,” he says. “If she spoke any language it was violently ripped out of her. It was a lot safer for my father and his siblings to focus on English and be part of this western world. A lot of Noongar families had to do that.”
Through learning to perform the Sonnets in Noongar and the conversations that took place in the rehearsal room, he managed to progress from what he describes as “toddler to pre-primary” level.
Before Yirra Yaakin took the production to London, Morrison put on a small performance for members of the Noongar community. He had to stop looking at his grandmother during the show.
“I was halfway through my first sonnet and my grandmother’s tears were just flowing out because that was the first time she heard her language fluently spoken by her family in over 80 years,” he says. “My mother drove my grandmother home after and my grandmother was like ‘I remember some of those words now. He was talking about this. And I’m sure he was talking about that’. It actually woke up the language in her.”
Bracknell’s voice cracks when she talks about the large portion of the Noongar population who were severed from their language. This film, she says, is for them and for their children.
“Bruce Lee represents a time where the Noongar teenagers of the ’70s were pretty much the first generation to have full impact of language loss because they are the children of the Stolen Generation. I wanted to pay homage to them,” says Bracknell, who conceived the project with Tom Vincent who curates the festival’s film program.
The film is produced by Boomerang and Spear, a cultural consultancy she created with her husband Clint Bracknell to preserve and apply the language to contemporary projects. Clint also worked as a translator on Fist of Fury. Speaking on the phone from Perth during the recent lockdown Kylie, 40, interrupts our conversation with some instructions in Noongar for her husband, asking him to tend to their toddler.
“It’s a part of my everyday,” says Bracknell, who is raising her son to be bilingual. “I learned orally from grandmothers, uncles aunts and with that being my foundation I then looked into every resource ever put together in Noongar language and I guess I’ve calibrated all of that knowledge.”
In dubbing the film she wanted to work with a Cantonese speaker, preferably a woman “because I am”, and ideally someone she had worked with previously. The only person who ticked all of those boxes was Hong Kong-Australian theatre director Ching Ching Ho who she worked with on the Black Swan State Theatre Company and National Theatre of China production The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 2016.
“There are so many relatables in the film,” says Bracknell, whose paternal grandfather is Chinese. “It had to be done in earnest and it had to be done from Chinese directly to Noongar with the bridge of English because that’s our common language.
“I feel we have really reached the strength of the interpretation considering that Cantonese is arguably one of the most sophisticated languages in the world and Noongar is one of the most critically endangered languages in the world.”
Naturally there were instances where there was no direct translation from Cantonese to Noongar, but together with Clint she could explore the “synonyms that sit inside the brackets” of the words. “I don’t think any senior Noongar speakers have ever had the opportunity to really sit down and evaluate that.” For example, in Noongar there are no past tense negatives, so when Bruce Lee’s character says “I’m late” this was voiced as “I’m slow” or daba karn. “We don’t really have a word for ‘late’ because the concept of time for us is that you’re never late. When you look at Chen and he says daba karn you hear the words ‘I’m slow’ but (because of his) body language you go, ‘Oh he’s late’.”
The 1972 English dub of the film is soaked in the American accents of Hollywood. Watching the Noongar version one can’t help but feel this language is a better fit; the voicing is more considered and conversational and allows the focus to be on the story.
The script is voiced by a cast of 22 actors and aspiring Noongar speakers, including Bracknell who rather amusingly plays Wu En, the translator and advisor to the dojo’s grandmaster Suzuki. Wu winds up hanging from a lamppost.
“I’m a huge fan of Kate Mulvany and she played Richard III. I admire female actors who can break down the gender barriers and play male characters. And I wanted to play the bad guy. I don’t think I’ve played the villain before.”
Fist of Fury Noongar Daa is showing as part of Perth Festival at various venues, February 20-March 6.
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