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".