Cirrus@Austlit

East Timor is a country of which the totality of feature films made in or about it are history films, including East Timor’s first locally controlled feature film, Beatriz’s War (East Timor-Australia, 2013). Beatriz’s War places at the centre of its story a historical event, but surprisingly remediates it through a French film set in the sixteenth century, The Return of Martin Guerre (1982). This article investigates the former’s use of the latter in terms of the desire for verifiability, stories which a polity believes are useful, the failure of truth commissions in East Timor, and the need for local witness to make stories have meaning with respect to issues in the present.

This paper examines Rolf de Heer’s 2002 film, ‘The Tracker’, in the context of the ‘history war’ debates relating to frontier violence that were rehearsed in the Australian public sphere during the 1990s/2000s. I examine how ‘The Tracker’ challenges the very terms underpinning conventional forms of historiography, wedded to discourses of ‘fact’ and ‘truth’, in the way it investigates what it means to ‘screen’ memory within the context of the politics of the present. Focusing on ‘The Tracker's' self-conscious use of Peter Coad's arresting paintings of frontier violence, I argue that ‘The Tracker’ develops a nuanced engagement with frontier history in the way it highlights the dialectics of ‘revealing’ and ‘concealing’ – rupture and disavowal – at play in the nation’s ‘screening’ of frontier violence.