Serenade for Haiti. Directed by Owsley Brown. Los Angeles: GOOD DOCS, 2016. 70 minutes.

Gurrumul. Directed by Paul Damien Williams. Tel Aviv: Cinephil, 2018. 96 minutes.

The two films reviewed here tell stories of music against the odds. Owsley Brown’s Serenade for Haiti explores the role of classical music in the lives of the students and faculty of the École de Musique Sainte Trinité in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and Paul Damien Williams’s Gurrumul chronicles the life and career of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu (1971-2017), a blind Indigenous Australian singer and songwriter. The films offer compelling and sensitive narratives that are sure to engage students. However, as both deal with marginalized communities with which students are likely unfamiliar, a degree of pedagogical curation is helpful to present them effectively in the classroom.

Serenade for Haiti captures the joys and trials of a school community both before and after the devastating earthquake of 2010. Filmed over seven years—from 2006 to 2013—the documentary attests to the school’s resilience in the wake of unspeakable tragedy and will make a deeply affective viewing experience for students of musicology and cultural anthropology. That being said, I would caution instructors against parroting the media’s refrain of inspirational overcoming in the face of incredible trauma. As a chorus of Haitian academics have made clear, Haiti deserves new narratives (see, e.g., Ulysse 2015).

Instead, instructors may wish to use this documentary to introduce students to Haiti’s rich history of classical music—a musical tradition at least as old as the nation itself, represented by composers such as Occide Jeanty (1860-1936), Ludovic Lamothe (1882-1953), Justin Elie (1883-1931), Werner Jaegerhuber (1900-1953), and Carmen Brouard (1909-2005). Alternatively, this film could be paired with readings from the field of disaster studies to examine how the 2010 earthquake shaped the production and narrative arc of this documentary. Though some students may conceive of natural disasters as aberrant or unexpected phenomena, it is important to acknowledge the decisive effect they have had on the history and culture of Haiti, a nation situated on a major fault line in the Caribbean Sea and thus particularly subject to earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, floods, and hurricanes. Fortunately for instructors, scholars of Haiti have brought these two fields together—disaster studies and musicology—to offer thoughtful and nuanced analyses of musicmaking following the earthquake (Stewart 2022; McAlister 2012). Please be advised: this documentary includes footage that may be shocking. Instructors should warn students accordingly.

Like Serenade of Haiti, Gurrumul is a work of musical portraiture. Through personal vignettes and moving performances, the film captures one musician’s humility, humor, and bemusement at his stratospheric rise to fame, from performing with his friends in a remote Aboriginal village to being interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and enduring the cringey condescension of Sting. The filmmakers also expound on the more cynical elements of the story, that of an Aboriginal man thrust into the international spotlight and struggling to maintain his cultural values without being consumed by the demands and expectations of the white—balanda—world.

Instructors may wish to use this film to spark discussion about what it means to be indigenous—in this case, Aboriginal Australian—in a time of cultural precarity. Though the film provides a glimpse into the spiritual world of the Yolŋu people, aspects of Gurrumul’s music and culture will remain opaque to foreign viewers. Instructors should address this dynamic with their students. Ask them: What are the ethics of documenting, with sensitivity, a culture that is not one’s own? And how did the filmmaker involve indigenous interlocutors in the production of the film? Instructors may also wish to pair this film with readings about the music of Aboriginal Australians, either in historical contexts (Harris 2020; Magowan and Neuenfeldt 2005) or more recent contexts (Dunbar-Hall and Gibson 2004; Ottosson 2020). Please note: though Yolŋu custom dictates that the names and images of the deceased be retired after their death, the film was produced with the approval of Gurrumul and his family.

Both Serenade for Haiti and Gurrumul contain moving performances that will arouse student interest. But the music should not be left to speak for itself. With the right curation, the films may serve as overtures to timely discussions about the ethical responsibilities of ethnographers and filmmakers working within marginalized communities.

Henry Stoll is assistant professor of music and postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the cultural history of Haiti and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French Atlantic.