 A FilmExposed Film Review |
 Dir: Rolf de Heer, Peter Djigirr, 2006, Australia, Aboriginal/English, 90mins
Cast: Crusoe Kurddal, Jamie Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin, Peter Minygululu, David Gulpilil
“Bout time to tell you a story, eh? Then I'll tell you one of ours...” starts the narration of Ten Canoes over aerial shots of the Northern Australian landscape. In reality, it is two stories, one of the ‘ancestors’, who lived a long time ago, and one of the ‘ancients’, who lived in a time even longer before that. The first is a traditional goose egg hunt in the Sarafura Swamp that could take up to seven days, during which the men eat and sleep in the swamp. This is a great time to tell stories, and a good one would take as long to tell as the hunt itself. It is Dayindi’s (Gulpilil) first hunt, and he is taught not only the skills of canoe making but some important life lessons too. Dayindi has the wrong kind of love, he covets his older brothers youngest wife. So the brother (Minygululu) tells him an educational tale from the time of the ancients.
Ten Canoes is the kind of folktale that seduces unsuspecting freshmen to take up social anthropology, only to spend the next three years comparing the philosophical theses of Radcliffe-Brown, Lévi-Strauss and other gentlemen with double barrel names who toured the imperial colonies. The film has a pronounced anthropological bend, especially the goose egg hunt strand. It is shot in black and white, directly inspired by the photos taken by anthropologist Dr Donald Thompson in the 1930s. Thompson left a legacy of several thousand photographs that have entered Aboriginal common consciousness. Although not even a hundred years ago, the traditions and skills documented are now almost forgotten, and the pictures served not only as inspiration, but had to be consulted for accuracy. This was an interesting ethnographic study, but would not have made for an internationally commercial movie. Hence the fable of the ancestors was introduced, shot in colour, which tells of many wives, spears, ritual retribution, magic and mystery.
The switching between black and white and colour is jarring without the prior knowledge of the significance of the Thompson photographs that few audiences will have outside Australia. But the reference to old travellers’ pictures is obvious, as static poses are often held for several seconds before the actors crack a smile. This is where Ten Canoes divorces classic anthropology; here the indigenous people tell their own story in their own words. Scenes of everyday life, the wives’ nagging and earthy humour is in the forefront, details that would never find their way into textbooks between tables of how yam production affects social hierarchy, thanks to director de Heer’s close working relationship with Djigirr, David Gulpilil, who is also narrator, and the inhabitants of Ramingining town.
The result is a film that is entertaining despite being culturally informative. It allows a glimpse of the memory of a people without the depressing moral ‘…and none of this exists any more.’ Ten Canoes is admirable, even if it is slow or amateurish at times, for its optimism and warmth. |
