Ten Canoes

I was going to write a review of Ten Canoes, but Ms Laura has beaten me to the punch and articulated many of the main issues surrounding the film.  After reading Laura’s quite beautiful review, I felt I had a few things left to say, but that they wouldn't all fit in the 'comments' box so I’d put them here.

Ten Canoes is the joint project of film director, Rolf de Heer, and the people of Ramingining, with strong input from David Gulpilil.  De Heer has a diverse and interesting oeuvre as a film director, which includes The Tracker, Bad Boy Bubby and the execrable Alexandra’s Project.  Collaborative productions with Aboriginal people/communities, particularly those involving oral/mythic stories as Ten Canoes does, raise some potentially fraught authorial and copyright issues. However, the film appears to have negotiated these without a ripple.  According to the film’s official website:

The film is directed by Rolf de Heer and features the son of David Gulpilil in one of the lead roles: twenty-two year-old Jamie Gulpilil, whose traditional lands fall within the Arafura Swamp area. The entire cast are people indigenous to the swamp region, mainly Ganalbingu and related clans, who are also responsible for the making of all the traditional artefacts needed for the film, such as the swamp-specific bark canoes, the spears and other weaponry and the dwellings.

Indigenous people from the area are involved at most levels of the production, from input into and editorial control of the script to the casting and selection of locations.

In some ways, this film presents an interesting new development in Indigenous film-making because of its take on one of the earliest approaches to fostering Indigenous literature/culture, an ‘anthropological’ focus which seeks to retrieve and maintain traditional, mythic material.  Most recent Indigenous films have focussed on political, historical or contemporary issues (cf. Rabbit Proof Fence; Beneath Clouds, The Tracker).  Off-the top of my head, the closest relative to Ten Canoes I can think of would be segments of Yolngu Boy, which was produced in a similar area.  Some commentators on Indigenous literature, such as Anita Heiss, are sceptical of the merits of an anthropological approach.  Others such as Colin Johnson/Mudrooroo (a controversial figure himself) find a certain strength, a point of resistance and irreducibility to Western culture, in the elements of creolisation that feature in texts such as Elsie Roughsey’s An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New.  It would be oversimplistic to say that Ten Canoes is purely anthropological in its approach: like most Indigenous films, it’s a highly hybrid project, particularly in its genesis and development. But where the power of its hybridity lies is a provocative question.

For me, one of the most interesting things about Ten Canoes was the way it used film as a medium for dramatising material from an oral story-telling tradition, a potentially difficult project given the relative inaccessibility of much of this material for a contemporary audience.  I have students who want to focus heavily on reproducing mythic material. In order to avoid marginalising themselves into some particular niches (and to get them to engage with more contemporary narrative ideas), I’ve been trying to encourage them to play with magic realism (as in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung) and the idea of writing modern fairy tales/fables for our times, etc, in using this material.  Ten Canoes suggested to me that film might be a more flexible and innovative medium than writing for engaging with oral material, with its use of such devices as the characterisation of the story-teller in a framing narrative and its tableau-like introductions of various characters.  (As a corollary, I was reminded of medieval poems, such as Gawain and the Green Knight, which would have been performed orally and make strong use of a narratorial frame, and the production of mystery plays to dramatise biblical stories for a non-literate, visually-oriented public.) At the same time, the introduction of these elements could have been terribly botched, and De Heer and co are careful not to be too heavy-handed in their application of them.

The film employs a story-within-a-story structure, which parallels two narratives: that of Dayindi, who covets one of his older brother’s wives, and that of his ancestor, Yeeralparil, who’s in an analogous position.  Dayindi’s narrative is set in pre-contact tribal times and filmed in black and white; Yeeralparil’s is set in a mythic era and shot largely in colour, suggesting the vitality and authencity of this ancestral story’s themes.  Ten Canoes is ‘the first feature film to be shot entirely in Aboriginal language (predominantly Ganalbingu)’, the language spoken in the Arafura swamp area.  A little confusingly for my fatigue-sodden mind, David Gulpilil’s narratorial voice addresses the (largely) white audience with a degree of intimacy and irony.  Combined with the mimicry of Thomson’s iconography, the initial effect for me was to think that the framing narrative might have been set in slightly more recent times and that the ‘white man’ was going to be introduced sooner or later as the source of all their problems.

That being said, there’s nary a sighting of white man or even a Bunnings spear, and the film in some ways presents a docu-drama on traditional Ganalbingu life.  Nevertheless, the life that it depicts is not some kind of a prelapsarian idyll, but one of both joy and hardship.  I read this film as being about exchange, boundaries and questions of who has the right to what resources, particularly land/food supplies and women.  (The ‘food’ question is parodied in the character of the honey-eating Birrinbirrin.)  I agree with Laura that the central message of the story is to warn against pitting individual desires against the customary ways of the communal group.  Going off by yourself, deceiving the group will only lead to trouble: you might be abducted by the cross-river people and sold to that desert mob or you might get so eaten up by your own concerns, you come all over paranoid and spear someone you shouldn’t have.  Like many a great tragedy, the inner story ends with a bitterly ironic twist to underline its point.

The danger of putting individual desire ahead of communal well-being is a recurrent theme in narratives from medieval (e.g. Le Morte D’Arthur), and other, older communal cultures, which stress that the individual must subjugate their interests to those of custom and tradition to ensure the group’s survival.  As Laura notes, Ten Canoes appears to share or emulate the typological story-telling patterns of other mythic and folkloric cultures – Biblical, Greek, Celtic, etc – though the message is for Dayindi’s benefit rather than that of the contemporary audience: as the narrator says, it’s one of their stories, not one of ours.  As such, I don’t think the framing device employed by Ten Canoes opens out to operate as a typology or to provide ‘universal truths’ to a modern (predominantly non-Indigenous) audience.  We can glean what we like about jealousy, suspicion and human relationships in a general way, but specific analogies or typologies are more difficult to maintain across the expanse of cultural difference. Despite the film’s use of some postmodern framing devices and notions, I think it’s something of a stretch to say that there are parallels between postmodern notions of the decentred self and the subjugation of the individual self to the collective as represented in this film, especially since some forms of global culture lead to a more atomised and individualised sense of self.  If anything, the film’s narratorial frame is perhaps ultimately disorienting rather than orienting, suggesting an ironic gloss on the cultural strength and superiority of Ganalbingu traditional ways of life, hard though they might be, as well as the slight penetrability of this culture.  (Interstingly, in a time when customary law is often under public scrutiny, the film presents this system as operating with strength and integrity to negotiate difficult circumstances.)  Ten Canoes is perhaps a passing spectacle, a brief translation of a world through frames we recognise (Thomson, film, certain narrative devices, etc) but to which we have limited access –- a story that appears to be told on our terms but is ultimately told on theirs?

That said, the film is wonderfully human and earthy, especially in its exchanges on food, sex and well, poo, bum, fart stuff. I sat in front of a row of Aboriginal ‘ladies’, who chuckled knowingly throughout the film, particularly during moments of sexual intrigue.  Ten Canoes certainly enlivens the typically static and serious tone of much anthropological accounts of traditional culture.  I imagined the director spending much time devising genital-obscuring tableaux to keep it rated M. I was also fascinated by the way Ridjimiraril had enough energy to perform his own death dance: it would never be allowed in ICU.

Laura raises an interesting point about gender issues in the film, and the positioning of the ‘discernibly male’ narratorial perspective as universal, suggesting that the film could have given a similar treatment to gender issues as it did to time and history.  She qualifies this, commenting that more films like Ten Canoes need to be made, but from female as well as male perspectives.  I’m in agreement with most of this: there’s very much a ‘Claude Levi-Strauss’ feel about gender relations in the film.  The object of desire in both narratives (the young chick with the best tits) is very passive and largely silent, and one can only guess at her thoughts.  However, I did find the depiction of the older women quite interesting, as being powerful in their own right, if preoccupied by sexual/domestic matters: were they cougars or viragos?, I was left wondering.

It’s only been a few months since I went to similar country as that depicted in Ten Canoes – indeed, to the border of Arnhem land and I spent some time at the opening of this film thinking thoughts like, ‘Even an experienced film director has problems with green light, reflected light and overexposure – my photos of the wetlands aren’t so bad, after all’ till the penny dropped that he was probably imitating the slightly bleached out look of some of Thomson’s photography.  (I also entertained other competitive thoughts like, ‘The desert is so much prettier than the wetlands.’)  That said, this is definitely a film you should see on the big screen rather than wait till it comes out on DVD: a small screen won’t do it justice.

Comments

[Laura]

I read this film as being about exchange, boundaries and questions of who has the right to what resources, particularly land/food supplies and women.

That seems very right to me, like everything else you've said. Great review, El.

One thing the movie did to me was make me very eager to visit Arnhem Land. It's interesting that it's filmed in a way that makes it look different than it does in reality to someone who's seen it herself. To me it looked quite gorgeous - especially the ground on the grassy plains - they looked soft and fluffy and like they would feel nice underfoot.

[elsewhere]

It might also depend on the time of year. Some of my pictures from the wet can be seen here: http://elsewhere.typepad.com/the_view_from_elsewhere/2006/02/wetlands.html

I wouldn't say it looked that different to how I saw it -- just drier, and more bleached out. Of course, I'm biased after living in the desert.