Many of the film’s memorable visuals are recreations of photographs taken in the mid-1930s by Donald Thomson, a University of Melbourne anthropology professor who spent almost two years with the Arafura Swamp people. RP: Ten Canoes certainly educates its audience and undermines the right-wing ideologues and racists who seek to blame Aboriginal people for their own demise. He has made 11 features since 1984 including, Incident at Raven’s Gate, The Quiet Room, The Old Man Who Loved to Read Stories, Dance to Me My Song, Bad Boy Bubby, The Tracker and Alexandra’s Project. I was simply the means through which they could tell their story. Ridjimiraril’s final dance and the traditional ceremonies of fellow tribe members coming to terms with his death, have a luminous beauty. There was this veneer of western civilisation, but inside, the house was like a garbage tip, with rubbish everywhere. Ten Canoes, which recently won a ... because if I have a special reason in mind for making a film and the themes I want to deal with, it becomes contrived. At the same time, de Heer’s film does not indulge in suggestions that a return to the “old ways” would provide an answer to the appalling social problems now facing Australia’s aboriginal population, amongst the poorest and most oppressed in the world. Ten Canoes is a 2006 Australian drama film directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr and starring Crusoe Kurddal. Over the past two years the number of features made in Australia has dropped to record lows. I actively avoid analysing what I do, because if I have a special reason in mind for making a film and the themes I want to deal with, it becomes contrived. Rolf de Heer: Thomson was a serious anthropologist who worked for extended periods in northern Queensland and the Northern Territory during the 1930s. But overall it is a sincere and audacious attempt to explore subject matter never before dramatised on film. The original individuals in that picture have all been identified and there are many people up there related to them. Ten Canoes begins with a playful acknowledgement of the type of stories that non-Indigenous Australian audiences are used to seeing. In fact, the canoe making and hunting sequences are mainly of anthropological interest. The reasons for this are really complex. For me, the goose-egg hunting had to be a major element in the film but, of course, this is not very dramatic and the locals wanted it set in “old times”. It is not so much the story itself that is of interest in Ten Canoes but the way the story is presented. Enter your email address to subscribe to Cinema Autopsy and receive notifications of new posts by email. Culturally, cosmologically these people are still in the bush. The dominant culture has told them often enough that they are useless, they don’t work, they don’t get the kids to school, they throw rubbish out, etc., etc. My job was to show them how to make what they wanted work for them, and for a cinema audience in the rest of the world. As the camera records this stunning country, narrator Gulpilil playfully explains to non-Aboriginal audiences: “Once upon a time in a land far, far away.... No, it’s not like that. Ten Canoes opens with a long helicopter tracking shot along a river and into the spectacularly wild Arafura Swamp. The story told by Minygululu is about another pair of brothers; Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kurddal) a proud warrior who like Minygululu has a younger brother (Yeeralparil, also played by Jamie Gulpilil) who desires one of his wives. The film couldn’t be made if they didn’t feel that they had ownership of the process. I don’t want people to think that it is part of this discussion and not go and see it, which would be a real pity. However, like the bark of a tree, each layer has significance and importance to the whole. Ten Canoes is an extraordinarily unique film about the Indigenous Australian Yolngu people, who live in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Over the course of the hunt Dayindi is told a story by his older brother Minygululu (Peter Minygululu), a story set in the mythical times that reflects the situation where Dayindi desires one of Minygululu’s wives. The Storyteller then begins to describe his ancestors, taking the audience to the next level of storytelling, which concerns the story of young Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil) on his first goose egg hunting expedition. His story is from a long time ago but unlike Star Wars it does not follow the linear conventions of a classical Hollywood narrative. In the prologue (the external layer) The Storyteller describes the creation of the land and his own birth. The concluding scenes, dramatising the passing of Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kurddal), one of the ancient tale’s central characters, are memorable. This is the second part of a series of articles on the 2006 Sydney Film Festival, held June 9-25. Under the combined direction of acclaimed Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer (The Tracker, Bad Boy Bubby) and Peter Djigirr, a local man from the Arafura Swamp region where the film was shot, Ten Canoes combines Yolngu storytelling traditions with a Western approach to narrative cinema. Without repeating the entire story, Minygululu’s tale involves sexual jealousy, kidnapping, sorcery, inter-tribal conflict and customary law. Ten Canoes simply, but with optimism and confidence, employs Aboriginal story-telling traditions to present an authentic picture of life in the past. This mythical story then takes us to the next layer of the film, which The Storyteller tells us occurred even further back in time. RP: Ten Canoes is being released under conditions where the government and the media continuously claim that the social problems facing Aboriginal people today are caused by welfare—or what they call “sit down money”—and the use of tribal customary law in sentencing. So yes, in a way, one of the reasons for making this film was to somehow subvert our skewed views of things, by showing aspects of Aboriginal society and culture, which are largely not understood and falsely judged to be worthless. Hopefully some of these will be of the same standard as Ten Canoes, a valuable and visually striking film about ancient Aboriginal life, directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr.
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