Canoe Culture Bridges Gap

The Age

Saturday June 3, 2006

PHILIPPA HAWKER

A new film, awarded a special Jury Prize at Cannes, enabled a community to discover things about itself and to re-engage with lost practices and activities, writes Philippa Hawker.

TEN CANOES IS SET in a distant past, a thousand or so years ago. Its cast is entirely Aboriginal, and only the occasional voiceover, a storyteller's narrative, is in English. It summons up a world that flourished long before European settlement, but its life is also intimately bound up with a series of photographs taken in the 1930s by a white anthropologist. It is a vivid, engrossing mixture of humour and drama, a film of rich images and sudden surprises that deals with desire, death and everyday ritual, with ceremonies and stories and the awkward, intractable, perplexing aspects of human nature.

The film was devised in consultation with the community in which it was made: it allowed its performers to depict the life of the culture from which they come, but also to discover things about it, to re-engage with lost practices and activities.

When I speak to cast members shortly after the first public screening, they're exhilarated and exhausted by the response. Bobby Bununggurr tells me that he hasn't made a canoe since he was a little boy, and puts out a hand somewhere around his knees to show me how tall he was at the time. But there are other aspects of his heritage that he is closely involved with: he's an accomplished artist and musician, whose work has been exhibited widely, here and overseas, and he's a seasoned traveller who's made several trips around the world

For Frances Djulibing, another performer, the film represents something personal and something with a wider application. She always wanted to be an actor, she says, and the film has given her the chance: but it's also a work that can teach the children of her community things about the past, it can "show people and bring back their spirit".

And to David Gulpilil, who initiated the project, withdrew from it, then became involved again, and whose son, Jamie, plays two central roles in it, the film represents opportunities for those who made it and those who will see it. He hopes that it will launch careers in filmmaking, and that it will allow "people in the community and around the world to know how our ancestors lived, and to understand them".

Ten Canoes grew out of a discussion between director Rolf de Heer and David Gulpilil, during the making of de Heer's The Tracker, the stylised tale of frontier rough justice and retribution in which Gulpilil starred. (After more than 30 years in the film industry, it was his first leading role.)

Gulpilil's idea was that de Heer should make a film with his community, of some 800 people, in Ramingining, in Arnhem Land. What form it would take was to be decided - all kinds of options were canvassed. But in the end, the starting point was a photograph, taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson, an image of 10 men and their canoes, taken during a traditional goose-egg hunt.

The conventional wisdom would be that ethnographic images have nothing to offer their subjects. But the Thomson photographs, de Heer says, have become part of the community's culture, something that they value and draw on. They recognise family members in them, they use them to provide cultural connections.

Having acknowledged this image as the catalyst, de Heer says "the most important decision I made was at the very beginning, when I thought, don't impose, structure the film so that it can go anywhere and go with whatever happens".

De Heer spent almost two years working on the elements of the film, flying up to Ramingining once a month and spending a week or so in what he describes it as an "intelligence-gathering" exercise: sometimes it was an intense series of encounters, sometimes a matter of simply waiting for someone to talk to him. "I was finding out, in a broad sense, what they would want in the film, what they would not want, what were the factors that had to be taken into account, and gradually bringing them back stuff."

Certain parts of the film grew out of the community's desire to get back to specific cultural practices. There had been discussions, off and on, over 10 years, about going on a traditional goose-egg hunt. An expedition therefore became the activity at the centre of the movie, when a young man on the hunt is confronted with a dilemma: he finds it hard to hide his longing for his brother's young third wife. To bring home to him the dangers of his situations, he is told a story, a cautionary tale-within-a-tale that takes on its own imaginative power and drama.

Ten Canoes is a mixture of black-and-white and colour. The black-and-white footage represents the time in which the film is set, the colour footage (the majority of the film) depicts the events of that cautionary tale, a narrative from an even more ancient, perhaps mythological, past.

Thomson's photographs were black and white, and these parts of the film are shot with a fixed camera, a further link to the qualities of the still image. The colour footage, however, is fluid and mobile. And the boundary between fact and fiction is blurred,

De Heer always knew, as he said, that he would have to be flexible, but one change almost derailed the project. It was designed to be co-directed by David Gulpilil, but a few weeks before shooting, Gulpilil decided to withdraw from the film, for reasons that de Heer says are complex and difficult to explain but were not directly related to the movie: it would take hours to do justice to both sides. The film went ahead, but some recasting had to be done.

David Gulpilil was to play two characters, one of them a figure with a significant dramatic impact: as it turns out, Crusoe Kurddal, who took this role, brought a forceful, melancholy element to the film. One of the elders, Peter Djigirr, became co-director. And in the end, Gulpilil had a part to play in the finished film: he worked on a voiceover narration, which he recorded in English and in a Yolngu language. "Apart from the fact that David would be the best storyteller that we could find," de Heer says, "it felt right that he did it. And people in the community were very happy about that, because in some way they feel it's his film: without him, it never would have started."

In planning the production, de Heer threw out all the conventional "rules" of filmmaking. Landscape shots were designed to become part of the fabric and texture of the film, so that the story could be told over them" - although this also happens to fit well, he says, with the place of land in the culture, where land, self and art are part of a continuum rather than separate elements. Rather than the usual practice of "coverage", filming scenes several times from different angles, he designed separate shots, "so that no one had to repeat things or match actions, and they could improvise and it would be OK". At the same time, he had to be very careful with nudity, making sure that this was depicted in a way that everyone was comfortable with. "There were different schools of thought in the community about this," he says, although there were certain scenes where detailed planning was necessary.

One of the important elements, according to community members, was an emphasis on the role of ceremony. It would be necessary to include a ceremony in the film. The challenge, de Heer says, was to find something that stop the drama in its tracks: as the story evolved, the ceremony became a death dance and the rituals that followed it. This wasn't a secret or a sacred material, although it was an intense episode to film, de Heer says. "There was a lot of joking, and some real grief as well": there were also adjustments that he had to make, as decisions changed over who would perform the dance, and more than one person became involved. "There were cultural reasons for this that I wasn't privy to and didn't need to know. It was simply that they both had to do it."

But he did, however, need to negotiate one thing related to death and imagery, a hard logistical imperative. He had to be assured that, were one of the cast members to die, the film could still be screened - something that goes against custom. "I told them, 'I can't make this sort of film if that happens. The nature of the money that is involved in this means that it has to be shown, no matter what.' There was a lot of discussion among themselves, and they came back and said, 'We've talked about it and it's OK.' "

Around the film, there are additional projects that have been designed to add to the life of Ten Canoes. There was an exhibition at the South Australian Museum to accompany its world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival earlier this year: it included not only artworks from the community, some of it by some of the actors in the film, but also objects made for the movie and footage from a documentary about Ten Canoes shot by young people from Ramingining. There's a website, and a project to record traditional songs from the area.

And there are several in the community who want to continue with filmmaking. Jamie Gulpilil would like to pursue an acting career, and Djulibing, for example, feels that Ten Canoes could be a starting point for further exploration. She has talked to Djiggir about filming more stories, she says. There's more to be told, she believes, about her character, Nowalingu, a woman whose circumstances remain a tantalising mystery, a piece of unfinished business. "I need to tell the rest of her story," she says, "I need to make another film."

Ten Canoes opens on June 29. There will be advance screenings and Q&A sessions with Rolf de Heer and actors Frances Djulibing and Richard Birrinbirrin: these include Monday June 12 at 4pm Cinema Como and at 6.45pm Rivoli and on Tuesday, June 13, at 7pm at Cinema Nova.

© 2006 The Age

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