Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes is an ethnographic photograph come to life. Winner, as I understand, of a special mention at Cannes and already announced as Australia's entry into the Oscars foreign film category, Ten Canoes is visually stunning as it crosses back and forth between real time and dream time through strategic shifts between color cinematography and black and white cinematography. The story is simple even as the storytelling is complex. While hunting for geese and geese eggs, an elder tells a younger man a story that proves relevant for his own inappropriate feelings for his brother's wife. What became of tremendous interest at the screening I attended was that the print sent to TIFF did not include subtitles! This outraged some even as it delighted me for being so sensually immersive in the aboriginal language. Though (thankfully) the storyteller's narration was in English, de Heer was horrified and deeply apologetic during the Q&A and said as an audience we had missed a lot by not having the subtitles, and I'm glad that in a couple of weeks I will have an opportunity to see Ten Canoes again in the Bay Area to compare and contrast, but surely this is an indication of how accomplished the film is that I could have enjoyed it so immensely just for the imagery and the hypnotic cadence of its language?
Rolf de Heer was asked how he cast Ten Canoes. He responded by saying he would have to paraphrase the question: how the film was cast. It was the most remarkable casting process he'd ever been through. In many respects he could do little. The inspiration for the film was a photograph by the Australian anthropologist Donald Thomson of ten men in canoes on a swamp. The initial casting of the movie was for four of those ten. It was really the community itself who moreoreless decided who was going to do what. The ten men in the canoes in the photograph were all named and everyone was related to them in some way and so the people who were most closely related chose to "be" them. The last of the ten canoeists were cast in that way. For the rest of the casting, a number of aspects came into play. Primarily, there is a complex kinship system where everyone belongs to one of two moieties with subsections and classifications that determine who can marry who. As far as he could understand it, in the aboriginal culture there is no concept of "fiction." Thus, the relationships on the screen between the characters had to be allowed in real life between actors playing those characters. This was so complex that there was nothing he could do to even determine who he could cast from. It didn't work for him to ask each actor which moiety they belonged to and try to figure it out from there; they moreorless determined these casting choices themselves. He had to concede to their cultural imperatives.
He was asked how Australians and the aboriginal communities reacted when they saw the finished film. The very first people to see the film were the aboriginals who saw the version that was completely in their language, including the storyteller's narration (in our version the narration was in English). It was the wildest screening he had ever been to. It was complete madness, chaotic, wonderful. It was the first time any of them had seen anything on the screen that was about them in their own language. There was yelling, screaming, laughing. The response was tremendous.
He was asked how he came about to write this story, to know this community, and to become so involved, and whether he spoke aboriginal. Not at all, he admitted, maybe five or six words. It started when he made a film called The Tracker and he cast David Gulpilil [who, incidentally, is the English-speaking narrator of Ten Canoes]. After he cast David, he found himself not knowing how to deal with him because he was so different from anyone he'd ever dealt with before. He didn't even know how to talk to him. David invited him to come meet his people and de Heer realized he had to accept that invitation so he could understand him better to direct him. As their relationship developed during the filming of The Tracker, David kept asking de Heer to make a movie that would be about his people starring his people. As the project developed, David himself moved away from his community and became distant from the project, but, by then de Heer had developed a relationship with everyone else in David's community.
Almost three years ago to the day when de Heer was in Toronto for Alexandra's Project he was walking across one of Toronto's parks ruminating on Ten Canoes when all the contradictory elements of the script's thematic necessities and cinematic structure fell into place. In gist, the story of ten men hunting for geese and geese eggs was fundamentally undramatic but this was what the community wanted in the film and what he had to work with. The community was very attached to the Donald Thomson photograph and they wanted de Heer to bring it to life. They wanted the film to be about old times but they didn't want the old times to be depicted as a time of conflict. Because Thomson's historical photograph was in black and white, it seemed obvious that the recapturing of that image should be in black and white but he was under contract to deliver a film in color. It was while walking through the park in Toronto three years ago that de Heer figured out that if the film was set in mythic time when anything could happen, it would be sufficiently removed from historical old times, and could be contrasted by being shot in color. If the mythic times could be told by a storyteller as the old times geese hunt was occurring, then the film would be provided a dramatic structure that would make it compelling to western audiences while still satisfying aboriginal requests.
It was at this juncture that someone wondered if what was being said in aboriginal was incidental to the story's narrative momentum and if the audience was missing anything by not knowing what they were saying. "But you had subtitles?" de Heer queried and was then horrified to discover that no, the print shown did not include English subtitles, only an English narrative track. Though deeply shocked by this development, and not knowing what he could possibly do to remedy the situation, de Heer conceded that, yes, we had missed quite a lot by not having the subtitles. The audience then began to debate the merits of seeing the film with subtitles or without but de Heer asserted that, though he was glad to hear that some of us enjoyed being sensually immersed in the aboriginal language, he's convinced we would equally enjoy knowing what was being said, perhaps even a little more.
Because of his familiarity with the community, de Heer was asked if it has changed much since he first met them. Some aspects remain close to what he first encountered, they retain tribal customs even as some of the aborigines have become enamored with on-line banking.
The script was developed by de Heer sitting down with the aborigines, talking through each scene, discussing what needed to be said to further the scene, complicated by his inability to speak Aborigine and many of them unable to speak English. There was always a lot of talk before they could finally get down to a shoot. Despite all this complication, the performances are amazingly consistent and de Heer explains this as being a consequence of the aboriginal perspective that they were not playing their ancestors, they were their ancestors. This temporal aspect is difficult for Westerners mired in temporal tense to understand. Comparable to the aboriginal assertions that they are the land and the land is them. The western subject/object split, which we presume to be literal, collapses in the face of the aboriginal belief in their own literal connection. In being their ancestors, they could do it with relative ease and continuity.