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December 23, 2007
We watched Ten Canoes on DVD last night. What a great film in the tradition of Australian filmmaking. It is non-linear and evocative, imbued with the tradition of oral storytelling from an Arnhem Land swamp. The collaboration between filmmaker Rolf de Heer and the Ramingining community is one that attempts to tackle the very difficult cultural translation between western concepts and language and Indigenous cultural and storytelling concepts in order to make this film.
(Photo by Jackson, Courtesy of Fandango Australia and Vertigo Productions)
The look of de Heer's film refers back to Dr Donald Thomson's photography. Thompson went to Arnheim Land in 1937 when it was still deeply, deeply traditional and had never been conquered by white people. He lived there amongst the Yolngu people, learnt languages and took 4000 photographs on glass plates.
Ian Jones, the director of photography, creates the look of Donald Thomson’s photographs in the black and white section of the film, and part of the film’s beauty is the way it shifts between colour and monochrome, but with a reversal of their usual meaning – the black-and-white section here is the present. The rich colour is the distant past.
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Gary,
the images are only half there since the upgrade. What's wrong?