Content area
Full Text
1931-2009
FILM AS TEXT
This article discusses the theatrical version of Ten Canoes (2006) featuring Yolngu language with English subtitles and English narration by David Gulpilil.
Ten Canoes is a unique film about the Indigenous Australian Yolngu people, who live in north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Under the combined direction of acclaimed Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer 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. It is not so much the story itself that is of interest in Ten Canoes, but the way the story is presented. While conventional filmic techniques are used to indicate different time periods and the division between subjective occurrences and objective occurrences, the way these boundaries are collapsed and the way the story is layered reflects the importance of storytelling to the Yolngu people. As the unseen Storyteller (David Gulpilil) tells us, 'It's not a story like your story, but it's a good story.'
It is important to appreciate the immense importance of storytelling to the Yolngu people. Caroline Josephs, who examined sacred oral storytelling traditions for her doctoral thesis, presents Yolngu storytelling as an all-encompassing event that creates a relationship between all things, including self, country and kinsman. It combines history with the Dreamtime, past and present, interior experience for the individual and exterior experiences. Josephs writes, 'It is also primarily an experiential approach to knowing, a felt sense in the body, and can not in my view, be met through analytic conceptual frames of reference.' In order to 'explain' Yolngu storytelling to non-Indigenous people, one must tell a story.1
Ten Canoes illustrates the power of storytelling and how it creates a relationship not just between all the characters from the various parts of the film, but with the audience watching the film.
Layered storytelling
Ten Canoes begins with a playful acknowledgement of the type of stories that non-Indigenous Australian audiences are used to seeing. The first line spoken by the Storyteller is the very sombre 'Once upon a time in a land far, far away', which is the famous line that begins the popular Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). The Storyteller then laughs...