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Photograph by D. F. Thomson, Marrakaywarra, Ngulmarmar and Mangan, Arafura Swamp, Northeastern Arnhem Land, April 1937 Source: Courtesy of the Thomson family and Museum Victoria (TPH 1118) comparison of them with prints taken directly from Thomson's original glass plates, gives hints of this same aesthetic across a wide range of photographs. 28 Writers such as Athol Chase have discussed Thomson's commitment to an anthropological approach that emphasised material culture, and how this informed his photographic focus on 'natural humanity in seamless interaction with the biophysical environment'. Chase argues that Thomson's work pioneered what would later become the 'research paradigms … of ecological anthropology and cultural ecology … with their intellectual lenses focused clearly upon groups living in particular local biophysical environments and whose social and cultural existence was closely attuned over time to these environments'. 29
Source publication
This article explores the genesis of the film Ten Canoes in the photographs taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson, in Arnhem Land, in the 1930s. Thomson’s images profoundly informed the look and content of the film, and the paper traces this genealogy in order to identify a ‘cultural imaginary’ at work in the film. I argue that a close study of Th...
Citations
This article examines the ways in which Ten Canoes (de Heer and Djiggir, 2006) works as what Nicholas Rothwell has called ‘an inter-cultural membrane’. The article scrutinizes the rhetoric developed around the film, exploring questions around ownership, cultural mediation and the authorial voice. An extended interview with the co-director, Rolf de Heer, examines the production process to explore the structuring of the film through script, shooting and editing and the double process of pragmatics and aesthetics that drove the production process. The article proposes reframing the question of authenticity as fidelity to the complexities of the present, rather than fidelity to the past. It argues that an attempt to fully understand and articulate the complex dimensions of cultural exchange, collaboration and cultural translation, and the complex intermeshing of hybrid cultural and aesthetic notions, would produce a more productive and dynamic debate around the interface of cultural exchange than currently emerges from the rhetoric around the film. The article argues for an engaged and dialogic approach to film criticism, grounded in cultural research, in which the conceptual paradigms and speaking positions of the critic are equally opened to scrutiny.