Ten Canoes and the ethnographic photographs of Donald Thomson : 'Animate thought' and 'the light of the world'

Anne Rutherford

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    The release of the film Ten Canoes in 2006 has added momentum to interest in the ethnographic photographs of the anthropologist Donald Thomson, extending awareness of his work beyond the specialist fields where it was previously known. Thomson’s photographic images, taken in Arnhem Land in the area of the Arafura Swamp in the 1930s, were pivotal in the genesis and production of Ten Canoes. Ten Canoes draws heavily on Thomson’s photographs for both its look and content. My initial aim in this project was to explore a genealogy for the ‘eye’ of the film – the look or the visual style - and, by exploring the source photos and the tradition they come from, to decipher a ‘cultural imaginary’ at work in the source images themselves and the influence this heritage has on the visuality of the film. The initial hypothesis was that the visual codes of ethnographic photography inherited from Thomson, particularly the wide shot composition, produce a sense of a world that we look at across a vast distance of time – a space that appears floating and otherworldy. I believed that the monochrome sections of the film hook into deeply embedded ways of engaging with ethnographic images – in contexts where these forms have become familiar – that seem to reproduce what Faye Ginsburg has described as common colonial tropes that, to contemporary audiences, place tradition in a timeless, seamless past and traditional life as firmly rooted in that past, having no engagement with modernity. Ginsburg describes this as a ‘preexistent and untroubled cultural identity out there’.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)107-137
    Number of pages31
    JournalCultural Studies Review
    Volume18
    Issue number1
    Publication statusPublished - 2012

    Keywords

    • Arnhem Land (N.T.)
    • Thomson, Donald F.
    • ethnology
    • motion pictures
    • photographs

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