Ten canoes as 'intercultural membrane’

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.