Ten Canoes as a communist film

ABSTRACT

This essay thinks through the populist Marxism of Bertolt Brecht, and more specifically his courtroom challenge to the film industry, in order to interpret the Australian film Ten Canoes as a communist film. The idea of communism has recently been proposed by French philosopher Alain Badiou as a way of naming projects that are not only anti-capitalist, but that also suggest alternative modes of organisation. Ten Canoes actualises Brecht's ideas about what a collective filmmaking process might consist of, and more significantly what it might look like. The stilted acting, multiple storylines and structure of the fable that Brecht employed in his theatre productions are also visible in Ten Canoes, forms that resulted from a filmmaking process that involved extensive consultation with a remote Australian Aboriginal community. Its members made decisions about the film's story, script and casting. This coincidence between a German theatre director's ideas and twenty-first-century cinema points to a coincidence of aesthetics and politics, to which this essay gives the name communist.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewer who gave such substantial feedback on a first draft of this essay, and rescued it from even more assumptions, didacticisms and idealisms than it now contains.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Darren Jorgensen lectures in art history at the University of Western Australia. His recent book, co-authored with David Brooks, is The Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa (UWA Publishing, 2015).

Notes

1. In Australia, this was represented by the now defunct Communist Party of Australia, which supported the Aboriginal struggle for citizenship, equal pay and land rights (Boughton 2001).

2. My reading of Brecht relies on Frow (1984), who gives a detailed account of Brecht's German text, ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit'. For more information on Brecht's relation to cinema, see Giles (1997).