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Rolf De Heer’s The Tracker

Reviewed by Mark Freeman

August 2002 - Cinema operates often as a reflection of the challenges that face our society, representing our fears, our goals, the small obstacles (and the large) which temper our days and structure our lives. But it also can work as investigator, political weapon, treatise, and an active implement for social or political change.

The vision of the cinema as "a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second" outlined by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their polemic "Towards a Third Cinema" is one that has inspired such change, ranging from their own Argentinian film Hour of the Furnaces, through to the Dardenne Brothers’ Rosetta, which was the catalyst for minimum wage revision in their native Belgium.

Rolf De Heer’s The Tracker is hardly as forceful, or even as politically focused as these films, but it does continue a recent tradition of Australia’s examination of race relations. The demand for social change within the community is strong, the conservative government of the day is proving equally bullish in its resistance to calls for reconciliation. And so, as is one of the functions of cinema, a proliferation of Aboriginal stories are appearing; if the government can’t confront our past injustices, then our artists will. But despite all the noble intentions of these filmmakers, the stories have hovered uncomfortably between insight and clumsy didacticism, reducing things to easy characterisation, or earnest lessons in tolerance.

I’d like to say that The Tracker, probably the best of this cycle of Australian films, defeats these tentative attempts to confront a difficult, complex and painful history, but in truth it doesn’t. It is an admirable, sometimes exceptional film, but its reduction of its characters to archetypes serves to place undue emphasis on the sermonising and demonisation of attitudes. Like Ivan Sen’s attempt in Beneath Clouds, The Tracker makes the bad guys so awfully, fulsomely bad that you begin to wonder exactly what the purpose of the film is. Whilst certainly its heart is in the right place, you can’t help wondering if this film is directed firmly towards a white, middle class audience, wanting to see the past as clearly villainous as possible, and thereby denounce this history with the satisfaction and self-righteousness of the reformed smoker.

De Heer alerts us to these archetypes from the very beginning with a few printed lines giving an account of each character – they are never given names, but are simply The Tracker, The Fanatic, The Follower and The Veteran. They represent a varied Australia, elements of its history, its tradition of placid acceptance on the one hand, and vehement racial discrimination on the other. De Heer picks off a few characters, leaves them to rot in the burning desert, and aims, through his conclusion to offer us a vision of reconciliation, the forging of a new country where white and black are unified, but still cognizant of their significant cultural differences.

Mostly this segmenting of the characters is not too clumsy, but in the shape of The Fanatic (Gary Sweet), The Tracker pushes things just too far, and it sometimes borders on the ridiculous. Sweet is intended to represent the brutal white authority, treating the indigenous population with contempt, shooting them at any given opportunity, mouthing racist phrases like he’s reciting from scripture. That The Fanatic is so overwhelmingly awful is the only real error that De Heer makes. Sweet makes him a cartoon, almost unbelievable in his sneering, bile spitting performance, and De Heer’s script just feeds him plenty of bile to spit.

It overbalances the film, and suddenly you get the sneaking suspicion that this film is not so much about confronting our ignominious history, but about appeasing the guilt of the contemporary white audience. In fashioning a villain so monumentally awful, the bitter pill of our history is far easier to swallow, and makes our outrage over the past somehow easier to trumpet; the lack of complexity in this portrayal just makes The Tracker a far too comfortable story, almost Hollywood in its reduction of differences to stark, manicheaen opposites.

David Gulpilil

But apart from this niggling sense that The Tracker caters for white guilt, the film is also a strong, entertaining, and remarkably innovative film. Whilst Gary Sweet is lumbered with some awful dialogue, David Gulpillil as The Tracker is damn near perfect. An actor with a history of great films behind him (including Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout, Peter Weir’s The Last Wave and more recently Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence), Gulpillil finally lands a leading role and he makes the most of this opportunity.Whilst The Fanatic’s actions play out on a grand scale, all bluster and grimace, The Tracker keeps things small – a drop of the eyes, a lift of the hand, a joke that cuts deeper than anything The Fanatic gets to utter.

Although it’s a shame that legendary stuntman Grant Page doesn’t get much to do as The Veteran, Damon Gameau as The Follower manages to pull off a task equally as difficult as the one given to Sweet. Gameau takes the naïve, innocent Follower and retains his goofy Felix Williamson persona, whilst still allowing him to mature and understand more about the Aboriginal culture and the land he traverses. As the representation of the Australia of the future, it’s an awful burden to have to carry, but the performance rarely stumbles into mere heartwarming nonsense – Gameau keeps the reigns tight. The cinematography, too is exceptional, and the imposing landscape around the Flinders Ranges and Wilpena Pound act as a perfect backdrop to the action.

But probably beyond the generally decent performances, it is the striking inclusion of other media into this story that gives The Tracker an edge over the other films in this indigenous new wave. Not only is De Heer's film a quite compelling drama, with surprisingly effective moments of comedy, it is also a musical, with the soundtrack courtesy of Archie Roach an integral part of the film.

The music plays throughout, commenting on the characters and actions just as a traditional MGM musical might, the images of the four crossing the harsh terrain layered across the indigenous blues of Roach’s voice, alternately indignant, proud and wise. It’s a great tactic to pull back like this, and the music is not used to simply cue emotions – it acts more as the intellectual dialogue of the film, encouraging your investigation into the people, the country, the cultures. And doubled with this is De Heer’s coup de grace, the frequent cutting to artwork by Peter Coad, which establishes scenes, and more importantly, represents the incidents of violence which pepper the narrative.

It’s probably fair to say that Australian cinema is rarely truly innovative, but the inclusion of this approach is one of the more exciting and powerful uses of image and tableaux in recent years. It sets itself apart from a more traditional approach to violence, which is all about stretching the boundaries and transgressing further, providing a more visceral, repulsive image. But De Heer pulls back from this in a sly comment on the audience’s thirst for blood, and in many ways it proves more moving, and more visceral than if such images had been painstakingly rendered in all its crimson glory. It’s certainly one thing to have a story to tell, but De Heer’s triumph is that he finds the perfect ways to communicate it, where sound and image are bound together in a startling, audacious package (you can’t help wondering how the film would have worked even without the dialogue, as a pure extended musical).

And so even though The Tracker is a film with problems, it is also a film which tackles its subject matter with a winning style. De Heer’s errors come in his attitude to the past, and his desire to repulse us by its brutality and lack of mercy or compassion. Where he succeeds, though, is by finding the right means for communicating his story, and when he draws back and lets image and sound work for him, or the subtle performance of David Gulpillil to suggest an attitude or position, The Tracker shows us what can be achieved.

We are as a nation, perhaps still too close to the debate to be able to discuss it without overreaction on either side, and histories are becoming blurred through guilt. But if cinema functions as an agent of social and political change, as it has in the past, The Tracker serves as a leader in the progress towards reconciling the past injustices, and the unification of Australia in a melting pot of tribes, communities and cultures.

Source:Critical Eye

Making tracks

Rolf de Heer, David Gulpilil and Gary Sweet? Sacha Molitorisz examines one of Australian cinema's most curious collaborations.

August 9 2002 - In 1991, two years before the release of Bad Boy Bubby, writer/director Rolf de Heer had an idea for a film about a black tracker pursuing a black fugitive on behalf of a zealous, vengeful whitefella.

"I wrote it down on the spot," recalls de Heer. "Twelve pages, double-spaced."

Eleven years later, that film has finally been made. Called The Tracker, it features songs by Archie Roach and stars Gary Sweet as "the Fanatic" and David Gulpilil as "the Tracker". The parable-style plot follows the characters on a pursuit deep into the South Australian outback; and the plot's journey to the screen, it turns out, was equally epic.

"I applied with the treatment to [the WA's film funding body], and they said, 'OK, but we want you to have a script editor.' I said, 'Sorry, I haven't written a script yet. What am I going to do with a script editor?' But they insisted. So they paid for me to come across [from Adelaide to Perth], and I talked for two days with the script editor. And it was very good and really challenging. But then I came back and I couldn't write a word.

"And then Bad Boy Bubby happened and [The Tracker] just ended up in the drawer ..."

Bad Boy Bubby, of course, was a career-making film. The 1993 drama won four AFI awards - including best director, best screenplay and best actor (for Nicholas Hope) - as well as the Special Jury Prize at Venice. Next de Heer made the sci-fi drama Epsilon; The Quiet Room, the touching drama of a girl rendered speechless by her bickering parents; and Dance Me to My Song, another touching drama, this time about a woman with cerebral palsy and an indifferent carer.

Then, in 2000, de Heer travelled to South America to shoot The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, a Dutch/Spanish/French/Australian co-production starring Richard Dreyfuss, Timothy Spall and Hugo Weaving.

"It was a nightmare," says the 51-year-old, with just the faintest trace of a Dutch accent. (He came to Australia aged eight.) "It was terribly difficult. Awful. It will be lucky to ever see the light of day, not because it's a bad film, but because of the politics involved. After that I was seriously thinking I don't want to make any more films."

Fortunately, just as he was considering career suicide, he was contacted about the Adelaide Festival of Arts. Did he have anything suitable?

"As it happened I did, sitting in the drawer from 10 years before. It was the opposite [of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories]. It was small, and the nature of it meant I could do it the way I wanted."

Partly funded by the Adelaide Festival, The Tracker is de Heer's ninth film. It was shot in the spectacular Flinders Ranges.

"Not hearing the phone ring for nearly two months - it was wonderful."

De Heer says that originally he didn't consider Gary Sweet for the pivotal role of the Fanatic.

"I don't watch much television, and from his television stuff he's not the sort of actor I really thought I'd ever work with. But I saw him in Adelaide one time, he was doing a film there and just standing outside having a smoke.

"And I was struck while thinking about the casting about how different he felt. It was like he was wiser, it was like [he'd shed] all the notions of personal vanity. Before the end of the day I thought he'd make a really interesting Fanatic. At that time I was reading the diaries of a particular character from the 1890s to 1910, and I kept seeing Gary's face, so I thought, 'Bugger it, I'll ask him'. And with David [Gulpilil], I had recently seen a photo of him. And the older he gets the better he looks. He's just such a legend, such a good actor, so you think, 'Let's go for the best'."

De Heer is delighted with the performances of his cast. Further, he was heartened by the warm receptions at the Adelaide Festival and the Melbourne International Film Festival.

"They were terrific screenings, so you think, 'OK, the film is working'." What's more, the Venice Film Festival recently selected The Tracker to screen in its competition, which starts at the end of this month.

Given the success of Rabbit-Proof Fence, perhaps the decade-long delay was a good thing. "I think its reading is quite different now than it was 10 years ago," says de Heer. "Reconciliation and saying sorry just weren't part of our consciousness then. Now they are."

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

WRESTLES WITH JAGUARS DE HEER: THE TRACKER

Archie, an Australian mechanic who once wrestled a Jaguar, used to help keep Rolf de Heer ‘in perspective’- and his influence carried on into The Tracker, in which de Heer is doing a bit of political Jaguar wrangling himself, reports Andrew L. Urban.

Director Rolf de Heer

August 8, 2002 - As the credits rolled at the end of The Tracker in the great space of Melbourne’s Concert Hall on the opening night of the Melbourne International Film Festival, one of the last items was a line dedicating the film to Charlie Kiroff. Patrons in their formal wear were shuffling out and the Archie Roach Band, which had accompanied the film playing and singing live as a special treat for festival patrons, was packing up their instruments. I scribbled down ‘Charlie Kiroff’ on my notepad, to ask the film’s writer and director, Rolf de Heer, who was Archie and why was this film dedicated to him.

Next day, in the marble foyer of a Melbourne hotel, Rolf de Heer told me. Charlie Kiroff was a car and motorbike mechanic and a best boy; he had designed a motion control camera system and wrestled a Jaguar in South America (as a stunt double for Richard Dreyfuss). “He was always the first person I’d pick in a crew,” says de Heer. They first worked together on de Heer’s second feature, Raven’s Gate in 1988. “I’d say, ‘what do you want to do? And he might say, ‘best boy to a good gaffer’” (Gaffer is lighting technician, best boy is his/her assistant.)

This is exactly the opposite to the usual procedure, in which the director of photography is hired first, then he picks the gaffer and then the best boy is hired.

Rolf de Heer’s admiration for Charlie was so great he once even wrote a role for him, one so specific as to make it nigh-impossible to hire an American; “I created a short, red haired, red bearded mechanic character to get Charlie to the US for a film I was planning to make – but it never got made.”

When Charlie Kiroff turned up, uncharacteristically, one day late on the Arkaloora location in South Australia preparing for The Tracker, he was complaining of back pain. He died of cancer of the spine a few days before shooting began. He was just 44. “He always helped me to keep my perspective on things,” says de Heer.

And even though Charlie was not around in person for the shoot, his spirit clearly helped de Heer keep his perspective while making The Tracker. For one thing, Charlie had been around throughout its gestation: de Heer wrote a 12 page treatment back in 1991. “I was just angry and this story formed itself in my head. I took half a day off work and wrote it down.”

His anger came from “discovering stuff I didn’t know … things that were swept under the carpet that are a part of my heritage,” he says, referring to social history around the 1920s when much of white Australia treated Aboriginals virtually as slaves. He set the film in 1922, the year his father was born.

“From that starting point, you’re making a film to give enjoyment to the audience – which is a broad concept. So it becomes a process of evolution as you develop the script and make the film. The songs started off as an effort to lighten it up. But that just seemed to trivialise everything. It only began to work when there was an indigenous voice – and that influenced the words,” says de Heer, his long legs resting over the arm of a sedate lobby armchair, his beard regrown in full, his hat tossed onto the nearby lounge.

This is the ninth film on which de Heer and compsoer Graham Tardif have collaborated: “so we had a close working relationship. And the songs also perform the function of cinema music. So he wrote the songs knowing that. Then I wrote the words and I knew they had to resonate with the images but not describe them.”

He knew where there would be music, and many of the scenes are clearly meshed so effectively with the music that it is hard to believe they weren’t created simultaneously.

The anger that triggered the film’s creation is balanced by years of development and the growing of wisdom, perhaps, but it is still discernible. The film, however, is not an angry film. Indeed, it’s often wryly humorous, among moments of great drama. Indeed, the film’s final scene aggregates the many issues it raises in a gently mocking, humorous vein that removes the anger and replaces it with an urge to recognise the reality of the human condition.

But for many, especially in Australia, The Tracker will be seen as a political film, a cry for setting to rights the injustices of the past. Is Rolf de Heer wrangling the political version of a Jaguar that Charlie Kiroff once wrestled? Does The Tracker bring audiences into the jungle of Australia’s often reviled past? Is this a roar of pain or a plea for reconciliation?

The man himself is torn between two opposing positions on this: “My feelings fluctuate wildly. Sometimes I feel it should be just a cinematic experience. At other times I think things that I would not want to see printed anywhere – they’re so radical,” says de Heer.

Source: UrbanCineFile

AUDIO: Interview with Director of The Tracker, Rolf de Heer (RealAudio)

VIDEO: clip from The Tracker (Quicktime, 582k file)

• More reviews of The Tracker

HOW TO SEE THE TRACKER

Please note that ENIAR is not responsible for external links content and does not endorse a particular website

The Tracker is not distributed for sale in Europe.

ENIAR supporter Steve Lowman says that a double CD pack of The Tracker/Walkabout (another classic movie starring David Gulpilil) is now not on the list of the major online CD seller, CD-Wow - infact The Tracker is now on no UK list.

However, it is possible to import the double pack from Australian DVD sellers, and probably for a very reasonable price. The best search I have found for this is at the following URL:
http://www.happyhunter.co.uk/zon_GB/Curr_GBP/catryDVD/reg_10/tracker%20walkabout

I believe that, whatever the listings say about it being Region 4, all copies are actually Region 0, and will play on PAL Region 2 machines.

This search result page can take you to any of a number of Australian DVD sellers, which generally confirm that this is a multi-region DVD pack, and perhaps it is up to individual purchasers to decide who they want to buy from.

The search result page says that prices include delivery, but one cannot be 100% sure of that until the appropriate stage of the purchasing process at each individual seller site. Obviously, delivery from Australia will take a little more time than from UK.

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