Executive Producer: Bridget Ikin, Domenico Procacci, Bryce Menzies

Producer: Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan

Director: Rolf de Heer

Writer: Rolf de Heer

Cast: David Gulpilil, Gary Sweet, Damon Gameau, Grant Page

Director of Photography: Ian Jones

Editor: Tania Nehme

Composer: Graham Tardif, vocals by Archie Roach

Art Director: Beverley Freeman

A painted landscape dissolves into the opening shot of The Tracker, a theme that carries on throughout various scenes of Rolf de Heer’s new film.

It is a film set in 1922 and although it seems that Indigenous themed films are all the go at the moment, but there’s a huge difference between doing an Indigenous story and doing it well. Phillip Noyce, Director of Rabbit Proof Fence, raised the bar again and gained attention for not only thinking outside the square in using relatively unknown Indigenous talent but treating the story with respect and understanding the cultural protocols involved in doing such a story.

I was a little hesitant at first attending the film, with the limit information I had read, but by the end of the film I was somewhat converted. The Director not only portrays the colonial feelings of the time but also uses interesting effects in telling the story.

From the start, it becomes obvious that this film is not about the characters, as unlike a normal film the characters as such do not have names but only titles. “The Tracker” (David Gulpilil) is a “native” policeman, in a time when they were employed to find suspects. He answers to “The Fanatic” (Gary Sweet) who is hell bent on getting “The Accused” (Noel Wilton) who is suppose to have killed a non-Indigenous woman and is wanted for her murder. Sweet was not the first choice for the part, but after running into him a while after the script had finally been written; De Heer was keen for him to play the part. Sweet’s character is typical of its time, a policeman who has very little tolerance for blacks and has no qualms about shooting and killing innocent people along the way.

On this journey into the remote bushlands are “The Follower” (Damon Gameau), a new colonial copper who is still green behind the ears and still learning about the ways of the law and the vast land he must now work in. “The Veteran” (Grant Page) is a weary man whose kind nature is overridden by what he must do and how society expects him to treat blacks.

The film delves into the colonial world and touches on a subject that has never really been told in mainstream films and deals with the massacres of Aboriginal people during this time. During scenes such as this and others, De Heer chooses to use still shots of paintings to illustrate the scene with the sound of the event continuing on in the background. It is a style that is used throughout the film at various times and gives the film a slightly experimental touch, but it works well. As the story rolls out, there are various themes around Aboriginal beliefs, white man’s law and traditional lore.

The story stirs up emotions of anger at the way Indigenous trackers and people of the time were treated. Discrimination, exploitation and racial intolerance are evident throughout the telling of this story but unlike most films that continue on this path, it has a great twist that I won’t ruin, which leaves you feeling as though justice has been done and a little feeling of empowerment for one of the characters.

Overall the performances are well cast and David Gulpilil in the lead continues to prove his greatness as an actor who has come back from the edge.

Reviewed by Rhianna Patrick

abc.net.au/message/blackarts/film

The film opens with a painted landscape – and this is signficant because paintings by Adelaide artist Peter Coad are integrated into the action of the film to historify events and to move the violence from realistic representation.

Into this landscape come four men – four archetypal characters. They are the Fanatic, Gary Sweet, a government trooper who is heading an expedition to find an aboriginal man accused of murdering a white woman. Others in the expedition are the Follower, Damon Gameau, a greenhorn trooper, the Veteran, Grant Page and the Tracker, David Gulpilil.

Like a tapestry unfolding the film charts the attitudes, the shifts and balances of power within the group as if it were the history of white settlement here. Along the way are confronting scenes of violence. But at the heart of every scene is the Tracker. Graham Tardif composed and Archie Roach sings on the soundtrack and it was one of the most emotional film experiences of my life to see The Tracker with Roach performing live at the opening of the Adelaide Festival. De Heer’s use of Coad’s paintings adds an uncanny power to the film, strangely making the violence more meaningful, more tragic, taking away any notion that’s it’s only a movie. David Gulpilil brings important heart to the film. De Heer’s screenplay and direction has extraordinary compassion despite the violence.

It’s actually a film that’s important not to miss.

Reviewed by Margaret Pomeranz

Margaret: David:

Looking Both Ways: The Tracker

by Jake Wilson, a Melbourne writer.
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This article originally appeared in Cinema Scope [Winter 2002].
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Early in the 20th century, four men are travelling in the Australian outback, over high sandy ridges strewn with gums and mounds of spinfex. They are in pursuit of a fugitive, an Aboriginal man accused of the murder of a white woman. Three of the four are white and on horseback: the Fanatic (Gary Sweet), the Veteran (Grant Page) and the Follower (Damon Gameau). Their Aboriginal offsider, who precedes them on foot, is the Tracker (David Gulpilil).

As their labels suggest, these figures are immediately recognisable types, rather than individuals. The Fanatic, who heads the expedition, is a lean, grizzled martinet who believes in being firm with the natives. The Veteran is an older man, who looks wise but says little. The Follower is a cheerful youth, anxious to do his best. He plays the ukulele, and sings a song, “The Copper's Lament.”

As for the Tracker himself, he's a seemingly docile “civilised” black who blithely echoes his companions in their scorn for his race. Like a Shakespearian clown, he plays the fool, cringing and capering in his baggy borrowed clothes. Yet right from the start, there are moments when his mask of deference slips a notch – when his grin stretches a little too wide, or his laughter vibrates for a moment longer than expected.

In some ways, The Tracker resembles a stripped-down Western, with its rugged outdoor setting and focus on primal power struggles between men. Equally, the film is a politically charged fable about colonisation and resistance, pondering the very contemporary question of how far two laws and two systems of belief can exist side by side. But above all, this is a drama of vision, where what each character sees (or fails to see) will determine his destiny.

We might think of the game “Follow The Leader.” As a subordinate member of the party, the Tracker is expected to mimic the attitudes and actions of his masters. Yet it's not so obvious just who's following and who's leading. In theory, the Tracker is a despised servant. In practice, the others must defer to him at every step, since only he can read the traces in the landscape that mark out the fugitive's trail. By acknowledging their guide's superior skills, the white men confess their essential weakness: their failure to grasp the reality of the country they purport to rule.

Rolf de Heer is one of the very few auteurs who regularly succeeds in getting features financed in Australia. His earlier work has been uneven, marked by a taste for punitive morality tales, for the abject and grotesque, at worst falling into clumsy sadism. Yet The Tracker (his ninth film) shows that his years of practice have at last paid off, letting him develop a mastery of cinematic language few of his colleagues can match. It also suggests that while de Heer has been identified with “art cinema,” his real gift is for flamboyant, highly personal melodrama, in the vein of Sam Fuller (Run Of The Arrow [1957] or even Cornel Wilde (The Naked Prey [1966]).

The film's formal system depends in large part on an alternation between multiple points of view, spatial and psychological. De Heer makes classical use of widescreen composition to dramatise the shifting group dynamics, but also regularly employs overt stylistic flourishes at dramatic high points and as plot punctuation. One important recurring device is the bold use of zooms, as when the Tracker's gaze fixes on an object and seems to penetrate the intervening space like a spear – or, conversely, when the image begins as an extreme long-shot, then zooms out until the figures in the distance are lost to sight, folded into the detail of the immense landscape.

Much as these zooms pull us towards and away from the subject of the image, the film overall solicits a mixture of immediate emotional response and more distanced contemplation. Throughout, de Heer refuses to represent acts of violence directly, replacing them with Aboriginal-influenced, faux-naïf paintings. With characters reduced to anonymous stick figures, the depicted punishments and massacres seem partially detached from their narrative context, like archetypal events repeated throughout Australia's bloody history. A similarly meditative commentary is supplied by the mournful songs written by de Heer and his regular composer Graham Tardif, and performed on the soundtrack by Aboriginal singer Archie Roach. These contemporary laments, backed by guitar and Hammond organ, create a kind of fourth-dimensional perspective that complicates our response to the linear narrative – an extraordinary effect, like looking down a corridor of time between past and present.

But the film's greatest asset is David Gulpilil, in perhaps the best role of his long career. If the Tracker is conceived by the script in basically abstract, allegorical terms, Gulpilil's concrete, humorous performance clearly draws on a lifetime's experience of navigating between cultures. It's largely thanks to him that the film pulls off a remarkable balancing act, neither veiling Aboriginal traditions in romantic mystery nor seeking to define their essential truths. To the last, the Tracker remains a protean hybrid, whose thoughts and motivations are knowable only in part. Literally and figuratively, he has the last laugh as he rides off into the sunset – leaving us to wonder what else we might have failed to see.

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© Jake Wilson, January 2003

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