Clip description
As the men prepare for a big lunch of magpie-geese, cooked in the canoes on the swamp, the narrator (David Gulpilil) returns to the climax of the old story. Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kurddal) and his brother Yeeralparil (Jamie Gulpilil) must stand and face the spears of another clan, in payback for Ridjimiraril’s crime.
Curator’s notes
This is one of the only parts of the film in which Rolf de Heer abandons the matter-of-fact realism he has used throughout. We hear a didgeridoo and the two men become opaque, like ghosts, as they dance to avoid the spears. He also uses slow motion, perhaps to contrast the speed of the spears, in the superb shot of the line of men throwing spears. Before and after this sequence, we get the men in the swamp, in black-and-white scenes of great tranquillity. The narrator decides to hurry the story along, because he knows we are impatient. The storytelling in the film has many levels, not just in time, but in the sophisticated way it addresses the audience.