The Nightingale Sings in a New Year … 

The most powerful films are frequently divisive and often stay with you, making an impression that requires a response. After my first viewing of Jennifer Kent's (2019) film The Nightingale, I felt heavy and immobilised. I felt the weight of the film in my body, and at the same time was unsure as to whether to be angry at the violence or to see it as an absolute diegetic necessity; to question the spectacle of both victimhood and agency, or to loudly applaud a different representational perspective of Australian/Tasmanian history, colonial violence, space, gender and indigeneity. In truth, the film invites all of these reactions and more, as evidenced by the contributions featured in this special issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema, guest edited by Michelle Arrow and James Findlay. Multiple threads of temporality, identities, bodies, emotion, language, critique, memory, sound and location are, like the film, interwoven in a series of passionate and provocative responses, from Arrow and Findlay's vital ‘Critical Introduction’ to rigorous articles from Joanne Faulkner, Kristyn Hamer, Catriona Elder, James Findlay, and the inclusion of Rebe Taylor's remarkable conversation with Jim Everett, the film's associate producer and Aboriginal consultant, taken from the symposium ‘The Nightingale: Gender, Race and Troubled Histories on Screen’ held at the University of Technology, Sydney in December 2019.

Given the twin narrative engines of racial and sexual violence in the colonial context, scholarly and critical attention to this important film is both necessary and urgent. Such timely interventions as those brought together here are ultimately made possible by the film's intertextual and discursive location within Australian cultural production. The Nightingale is a return to, and re-examination of, Australia's past in a number of ways, not just historically but also cinematically and televisually: the film is a nod to the staging of indigenous rebellion from The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1978) to Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017), and to resisting female convicts in The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole (Raymond Longford, 1918), Journey Among Women (Tom Cowan, 1977), and the miniseries The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant (Peter Andrikidis, 2005). Though Kent reworks elements of male centred convict and captive narratives found in the multiple versions of For the Term of His Natural Life and more recent films such as Exile (Paul Cox, 1994) and Van Diemen's Land (Jonathan Auf Der Heide, 2007), she explicitly answers the ‘Ozploitive’ female rape-revenge figures and stories of Fair Game (Mario Andreacchio), Shame (Steve Jodrell, 1988) and Wasted on the Young (Ben C. Lewis, 2010), revising with a subversive gaze more akin to the work of Ana Kokkinos or Julia Leigh. Likewise, The Nightingale reinvigorates the eerie Tasmanian landscapes and death-scapes which shape The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Richard Flanagan, 1998) and The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim, 2011), whist revelling in the excesses of the more contemporary ‘Tasmanian gothic’ that underscores well-known Tasmanian spaces in recent limited TV series such as The Kettering Incident (Showcase, 2016) and The Gloaming (Stan, 2020).

At the time of writing, most of the world is living within the effects of the COVID19 pandemic. It is in times such as these that challenging ideas and images become ever more important. The Nightingale suggests that we should not shy away from the more painful aspects of human nature and human history. As Scott (2019) writes in The New York Times, ‘though The Nightingale is an effective history lesson, it is even more powerful as an ethical inquiry into the consequences of violence and the nature of justice.’ I wish to thank and commend the guest editors and contributors.

Please enjoy this very special issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema.