‘Brutal’ and ‘Grisly’: exploring the (non-Indigenous) critical reception to two Australian postcolonial films of the frontier, The Nightingale (2018) and The Proposition (2005)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the marketing and non-Indigenous critical responses to the film The Nightingale (2018) by reading it alongside the reception and responses to a similar film, made over a decade earlier, a film that also studies the multi-layers of colonial violence. Using the film The Proposition (2005) as a foil this article considers the ways that violence figured by two non-Indigenous directors working in a postcolonial Australian context is interpreted by the critics reviewing films. The articles considers the different tropes, non-Indigenous critics offer viewers of the film. How do they suggest consumers interpret or experience the film? The argument is that the tropes, and cues can be understood both in terms of the immediate film experience, but also, for Australian viewers in terms of two ‘events’ – Reconciliation and the Uluru Statement – that help shape what national and counter histories of Australia have power at different times. The objectives of the article are therefore twofold. The first is to catalogue some of the ways each films’ marketing machine and then some key critics explained or described the plot and narrative of the two films, in particular how they explained the idea of colonial trauma in relation to the two events. The second objective is to examine how the reviewers/marketing material explained how each film deployed these ideas in order to challenge historically powerful understandings of history and belonging – in its multiple meanings – in Australia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Catriona Elder is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney She is a scholar of Sociology and Australian Studies who thinks about Australia in an international context. Key research areas include: national identity and belonging, Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, immigration and racism and critical whiteness studies.

ORCID

Catriona Elder http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2515-595X

Notes

1 Sweet Country (Dir. Warwick Thornton) is a similar film to the two selected for this analysis and further research that included it would be fruitful. However, for this research the focus is on non-Indigenous filmmakers.

2 As noted this is an exploratory study. A larger research project could include other materials – e.g. photographs, interviews, posters, and viewer reviews.

3 There is a second database made up of the everyday reader’s reviews. These were not used for this process

4 Word-clouds are not sophisticated or nuanced. Other data analysis software such as NVivo should be used if significant content analysis is required (Hawthorne 2015)

5 This led to a different choice by the two directors on the ratio used for filming the two films.