The real gaze in Australian cinema

ABSTRACT

This paper takes up Todd McGowan’s rethinking of psychoanalytic film theory to consider what such approaches might disclose in the work of a national cinema. I focus on Australia’s national cinema where it is caught, I argue, between the Imaginary gaze of an aestheticized nationalism and a traumatic ‘Real’ gaze that disturbs the field of cultural vision. I show how Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 Wake in Fright introduces the Real gaze to Australia’s cinematic vocabulary where it is taken up in the film Renaissance and disturbs the aesthetic inquiry into nationalism with the traumatic Real frequently repressed in national discourses. Here I suggest that if a national cinema can be seen to function as a form of ‘public dreaming,’ this Real gaze functions as a national symptom that, as in the psychoanalytic clinic, troubles the story the subject tells about itself. After mapping the emergence of this Real gaze in Wake in Fright, I consider where this visual trope is reworked in more recent Gothic landscape films, such as Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo (2008), before considering how post-Mabo history films reverse the terms of this gaze such that what haunts the national Imaginary is put before the viewer without relent.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalytic film theory
• Real gaze
• National Imaginary
• Australian New Wave
• Gothic landscape cinema

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Tim Themi for his invaluable input into the development of this paper, as too the students of ‘Australian Film and Television’ at the University Melbourne who inspired the need to write a paper that would articulate something of the national cinema from a psychoanalytic point of view. Thanks are also due to the encouraging feedback provided by participants of the Sydney Screen Studies network annual conference where this paper was first presented, as too the peer reviewers whose detailed advice helped refine the argument.

Disclosure statement

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

Film Works Cited

Bitter Springs (1950) directed by Ralph Smart.

David Stratton: A Cinematic Life (2017) directed by Sally Aitken.

Duel (1971) directed by Steven Spielberg.

Gallipoli (1981) directed by Peter Weir.

Lake Mungo (2008) directed by Joel Anderson.

Muriel’s Wedding (1994) directed by P.J. Hogan.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) directed by Peter Weir.

Road Games (1981) directed by Richard Franklin.

Samson and Delilah (2009) directed by Warwick Thornton.

The Castle (1997) directed by Rob Sitch.

The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) directed by Charles Tait.

The Last Wave (1977) directed by Peter Weir.

The Overlanders (1946) directed by Harry Wyatt.

The Nightingale (2019) directed by Jennifer Kent.

The Shiralee (1957) directed by Leslie Norman.

Van Diemen’s Land (2009) directed by Jonathan auf der Heide

Wake in fright (1971) directed by Ted Kotcheff.

White Fellas Dreaming: A Century of Australian Cinema (1997) directed by George Miller.

Wolf Creek (2005) directed by Greg McLean.

Notes on contributor

Alison Horbury Lecturers in Screen & Cultural Studies in the School of Culture & Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her first book, Post-feminist Impasses in Popular Heroine Television: The Persephone Complex (2015), applied psychoanalytic thought to post-feminist media cultures for women. Her current research explores the psychoanalytic ethics of screen entertainment.

Notes

1 For a discussion of the problems of theorising a national cinema see Andrew Higson (2000). For though many national cinemas may share some abstract qualities—performing a role ‘in relation to the state,’ holding a differential relation to Hollywood, or developing ‘a range of formal and generic characteristics’ (Higson 2000, 63)—each of these are animated in vastly different historical, cultural, and political contexts, making the specificity of these ‘qualities’ largely untransferable.

2 See the documentary David Stratton: A Cinematic Life (Aitken 2017), and the interview with Kotcheff in The Projection Booth podcast in the episode hosted by Maitland McDonagh and Maurice Bursztynski (‘Episode 271: Wake in Fright’ 2016). Also cited in Kaufman (2010, 63).

3 This is something closer to Gaylyn Studlar’s thesis on the viewer’s masochistic pleasure in the woman onscreen, a pleasure in ‘submission to rather than possession of the female’ (1984, 274); however, McGowan’s theorising of the tripartite schema and psychical structure of the subject qua desire abstracts gender from filmic language (though it may be mobilised toward gender in some instances).

4 As Hilton points out, Cook’s novel employs similarly ambiguous language around the sex-act, with Grant reflecting: ‘what had happened before was terrible. It should not have happened … It had happened twice’ (quoted in Hilton 2009, 128).

5 As with Steven Spielberg’s 1971 Duel—a key example of the Real gaze McGowan draws on (2003, 33)—the protagonist of Road Games is inexplicably pursued by a vehicle whose driver he (as too the viewer) can never see. A receding point in the image, the invisible driver forces the protagonist to confront their position not as master of the gaze but as object in/for the gaze of the Other. Yet little in the film suggests this gaze is linked to nationalist discourses.

6 A similar disturbance to the status quo becomes even more manifest and less allegorical in Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), where a Sydney architect (Richard Chamberlain) becomes haunted by the mystical tribalism surrounding an urban Aboriginal man (David Gulpilil) despite beliefs that such ancient culture was long dead.

7 For a detailed analysis of how this film plays out the tragic hubris of colonisation see Tim Themi (2019) ‘A Psychoanalytic Translation of the Australian Film The Proposition’ Parce que ce n'est pas ça [Because That's Not It]: Journal of the Lacanian Field, volume 1: 1-24.