Introduction: Materialising Absence

Saige Walton and Nadine Boljkovac

- This Dossier addresses absence as theme, form and experience. We start from the
central premise that absence in screen media is not ‘nothing’ – that absence itself is
always invested with material attributes. We ask: how is an aesthetics of absence
foregrounded in film and media? Consider some of the following examples, all of which
resonate with the selection of articles that we have assembled and the close
interrelation between absence and presence.
- As absence is relational, it often manifests through character interaction. Amelie Hastie
captures this dynamic well in her discussion of the painful presence of an absence.
Discussing a scene from Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002), Hastie describes how pain and
absence commingle in the film’s young character of Paikea (Keisha Castle-Hughes), the
twelve-year-old-girl who aspires to be the leader of her Maori tribe.
- This pain of absence is inscribed on her body before us: in her tears, for instance, as she
asks her father, ‘Why doesn’t he want me?’; or as she recites a speech in honour or her
grandfather who is, at that moment, absent from the space of the audience. [5]
- Here, absence is made material through Paikea’s pained gestures, her speech, attitude
and comportment, as well as by the gaps, emotional voids and empty spaces of the mise
en scène. By making visible this kind of emptiness, cinema can elicit our compassion and
“the hope of its being filled”, Hastie states.[6] Manifesting a painful absence in film and
media, however, is not always bound up with hope. For some of our contributors,
especially those who are exploring the affective politics of absence and its connections
to the gendered and culturally situated body, this pain endures.
- Deleuzian studies of affect, cognitivist accounts of the emotions, the haptic sense, the
synaesthetic and so on. Nonetheless, the reign of presence and visibility continues. Film
bodies (however defined) and the body of the viewer are often used as a vital testament
to the animate and animating power of cinema. In developing this Dossier, we wanted
to speak to the sensuality of what is not there, what might only be implied or suggested.
We wanted to address the materiality of what exists beyond the frame or perhaps at the
very limits of representation; the expressivity of landscape, environment and the non-
human; and more elusive properties of film and media sensation such as mood,
atmosphere and the imagination. We asked our authors to speak to the
interrelationship between absence, embodiment and presence – and that they maintain
a close focus on how the aesthetics of absence works in relation to specific screen
media examples.