‘Film Theory’ (Lisa Trahair, ed.

), The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory #

14, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 323-335.

– Hamish Ford’s component [Roger Dawkins wrote the other half of this journal article] –

Three longstanding, often intertwined discourses notably underlie the books I looked at in
variously presumed and interrogative ways. First, an assertion of auteurism features in four
of the five volumes – affirmationally foregrounded as guiding methodology, as an un-argued
central assumption driving the analysis, or set up with the avowed aim of critique. Second,
cinema’s relationship to, and representation of, national culture and history marks this work
as an overt or implicit presence. And the third primary area of enquiry plays out as overt
polemical interventions within, or potentially refreshing corrective approaches to, debates
around film history.
These discourses play strongly in different ways throughout The Cinema of David
Lynch, a compilation volume from the Wallflower Press Directors’ Cuts series. Editors Erica
Sheen and Annette Davison frame Lynch’s films as marking out a fault line between the
‘cinema as art’ invocations of auteurism and the filmic and historical socio-political culture of
the United States over the last three decades. This conflict is seen as generating uniquely
‘American’ films that subvert their historical and cultural specificity – sometimes posited in
the various essays as characterised by the terminology and assumptions of ‘postmodernism’
– while still being grounded in those discourses, such that popular culture, commercial
cinema and Hollywood are presented as both zones of utopian possibility and oppressive
enslavement. Employing a variety of critical readings while being intertextually engaged with
other analytical discourses in the collection, Sheen and Davison have put together what
amounts to a notable diversifying of Lynch scholarship and evidence of the field’s critical
mass.
A foregrounding of auteurism as problematised by Lynch’s work is at the forefront
in Steven Jay Schneider’s essay, ‘The Essential Evil in/of Eraserhead (or, Lynch to the
Contrary)’. Dismissing readings of the film as timeless art cinema, and arguing instead that
Eraserhead (1977) should be contextualised within generic and historical horror film
traditions, he nevertheless ultimately seems to affirm an auteurism in line with the original
1950s French analysis to Hollywood genre cinema by emphasising “Lynch’s skills as a master
of representational form and affect“. (17) More consistently offering Lynch’s work as
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problematising auteurism via a more grounded historical emphasis is Erica Sheen’s ‘Going
into Strange Worlds: David Lynch, Dune and New Hollywood’. Here it is pointed out that
the poor reputation of Dune (1984) in large part due to the director’s lack of power over the
final cut, belies the reality that post-Jaws franchise Hollywood and then the Internet have
collapsed the myth of authorship and the ‘original’ or primary text. Sheen also critiques
auteurism’s alleged historical biases against low/popular culture, describing Lynch as an
anomaly as an art house filmmaker who tends towards the aesthetics and temporal openness
of television. However, such claims are in need of broader historical context (famous
European art cinema directors have worked extensively in – usually state funded – television
for decades).
Joe Kember’s ‘David Lynch and the Mug Shot: Facework in the Elephant Man and
The Straight Story’ takes on a different historical argument, arguing Lynch’s work mediates
between a presentation of the “face-ruin” and the more classical “ordinary face of cinema”.
(21) He says while watching the deformed face in The Elephant Man (1980) “we are
encouraged, according to the unattractive qualities of our own gaze, to enact its monstrosity,
inhumanity, bestiality, feebleness an discordance.” (28) While a productive line of analysis,
Kember’s assertion seems to invoke an account of film history limited mainly to the opaque
ruin of silent cinema’s ‘grotesque’ faces versus classical narrative cinema’s supposed
transparency. Different theoretical impetus makes for a much more ahistorical address in
Sam Ishii-Gonzales’ essay, ‘Mysteries of Love: Lynch’s Blue Velvet/Freud’s Wolf-Man’,
which seeks to emphasise the psychoanalytic ambiguities of the Lynchian gaze (both
spectatorial and diegetic) in terms of castrator and castrated, and the repeated subversion of
the psycho-sexual basis of patriarchal power by the emergence of desire that cannot be
reconciled to the law. (57) Yet despite the textbook psychoanalytic universalising, with his
emphasis on a circular subversion of the Symbolic order Ishii-Gonzales opens up potential
space for the historical, socio-political impact of Lynch’s cinema to be considered.
Historically-grounded debates around social critique in Lynch’s work are critically
explored in Nicholas Rombes’ essay, ‘Blue Velvet Underground: David Lynch’s Post-Punk
Poetics’, via a discussion of irony – a hotly contested issue in many of these essays. After a
beginning that itself seems like a parody of textbook postmodern reading set-ups, Rombes
argues that while most critics judge Lynch’s films as either ironic (hence subversive) or
complicit in representing (conservative) US social forms (70), and whereas in films like The
 3

Matrix irony and parody work to provide “the audience a safe position (yet one that seems
to be dangerous) from which to critique”, with Lynch it is no longer clear what is being
parodied. (74) The films are thus seen as enacting a kind of historical intervention into the
national (US) cultural discourses and critical postmodern verities about ironic reading. Sheli
Ayers’ essay, ‘Twin Peaks, Weak Language and the Resurrection of Affect’, also contests
Lynch as glib postmodernist. Using Walter Benjamin’s account of modern allegory and
affect, she asserts that his Twin Peaks television series (1989-1990) ultimately denies the
viewer “a position of superiority”, so that it becomes “neither parody nor pastiche, but
rather allegory” (95), via a gaze which is able to “resurrect affect from abstraction” resulting
in a renewed emotional sincerity. (101) In apparent opposition to such arguments, John
Richardson’s ‘Laura and Twin Peaks: Postmodern Parody and the Musical Reconstruction of
the Absent Femme Fatale’ suggests Twin Peaks does work as “postmodern parody” in its
reworking of film noir’s gendered desire, particularly the aggressive male controller of the
gaze and its fetishised female object – here a distanced parody “deflecting and returning”
this aggressive gaze. (81) The argument for a subversive historical address concerns a
different purpose with Jana Evans Braziel's ‘‘In Dreams...’: Gender, Sexuality and Violence
in the Cinema of David Lynch’. Asserting gender and desire in Lynch’s work is refigured “as
artifice, surface and orifice” (111), she invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and
‘body without organs’ in suggesting that metaphysical ‘woman’ is materially negated in the
films by a degendered, radically material body of flesh and fluid she calls (with a nod to Luce
Irigaray) the site of “femm(e)rotic energy”, the radical ontological impact of which is already
other and “already artifice”. (117) Targeting privileged historical constructions of gender
very well, this queer-feminist reading ultimately ascribes an (perhaps problematically)
ahistorical radicality to the de-gendered material body.
In ‘Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation’, Greg Hainge asserts – via Zizek – the
film as quintessentially postmodern in the way initially familiar textuality dissolves into more
radical, decentered forms. Most interesting is his noting of how this dissolution affects the
subject, with Figurative painting invoked – via Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon – to
address the human figure’s spasmodic fading into the materiality of the artwork. An
emphasis on radical, reflexive form unique to a particular authorial touch also dominates
Anne Jerslev’s ‘Beyond Boundaries: David Lynch’s Lost Highway’. The “tactile quality which
characterises the hand that carries the painter’s brush” (154), and thereby undermines
 4

narrative elements, is what renders “the horror and the beauty of his work.” (155) Like
Richardson, differentiating the film’s treatment of gender from that of classic noir, she also
equates the film’s presentation of pornography as evoking the same thing: an “insatiable and
impossible desire to control female desire.” (161)
Annette Davison’s ‘”Up in Flames”: Love, Control and Collaboration in the
Soundtrack to Wild at Heart’ features a more clearly auteurist account, suggesting the
protagonist in Wild at Heart (1990) is a stand-in for Lynch himself due to the mysterious
subjective control this character appears to have over the film’s music soundtrack as a
lynchpin of his subjectivity. Barthes’ argument about the ‘grain of the voice’ as enforcing a
non-subjective body is applied to the filmmaker’s very particular use of high-definition
sound in which we cannot identify the source, allowing listeners to explore sound as
withdrawn from “semantic meaning”. (126-127) However, the most unreflexively auteurist
of all these essays is also by the most well known Lynch scholar. Martha P. Nochimson’s
‘”All I need is the Girl”: The Life and Death of Creativity in Mullholland Drive’ describes
Lynch’s most devastating critique of Hollywood: a space that could potentially offer genuine
creativity but has soured into a dystopia, tragically killing off “popular culture as a vital
cultural force.” (171) Problematically ascribing an ontological fullness to potentially creative
subjects in the film, while the more corrupted figures emanate a “state of nothingness and
unbeing” (175), and despite saying “Lynch does not see darkness as a morally negative
space”, Nochminson’s auteurist enthusiasms unfortunately result in an equation of nihilism
with evil rather than generative potential and openness as well as violence.
Ultimately, the most pressing issue in these essays often seems a desire to (re-)map
Lynch’s work vis-à-vis the critical and theoretical verities of postmodernism. The emphasis
on Lynch’s formal radicalism, and the resulting dislodgment of contemporary viewing
practices and positions, means that a kind of subversive neo-modernism seems implied at
times – though never stated as such. The gestures towards newly serious formally and
conceptually radical directions, and which might problematise critical verities of the last two
decades, usually have as their backbone a conventional adherence to central poststructuralist
theory, bolstering readings that ultimately affirm Lynch as contemporary Hollywood’s most
provocative auteur.
 5

Auteurism is the much more avowedly asserted methodology in another book from
Wallflower’s Directors’ Cuts series, Marek Haltof’s The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski:
Variations on Destiny and Chance. A traditional chronological account of Kieslowski’s
cinema, its main interest – and ultimate flaw – is in asserting the films’ ambiguity within the
political and historical context of Poland and its national cinema. While one gets a good
sense of this vexed relationship to issues of ideological or political commitment in particular,
Haltof’s general upholding of Kieslowski’s stress on humanist psychology as driving this
ambiguity often results in a bland and timid argument. For example, the narratively
unexplainable arrival of a horse in The Calm (1976) is treated an open signifier, when the
author could have discussed the extensive symbolic use of horses in famous Polish films
such as Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958) to represent the nation amid radically
changing political and historical forces. In such moments, often bolstered by supportive
quotes from the filmmaker, Haltof’s auteurist loyalty causes him to overstress trans-cultural
openness at the expense of enhancing the reader’s appreciation of Kieslowski’s aesthetics
within the poetic lexicon of Polish cinema.
Camera Buff (1979) is read as the moment Kieslowski completely abandons political
and social engagement with the protagonist’s symbolic ‘suicide’ by giving up trying to use his
camera in the name of improving the life of his factory co-workers, to instead chart his
family’s personal life. But Haltof’s loyalty to the filmmaker’s own statements means that
(contra most Polish critics’ reading of capitulation) this is offered as a critique of the political
power of the day’s eventual co-option of artistry and technologies of representation.
Authorial intention and privileged interiority – with all the metaphysical allusions such an
address seems to license – are set up as outside of, and oppositional to, history. The move
towards less socially engaged, more mystical concerns is further charted in Blind Chance
(1981). Seeking to transcend divisive politics via a humanist address, the filmmaker is quoted
as saying that “political and ideological divisions in Poland are a fiction and do not reflect
true differences.” (61) But Haltof’s account is typically evasive vis-à-vis whether the
protagonist’s being on opposite sides of the government/activist divide (depending on
whether he catches a train or not) is refreshing universalism or whether one’s political
attitudes are in fact not purely contingent on chance and conformity.
While more ambivalence seems to come through in general statements like
“Kieslowski’s formalist exercise is exquisite and frustrating, mesmerising and ostentatious”
 6

(120), it is hard to extrapolate Haltof’s precise view of the art-house clichés that dominate
the filmmaker’s first European co-production, The Double Life of Veronique (1991).
Drawing on Gaylyn Studler’s discussion of cliché in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, he
attempts to posit the film as a parodic genre piece. (120) But the point seems half-hearted.
Remaining unexplored is any discussion of what political, historical or mythological impact
any such parodic address might critically make concerning the form or content of European
art cinema, and surely by extension Haltof’s own auteurist discourse itself. Another
attempted advocacy line actually shows explicit disregard for film history per se, with the
bewildering statement that this ”is a rare ‘art film’ dealing with the subject of doubleness.”
(114) Much more persuasive is his brief assertion of the film as a commentary on Poland’s
new relationship with Europe, citing the death of the Polish ‘double’ Weronika (while the
French Veronique survives) as symbolic of the West’s post-Cold War takeover of former
communist countries. (119) But the unfashionable political and cultural implications of such
an interpretation are left unexplored.
The Three Colours: Blue, White and Red trilogy (1993-1994) is discussed as the
apotheosis of Kieslowski’s concern with the ‘inner life’. Here a rather different account of
the late films is drawn upon, a Polish critic quoted as throwing doubt upon both their
connection to a national/historical context but also as universalist ‘art cinema’, the trilogy’s
mystical implications of chance “bordering on kitsch sensibility.” (125) Haltof also asserts at
this juncture an interesting emphasis on national and historical context when he criticises
Western film scholars who interpreted the trilogy as a homage to Jean-Luc Godard and the
nouvelle vague, pointing out the inappropriateness and cultural ignorance of such an approach
(Godard was not popular in Poland because artists with “pro-communist sympathies” were
not taken seriously). (140) However, the wide-ranging implications and interventionist
potential of this line for conventional accounts of film history and Franco-centric critical
accounts of European cinema is left hanging. The book’s final assurance is that
“Kieslowski’s place in the pantheon of great European cinematic auteurs seems to be
assured.” (152) Haltof provides an excellent example of how a traditional auteurist study can
take its premise too literally whereby comments that offer potentially engaging contributions
to discourses around film history are ultimately overwhelmed by assertions (backed up by
copious quotes from the filmmaker) of a supposedly more accessibly universal humanism.
 7

Contrary to the presumed desire of the author, this both reduces the films themselves and
the advocacy of their continuing relevance.

Auteurism, national cinema and film history are all key concepts underlying Peter Cowie’s
Revolution!: The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s. The starting point shows both the
transparent nostalgia that drives the argumentation but also the potentially interesting, if
underpowered, re-calibration of historical debates. Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime je t’aime‘s
eventual appeared at Cannes in 2002 (after its aborted premiere at the ill-fated 1968 festival)
is presented as symbolizing “the risk-taking that characterized the period, the overriding
sense that film was a medium that knew no artistic limitations.” (xi) Cowie’s guiding
principle is thus flagged as the auterism of modernist European directors. One notable
outcome of this – and the book’s most welcome contribution – is a genuinely pan-European
approach to film history, including both sides of the Iron Curtain. Cowie also reminds us
that even within the national context, the nouvelle vague’s back-history lies with non- Cahiers
du Cinema aligned filmmakers such as Resnais and Agnes Varda (whose 1954 film La Pointe
Courte is offered at the fist real film of the French new wave). Refreshingly, the nouvelle vague
is neither the start nor the end of discussion. A particularly striking quote from Krzysztof
Zanussi highlights the heterogeneity of the various flowerings of film modernism right
across Europe in the ‘60s, and how commercial the French films could seem from the
communist East. “I was most disappointed seeing Truffaut shooting Tirez sur le pianiste
(1960),” Zanussi says, feeling “this cinema was somehow frivolous, and with an enormous
amount of vanity.” (107) But what comes across is not a Cold War divide so much as
Cowie’s following through an auteurist commitment to film as challenging but universalist
art – an emphasis personified by Ingmar Bergman, whose influence on would-be authorially
assertive filmmakers is offered as eclipsing that of Godard once the whole of Europe is
taken into account. Zanussi puts it simply: “Bergman for me was a god. … [He] was making
nothing but auteur films.” (108) Given a much more critically and theoretically rigorous
address, Cowie’s implicit presentation of Bergman as the key European filmmaker of the
period would make for a provocative contribution to contemporary accounts of film history.
Cowie makes clear his view of how different the ‘US independents’ of the day were
to the big-name Europeans, describing Cassavetes as preferring a “faintly sentimental
approach … to the anxieties and tribulations of a Bergman or an Antonioni,” whose
 8

celebrated circa-1960 work he regarded as “‘sordid’ and even ‘negative’.” (110) While such
remarks could raise controversial questions in regard to both the kind of auteurism that
accompanies independent US cinema and the scholarly historical positioning thereof
(notably the Cassavetes literature), they are typically unaccompanied by any real analysis and
argument. And while the refreshing inclusion of much less fashionable US figures such as
John Korty are welcome, the discussion is dominated by excessive quoting of the author’s
interviews with relevant figures that often get mired in anecdotal detail, and (like Haltof)
overplay the importance of the authorial word. Nevertheless, what strongly comes through is
something often downplayed in Hollywood-centric accounts of film history: the extent of
US filmmakers’ absolute fascination with European cinema in this period. Cowie also
emphasizes well the relationship between cinema of the ‘60s and emergent pop culture,
especially in the British context, with the appropriate nods to Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s
Night (1964) and Performance (Nicholas Roeg & Douglas Cammell, 1970). The extent to
which much ‘art cinema’ of the ‘60s contained as much ‘pop’ as modernism as exemplified in
these films, or Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), is also put into stark relief with the author’s
discussions of Eastern bloc and anti-Franco Spanish cinema where he notes innovations in
film language miles away from Godard, the Beatles or swinging London, and centered
instead around challenging forms of modernist allegory and subversive humanist comedy.
‘1968’ is covered via Cowie’s non-monolithic approach to history, Andrzej Wajda
quoted to put Paris-centric accounts of the year in perspective by noting that Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and France all had a 1968 – “three entirely different things, almost a
coincidence.” (216) But this kind of refreshing perspective (again without a follow up
analytical point) is followed by perfunctory, broad references to non-European radicalism
with The Battle of Algiers (1966) tokenly offered as a link between Marxist Europeans
(director Gillo Pontecorvo) and the emergent ‘third cinema’ of Latin America. And though it
gets a tiny mention in a chapter on post-1968 cinema, the ignoring of Japanese filmmakers
makes even clearer an obvious weakness in this book about world cinema, which really
perhaps should have admitted its purview as primarily European filmmaking. Cowie finishes
with a description of the most important films of the decade that while potentially useful and
provocative, is unfortunately unrepresentative of the book as it stands: “Their troubling
relevance still sends, to quote Lindsay Anderson, ‘both a threat and a reproach’ to later
decades.” (248) Such remarks make clear what would have made for a much stronger
 9

contribution to contemporary debates, the kernel of a corrective to dominant historical

accounts of 1960s cinema. Instead, its determined (and almost entirely non-reflexive)
auteurism, delivered via an excessively anecdotal form, stops any such analysis in its tracks.

Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons also shows
highly auteurist leanings, this time via high-level film criticism review-essays. Though not
oriented to the kind of reference-style film history writing Cowie offers, in this collection of
essays spanning thirty years Rosenbaum ultimately provides much more active contributions
to film history and national culture debates. An Introduction reflects on this critic’s early
grappling with the vexed issues of film criticism and history, and how his passion for canon-
affirming writing soon became seriously at odds with the theoretical winds blowing through
universities. (xii) Framing his project as a provocation to both film critics and academics – to
the former, advocating non-nationally biased ‘world cinema’ appreciation, and provoking the
latter with an auteurist approach that willfully seeks out ‘masterpieces’ of culturally engaged
film art that go beyond intertextual referencing of other films and television – Rosenbaum
co-opts Harold Bloom’s controversial argument about the need to assert a canon in western
literature before offering his own film canon as a contingent, personal one.
Rosenbaum essentially uses auterism – though again not explicitly framed as such –
to polemically assert and re-construct film history. A long piece opening the book on Erich
von Stronheim’s Greed (1924), and an essay on Orson Welles exemplify an interest in
Hollywood’s poor treatment of ‘visionary’ directors. Historical re-framings of seminal films
and filmmakers who have something fresh to offer contemporary debates are often what
spurs Rosenbaum on, as exemplified by a cogent formal and thematic reading of the newly
minted relevance of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) in the era of mass fear about terrorism and the
demonic other in our midst. (16) He is also very committed to extolling films barely seen in
the West, as exemplified by an essay on Dutch-born Joris Ivens’ China-based film A Tale of
the Wind (1989). The culturally contextualised nature of Rosenbaum’s auteurism is in many
ways the key to its nuanced effectiveness, and here he laments that filmmakers like Ivens
have suffered from being ideologically incorrect (as a globetrotting communist) such that the
“free world” hasn’t seen fit to allow us to see his films. (38) The regressive elements of a
national film culture and attendant version of film history are highlighted throughout the
book (seen from within his liberal-left corner of the US), with the romanticized auteur
 10

framed as the boundary-hopping hero who has much to tell us about contemporary global
reality. Heralded in similar terms by the late Susan Sontag, Bela Tarr’s seven-hour Sátántangó
(1994) is treated here as an exemplary masterpiece of zeitgeist-engaged cinema, ”a kind of
interim report on where humanity seems to be lodged – in a quagmire of cowardice, betrayal
… and deceit, a place where people snoop on their neighbors and strive to cheat them
behind their backs”. (48-49) Such discussions are often accompanied by polemical
comments concerning national cinema culture and film criticism, Rosenbaum comparing
films like Sátántangó with those he says most US critics usually take seriously and which he
is openly derisive of. A typical broadside occurs with the deriding of Dogma (Kevin Smith,
1999), which he says was treated by most US critics as more substantial than the concurrent
Rosetta (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 1999), concluding “we’re all such infantile escapists at
heart that we can’t possibly be interested in a movie that concerns anything as real as finding
a job” (71) – the ostensible drama of the latter film. But contrary to the claims of his
domestic detractors, Rosenbaum’s auteurist or ‘art cinema’ bias does not mean an uncritical
response to celebrated contemporary European directors, as can be seen in a conflicted essay
on Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996) and measured reflections of a more invested
kind in two pieces on trans-European workaholic Chilean-French director Raul Ruiz.
Rosenbaum’s discussion is particularly balanced and context-rich when addressing
innovative cinema from the US as compared to its European equivalent. This is the primary
quality of an early piece which puts Robert Altman’s particular achievements into
perspective vis-à-vis the work of Jacques Tati or Jacques Rivette, suggesting that “virtually
alone among his peers, he has opened up the American illusionist cinema to a few of the
possibilities inherent in this sort of game – played for limited stakes in controlled situations,
but played nonetheless.” (91) In another essay such trans-Atlantic comparisons result in
outright hostility towards more recent non-Mainstream US cinema – posited as archetypally
postmodern – when Fargo (Joel & Ethan Cohen, 1996) is considered alongside Kieslowski’s
Decalogue cycle (1988). The latter is offered as an apotheosis of lamentably disappearing
humanist cinema (though Kieslowski’s new-age ‘angel’ figure is fittingly regretted), while the
former shows “that people are idiots – the people on screen, that is; those in the audience
laughing at the idiots are hip aficionados, just like the Cohens.” (156) That Rosenbaum’s
heart is more with ‘60s-derived humanism and modernist ambition than hip ‘90s
postmodern irony is made clear in a nostalgia-coloured essay on Godard’s Le Mepris (1963).
 11

Yet the anecdotal discussion also brings out good historical context, and Rosenbaum does
distance himself from the more outlandish claims made for the film (notably Colin
MacCabe’s). An essay on Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet also effectively highlights
how the ‘60s generation of European high modernists are still capable of real innovation,
noting in particular that their latest film was released in four different versions comprised of
different takes that foreground the different ‘performances’ of clouds and trees in the wind
as well as the actors, asserting nature as not antithetical to culture and art. (128)
Rosenbaum’s critical faculties seem less cogent when it comes to addressing the pull of the
‘60s as the progressive epicenter of film history and culture in its US context, Jack Smith’s
seminal mid-decade counterculture films treated via a left-liberal reverie that extols “utopian
art, offer[ing] itself as a vision of paradise … within the grasp of everyone.” (235) Small
qualifiers notwithstanding, this seems to assume that the vision (as curated and
institutionalized by Jonas Mekas) of the New York avant-garde of four decades ago still
represents ‘paradise’ for viewers in different cultural and historical contexts.
Rosenbaum’s reading of Artificial Intelligence: AI (Steven Spielberg, 2001) utilises
auteurism while belying its central assumptions, viewing the film as a productively
paradoxical work culminating in a dialectical final scene that plays off the contrasting
hallmarks of director Spielberg and writer/ghost director Stanley Kubrick – an ending that
“sounds like typical Spielberg goo” but which is “at least as grim as any other future in
Kubrick’s work.” (275) A more palpably anguished conflict characterises an essay on Taxi
Driver (1976), which suggests the film gave birth to a hornets’ nest of movies echoing its
“vengeful, puritanical fantasies”. (295) In an argument that seeks to work as a corrective to
uncritical celebrations of the film in many New Hollywood histories, again we find the vexed
issue of irony – which he says here “becomes a convenient escape clause for the filmmakers
– though it’s highly doubtful that if Bickle himself saw Taxi Driver he’d be inclined to read
the ending as anything but straight. … [The] social ramifications are effectively rationalized
to the point of non-existence”. (300 & 301) He concludes by honestly describing the actual
(if troubling) formal-thematic achievement of the film as a successful rendering of psychosis
whereby both impactful critique and celebration “become intimately entwined, impossible to
distinguish.” (301)
A concluding appendix offering the author’s all-time canon is rewarding to gaze over
after reading the book, and provides encyclopedic proof of the inevitable biases an auteurist
 12

view of film history brings. Here that bias potentially provides the means to constructive
polemical intervention in debates around film criticism, history and national cinema.

Leaving auteurism behind, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis’ Australian Cinema after Mabo
offers much more overt emphasis on historical analysis and national culture/cinema
contexts, in what amounts to a sustained political intervention. The authors offer a
compelling argument about Australian cinema in the wake of the High Court’s 1993 Mabo
judgment, which overturned the founding principle of terra nullius – the myth that Australia
was ‘empty’ prior to European settlement/invasion. Collins and Davis argue strongly that
the late 1990s and early ‘00s saw Australian filmmakers respond to this belated realisation as
a completely new chapter in the country’s national cinema, a cinema now reflecting critically
upon Australia’s unresolved historical ‘trauma’. By necessity, such a project retains the idea
of national cinema, but through seeking to re-conceptualise recent Australian films as
enacting a more questioning, re-engaged public sphere in which the country’s colonial
history is re-staged in the wake of the Mabo judgement.
Invoking Walter Benjamin’s reflections on cinema and modernity like so many other
contemporary theorists of film history, the authors suggest that the participation of recent
Australian films in the ‘history wars’ offers national history as a discontinuous experience of
‘shock’ brought about by the dialectical collision of the past (the setting of many of the
films) and the present (the new gaze thrown upon key moments in our colonial history). A
key concept enabled by such a shock is “backtracking”, a backward gaze with a view to a
more reconciled future. Such a schema is in direct opposition to the views of the present
national government lead by John Howard and its allies in the history wars, collectively
described as “the neo-conservatives [who] see Aboriginal reconciliation as a threat to the
nation.” (6) But the authors are not reverting to a simplistic national culture/representation
discourse. They also frame the debate in the context of a “global, media-based politics of
memory, where national traumas like genocide are now being understood in terms of the
failures of Western modernity“ (8), which valorizes “progress while simultaneously
lamenting the loss of a safer, more secure past.” (5)
The discussion of the aboriginal tracker figure is of central importance in the book,
as the guide to a literal and figurative backtracking. Thus in The Tracker (Rolf de Heer,
2002) the authors suggest that “an ethics of friendship” can be seen developing towards the
 13

end of the film between the tracker and the white soldier who are both abused by an openly
racist commander. This potential friendship, which the viewer is asked to metaphorically
share (via a final shot that comes across as willfully, unsubtly schematic along the same left-
liberal lines Collins and Davis assert), also has implications for national identity through
being “premised on an recognition of difference but one that allows for an ethics of
hospitality. The Tracker is now recognised as the one who is ‘at home’…” (16) While the
book is very strong in addressing films directly responding to the crumbling myth of terra
nullius, it seems less focused when trying to discuss other films’ portrayals of contemporary
Australia’s attitudes towards national history. The authors appear unsure as to whether The
Dish (Rob Sitch, 2000) conforms to the Howard era’s conservative re-energising of a
patriotic white Australia against Mabo, or whether it offers an effective parody of this insular
mood. Lantana (Ray Lawrence, 2001) is given a more perfunctory treatment, the film’s
protagonists and audience described as “tempted by Howard’s promise of security, [but] less
enamored of nostalgia for community than The Dish”. (38) And Head On (Anna Kokkinos,
1998) is addressed in terms of recent re-thinking of national identity but sidelines the
problematic implications of the film’s nihilism for a reconciliatory politics. The authors are
more persuasive when discussing the implications of the important SBSi/Adelaide Festival-
commissioned 2001-2002 series of films, a project they see as openly interventionist in
offering a counter-narrative to the prevailing conservative political mood. Films from this
series such as Black and White (Craig Lahiff) and Australian Rules (Paul Goldman) are given
clearly relevant readings that fit right into the central theme of the book. But rather than any
analysis of Walking on Water‘s (Tony Ayres) urban Sydney-dwelling characters’ tendency
towards narcissism and socio-political disengagement, their lifestyle is offered as
“provisional, utterly experimental” and oppositional to neo-conservative dreams of the
nation because “characters slip the noose of class, ethnicity and gender”. (48)
The book’s thematic epicenter is a fine chapter on the documentary Mabo – Life of
an Island Man (Trevor Graham, 1997), and the symbolic significance of the vandalising and
desecration of the Aboriginal land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo’s grave. The authors argue
that,

having been obliterated and estranged, the defaced name actualises the unspeakable history
of defacement that attaches to his name – that is, terra nullius... The film is not only a
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historical record of race hatred but also a cultural form that enables historical recognition
and public memory of Australia’s particular history of defacement. (66)

This kind of clear intellectual, emotional and political commitment sometimes motivates
discussions that result in less well-argued claims. One chapter concerns the way recent
Australian cinema surveys the same landscape as did more patriotic films of earlier decades
but now as inhabited and “recognisable, post-Mabo, as a land with a history.” (79) Collins
and Davis describe secular gazes upon this newly recognized land in Holy Smoke (Jane
Campion, 1999) and The Last Days of Chez Nous (Gillian Armstrong, 1992) as a “negation
of the sacred… It is as if the characters who journey into the outback are held captive by a
secular modernity which allows the nation to continue to deny native titled despite the Mabo
[case].” (83) Here the authors seem to echo a longstanding, problematic contradiction
whereby left-liberal theorists are understandably dismissive of any colonial European
mysticism about the land yet their political vigour leads them to critique characters or films
that enact a passively secular gaze upon it for being insufficiently seduced by the non-
Western spirituality of the dispossessed other.
An analysis of The Castle (Sitch, 1997) addresses the co-option of the Mabo finding
in the film, whereby the white working class family’s lawyer uses the protean new legal
precedent to argue for ‘land rights’ to their home in the face of redevelopment. Released just
after the Howard Government’s election when opposition to both Mabo and the High
Court’s subsequent Wik land rights finding was at fever pitch, The Castle “almost politicises
suburban home-ownership” when the protagonist says, “this country’s gotta stop stealing
other people’s land”. However, a “happy ending comes at the cost of history”, race being
downplayed with globalised capital as the home- and tradition-threatening villain. (120) Yet
this apparently convincing point notwithstanding, Collins and Davis then go on to suggest
that this same ending can also be seen “as a utopian imagining of an open community based
not on identity but on reconcilable differences.” (121) Happily, there’s no problem of
history-disavowing endings to deal with in a very respectful discussion of Rabbit-Proof
Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002), the authors stressing that the successful journey home of the
children is followed by the cut to documentary footage of the real-life present-day
protagonist as we are informed of her ensuing and repeated tragedies of dispossession. (148)
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The book’s intermittent use of trauma theory comes to a head with a specific analysis
of ‘grief-work’ as a usually disavowed psychological and aesthetic expression in Australia.
While central to the post-Mabo thesis, this idea seems more arguable as applied to Japanese
Story (Sue Brooks, 2003). Although the film doesn’t canvass reconciliation in any overt way,
the authors assert what seems a too-broad reading that emphasises a “profound shock, a
sudden moment of realisation, [which] can break through habitual barriers of cultural
insularity” (178), featuring a central “performance of grief … deeply tied to the post-Mabo
era, that entails giving up a form of emotional insularity which turns a blind eye to our
history and place in the Asia-Pacific region.” (181) In pursuing their reading, the authors
ignore the film’s seemingly non-reflexive use of ethnic stereotypes and its glib portrayal of an
Anglophone white woman’s erotic objectification of a traditionally feminised, non-English-
speaking Japanese man.
If readers will not find all the interpretations in Australian Cinema After Mabo
equally persuasive, it nonetheless offers an excellent, much-needed sophisticated
contribution to contemporary political, historical and cinematic debates around Australian
national identity, while evidencing the continuing weight and relevance of film as a culturally
engaged form.

Hamish Ford

Books Covered:
- Felicity Collins and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema After Mabo, Melbourne: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
- Peter Cowie, Revolution!: The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s, London: Faber and
Faber, 2004.
- Marek Haltof. The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski: variations on Density and Chance,
London: Wallflower Press, 2004.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum. Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 2004.
- Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (eds.). The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams,
Nightmare Visions, London: Wallflower Press, 2004.
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