Australian Outback Allegory

Abstract

Italian cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s, along with specific cases like El Topo, demonstrate how wasteland landscapes reflect the larger spiritual crisis of the time. Other national cinemas from the same period associate this spiritual crisis with one culture’s exploitation of another, in both environmental and cultural contexts. In these films, landscape allegory emerges similarly by way of peripheral wilderness locations. Simon Schama’s ideas about landscape inform this mode of film allegory. In his study Landscape and Memory, Schama asserts: For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.1