Introduction: The Eurocentric Gaze, Postcolonial Gothic, Indigenous Visions

Abstract

Introduction:The Eurocentric Gaze, Postcolonial Gothic, Indigenous Visions Eva Rueschmann (bio) Introduction In keeping with Antipodes's focus on literary and other cultural texts from the Pacific region, this special section features six new essays on Australian and New Zealand fictional feature and documentary films. While Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand are separate and distinct national cinemas, this section's coverage of narrative films from both nations reflects a tradition of scholarship based on the significant cultural crossovers between them.1 Beyond the nations' common origins as former British colonies and their Pacific location, Australian and New Zealand filmmakers have both drawn on their respective settler histories and postsettler social development as multicultural nations for narrative subjects and inspiration. Ian Conrich has noted that "Australian and New Zealand cinema share a use of powerful landscapes, they also share a post-settler Gothic, a cinema of isolation and travel, similar screen representations of masculinity, and similar fictional depictions of small-town communities" (5). An expanded list of commonalities includes the important rise since the early 2000s of Indigenous film and filmmakers in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand alike, which Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye called in A Companion to Australian Cinema (2019) a necessary challenge to the previously dominant "uninterrupted whiteness of Australian screen culture" (37). Discussed here are a diverse range of contemporary films including the director Christine Jeffs's Rain (2001), Richard Roxburgh's Romulus, My Father (2007), Taika Waititi's Boy (2010), Tony Krawitz's Dead Europe (2012), Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014), and Natalie Erika James's The Relic (2020). In addition, this section includes new critical reappraisals of notable earlier works such as Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table (1989). The essays in this special section offer fresh and original critical perspectives on three facets of feature filmmaking in Australia and New Zealand: the representation of Europe as colonial metropole in the antipodean imagination, the postcolonial [End Page 233] Gothic as a film mode or genre, and Indigenous representations on-screen. The section begins with a long-neglected topic in film scholarship: the image of Europe in contemporary Australasian cinema.2 As former British settler colonies, Australia and New Zealand have had a long and complicated relationship—both politically and artistically—with Europe and specifically Great Britain. For instance, in twentieth-century Australian literature, attitudes toward imperial Britain oscillated between "a yearning for a distant Home and the rejection of the Old Country" (Bader 109). Despite this ambivalence, Australian and New Zealand writers and artists long remained intrigued and even drawn to Britain and the European continent as an imagined center of cultural sophistication. While this theme is treated in literary works depicting the journeys of Australians and New Zealanders to Europe, very few feature films focus on the return of descendants of former colonists or immigrants to their European homelands. In the first essay in this special section, Janine Hauthal discusses four films that make visible shifting perceptions of Europe in relation to antipodean cultural identities. If Australians' and New Zealanders' journey back to Europe in these works shows a sometime idealized but now more often problematic "imaginary homeland" for the descendants of white settlers, its dark mirror image can be seen in Australasian Gothic cinema, which not infrequently seems haunted by the traumatic dislocations and tragedies of European colonization. In the Gothic, protagonists perceive and experience the antipodean unfamiliar landscapes as a source of dislocation, psychological terror, melancholy, and the uncanny—an unsettling reversal of Europe as a putative homeland. In Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction, the film scholar Jonathan Rayner has called the Australian Gothic "a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, … suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature" (25). Although Australian and New Zealand Gothic is often associated with horror and fantasy films, less generic dramas such as the well-known art house films Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Piano (1993) also draw on this Gothic mode. While the Gothic was imported to the antipodes through the eighteenth-century British Gothic novel, it adopted regional inflections as...