Felicity Collins

Australian cinema after Mabo

Part I. Australian Cinema and the History Wars: 1. Backtracking after Mabo 2. Home and abroad in Moulin Rouge, The Dish and Lantana 3. Elites and battlers in Australian Rules and Walking on Water 4. Mediating memory in Mabo - life of an Island Man Part II. Landscape and belonging after Mabo: 5. Aftershock and the desert landscape in Heavens Burning, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Holy Smoke, Serenades, Yolngu Boy, The Missing 6. Coming from the country in Heartland, Cunnamulla and Message from Moree 7. Coming from the the city in The Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange Planet and Radiance Part III. Grief, Trauma and Coming of Age: 8. Lost, stolen and found in Rabbit-Proof Fence 9. Escaping history and shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds 10. Sustaining grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion.

After the Apology: Reframing violence and suffering in 'First Australians', 'Australia', and 'Samson and Delilah'

This article explores the cinematic reframing of media images that normalize violence and suffering in remote Aboriginal communities. It proposes that, in the light of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response and the 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, the archival history series First Australians, the postmodern blockbuster Australia, and the arthouse drama Samson and Delilah contribute to an anti-colonial politics by creating cinematic spaces for affective and ethical response to issues of ‘bare life’ that tend to be exhausted, rather than worked through, in media temporality.

Disputing history, remembering country in The Tracker and Rabbit‐Proof Fence

This essay takes issue with newspaper pundits, academic film critics and historians who seek in their respective professional ways to bar ‘history’ films from counting as ‘good cinema’ or who decry cinemas capacity for doing ‘real history’. Paying particular attention to the reappearance of the figures of the lost child and the black tracker in recent Australian cinema, we propose that history films be understood in terms of spectatorship rather than historical representation. Drawing on concepts of shock, recognition and nachtraglichkeit, we approach lost child and black tracker films as deferred revisions that invite the viewer to perform a cinematic kind of backtracking—that is, going over old ground in ways that may lead one to retract or reverse ones opinion.

The ethical violence of celebrity chat: Russell Crowe and David Gulpilil

Tracing patterns of repetition in media interviews with Australian film actors, Russell Crowe and David Gulpilil, this paper looks at how Andrew Dentons Enough Rope interview with Crowe, and Darlene Johnsons biographical documentary Gulpilil: One Red Blood, work through anachronistic norms that have made Crowe and Gulpilil intelligible to Australian audiences over several decades. Drawing on the post-colonial feminist discourse of Ahmed, Butler and Gandhi on ethical encounters with familiar and strange others, I argue that both Crowe and Gulpilil, under different conditions of intelligibility, resist the ethical violence of social and media norms on which their national and international recognition depends.

A Hungry Public: Stranger Relationality and the Blak Wave

Proposing a democratic politics based on a common love of public things currently threatened by neoliberal privatization—from parks and libraries to public broadcasting—Bonnie Honig draws on Hannah Arendt and D. W. Winnicott to envisage a public realm characterised not by identity and exclusion but by collaboration, relationality, creativity, and resilience. This chapter responds to Honig’s proposition that a democratic holding environment enables resilience when it recognises the generative power of public things and allows them to flourish. It asks what factors have enabled a Blak Wave of Indigenous film and television production to flourish in Australia in a decade when public screen culture and public broadcasting have been subject to ideological attacks and regular funding cuts. Drawing on Michael Warner’s concept of stranger relationality, it focuses on performative media texts that address a public hungry to know more about Aboriginal Australia. It identifies modes of resilience in public performances of Aboriginal personhood, and it analyses templates of stranger relationality in The Darkside (Thornton, The politics of public things: Neoliberalism and the routine of privatization. No Foundations 10. http://www.helsinki.fi/nofo/NoFo10HONIG.pdf. Accessed 6 Jan 2015, 2013), an anthology of ghost stories performed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors.

A writer's tale

Review: Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant‐Garde Film, Video & Feminism (Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990).

Disturbing the Peace: The Ghost in beDevil and The Darkside

ABSTRACT Comparing transitional and agonistic theories of reconciliation, this essay takes a second look at the figure of the ghost in two films that bookend both the reconciliation movement in Australia and the Blak Wave of film and television production. It argues that telling ghost stories in beDevil (directed by Tracey Moffatt, 1993) and The Darkside (directed by Warwick Thornton, 2013) convenes a space for the unreconciled to disturb the peace in a settlercolonial context where the nation-state is the most recent but not the only polity.

‘Rethinking witnessing across history, culture and time’

This themed issue brings together international scholars from history, literary, media and cultural studies whose work offers new approaches to researching, writing and thinking about the witnessing of diverse instances of conflict and violence, ranging from the Crusades (Cassidy-Welch) to the Holocaust (Dean) and the Vietnam war (Caruth), and extending to cumulative violence experienced by Nigerian and Canadian first nations women (Collins), non-whites in South Africa (Field), seaborne, Australia-bound asylum seekers and refugees (Radstone) and Native Americans (Spence). Emerging from an interdisciplinary symposium on trauma in history and testimony hosted by Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation in 2014, this themed issue focuses on one of trauma studies’ key concepts – witnessing. It is this shared attention to processes and methods of witnessing in all their forms and vicissitudes that binds these essays into a conversation. Cathy Caruth’s revisiting of the Vietnam war’s 1968 My Lai massacre expands on the concept of ‘false witness’ in relation to the history of perpetrator violence as one of cyclical erasure and repetition and raises the question of whether that cycle – as well as the contemporary prominence of ‘fake truth’ – could be ruptured by new modes of witnessing. Focused on the capture of a relic of the True Cross by Saladin at the battle of Hattin in 1187, Megan Cassidy-Welch discusses the challenges posed by contemporary trauma studies to the historian of the medieval period. Finding herself positioned as witness to anachronistic and therefore initially opaque modes of experiencing and representing violence, Cassidy-Welch concludes that the framework offered by contemporary trauma theory’s understanding of witnessing emerges as pertinent, shedding light on the experience and memory of the loss of the True Cross in its historical particularity. Carolyn Dean brings us back to the question of the complex contemporary politics of witnessing. Turning to Didier Fassin’s critique of humanitarian identification with the victim, Dean develops an important historical distinction between different kinds of witness: the survivor-witness that emerged around the 1961 Eichmann trial, and the humanitarian-witness. As Dean points out, recent criticism that mobilizes arguments sceptical of the language of trauma conceives institutionalized compassion for distant others, especially in the form of ‘bearing witness’ to trauma, as leading inevitably to the denial of victims’ political recognition as well as to the erasure of the structural and ongoing underpinnings of violence. On the question of bearing witness to the disappeared through proxy performances on public screens and social media, Felicity Collins contributes to a body of work in trauma theory that calls attention to missing women and schoolgirls as soft targets of multifaceted trauma. Moving witnessing beyond the confines of trauma studies, Susannah Radstone focuses on asymmetrical witnessing, instantiated in the visitor’s viewing of Alex Seton’s artwork Someone died trying to have a life like mine. Radstone proposes that this artwork’s engagement with privilege prompts a mode of Arendtinan

Soft targets: missing women, insidious violence and proxy performance

Abstract This article draws attention to a gestural poetics in activist screen culture where proxy performance, on behalf of missing women and schoolgirls, prompts a rethink of trauma theory’s distinction between working through and acting out. It looks closely at a triptych of short films by Anishinaabe film-maker, Lisa Jackson, where gestures – from writing, to hip hop, to singing the national anthem – ‘work through’ the structural violence of Canada’s policy of ‘killing the Indian in the child’. It turns, then, to the social media campaign, #BringBackOurGirls, focusing on its signature gesture ‘acted out’ by celebrities, activists and ad hoc groups on behalf of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014. It argues that Jackson’s film trilogy facilitates the return of ‘the Indian in the child’ through affective performance, while #BringBackOurGirls participates in a gestural politics of equivalence.

Decolonizing settler-colonial and Pacific screens

While postcolonial critique has been a remarkably fertile field within the humanities, the concept of the postcolonial has been problematic when applied to the peculiar situation of settler-colonial nations. In such nations, the colonial period has been largely relegated to the past. Yet, unresolved issues of treaty, sovereignty, native title and reparation for discriminatory policies such as child removal provide clear evidence that the nation states that replaced colonial regimes have yet to be decolonized. As Deborah Bird Rose says: