AustLit

'The seminal Australian film Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) opens with a sweeping, circular pan around a desert landscape. It begins in silence, briefly focussed on a small house next to a railway track, but the camera soon moves on, curving around to the right, taking in an unending dusty expanse of yellow earth and pale blue, cloud dappled sky in all directions. The disorienting pan of the desert, the awareness of temporality as the simple shot goes on, work to bodily involve the viewer. The stillness of the landscape, contrasted with the steady movement of the camera, creates a feeling of presence in the scene – the spectator’s gaze roves over the landscape, taking it in and experiencing the isolation and solitude as if they were standing in it. The familiarity of the ‘outback landscape’, an archetypal image of Australia, also stirs affective responses in the Australian spectator, reminding them of their ‘closeness’ to the film’s eerie locality. ‘This is who you are to the world’, the film seems to say. This closeness, combined with the camera work which positions the viewer ‘in’ the desert, renders this scene extremely bodily – the spectator is pushed against the landscape, invited to feel the heat and dry stillness of the outback, as well as the isolation, before any plot or characters are introduced. Thus, we are invited to experience the film sensorily before we engage with it cerebrally, aligning with the hopes of director Ted Kotcheff, who “wanted people to watch the film and be sweating”. (Introduction)

'The Power of the Dog premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 2, 2021. In a short time, however, much has already been written about writer-director Jane Campion’s latest feature film, one of the most awarded releases of 2021 and the nexus of a range of heated, high-profile debates. These debates revolved around the place of the Western in contemporary cinema, with actor Sam Elliot infamously challenging Campion’s right to direct a film in the genre its representation of queerness, with, for example, The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber bemoaning its ‘queer problem and, coincident with the start of Oscar voting, Campion’s careless stumble into personifying white feminism’s glaring blind spot regarding race—when she framed the difficulty of her perennial competition with men for major directing awards against Serena and Venus Williams’ comparatively easy (in Campion’s view) challenges in professional tennis. While the intensity and diversity of these conversations no doubt speak to the strength of The Power of the Dog’s immediate impact, this article is motivated by the desire to comment on issues raised by the film that have yet to attract the wandering eye of mainstream film journalism to any sustained degree. And, in anticipation of longer-term discussions in the sphere of film scholarship, it approaches The Power of the Dog as an opportunity to revisit provocative questions about national cinema, genre and masculinity that Jane Campion’s cinema has evoked since the inception of her career.' (Introduction)