Conjuring the Real: Ghosts, Technology and Landscape in Lake Mungo (Extract) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Denegation and the Undead in Lake Mungo
This article examines the signification of the undead and the production of a supernatural ontology within the pseudo-documentary Lake Mungo (Joel Andersen, 2008). The narrative concerns Alice, a sixteen-year-old girl in the rural Australian town of Ararat who has drowned mysteriously at a reservoir on the edge of town and subsequently returns to haunt her family home and the site of her death. She is survived by her brother (Matthew), mother (June) and father (Russell) to whom she reappears both directly and through various media including video and still image sources. The investigation of the hauntings is reconstructed through fabricated news items, home video, and interviews with family and friends conducted in a largely observational mode. Academic writing on Lake Mungo has focused principally on the family dynamics of the haunting. In her book Found Footage Horror Films, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas reads Lake Mungo as exemplary of how:
Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae – Film and Media Studies
Since its beginnings, cinema has recognised that water can visually give matter and meaning to human desires, dreams and secrets, eliciting suspense and fear. Using different aesthetical and technical strategies, contemporary cinema shows immersed and drowning bodies to represent and express intimacy and protection, suspense and fear, obsession and depression, state of shock, past or infancy trauma, hallucinations and nightmares, etc. The case of enwaterment (i.e. “waterembodiment”) is significant because of its relevance to the point where psychoanalysis and philosophy meet. In this essay, I attempt to investigate what is actually meant today by making a bodily and sensible experience of film by analysing the substance of water and the figures of the drowning and immersed body. Cinema embodies aquatic modalities of perception and expression, pulling the viewer into a liquid environment that is the confluence between the film-body and the filmgoer-body.
PhD Thesis Through the medium of artists books, this study explores the re-contextualisation and repurposing of scientific images within visual narratives of freshwater places in Australia. Aquatic fungi are featured in these visual stories as a representative for the more-thanhuman inhabitants of these aquatic environments, that lie mysteriously, like the Bunyip, beyond normal human perception. Appearing as apparitions, these natural recyclers metaphorically de-compose the detritus of the colonial freshwater narratives to assert the presence of the non-human. Many issues arose from the interdisciplinary work as objectivity of science collided with subjectivity of a physical and metaphysical experience of place. In this contested space, preconceptions of scientific knowledge and values were challenged and then reconciled. In this work I was informed by Gaston Bachelard’s deliberations in Poetics of Space and the concept of ‘science as cultural practice’ outlined in the collected writings of Donna Haraway. Yet this was not a Consilience, as EO Wilson would prefer, but a montage layering of intervention and flow within site-specific, placenarratives of fresh water. The study concludes that the visual montage and the narrative offer inclusive and extended potential to deconstruct rigid structures and then recombine or hybridise these elements into an unexpected diversity of ideas. Intentionally, the reader is not offered yet another eco-political environmental narrative of water and rivers. These stories flow from one site to another, from colonial perceptions of progress and production to a natural recognition of absence and presence, and from scientific fact to mythical reality.
The poetics and uses of fluvial landscapes throughout the history of cinema
In Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), Jean-Luc Godard opens up an avenue of thought concerning cinema (and the history of cinema) that consists in a dialogue between the forms present in the (cinemat- ographic) images and sounds of the 20th century. The French filmmaker breaks with a single and un- directional history of cinema, in order to show the existence of multiple histories which remain open and in a process of permanent re-writing. Godard’s approach, particularly his ”inter-images” thinking, is adopted here to propose a (microscopic) history of the cinema based on the visual motif of the river; i.e. a synecdochic approach that offers an alterna- tive way of considering cinema history. This history branches off into two: an individual one which is constructed on the basis of my memory (audiovis- ual) as spectator, and, at the same time, a collective one which is framed within a potential history of cinematographic forms. This (individual-collective) dialectic turns the journey proposed throughout this chapter into a work-in-progress in which the reader may establish a dialogue between their own images and the ones suggested: images that, as (derivative and fragmentary) meanders, trace a poten- tial panorama of the aesthetic and narrative uses that cinema has made of fluvial landscapes. Every one of the mutations or reinterpretations that the motif has gone through, since its origins up to today, are indicators of the evolution of cinematographic tech- niques and aesthetics.
Cinematic Enwaterment. Drowning bodies in the contemporary film experience
"Over the last twenty-five years, as the actor’s physical body has gradually disappeared from the cinematic screen, the bodily dimension of the film experience has increased. In a scenario in which cinema has spread to a myriad of monitors and displays and the film experience seems to lose its integrity, the spectator is still seeking a strong and involving experience, still demanding stories made up of images and sounds that can still arouse the senses. My hypothesis is that contemporary cinema is facing this mutation by developing a number of specific and recurrent “experiential figures”. These figures are cases of strong and effective bodily tension, in which spectators’ motor, perceptual, emotional and mental activities are embodied into a “sensible substance”. Such a substance extends its features from the screen to the psychological space of the experience and transforms it into a unique “sensible environment”. One of these figure is the body in the water. Since its beginnings, cinema has recognized that water can visually give matter and meaning to human desires, dreams and secrets, eliciting suspense and fear. Using different aesthetical and technical strategies, contemporary cinema shows immersed and drowning bodies to represent and express intimacy and protection, suspense and fear, obsession and depression, state of shock, past or infancy trauma, hallucinations and nightmares, etc. The case of “water-embodiment” (or enwaterment) is significant because of its relevance to the point where psychoanalysis and philosophy meet. In this provisional paper, presented at the International Film Studies Conference “Emergent Encounters in Film Theory. Intersections Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy”, held at King’s College of London on March 21st 2009, I attempt to investigate what is actually meant today by making a bodily and sensible experience of film by analyzing the substance of water and the figures of the drowning and immersed body. Cinema embodies aquatic modalities of perception and expression, pulling the viewer into a liquid environment that is the confluence between the film-body and the filmgoer-body."
ANUAC, 2015
In this piece we will offer some reflections that emerged from the experience of curating and presenting the Film Programme of the Finnish Anthropological Society Conference in Helsinki from the 21st – 22nd October 2015. The theme of the conference, Landscapes, Sociality, & Materiality, encouraged a discussion that thought of landscapes as "contextual social and cultural processes defined by time, place and space rather than as an image and an object of the visual gaze". The Film Programme aimed to investigate different ways in which objects, landscapes, material properties, infrastructures, and environments enable and restrict certain forms of creativity. In a nutshell, we sought submissions that considered – through their cinematic form or content – different perceptions, mediations, and constructions of landscape.
Dystopian Screen Media Overthrows Utopic Conventions: The Australian Landscape as an Enigma
EASA: European Association for Studies of Australia. SPECIAL ISSUE, VOL. 12, NO. 1-2, 2021 | AUSTRALIA AS A RISK SOCIETY: HOPES AND FEARS OF THE PAST, THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE, 2021
From Joan Lindsay and cinematic master Peter Weir to Ted Kotcheff and Warwick Thornton, over past decades authors, screenwriters and filmmakers have produced films that depict the vast Australian landscape-simply referred to as terra nullius during colonial times by settlers literally confronting a continent vastly different from anything they were culturally and geographically accustomed to-as mysterious, impenetrable and ominous. Just like the dark cold of Scandinavia lends itself perfectly to contemporary Nordic Noir, the Australian New Wave or Australian Film Revival of the 1970s and 1980s saw the release of films that encapsulated the eeriness of this largely rugged, arid and windswept continent, which opens up possibilities for anything to happen within those very, limitless, territories. This article analyses Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Kotcheff's horror flick par excellence Wake in Fright (1971); "the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence" and with a TV-series remake in 2017, and Thornton's more recent portrayal of Aboriginal misery and poverty Samson and Delilah (2009) set against a hostile urban backdrop, from a Foucauldian perspective. In its theoretical framework it also draws primarily on Freud. Heterotopia is used as a term to refer to strange, bewildering spaces that are disturbing and undecipherable-also described as "an unimaginable space, representable only in language, and as a kind of semimythical real site" (as articulated in Knight, 2017, 141). Foucault's concept is applied in a cinematic context and used in conjunction with Freud's notion of the uncanny as a feeling of uneasiness; or, as has been explained in his seminal text "The Uncanny" (1919), "that class of the terrifying that leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar." 1 We argue that these eerie, fear-induced screened narratives represent a nation whose weather-beaten, freedom-loving yet at heart anxiety-ridden people are most definitely a product of their environment.