Film Studies

What is a monster? Why are we so recurringly fascinated by graphic representations of the monstrous? And, in particular, what do cinematic images of male monstrosity tell us about the ways in which Western culture produces and views the categories of masculine and feminine?  Barbara Creed’s new book is a direct extension of much of the lively work she did in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993). In Phallic Panic, she moves from her earlier consideration of how we might interpret visions of female monstrosity as evidence of profound anxiety about the role of the woman in phallocentric society, particularly in her vagina dentata manifestations, to an examination of the cultural and psychological implications of male monsters.

By chance the other day, watching British director Herbert Wilcox’s toe-curling ‘Scottish’ whimsy, Trouble in the Glen (1954), one of Orson Welles’s worst films (one of anybody’s worst films), I was struck anew by the fact that even when Welles could not save a film, he was always sure to be remembered in it. Here he plays a Scottish laird, long absent in South America, who returns to take up the castle he has inherited and, failing to bring a castful of theatrically canny Scots to heel, admits his errors and ends by presiding – benignly, but still presiding – in a kilt, yet. A romantic liaison and an appalling little girl taking her first post-illness steps may be intended to warm our soured hearts, but it is the massive figure avoiding the worst punishments for hubris that grabs what is left of our attention.

Why are we still hooked on the 1960s? As English art historian David Mellor said they were the Utopian Years. Perhaps our dreams and aspirations were anchored there. It is a rather difficult period to review with historical accuracy precisely because it was so rich in ideas and ideals; there was so much happening.

In a course on Australian popular culture, I routinely ask students a pair of questions: is Australian culture increasingly Americanised; is Australian culture increasingly distinctive and original? They routinely answer yes to both. Australian National Cinema suggests why there might be more than poor logic behind their response. Its contradictoriness tells us something fundamental about how Australian cinema exists in the cinema world and the social world.

Near the end of a candid 1966 documentary portrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini shot in 1966 (and shown last year on SBS), the French critic Jean-André Fieschi casually asks the Italian director whether art is for his a ‘matter of life and death’. Pasolini – who up to this point has been discoursing urbanely on class, culture, cinema and language like a true public intellectual – is floored by the question. ‘This changes the whole basis of our discussion,’ he declares, and goes on to confess that everything he has previously said is a mere mask hiding his actual, primal, angst-ridden feelings about life, death and survival. Unmasked as a trembling existentialist, Pasolini announces that the interview is over. And there Fieschi’s film abruptly ends.

Mickey and Mallory love to kill. Murder comes naturally to them – it’s all part of a successful day’s work. Bullets fly, bodies drop, and the couple move on as if enjoying a prolonged shopping spree in which the objects consumed just happen to be human lives. Their actions blend in perfectly with a culture that emphasises mass production, mass consumption, repetition, seriality. After all we live in an era that has not only produced a new breed of serial killers but also raises them to the status of folk heroes – icons to be consumed, in turn, by the media, fans, filmmakers, writers, profiteers. Mickey and Mallory are also deeply in love; a starry-eyed Romeo and Juliet whose passion, in the post-consumer society, feeds on a continual diet of violence, cruelty, death. (It is perhaps telling that in many contemporary films, violence and murder serve to unite the couple rather than drive them apart.) This circuit of consumption, repetition and seriality is self-regulating, continuous, carnivorous.

Like many students of Australian film, I became aware of Cecil Holmes’s work through the viewing of a scratched print of Three in One in a lecture hall in one of our tertiary institutions, many years after it had failed to gain general release within Australia and killed off the dream of an indigenous film industry, yet again. A brave and naïve film, it was clearly well-made, stylish, and addressed a local audience without condescension or parochialism. Three in One was an early hint of what an Australian cinema might look like, and is now held to be one of the landmarks in the history of Australian film. To those who see the film now, though, its maker must seem to have suffered the same fate as its optimistically named production company, New Dawn Films. There is some satisfaction, then, in reading One Man’s Way to see what did happen to a substantial talent squandered by an insecure and conservative Australian film industry.

Words and Images is a valuable contribution to the rapidly growing body of work on Australian film culture and a welcome addition to the relatively small collection of volumes dealing with the film-literature connection. As McFarlane notes there is not, as yet, a ‘definitive work’ on the art of adaptation, though George Bluestone’s Novels into Film (1957) established a fairly solid base for others working in this area. McFarlane’s acknowledged indebtedness to Bluestone is most evident in the method he adopts in order to examine individual adaptations. Essentially it is one of determining and exploring changes to texts, that is, the major alterations and manipulations which take place in the process of adapting a narrative from one medium to another.