Women, Film, and Oceans A/Part: the Critical Humor of Tracey Moffatt, Monica Pellizzari, and Clara Law

Home , Australian comedy, Australian New Wave, A Separation, Bad Boy Bubby, Bedevil, Bobbi Sykes

WOMEN, FILM, AND OCEANS A/PART: THE CRITICAL HUMOR OF TRACEY MOFFATT, MONICA PELLIZZARI, AND CLARA LAW

Alessandra Senzani

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

December 2008

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study is the culmination of interests that developed in Italy and travelled with me through the Australian land, the Ohio snow, and the Floridian tropical sun where the final project ripened. The voices of many scholars, colleagues, friends, and family have made this research possible. Foremost, I owe my thanks to the professors who guided me through this journey. Dr. Freedman has served as a supportive chair and has first helped me polish my theoretical and analytical skills in film studies. Dr. Tamburri has been an academic mentor and his friendly advice and courses have been invaluable to my academic formation. Although through late encounters, I am greatly indebted to Dr.

Hokenson for her passionate understanding of the comic and to Dr. Guneratne, whose far-reaching knowledge of Third and accented cinemas has enriched this study in too many ways to count. Many thanks go to all the friends whose laughter and food have nurtured and motivated me through the years in Boca Raton. My greatest debt I owe to my family; to my grandmother who imparted me stern respect for education, to my mother who has passed down to me her passion for global cinema and languages and to my father, who has been a supportive and critical reader of my work. Finally, this study would have never seen the light of day without the encouragement and patience of

Stephane, who in fact began it all, with a trip to Australia and his willingness to move, struggle, endure, and adapt so that I could pursue my academic career.

iii

ABSTRACT

Author: Alessandra Senzani

Title: Women, Film, and Oceans A/Part: The Critical Humor of

Tracey Moffatt, Monica Pellizzari, and Clara Law

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Eric Freedman

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Year: 2008

The politicized use of humor in accented cinema is a tool for negotiating

particular formations of identity, such as sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and class. The body

of work produced by contemporary women filmmakers working in Australia, specifically

Tracey Moffatt, Monica Pellizzari, and Clara Law, illustrates how these directors have

employed critical humor as a response to their multiple marginalization as women,

Australian, and accented filmmakers. In their works, humor functions as a critical tool to

deconstruct the contradictions in dominant discourses as they relate to (neo)colonial,

racist, globalized, patriarchal, and displaced pasts and presents. Produced within

Australian national cinema, but emerging from experiences of geographical displacements that defy territorial borders, their films illuminate how critical humor can iv

inflect such accepted categories as the national constitution of a cinema, film genre, and

questions of exile and diaspora. Critical humor thus constitutes a cinematic signifying

practice able, following Luigi Pirandello’s description of umorismo, to decompose the

filmic text, and as a tool for an ideological critique of cinem and its role in (re)producing

discourses of the nation predicated on the dominant categories of whiteness and

masculinity. The study offers a theoretical framework for decoding humor in a film text,

focusing on the manipulation of cinematic language, and it provides a model for a

criticism that wishes to heighten the counter-hegemonic potential of cinematic texts, by

picking up on the humorous, contradictory openings of the text and widening them through a parallel dissociating process. Finally, critical humor in the accented cinema of women filmmakers like Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law is shown to constitute a form of translation and negotiation performed between the national, monologic constraints of film production and cinematic language, the heteroglossia of the global imaginaries that have traveled since the beginning with film technology, and the local and diasporic accents informing a filmmaker’s unique style and perspective.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1 1. Geographical and Cultural Disjunctions: An Accented Cinema in Australia ...... 18 1.1 Introducing Accented Cinema and Creolized Identities ...... 18 1.2 Indigenous and Colonial Migrations ...... 32 1.2.1 The Forced Displacement of Britain’s Lowly ...... 33 1.2.2 The Sexual Politics of Australia’s Violent Colonial History ...... 37 1.2.3 Contextualizing Tracey Moffatt ...... 42 1.3 European Migration to Australia and The Politics of Whiteness: The Case of The Italian Australians ...... 48 1.3.1 Italian Immigration and the Whiteness Test ...... 50 1.3.2 The Gender Politics of Italian Migration to Australia ...... 55 1.3.3 Contextualizing Monica Pellizzari ...... 60 1.4 The Chinese Presence in Australia: Modern and Past Diasporas ...... 65 1.4.1 Chinese Immigration in the Context of Asian/Australian Relations ...... 67 1.4.2 The Genderedness of Asian Migrations and Anxieties ...... 70 1.4.3 Contextualizing Clara Law ...... 75 2. A Fraught National Cinema ...... 82 2.1 Accenting National Cinema ...... 82 2.2 Tracey Moffatt: Tearing down the Nationalist Canvas of Classic Australian National Cinema ...... 90 2.2.1 Early Filmmaking in Australia and The Ethnographic Film: A Critical Vision through Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls ...... 91 2.2.2 Australian Feature Film and the Spectacle of Alterity: Moffatt’s Resignification of the classic Jedda in Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy ...... 100 2.2.3 Accented Cinema in Australia: The Ghosts of Moffatt’s Bedevil and the Discourses of Australian Multiculturalism ...... 108 2.3 Monica Pellizzari: Recovering an Ethnic Identification through Migrant Film Schooling ...... 116 2.3.1 Global Hollywood’s Hold Down Under: An Italian Australian Responds to Italian/American Stereotyping ...... 117 2.3.2 Pellizzari’s Hybrid Schooling and Cinema: The Role of the Short Film in Women Accented Filmmaking...... 124 2.3.3. An Artistic Journey: Criss-Crossing both Australian and Italian National Cinemas ...... 133 2.4 Clara Law: Inbetween National, Diasporic, and Commercial Cinemas ...... 140 2.4.1 Hong Kong Cinema’s Uncanny Signification on Australian Cinema ..... 141 2.4.2 Asian Transnationalism in Australian National Cinema and Society ...... 148

2.4.3 Australian National Cinema in Light of Diaspora: Claiming a Tradition ...... 156 3. Creolizing Counter-Cinemas with Critical Humor ...... 165 3.1 Theorizing Critical Humor ...... 165 3.2 Pirandellian Humor: A Decomposizione of Cinematic Codes ...... 180 3.2.1. Moffatt’s Parodic Treatment of Multiple Film Tracks ...... 183 3.2.2 Pellizzari’s Sensuous Satire through Associational Montage ...... 193 3.2.3 Law’s Humorous Disjunctions: Emphasizing Cinematic Kinetics and Haptics ...... 205 3.3 Pirandellian Reflection: Playing with Cinematic Looks ...... 218 3.3.1 Moffatt Laughs Back: The Ethics of Looking Out and Beyond ...... 222 3.3.2. Pellizzari’s Unruliness: Constructing a World of Female Perspectives...... 234 3.3.3 Law Looks at Celluloid Sex: Fetish Humor ...... 241 3.4 Pirandellian Masks: Doubling the Mimetic Plays ...... 252 3.4.1 Moffatt’s Masquerades of Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality ...... 257 3.4.2 Pellizzari’s Medusan Humor and the Female Grotesque ...... 265 3.4.3 Law’s parodic Gestencharaktern ...... 275 4. Creolizing Genres, Relativizing Hierarchies, and a Touch of Humorous Blasphemy...... 285 4.1 Theorizing the Creolization of Genres and Humorous Blasphemy ...... 285 4.2 Tracey Moffatt: “Scary, Funny and Terribly Arty” ...... 297 4.2.1 Bedeviling Generic Chronotopes and Conventions ...... 297 4.2.2 Fragmenting and Syncretizing Christian Missionary Discourse ...... 305 4.3 Monica Pellizzari’s Humorous Excesses ...... 312 4.3.1 A Feminist Look at the “Freakishness” of Australian Cinema ...... 312 4.3.2 Laughing back at Patriarchal Italian Catholicism ...... 319 4.4 Law’s Journey through Australian Cinema and Society...... 327 4.4.1 Becoming Familiar with Australian Cinematic Chronotopes ...... 327 4.4.2 An Irreverent Look at Australian Purgatorial Narratives ...... 340 Conclusion ...... 347 Endnotes ...... 374 Works Cited ...... 433 Films Cited ...... 487

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INTRODUCTION

Il pessimismo dell’intelligenza e l’ottimismo della volontá.1 (Antonio Gramsci, 1131)

In our post-colonial, post-slavery, post- migratory world only conditions of double or triple consciousness prevail and the task of fragmenting the signs and the languages of representation, so that we can make manifest the endless cultural disputes of our heritage, remains to both the writers and the readers of these systems. (Irit Rogoff, 110)

Marginal because they are women filmmakers, marginal because they are

Australian filmmakers, and marginal even at the antipodal fringe of filmmaking because they are displaced, accented, and transnational filmmakers, Tracey Moffatt, Monica

Pellizzari, and Clara Law have responded to their multiple marginalization with critical humor. Coming from different disjunctive experiences, these three women filmmakers have gained visibility in Australian cinema and beyond, voicing their peripheral and hybrid perspectives. Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law illustrate how humor can be used as a critical tool to perform the task called for by Rogoff of “fragmenting the signs and the languages of representation,” in order to point out the contradictions in dominant discourses as they relate to (neo)colonial, racist, globalized, patriarchal, and displaced pasts and presents. Produced within Australian national cinema, but emerging from

experiences of geographical displacements that defy territorial borders, their films

illuminate how critical humor can inflect such accepted categories as the national

constitution of a cinema, film genre, and questions of exile and diaspora. Representative,

albeit with different histories,2 of what Hamid Naficy has termed “accented cinema” (4),

these three filmmakers discover the humor buried in the clashes between the multiple

cultures informing their sensibilities as women, as (trans)national and subaltern subjects,

as filmmakers, and as critical observers of a growing globalized diaspora.

“Critical humor” is here understood as an umbrella term for such different forms

as parody, satire, farce, irony, and their many hybrids;3 its use does not indicate a new

theory of humor, but rather stresses the critical function that humor can serve, a property

already recognized by satirists like Aristophanes and Menippos in ancient Greece and by

many populist theories of humor that inform this study, as it will be discussed in Chapter

three.4 The adjective “critical” points both to the crucial role that humor plays in the film projects analyzed, as a suprasegmental feature that affects the film text as a whole, and to the function of a humorous attitude that wishes to encourage critical evaluation and

questioning of both film and discursive practices predicated on the exclusion of subaltern

voices.5 The detailed analysis of the different uses of humor in the works of the three filmmakers will offer a concrete and applied model for reading humorous tactics in accented cinemas. However, this study will not attempt to compile a list of forms and techniques of critical humor, which is here not understood as a unitary practice or style, but rather as a goal, as a trust in the spectator that he/she will detect and disassemble the humorous inconsistencies unveiled in the films and will thereby question received

notions of norms and behavior. Bertolt Brecht famously described realism as a goal rather

than a style; for him, realism “muß breit und politisch sein, freiheitlich im Ästhetischen,

souverän gegenüber den Konventionen” (149-161).6 Like Brecht’s realism, the clothes

and masks that critical humor can wear are numerous and ever-changing; they are supple

and flexible, so as to adapt to floating times, spaces, discourses, frames, and ideologies.

Although this approach foregrounds the authors’ aesthetic freedom to discover ever-new

ways to insert humor in their films, it nevertheless also acknowledges that to be critical,

humor needs to aim at unveiling the contradictions not only in narrative, but also in

discursive practices. Critical humor will be located at the intersection between notions of

authorship and spectatorship;7 it is a practice that draws attention to the encoding of the

text, but that to be effective relies on the decoding of the spectator and a parallel critically humorous reading/viewing. It is a bridge between the author’s critical and ironic

perspective onto the world and the spectator’s willingness to put on those lenses and

question his/her world through such a humorous perspective; it is an encouragement to

think critically and thereby transform oneself and the network of relationships in which

one participates.

Critical humor is understood as a cinematic signifying practice, following Luigi

Pirandello’s description of umorismo, to “decompose” the filmic text. As Manuela Gieri

has pointed out, Pirandellian humor well translates to cinema studies, where humorous

decomposition can be pursued by many techniques, but especially through montage,

through the contrast between the multiple tracks constituting the film text, and through

the mixing of genre conventions. Humor, however, can also serve as a tool for an

ideological critique of cinema and its role in (re)producing discourses of the nation, a

characteristic of Australian cinema, predicated on the dominant categories of whiteness

and masculinity.8 It can function, in Gramscian terms, as a counter-hegemonic tool to bring out the dissenting voices inhabiting the interstices between contradictory national and global discourses. Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law employ humor to play with the multiple planes involved in a film text; a technique that, using a terms introduced by

Mikhail Bakhtin, contributes to the dialogization of Australian national discourses and cinema,9 challenging the common unitary discourse that silences the many accents

piercing through the lenses of Australian films.

By favoring the contamination of genres and by exploiting contradictions and

affinities between the cultures and languages coming into contact, humor in their films

exemplifies the process of what Édouard Glissant terms créolisation.10 Drawing on his

own experience and knowledge of the processes and politics involved in the creation of

the Creole languages spoken in Martinique, Glissant has extended the metaphor of

créolisation to historical processes as a means of illuminating the continuities between

colonialism, neo-colonialism, and neo-imperialism.11 Créolisation entails a hybridizing

of languages and forms – literary in Glissant’s case, cinematic in this study – but also of

cultures and discourses. Like critical humor, créolisation thus simultaneously functions

as a narrative strategy and an ideological critique; creolizing film texts involves playing

with the multiple voices, perspectives, authors, and tracks on which cinema is

constructed. This formal and playful créolisation can well serve critically humorous

purposes, by always conveying that Pirandellian sentimento del contrario (“feeling of the

contrary”), whereby our smile and laughter transform into a critical detachment that

allows us to negotiate the fine line indicated by Gramsci between the “pessimism of the

intellect and the optimism of the will.” Critical humor can contribute to the relativization

of the tragedy and hence maintain the will for action, while simultaneously containing the

comic to foreground the need for action.12 Taking his cues from Adrienne Rich’s poem

An Atlas of the Difficult World, Homi Bhabha, draws attention to an “ethic of

unsatisfaction,” wondering whether it is “the pessimism of the idealist or the aspiration of the utopian” (The Location of Culture xx-xxi). If Rich’s poem does not present any humorous intent, an “ethics of unsatisfaction” can, however, also describe a form of humor that does not aim for laughter, but rather for critical reflection, which, as in Rich,

“turns the abjection of modern history into the productive and creative history of the minority as social agent” (xx). To different degrees and effects, all three filmmakers in this study use humor to express their “unsatisfaction,” while motivating the viewers to reflect critically and rethink national relations and their global resonance.

Créolisation also takes the form of a critical humor situated in geographical space and historical time, which comments on different forms of displacement and disjunction and on the many contradictions that undergird the discourses of the Australian nation.13

For geopolitical and historical reasons, Australia represents a valuable space to investigate a form of humor, which, arising from the margins and experiences of forced displacement, aims at uprooting the discourses of nationhood and their intersections with dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity. Disenfranchisement, geographic disjunctions, and forced exile have shaped an Australian (post)colonial14 nation since its

British invasion in the late eighteenth century. The first colonization of the Australian

land actually took place around 60,000 and 120,000 years ago and, as Robert Hughes in

The Fatal Shore points out, “it was the first time Homo Sapiens had ever colonized by

sea” (8).15 For thousands of years, the First Australians, consisting of about 500 different

linguistic groups, roamed, nurtured, and ritually sang into existence their land along

trading and survival routes.16 This “longest continuous cultural history in the world” was

to experience a brutal disruption in 1788 with the arrival of the first British fleet in

Botany Bay (Flood 16). The majority of the men and women on these ships were not

eager colonials in search of a “promised land” like the Pilgrims who landed in North-

America, but rather subjects “coerced, exiled, deracinated, in chains” (Hughes 1). As

Hughes observes, England was to colonize the South land and turn it into a jail in the

hope “that it would eventually swallow … the ‘criminal class,’ whose existence was one

of the prime sociological beliefs of late Georgina and early Victorian England” (1).

Biological determinist discourses contributed to the forced exile of British convict men

and women, whose criminality was defined as a genetic characteristic and used as an

excuse for a compulsory expulsion to Australia, which was hence “demonized” as “the

continent of sin” by the British (44). Australian society today stands as probably the

largest, visible disproof of biological determinism.17

Yet, such ideology was to be exploited again in Australia as a means of declaring the alleged evolutionary inferiority of the Indigenous populations of Australia and thus justify their systematic killing, dispossession, and forced uprooting.18 Following the near

genocide of the Aboriginal populations and the establishment of a dominant white society

in Australia, biological determinism was once again to inform the White Australia Policy,

according to which potential immigrants were to be screened and selected according to

their desirability, and freedom from “criminal tendencies” (London, Price, Pugliese,

Hage, and Tavan). Given these histories, positions of subalternity in Australia take on

unique nuances and the “socially constructed category” of whiteness (Dyer) has visibly

dominated the national debate since its colonization. Experiences of displacements and an

obsession with color gradations thus mark the histories of the Australian nation and

inform the humor of the accented films analyzed in this study. In its geographical and

historical specificities, this creolizing humor can also resonate with other subaltern voices

arising from experiences of forced deterritorialization and laughing back at the

Eurocentric discourses that tried to define them.

The histories of displacement and subalternity sketched here are also at the root of the fissures and crises characterizing the Australian national identity, as Tom O’Regan points out in his perceptive study of Australian national cinema. The movie industry has indeed played a major role in the negotiation of an Australian identity expressive of a subaltern relationship with the United Kingdom, the strong influence of American economic imperialism, especially in the film sector (O’Regan Australian National

Cinema, Lewis, Adams, and Miller et.al.), and finally its proximity to the Pacific Rim nations of Asia. A multicultural “Western” democracy in the mold of the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom, Australia is, however, geographically, culturally, and economically positioned at the crossroads of Asia. Financial, political, and cultural transactions with Asian countries and societies daily question the Western dominant

discourses that the Australian government is at pains to foreground (Walker). Moreover, being colonized two hundred years after the USA and Canada, the ongoing postcolonial and multicultural debate in that increasingly multiethnic society offers a fresh criticism of such discourses as they circulate in the Atlantic. In this crisis of self-definition (O’Regan

Australian National Cinema 45-167), humorous créolisation thus contributes to ongoing debates within such discursive formations as national cinema, accented filmmaking, and patriarchal machismo.

Crocodile Dundee and Mad Max, bushrangers and action heroes represent the dominant images that Australia has been exporting around the world and that associate its national cinema with patriarchal narratives of a land for tough, somewhat rebellious but principled white males. Australia predominantly exports a masculinist screen image that effaces the labor of increasing numbers of Australian women working in the movie industry and the geographically and culturally pluri-inflected perspectives that are emerging (Robson and Zalcock). Women filmmakers speaking from differently accented positions in Australia and beyond are painstakingly and tenaciously deconstructing the patriarchal discourses imbued in national(ist) ideologies and reproduced in dominant commercial cinemas. Their films resonate with the significant work carried out by cultural critics and theorists who emphasize the centrality of gender and race discourses in the processes and ideologies of (neo)colonialism and in the role that cinema has played in its (re)production. One thinks, for instance, of Ella Shohat’s analysis of “post-Third-

Worldist feminist cultural practices … [which] articulate a contextualized history for women in specific geographies of identity” (52), of Sumita Chakravarty’s analysis of

“eroticism [which] connects sexuality to a political and/or ethical vision, a vision that records and interrogates the failed narratives of the national past” (79), of Trinh Minh- ha’s video essays that deconstruct dominant film practices, and her Women, Native Other,

where a female voice carries out a counter-reading of anthropological discourses in a

polemical dialogue where the “fathers” have lost the authority of their names, of Fatimah

Tobing Rony who unveils the racist and sexist ideologies of ethnographic and commercial Hollywood films and their role in constructing subaltern others, and of bell hooks who unveils the centrality of discourses of white supremacy and capitalist patriarchy in American popular culture. These voices inform the current study that understands humor as a critical practice that can contribute to challenge dominant

discourses and imaginaries, by voicing the perspectives of subaltern women filmmakers.

Humor can thus constitute a valuable line of research for the cultural and film critic who

wishes to participate in the ongoing exploration of the potentialities of alternative

cinemas.

The filmmakers chosen for this project well serve to investigate such issues

because, as different as their stylistic and filmmaking tactics are, they all use cinema to

revisit the Australian histories of colonization and discrimination and to employ critical

humor to unsettle dominant discourses and film conventions. When writing about

humorous, cinematic challenges to colonialism from down under, most readers will

probably think of Sri-Lankan/Australian filmmaker and theorist Laleen Jayamanne and

her seminal film A Song of Ceylon (1985), a direct parody of the ethnographic

documentary Song of Ceylon (1934) by renowned British director Basil Wright and with

it of ethnographic and anthropological discourse. For this reason, Jayamanne’s film, as

well as her writings on colonialism, film, and gender, will be crucial to this study, as they

have contributed to unveil cinema’s reproduction of colonialist discourses. Like

Jayamanne, the filmmakers chosen for this study have produced what could be termed

“film essays,” and have incorporated similar deconstructive and parodic elements in their

narrative films. Indeed, a commonality among the filmmakers selected, and a reason for

their inclusion, is that Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law are all positioned obliquely between

experimental, independent, and mainstream cinema. They have all produced short and feature films and toyed, to lesser or greater degrees, with more conventional film elements, making their works an interrogation of Australian national cinema and their own transnational participation in its problematics. The films of Moffatt, Pellizzari, and

Law fluctuate between conventional narrative and experimental devices, drama and

comedy, tapping both into local, national, and personal stories and into global visual

imaginaries. Their films are trans-generic, with elements drawn from drama, comedy, the

road movie, and the thriller among others, inflecting the film text with diverse accents

and gendered gazes. In these works, humor often serves to contaminate the films’

aesthetics, to bring out the tensions between cultures, acknowledging the tragic

hierarchies of power among them, simultaneously challenging existing and past power

relations. Thus, their works often confuse, shake, and awaken their spectators; in different

ways, they all indict passivity and stasis with varying defamiliarizing techniques that

remind of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, encouraging their spectators to accept ethical

responsibility, to think critically, and foster change. These similarities constitute part of

the rationale for choosing these three filmmakers with their specific histories and specific

accents. Together they represent a wide spectrum of experience and practice, in relation to cultural and geographic displacement, to the construct of the Australian nation, and to the film traditions and collective imaginaries that they evoke in their works. Most importantly, they have in common the use of humor to challenge dominant film practices and to reflect critically on gender, race, class, and sexuality, while proving with their diverse and unique approaches that debunking nationalist, patriarchal, and capitalist ideologies is not exclusive to one single brand of humor or model of alternative cinema, but rather to a plurality of practices that seek such a goal.

A brief overview of the filmmakers selected for this study will clarify their different contributions to a discussion of an Australian national cinema. First, however, I wish to stress that no filmmaker is here taken to be representative of a homogenized group, meant to carry the “burden of representation” (Shohat and Stam 182-88) that often weighs on many accented, non-white filmmakers. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s

theorization of “situated knowledges,” discussed further in Chapter Two, I am interested

in reading and deconstructing global and local discourses on diaspora, nation, gender, and

colonialism, as they relate to cinema, through the individual and local histories of

Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law. Within the framework of this “politics of positioning,” their

films will constitute a means for exploring the processes of displacement, colonization, and discrimination that have been part of an Australian national ideology predicated on whiteness from the days of colonization to the recent anti-immigration debates spurred by

Pauline Hanson’s founding of the nationalist party, One Nation in the 1990s. At the same

time, Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s films constitute unique, individual responses to

the histories in which each filmmaker has participated. It is the task of the critic to put

their works in dialogue with one another and with other film traditions and transnational

auteurs, in order to establish, hopefully fruitful, correspondences and intersections

between different counter-hegemonic film projects.

Tracey Moffatt is an internationally renowned photographer and independent

filmmaker currently residing in New York. In her experimental film texts, Moffatt trans-

contextualizes past representations of the Indigenous peoples of Australia, endowing

them with a pluri-inflected point of view from the perspective of a woman and avant-

garde artist who has been socialized in both the Aboriginal and Western ways of life. Her

films challenge dominant nationalist discourses and draw attention to the histories of

colonization and discrimination that many wish to evade in Australia. She points to the

contemporary multicultural mosaic of Australian society and to the interaction between

different ethnic groups. In her most recent work, Moffatt also turns her irreverent and

humorous perspective to commercial cinemas and to their systematic marginalization of

women.

Monica Pellizzari is a second-generation Italian Australian who also uses film to

give visibility to the bodies, viewpoints, and voices of the women – Italian/Australian19

in her case - who have been doubly silenced: in their home and in the society at large. In

her work, Pellizzari explores issues of women’s sexuality, unveiling and challenging the masculinist and heteronormative discourses that dominate her Italian/Australian community – both in terms of representation and socialization. Her films also respond to

the dominant representations of Italian Americans that have over-determined subjects of

Italian descent around the world and that partially also attest Hollywood’s hold over our

global imaginaries.20

Finally, Clara Law offers a fresh perspective on issues of immigration and

whiteness, moving from early Australia’s discrimination against Chinese immigrants to

the current treatment of Afghan refugees. Law is a Chinese-born director who has been

working in Australia for several years, after rejecting both Hong Kong commercialized

cinema and Chinese nationalism. In her films, she captures on screen the experience of

diaspora and displacement, the sensibilities of subjects floating between cultures and

spaces that they attempt to bridge or at least partially translate.

My analysis will contextualize the films of these directors within the discourses

circulating in Australian society and in its motion-picture industry, while also reading

within the texts echoes of the voices of marginal social groups, which can often be heard

laughing back at Eurocentric discourses.21 This study shares Shohat and Stam’s

contention that “issues of multiculturalism, colonialism, and race must be discussed ‘in

relation’” (48) according to a “dialogical approach” that emphasizes a “polycentric

multiculturalism”, “introduc[ing] a systematic principle of differentiation, relationality,

and linkage” (48). Heightening the visibility of women’s voices in Australia, this dissertation endeavors to make them polyphonically inflect and illuminate other aesthetic

and social practices around the globe, encouraging attention to the gendered texture of cinema and of our perceptions, as well as of our understanding of humor. The analysis will thus bring out the local histories and voices that inform these filmmakers and their

work, simultaneously drawing attention to the connections they establish across categories of class, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality, all challenges to the

“hierarchies of oppression” that need to be acknowledged and overcome. Starting from the local histories as a means of tackling their global significance and resonance, I intend to show that, in Rogoff’s words, “while the causes of displacements and of the ruptures that ensue are subject to differentiation, some of the effects these engender produce a set of linked states of subjectivity through which an alternative set of readings might become possible” (6).

In terms of methodology and theoretical approaches employed, the present work adheres to an understanding of media texts as necessarily bound by the social, cultural, and political discourses that constitute them. Governmental policies, economic factors relative to production and distribution, author’s and viewer’s histories, and viewing context are all understood as determining factors in the production of meaning. They are variables that need to be investigated in a project that requires the promotion of a critical questioning of the dominant discourses that find their way into our visual cultures, and of the relations of power that constitute them. For this reason, before moving to the textual analysis of the films chosen, I will first delve into the individual and global histories of cultural and geographical displacement that inform the work of the three filmmakers under analysis and into the contested terrain of Australian national cinema. Although the bulk of the dissertation will entail the textual analysis of the films chosen, my reading will also rely on research into the production of each film text, its contextualization within the socio-political context of Australia, and within the historical processes of

colonization and globalization that the texts (re)produce and/or challenge, as well as on

the life stories that have informed the authors of the texts. In other words, the present work will mainly perform a discursive analysis indebted to Michel Foucault’s understanding of discourse and power-knowledge relationships.22 Indeed, the filmmakers

under analysis display a strong awareness of the power of knowledge and disciplines in

defining our subjectivities and our place within the relations of power. The

textual/discursive analysis of the film will thus repeatedly unveil how these filmmakers

draw on and simultaneously deconstruct the languages and disciplines through which

they have been defined and are still constrained to speak today, bringing out what

Foucault terms the “subjugated knowledges” that inhabit the interstices between

dominant cultures (Power/Knowledge 82).

A discursive analysis necessarily moves beyond the realm of the text,

acknowledging that for the process of meaning production to be complete, we always

need to consider the conditions of its production and reception. Although the present

work is not principally concerned with reception studies, the analytical part of the study

will foreground Stuart Hall’s understanding of the interpretative event and its

mechanisms in his essay “Decoding/Encoding,” as well its current revisions by theorists

of media reception like Janet Staiger. To this end, I will read the literature produced

around their films, including published reviews, festival awards, and reports, as well as

scholarly publications, as an example of patterns of reception. I will point to the

connections that this scholarship establishes and enables by approaching different

cultures, traditions, practices, and languages together.

In conclusion, as the previous brief introduction anticipates, this project draws on a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches. It is transdisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, because it implies a will to look “at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines” (Nicolescu 44). Transdisciplinarity demands collaboration across fields of knowledge to understand the power that lies in the intersections of these planes, as implied by Ortiz’s transculturación as a “contaminazione che rompe i confini e le gerarchie tra i saperi e li trasforma costringendoli a influenzarsi l’uno con l’altro” (Camaiti-Hostert Metix 205).23 Beyond this echo of processes of contamination, I would argue that the prefix “trans-” also retains the traces of the process of translation and I draw here on Gramsci’s concept of traducibilitá, translatability, whereby he stresses that a necessary translation process between separate and at times contrasting terminologies and fields of studies has to take place, if we want them to mutually illuminate each other.24 Moreover, the concept of translation is central to

thinking about cinema as technology and cultural expression; indeed, Abe Nornes has

already pointed out that Naficy’s theorization of accented cinema is “built on the

metaphor of ‘cultural translation’” (19), in that it argues for an aesthetics of relentless negotiation and translation between multiple ways of seeing and feeling. Nornes goes further, maintaining that “translation is built into the very substance of the moving image, enmeshed as it is between the structuring forms of the nation and the more disseminating forces of both the local and the global” (240). This study will illustrate the role critical humor plays in this negotiation between local and individual voices and the collective,

national, and global histories in which they participate; it will prove as a means to repeat

and display them with the necessary critical distance to reflect and challenge them with

counter-voices.

As a last caveat, I should note that the emphasis on transdisciplinarity also comes

through in this study’s mingling of different terminologies, systems of knowledge, and

languages, in order to promote a dialogue between multiple disciplines and theoretical

approaches. Although predominantly in English, this study will constantly oscillate in

and out of this lingua franca and transmigrate into Italian, French, and German,

interrupting the seamless flow of the English language, which is itself a key and

conflicted instrument in the processes of colonization and globalization. These linguistic

intrusions attest to the accents that are already embedded in my use of the English

language; indeed not only are the films that I treat accented, but so is their interpreter. In this sense, I am certainly “writing with an accent,” to employ Edvige Giunta’s evocative title for her anthology on Italian/American women writers, in which she explains that “an accent is not a single, easily identifiable element … [but signals] a series of elements – narrative, thematic, and linguistic – that, collectively, articulate the experience of living between cultures” (2). My approach to the subject matter, thus, as well as my lexical choices and syntax in English are inflected with the accents of my mother tongue and culture, but also with the acquired languages and cultural perspectives that are now part of my daily life.

1. GEOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL DISJUNCTIONS: AN ACCENTED CINEMA

IN AUSTRALIA

1.1 Introducing Accented Cinema and Creolized Identities

The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. … She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode – nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing is rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. (Gloria Anzaldua 79)

As mentioned in the introduction, this study investigates Moffatt, Pellizzari, and

Law as accented filmmakers, as mestizas in Anzaldua’s sense, whose accented films

participate in the national cinema of Australia. Yet, given today’s increasing individual mobility and international cinematic production, which filmmakers actually fall into the category of “accented cinema”? What commonalities are there between immigrant, exilic, diasporic, and ethnic filmmakers? In this section, I will try to respond briefly to these questions, reviewing the literature on accented cinema and its relation and derivation from other film theories, as well as illustrating how the three filmmakers under analysis fit into the categories included under accented cinema, while simultaneously blurring their boundaries.

Naficy has coined the term “accented cinema” to describe the work performed by

those filmmakers who have experienced geographical displacement and are engaged in

artisanal film production modes (4). Despite the historical, geo-political, and social

differences between exile and diaspora, Naficy wishes to emphasize the similarities in the

experiences of deterritorialization (3) and, consequently, some commonalities in style

“that cut across gender, race, nationality, and ethnicity, as well as across boundaries of national cinemas, genres, and authorship” (39). Maintaining the linguistic metaphor, he points out that “accent” affects the “deep-structure” of the films (23); accenting is evident

in the themes developed in the films (“journeying, historicity, identity, and

displacement”), the narrative structure (“fragmented, multilingual, epistolary, self-

reflexive and critically juxtaposed”), but also the placement of the camera, the mise-en- scéne, the tonal qualities of a film (involving “dysphoric, euphoric, nostalgic, synaesthetic, liminal, and politicized structures of feeling”), and the modes of production of films that do not emerge in the centers of the film industry (4). Naficy thus argues that accented cinema is “counterhegemonic” because it undermines conventional ways of filmmaking, exploiting the play with the multiple elements making up the film text (24).

Moreover, accented cinema’s counter-hegemonic force is partially derived by its historic

and genealogic relation with “the transformation of cinematic structures, theories, and

practices since the 1960s” (30). Naficy is here referring to the wave of militant

filmmaking practices that emerged in Latin-America “in response to world-wide

liberation struggles and decolonization movements” and was announced by numerous

manifestoes such as Glauber Rocha’s “A Cinema of Hunger” in Brazil (1965), Julio

Garcia Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” in Cuba (1969), and Fernando Solanas and

Octavio Gettino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” in Argentina (1969) (4). All these projects

had in common the will to give a voice to the voiceless of colonial history and

contributed to the development of, what in English we refer to as, “Third Cinema theory,” which, as Anthony Guneratne observes, “is the only branch of film theory that did not originate within a specifically Euro-American context” (“Introduction” 7). Third

cinemas were conceived as calls to action and as challenges to dominant forms of

cinema; its practitioners engaged in militant practices, decolonizing film conventions and narratives.25

Although these militant cinematic theorizations and acts constitute a model for an

alternative and resistant filmmaking practice still valuable today, they need to be

recontextualized against the demise of the 1960s and 70s oppositional movements and

within current forms of solidarity, resistance, political movement, and filmmaking.26

Third Cinema, for instance, was initially required to be produced collectively and to be distributed outside of any film distribution network,27 but filmmakers’ collectives have

gradually waned and alternative filmmaking practices are today moving in the interstices

between industries, national cinemas, and independent filmmaking.28 Furthermore,

various new approaches to third cinema have since emerged, which take into

consideration the changed political context and the cultural work produced by feminist,

postcolonial, and Marxist scholars in the field of film studies. In the edited collection

Rethinking Third Cinema published in 2003, the variety of approaches and themes

indicates the intense heterogeneity of film theories and practices derived from, and at

times against, the Third Cinema movement of the 1960s. The volume sees as the legacy

of Third Cinema “a constellation of cinematic forms which embraced hybridity and

polyglossia” (Guneratne “Introduction” 19) where no “one model of alternative

filmmaking” is privileged (Stam “Beyond Third Cinema” 31).

Accented cinema constitutes one arena of production that rethinks Third Cinema;

it points to a specific investment by independent filmmakers, who might not work

collectively, but produce a cinema that responds to their multiple cultural allegiances,

inscribing hybridity and syncretism in their films. As Naficy argues, although his

formulation of accented cinema is “less polemical than the Third Cinema, it is

nonetheless a political cinema that stands opposed to authoritarianism and oppression”

(30). Accented cinema’s struggles are more “situated” in that they specifically tell

individual and collective stories of displacement; its engagement is mainly with “specific individuals, ethnicities, nationalities, and identities,” rather than with national and transnational militant, anti-colonial movements (31). However, “both accented and Third

Cinema films are historically conscious, politically engaged, critically aware, generically hybridized, and artisanally produced” (31). Hybridity, in the forms, themes, conventions, and identities represented, is indeed foregrounded in accented cinema (Stam “Beyond

Third Cinema” 32-33).29 As theorized by Bhabha, hybrid identities constitute a “third

element,” that, by being inbetween, disrupts the dichotomy Western-Other, modern-

primitive, and savage-civilized. From the “third space,” the individual can move in and

out of the two or multiple worlds/identities s/he inhabits, collapsing the boundaries, and

making the contradictions visible. In line with Derridean notions of différance and

deferral, Bhabha identifies the “third space” in the “disjuncture between the subject of a

proposition (énoncé) and the subject of enunciation which is not represented in the

statement but is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space” (The Location of Culture 53). There is a gap between the “I” speaking and the subject of the utterance that can be iterated outside of the deictic moment of enunciation. This interval between the enunciative subject and his/her cultural situatedness, and the enunciated “I” disrupts the dominance of the synchronic axis in the Saussurean linguistic paradigm and ties us back to the diachronic, to an historic time, space, and an enunciative body multiply marked by gender, race, age, etc.30 This “third space” thus also involves a pause, what

Bhabha terms a “time-lag,” that is “the temporal break in representation – [from which] emerges the process of agency both as historical development and as the narrative agency of historical discourse” (274). Agency finds a space in the interstices of enunciation, in the disruption of a system that tries to elide the historicity and situatedness of the sign. In other words, agency arises from the recognition that the constitutive gap of enunciation does away with any notion of “primordial unity or fixity;” for this reason the third space

emphasizes that “the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read

anew” (55). Accented cinema constitutes such a practice of counter-reading; it is a

“borderline work of culture” (7), which speaks from this third space where hybridity is

foregrounded and facile dichotomies challenged.

The theorization of the third space inhabited by hybrid subjects will prove crucial

to explore the potentialities of critical humor in Chapter Three and so contribute to the

comprehension of whence and how its potential for creolization emerges. In this formulation, a degree of creolization is already at work, in that I am mingling multiple

terminologies arisen from the debris of (neo)colonialism within differently inflected

histories of colonization, Spanish, French, and English. Such an approach wishes to

acknowledge the existing congruencies and emphasize the mutual illumination between

postcolonial theories in these different geo-political spaces.31 Bhabha, for instance, often

discusses hybridity in terms of its liminal position, drawing on the work of Victor Turner,

who, following Arnold van Gennep’s study of rites of passage, emphasized the liminal

phase of transition after an initial separation that followed puberty and that preceded

eventual re-incorporation into a social mainstream. In this model, liminality is understood

as a middle passage, which could however turn into a long-term position of

inbetweenness, if this second stage is not resolved. Applying this model to the effects of

colonization and cultural development, Francisco Ortiz writes of transculturación in the

colonial Cuba of the 30s and 40s. Rather than considering the liminal position of

inbetweenness as a transition, Ortiz argued for a third stage, where an inherently hybrid

culture emerges. Ortiz’s notion of transculturación defines a process that involves “not

merely acquiring another culture …, but [also] the loss or uprooting of a previous culture,

which could be defined as deculturation. In addition, it carries the idea of the consequent

creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neo-culturation” (103). This

approach has been very influential in analyzing the effects of colonial encounters and

conflicts of cultures, as Walter Mignolo illustrates in his Local Histories/Global Designs

(1999). If these approaches emphasize cultural and ritual changes, other scholars have

carried out what Stam calls different forms of media jujitsu: they have appropriated and inverted disparaging labels imposed on the many colonial others (“Beyond Third

Cinema”). In the French context, for instance, Édouard Glissant in Poetique de la

Relation (1990) and Françoise Lionnet in Postcolonial Representations: Women,

Literature, Identity (1995) speak of métissage, a word that recalls the pseudoscientific racist practices of tracing the biological mixing of races. The same term was also common within the Spanish colonial context as mestizaje, a term that has been forcefully re-appropriated by feminist Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua. In the British colonial context, Guneratne notes that acclaimed Indian writer Salman Rushdie “seems to delight in the word ‘mongrel’ (“The Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality”), which he employs also in his famous attack on what is often termed Commonwealth Literature in his Imaginary

Homelands. Moreover, the term’s jujitsu is in full display in the Canadian context thanks to the work of Sri/Lankan Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, who belongs to what

Guneratne terms Mongrel literatures (“The Chronotopes of Mongrel Literatures”) and who also established a film production company in the 1970s under the provocative name of Mongrel Films. Finally, the term mongrel has particular relevance in the Australian context, where it was infamously used in 1996 by an Australian city mayor, Peter Davis, who was a supporter of the nationalist party One Nation.32 The widespread usage of the disparaging term “mongrel” has triggered various forms of jujitsu in Australia as well, as testified by the collection Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on The Work of Mudrooroo edited by Annalisa Oboe – an anthology that celebrates the work of writer and cultural critic Mudrooroo. Throughout the present work, I will refer to the texts and critically

humorous practices under analysis as hybrid, transcultural, mongrel, and creolized texts, each time drawing on the term that best expresses the colonial history and power relations inscribed in the text under analysis.

Accented cinema contributes to the cultural mondialization described by processes like transculturation, mongrelization, and creolization because it defies and questions borderlines; it revolves around the stories of hybrid subjects; it is filmed on the margins of film industries; and it exploits the borders, visual and aural, of the film text to inscribe hybridity in its fabric. Drawing on Anzaldua, Naficy notes that accented cinema voices the “border consciousness … where multiple determinants of race, class, gender, and membership intersect” (31).33 As a writer, a Chicana, a woman, and a lesbian,

Anzaldua is well aware of the multiple borders that her many identities challenge; her whole work is a call against binarist thought and for a consciousness that is fissured and mestiza. As she argues, “la mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations”

(79); she “keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (80), unveiling the intersections between sexism, patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and (neo)colonial politics. Although Naficy does not specifically address gender issues in his conceptualization of accented cinema, his brief reference to Anzaldua is significant because of the important work carried out by women filmmakers on the margins around the globe. His reference constitutes an acknowledgment that dominant cinema is not just predicated on whiteness, but also on masculinity, heteronormativity, and class interests.

Although women filmmakers participated with important films and considerable enthusiasms in the many revolutionary film movements emerging in Latin America in the

60s and 70s, their role in Third Cinema movements was still marginalized (Shohat 58-

59). As Shohat argues, at the time “gender contradictions have been subordinated to anti-

colonial struggle: women were expected to ‘wait their turn’” (59).34 Yet, despite their

marginalization both in national discourses and in anti-colonial struggles, women have

continued to make their voices heard through film, exerting “a simultaneous critique of

both Third-Worldist anti-colonial nationalism and of First-World Eurocentric feminism”

(52). The 70s certainly saw an increasing scholarship in feminist film theory with

groundbreaking contributions like Laura Mulvey’s theorization of the “male gaze” and

Claire Johnston’s call for a “counter-cinema.” As many scholars since then have pointed out (Gaines, hooks “The Oppositional Gaze,” Mayne, among many), however, feminist counter-cinema, as construed in the 70s, was premised on a notion of universal womanhood that ignored its intersection with class, race, and sexuality. “Third-Worldist women filmmakers,” but also Black and accented filmmakers working in First-Worldist countries, found visibility and a voice within conferences, journals, and studies dedicated to Third Cinemas and it was not until the late 80s and early 90s that feminist film studies finally granted attention to these works (Shohat 53).

In opposition to the Eurocentric approach of early feminist counter-cinemas,

“post-Third-Worldist feminist works …, eschewing a discourse of universality, … claim a ‘location,’ arguing for specific forms of resistance in relation to diverse forms of oppression” (Shohat 52).35 These works address the “intersection of heterosexism with racism and imperialism” (53). Speaking from the local histories of nationalism, they underline the centrality of heterosexist ideologies to the reproduction of nationalist and

(neo)colonial discourses. Both Shohat and Chakravarty emphasize how the female body

has been central to Third-Worldist films as a symbol of the suffering and struggle of

oppressed nations.36 Yet, the woman’s body has often been made to bear the brunt of

(neo)colonialism, without being allowed to speak beyond its symbolic function.37 By focusing on accented women filmmakers, this study wishes to emphasize the gendered dimension of migratory, diasporic, and exilic experiences of displacement, hence adding to Naficy’s overall framework. From the early colonial myths of orgies in the antipodes, with convicts and prostitutes seen as the ancestors of most white Australians (Hughes), to the systematic rape of Aboriginal women as a means to whiten up the Indigenous populations of Australia (Sykes), to the governmental policies encouraging the migration of women to wed and discipline the immigrant men working in Australia (Gabaccia and

Iacovetta), gender has been central to the deterritorializations that contributed to

Australia’s constitution as a nation and to the regulation of its colonial history.

As previously mentioned, accented cinema is situated in geographical spaces and historical times that connect migratory waves and nationalist politics fostering the acquisition of new accents; this is the reason why, this study looks at accented films within the context of Australian national cinema with the aim of further illuminating the dynamics and intersections between accenting and nationalist discourses. Moreover, regional and national accents are further inflected by individual peculiarities and class perceptions, as Naficy emphasizes, noting that “accented cinema” is not a homogenous category, because “accented filmmakers are not just textual structures … [but] also … empirical subjects” (4). This is also significant in that it is a response to the 1968/69

formulations of postcolonial thought attacking the very notion of authorship. Following

Naficy’s nuanced approach to issues of accenting and authorship, in this Chapter I will

contextualize each filmmaker in the national histories and migrational displacements that

contributed to the formation of her identities. The rationale for this historical positioning lies in the very works of these filmmakers, all of whom, in different ways, are challenging official History by making the stories of displacement that they have shared

resurface. In Chapters Three and Four, I will illustrate how critical humor constitutes a

crucial analytical tool, in the filmmakers’ re-inscription of silenced voices and

contestation of dominant discourses. Furthermore, the three directors also shed some light

on the categories of accented cinema, which Naficy groups as exilic, diasporic, and

postcolonial (10-17).

Moffatt is a filmmaker of Aboriginal descent educated both in the Indigenous and

Western way of life; on the surface, she does not seem to fall into any category

contemplated by Naficy, who does not specifically address “Fourth Cinemas” produced

by indigenous populations within First-World countries.38 However, most native

populations have experienced dispossession and displacements at the hand of the white

colonizers that appropriated their lands. Indigenous peoples in Australia, but also beyond,

had to fight to be considered citizens of nations built on their own lands and today they

still inhabit the margins of a dominant white society. For this reason, to Naficy’s

categories, we must add marginalization within a polity, a displacement that accents its

victims as surely as any migration, as the histories of forced displacement of Aboriginal

Australians illustrated in the next Chapter well testify.

Pellizzari as a second-generation Italian Australian fits more readily into the

category of the postcolonial/ethnic filmmaker, whom Naficy understands as conflicted

between what Werner Sollors (in the US context) has termed descent and consent

relations. Whereas consent signals the ideal of an American identity voluntarily

embraced, descent relations tie many “ethnic” Americans back to their families and

cultures of origins. Such a perspective should be further explored in the context of

Australia, where the debate over hyphenation, which results between descent and consent

relations, is closely related to the national debate over of multiculturalism. As many have

pointed out, the hyphen is an ideological marker that has stood for lack, subordination,

and nativist or essentialist attitudes (Naficy 16-17).39 For this reason, Naficy proposes to

reframe the debate on hyphenation in terms of a “nested hyphen,” which would take into consideration how ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality intersect and provide different

accents that inflect the form and content of these alternative filmmakers (16). In terms of

ethnic cinema, Naficy points out that “postcolonial ethnic and identity cinema [is

dominated] by the exigencies of life here and now in the country in which the filmmakers

reside” (15). He thus distinguishes it from exilic cinema, whose primary focus is on the

homeland “there and then,” and diasporic cinema, whose emphasis is on “lateral

relationships” across communities. Although Pellizzari’s films do support Naficy’s

description of postcolonial/ethnic cinema, in that they focus on the fissures of descent

relations in Australia, her filmmaking also presents the lateral perspective that Naficy

mostly connects to diasporic cinema. Indeed, as Arjun Appadurai emphasizes, in today’s

globalized world “global imagined communities” are building, signaling a re-

approachment between long established ethnic communities across the oceans. Second,

third and fourth generations of displaced Italians, for instance, are increasingly interested in establishing contacts between the multiple diasporas that led to the formation of their ethnic communities (Gabaccia Italy’s Many Diasporas), thus opening them up to lateral influences and echoes.

Finally, Clara Law falls into what Naficy, drawing on Robert Cohen’s definitions, terms “trade/business diasporas” (14).40 As a Chinese filmmaker working in Hong Kong,

she voluntarily migrated to Australia in search of more congenial working conditions in

the Australian film industry. While diasporas are “necessarily collective” according to

Naficy (14), Law did not actually participate in a wave of collective displacement of

Chinese to Australia.41 Yet, she is not an exilic filmmaker either, because exile entails a

sort of state “banishment” outside or inside the country. Moreover, Law has been

documenting Chinese economic diaspora since her early film work in Hong Kong,

emphasizing “its vertical relationship to the homeland and … its lateral relationship to the

diaspora communities and experiences” (15). Given the long histories of economic

diasporas of Chinese, Indian, and Italian groups among others, we should today take into

account the diasporic consciousness of multiple generations, gained through family

stories, accented cinemas, and literatures, rather than only their personal participation in

collective displacement. These are subjects whose families have dispersed across the

globe, who learn of diasporic communities through personal, literary, and cinematic

experiences beyond their own displacement. In these terms, filmmakers like Law relate to

a global diasporic consciousness, while also offering a new perspective on their own

diasporic communities, because they join them as outsiders due to an individual migratory trajectory that is marked by differences in class, generation, education, and many other dimensions.

Having illuminated the differences between the accents of the three filmmakers under analysis, I need to stress that their filmmaking practices do present similarities and

connections, in that they all voice a “liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in

society and the film industry” (Naficy 11). All three directors deal with the struggles and

conflicts of juggling two or more cultures; all three have been financed by the Australian

Film Commission, but have produced texts that challenge dominant Australian national

cinema, as I will discuss in Chapter Two; to different degrees, they all experiment with film conventions, while partially maintaining a narrative thread in their works; finally, and most importantly to this study, all three directors employ humor as a structuring principle in their works. Borrowing Naficy’s words regarding accented filmmakers in general, all three “are simultaneously local and global, and they resonate against the prevailing cinematic production practices, at the same time that they benefit from them”

(4). Benefiting from their access to the means of reproduction and from state funding and support, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law have already partially moved from the margins toward the center. Yet, as accented, women filmmakers who have explored alternatives to commercial cinema, they still speak from a position of marginality within the center and can thus exploit their visibility to voice their criticism of national unitary discourses and

offer a polyglot perspective on Australianness instead. To explore the local specificities

which inform the three filmmakers’ aesthetics of displacement, I will focus the rest of

this Chapter on the migratory currents that have shaped the Australian nation, directly or

indirectly, as well as the three filmmakers’ accented identities. This overview will begin

to address Australian discourses of nation and nationality, but it will mainly focus on the

migratory processes that set them in motion, leaving the analysis of Australian national

cinema and its dominant discourses, and the filmmakers’ criticism of them, to Chapter

Two.

1.2 Indigenous and Colonial Migrations

In 1788 the Royal Navy’s First Fleet landed in Botany Bay to unload its cargo of

British convicts on Australian shores, the government steadfast in its belief that Britain’s lowly were best exiled “in the antipodes” of British empire and civilization (Hughes 1-2).

Watching from a distance, on Australian shores, were the Aboriginal Eora people

(Horton, Hughes), one of the 500 hundred Indigenous peoples of Australia, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years (Sabbioni et.al. XIX).42 It is generally narrated

that the first encounter was peaceful and that in the first stages of colonization, as John

Healy maintains, “curiosity without panic was the mood” (4). Numerous accounts,

however, dispute such a claim and emphasize that “armed conflict between Aboriginal

peoples and Europeans began almost immediately after 1788” (Sabbioni et.al. xx).

According to Captain John Hunter of the Sirius fleet, for instance, the first words uttered by Australian Aborigines watching from the shore were “warra warra,” meaning “go

away!” (Hughes 84).43 The Indigenous peoples of Australia fought hard against territorial

colonization for 140 years, in the attempt to preserve their land,44 the source of their

sustenance and their sacred Dreaming, from being appropriated and alienated by a system

of knowledge and power that could not have been more foreign.45 Yet, the forced

deportation of England’s convicts to Australian shores was ultimately to lead to the

forced displacement and destruction of that land’s Indigenous populations and the

construction of a nation, where marginalization and deterritorialization are embedded in

the national tissue.

1.2.1 The Forced Displacement of Britain’s Lowly

For seventeen years, after the first British sailors set eyes on Australia in 1770, no attempt was made from the British Empire to colonize the territories Captain James Cook had reported about. The possibility of claiming this antipodean land for the English crown was, however, discussed at length and repeatedly promoted for the broadest of reasons. Prime Minister William Pitt, for instance, explored this possibility with an eye towards securing England’s position in the Eastern trade thanks to an outpost close to

China and India that would stop both the French and the Spanish. Moreover, Australia seemed to offer plenty of timber and flax needed for the repairs to the British fleet, which the Indian colonies lacked (Hughes 57-61). Yet, “despite the talk about strategic advantage …, the actual benefits of the new colony to England were only two: It was a sign claim, a foothold on the new continent; and, in Evan Nepean’s words, it absorbed ‘a

Dreadful banditti’” (66). In actual fact, the economic centrality of the Eastern British colonies was not really threatened and the flax industry was never really developed. With a growing convict population (as draconian legislation followed increased urban migration), what Britain needed with greater urgency was relief from its penal crisis

(65).46 For most of the convicts eventually deported, their “worst offence” was not to

own any property (Hughes 170).47 Given the constant extension of prosecutable crimes

and the fact that many capital sentences were not carried out, “eighteenth century

England was short of jails” (36). So was Australia turned into a penal colony.

Hughes reports that overall England transported “835 shiploads of prisoners”

between 1787, when the First Fleet sailed, and 1768 with the last deportation to Van

Diemen’s Land, i.e. Tasmania (143).48 In preparing for the voyage and the settling of the

penal colony, little care was taken to assemble a group of convicts with diverse skills, so

as to facilitate survival in the unknown land (74). Given such poor planning, the first years of the colony were marked by famine, difficulties in erecting the colony, and a constant attempt to educate the convicts in being builders and farmers, in other words

British settlers (103). In such a dire situation, social hierarchies were systematically eroded by hunger and isolation until Britain’s concern over losing control of the colonies secured an increased presence in the Second Fleet of non-convict settlers known as “New

South Wales Corps” (106-09). The Corps restored a rigid hierarchy, pushing the convicts once again to the bottom of the social scale; moreover, an assignment system was developed, according to which any member of the Corps could request free land and be assigned 10 convicts to work it. The independence of the colonies was thus partially achieved through slave labor (109).

In the brutal and brutalizing system of deportation, forced labor, and class

oppression, women were in the most vulnerable and lowest position of all, subject to the

whims and mercies of both guards and prisoners (259). Though an extreme minority

compared to the number of male convicts, women were present since the very first

boatload; although Australian legends describe the “founding mothers” as “whores”

(244), Hughes points out that prostitution was not “a transportable offence” (244).

Deborah Oxley in her Convict Maids investigates in further detail the myths surrounding

women sentenced to transportation to Australia and corrects the record, pointing out that

the most common crimes for which women were sentenced to transportation were

stealing, robbery, violent crimes, vagrancy, receiving stolen property, pickpocketing, and

shoplifting. Clearly, theft was the major cause of conviction, which also points to the

harsh conditions and class status of the convict maids in their native England and the

absolute value of property. Certainly, many of the women might have been forced into

prostitution by their situation, but their deportation was usually due to theft crimes.49

Deported, destitute, with no prospect for freedom, the women were often left with their

bodies as the only antidote against hunger, and with alcohol as their only respite (79-80).

Given these premises, it comes as no surprise that the arrival on Australian shores has

been constructed in diaries and reports of the time like a legendary orgiastic “bush party,”

signaling the beginning of the “sexual history of colonial Australia” (89) and of the new

colony’s reputation as depraved (244).50 Ever since convict women have been

stereotyped in caricatures and English accounts that pitted them as “disobedient, refractory, untalented, abandoned, vice-ridden creatures, a scourge upon the colony”

(Oxley 198).51

Despite such public denunciation of convict women, their transportation was considered essential for the development and control of the Australian colonies. Indeed,

as careless as English authorities were in planning the deportation of convicts, they were

quite careful in ensuring sexual discipline in the new colony and in ruling out

“irregularities and disorders” (Hughes 245).52 After the First Fleet, women were enslaved and deported in sufficient numbers and in “marriageable age” (252) as a means for

“social control” (245). Wives of deported convicts were allowed to join them and then granted “tickets-of-leave” to sustain a family in the new land (254); women with property were also allowed their freedom upon arrival and encouraged to marry; “all the others – those pregnant or with children born on shipboard, the rejects from the ‘market,’ the poor, the ugly, the mad, the old, the wizened – were sent to the Female Factory in

Parramatta” (254). The Factory then served as “the colony’s main marriage-market”

(256) and marriage became a path to freedom, since convicts and their spouses were guaranteed “rewards of land or free time,” in an attempt to encourage “a native-born yeomanry” (245-46).53 From the 1830s onwards, such efforts at disciplining the colonies,

sexually and otherwise, were further promoted with the “arrival of a substantial number

of free women,” preferably “young single women” (Oxley 180-83).54

This Foucauldian anxiety for control and discipline was predicated on both “the

sexism of English society … brought to Australia and then amplified by penal

conditions,” and on the expulsion of deviant English subjects (Hughes 258). These

conditions were the cause of “languid sneers” echoing from London against Australians,

summarized in the vilification as broads and scum, a “colonial vestige” that survived well

after World War II (158). As a sign of an emerging new culture in Australia, the brutal

colonial penal system “inadvertently produced Australia’s first folk-heroes, the

bushrangers, most of them escaped prisoners” (158). English authority, with its derision

of would-be Australians, was loathsome and convicts’ escapes became the subject of

white Australian native legends celebrating male “mateship” and adventure against the

patronizing and discriminatory discourse of British colonialism (174). The bushranger

myth became the base of what is today recognized as the very first feature film in the

world, The Story of the Kelly Gang; shot in 1906, the film narrates the adventures of Ned

Kelly, arguably Australia’s most (in)famous bushranger who was captured and hanged in

1880.55 The English sneers at white Australians were thus appropriated and reversed to

fashion national heroes and myths, which, nonetheless, reproduced the sexism and

“sexual history” of colonization.56

1.2.2 The Sexual Politics of Australia’s Violent Colonial History

The colonial encounter on Botany Bay brought Indigenous Australians in contact

with two classes of English citizens: guards and exiled convicts. The relationship

between guards and Aborigines, Hughes claims, was initially almost friendly, because

most officers had no plan to settle in the Australian land and were instead fascinated by its exotic flora and fauna, which, in their eyes, included the Aborigines (91). For this reason, Hughes maintains, Aborigines enjoyed initially more respect from the guards than the British convicts “sent there to be forgotten”; the status of Indigenous Australians at first was in fact “higher than it would be for another 150 years” (94). On the other hand, the interactions between the Aborigines and the convicts were tense from the beginning for multiple reasons; Hughes argues that the former could not respect a class of people they saw as indignantly accepting total subjugation by the guards, while the latter resented the better treatment reserved for the Aborigines, their freedom, and their

(indirect) complicity with their captors (by barring the bush as a viable escape). Hughes hence concludes that resentment of the prisoners against the Aborigines fueled

“Australian racism” at the outset and was a major reason for the subsequent violent

history of Australian colonization (93-94).

Despite positing the problematic argument that “every underdog needs a dog

below him so he can feel canine” (279), Hughes also acknowledges and documents the

extent to which opportunist, racist discourses were part and parcel of a colonial system

aimed at appropriating the Australian land. Hughes himself observes that “if at first the

officers of the fleet saw the Aborigines through a scrim of Arcadian stereotypes and

Rousseauist fancies, this pleasant delusion did not last long” (92).57 Beyond the recurrent and troublesome connotation of an unpleasantness characteristic of the Australian

Aborigines, Hughes acknowledges here that the “noble savage” narratives were soon dispelled in Australia, and with them the fascination of the officers previously emphasized by Hughes. Indeed, after the arrival of the First Fleet and the initial armed conflicts, the colonial enterprise was soon expanded with the help of an army of

anthropologists, scientists, and ethnologists who classified the Aborigines on a lower step

in the Darwinian evolutionist scale.58 As with the Congo and most colonies, this political strategy was adopted to justify the persistence in a foreign land and the atrocities

committed.59 Thus, the lack of signs of sedentary life, the absence of tribal hierarchies,

and of clearly marked tribal territories was exploited by the white colonizers to sanction

with a “a New South Wales court decision” in 1836 that the Aborigines “were too few

and too ill-organized to be considered ‘free and independent tribes’ who owned the land

they lived on” (Hughes 275). Australia was thus declared a terra nullius, a nobody’s land, juridically dispossessing Aboriginal Australians of any territorial ownership.

Having thus stolen the ancestral land of the Aborigines, little resistance was left against their decimation through armed conflicts, massacres, disease, and policies aimed at breaking tribal bonds and displacing Aboriginal peoples even of ensuring this eradication through rape, which eventually reduced the 300,000 Aborigines inhabiting the land before the whites to about 122,000 (Berndt and Berndt 30).60 After the first phase of violent conflicts, white colonization changed its strategy, actively pursuing a policy of

“smoothing the pillow of a dying race” for the “full-blooded” Aborigines. As Adolphus

Elkin observes, this policy was justified by the pseudoscientific racism that presented it as “the best that could be done for them” since the lack of any “[principle] of Western civilization” made them unfit for survival (5).61

Following the “smoothing the pillow of a dying race” policy, Aborigines were isolated in reserves that were officially established to protect the Aborigines, but in fact designed to break tribal bonds. David Horton notes that these settlements were “place[s] of re-education, where Aboriginality could be isolated, controlled and, in the case of the children, trained out” (715).62 Originally, the Aborigines assigned to these settlements were those living in camps on the margins of urban centers; yet, soon they also started

“deporting” Aboriginal children of “mixed blood,” in order to train them for life and work in white society (715). In reserves, men were trained to become farm workers and women domestic servants (Bourke et.al. 227); Aborigines had no decisional right on their destination, occupation, and future.63 Writing back with rage, Aboriginal writer and

activist Robert Bropho documents his and his community’s life at the margins of

Australian white society, plagued by alcohol, “homelessness, powerless, poverty and confusion” (Stanner 44).64 His motivation for writing is exactly “because I want you, the public in general, to know what makes a fringedweller tick … It is your belief that you are master of your own destiny and the Aboriginal people’s” (14). Denied any right over their own lives, the Indigenous peoples of Australia were forcibly displaced in their own land; given the spiritual bond that links every Aborigine to his/her land, the internal deterritorialization equalled a tragic diaspora that left most of the Aborigines dispossessed and uprooted.

Another common practice under the “smoothing the pillow of a dying race policy” was the expropriation of children of mixed race from their families to be bleached and re-educated in white settlements. As Cecil Cook observes, “Surgeon Protectors in the

North” were worried by the “increasing number of mixed-blood children and pressed for their removal from the camps, to be reared in hostels … even though this meant taking them from their mothers at an early age” (21). The main proponent and supervisor of this policy was Auber Octavius Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines from 1915 to 1940.

Neville sustained the belief that a drop of white blood gave any Aboriginal child the chance to improve and become civilized, i.e. white.65 Half-caste children were thus removed from their Aboriginal families to “ameliorate” their blackness. Bobbi Sykes, an

Indigenous writer, reports that one out of ten, and up to one out of three children were forcibly removed in some periods. This colonial practice has been silenced in historical accounts up until 1997 when, finally, the report of the National Inquiry into the

Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families was

published (Morgan 4).66 As documented in the report, to assure the successful inculcation

of “mixed blood” children, the possibility of escape and tracing of their destination were

hindered by falsifying their identities and sending them in the settlements furthest away

from their place of origin (Sykes). Today, many adults of Aboriginal descent, commonly

referred to as “The Stolen Generation,” are still searching for their ancestry and have long

fought for an official recognition of the abuses committed by the Australian state.

Although many joined the Sorry Ribbon Campaign that encouraged white Australians to

apologize for their complicity with a system that broke up Aboriginal families, it was not

until the thirteenth of February 2008 that the Australian Government, led by the newly

elected Labour leader Kevin Rudd, finally issued an official apology to the Indigenous

populations of Australia.67

As a consequence of the colonial policies highlighted above, Aboriginal peoples

decreased in numbers until the 1930s; from then onward, they rose again, although

Aborigines remain a minority even compared to immigrant groups (Horton 1299). Sykes

interprets the gradual increase as a form of rebellion by Aboriginal women who resisted

the “smoothing the pillow” policy (313-21). Guaranteeing cultural and physical

continuity to their peoples, Aboriginal women have turned abuse and rape against the

perpetrators. Black women were indeed at the bottom of the social scale and the most

vulnerable subjects in colonial Australia. “Protection” officials, inspectors, and white

farm owners could abuse Aboriginal women with no consequence; the white owners actually enjoyed an unofficial, feudal right to sleep with their black women servants

(Sykes 313-21, Morgan 173, and Hamilton 167-79).68 Yet, the abused Aboriginal women turned the abuses against their perpetrators, by raising their children as Aborigines so as to re-populate and keep alive their traditions (Sykes 313-21).69 As Gilbert points out, such tactics “of appeasement, of low profile, of submissiveness” became the most effective means of resistance for Aboriginal men and women, once decimation and destruction made a continued guerrilla impossible (“Black Policies” 35).

1.2.3 Contextualizing Tracey Moffatt

These stories of abuse, forced displacement, and silent but tenacious resistance come strikingly to life in the visual work of internationally renowned photographer and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt. She gained international fame in 1989 with her series

Something More, whose opening frame well represents her keen attention to the stories of displacement and oppression spread over the Australian land. In the words of Penny

Edwards and Shen Yuanfang, editors of Lost in the Whitewash: Aboriginal Encounters in

Australia. 1901-2001, Moffatt’s first frame depicts

a Chinese immigrant, his pigtail and conical hat signaling the nineteenth- century gold rush ... a peroxide blonde redolent of a 1960s Hitchcock movie, a caricature of a ‘fallen woman’ whose descent (from grace, and Whiteness) is mocked by the cherubic features of two-blonde haired schoolboys in the background. Third is an Aboriginal man, nursing a beer bottle in the shed’s shadowy interior. Occupying the foreground, central to the composition, is an anti-stereotype: a young country girl of mixed race, looking out of the frame to an unknown elsewhere. Performed by Moffat [sic] herself, she’s dressed in a scarlet and black cheongsam that speaks to the 1950s, whose jagged hem hints at frayed boundaries and sexual encounters. (1) Moffat’s [sic] very presence in this fictional tableau simultaneously unsettles colonial representations of Aboriginal female sexuality and destabilises both the colonial triangulation of race relations and contemporary formulations which divide Australia into White, Black, and immigrant populations. (1-2)

Moffatt’s play with dominant constructions of both gender and race in this initial framing

will prove a constant theme throughout her photographic and cinematic work, where

color gradations are always foregrounded and problematized beyond the simplified

dichotomy of black and white. In particular, her first films revisit the erotics of an

Australian colonial history that has disenfranchised Aboriginal women and their

communities. These early painterly images of the Australian colonial outback earned

Moffatt international recognition and thus migrated to the most prestigious art avenues in

Australia, Europe, the USA, Canada, and China. Similarly, her films have been critically

acclaimed and “screened at Cannes and the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York and the

Nation Centre for Photography in Paris” (Cathcart).

Although Moffatt currently commutes between her New York apartment and her house on the beach in Australia, being thus securely positioned in the centers of contemporary art, she started out from the remote “Aboriginal mission outside Brisbane called Cherbourg” where she grew up (Moffatt qtd. in Rutherford 52). Yet, at a very young age, she was placed inbetween the racial divide in Australia, being “fostered out to a white family” (52) in the “Brisbane suburb of Mount Gravatt” (Sullivan 234), experiencing a working-class childhood in a white neighborhood. Unlike many

Aboriginal children of mixed marriages, Moffatt did not personally live through the

traumas and abuses of the Stolen Generation, since her ties to her Aboriginal family and

community were never severed and she retained the right to decide for her own future

(Rutherford 52). Her perspective on the atrocities and conflicts of colonial Australia is thus uniquely hybrid, as she has illustrated in Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989),

where the relationship between an Aboriginal daughter and her white mother is full of the

ambiguities and nuances Moffatt experienced in her own life.

Her passion for the visual arts, photography, and film started at a very young age

and was fostered by her avid consumption of Hollywood and European films and TV

during “a whole 1960s childhood and 1970s adolescence … glued to the television”

(Moffatt Fever Pitch 5). At fourteen years of age, that is around 1974, she started

experimenting with “a Kodak instamatic camera” and produced her first photographic

series, which she eventually exhibited as Backyard Series in 1998 (Sullivan 234). The

series includes four pictures; the first taken in 1969 and titled “I made a camera,” where

Moffatt recreates a Chaplin gag by posing with a “fake box camera” in the center of the

frame, the object of everybody’s attention (239). Her other pictures are equally playful,

repeating a constant theme of role-playing that will find full expression in her later work:

this ranges from a “Planet of the Apes” re-enactment, to a young blond girl playing a

“rock star” in pink with a blue guitar, to her exhilarating “Nativity Scene” where in front

of a suburban backyard, a black Virgin Mary poses next to a young white girl (as Joseph)

and three white boys (the magi) kneeling and offering gifts in front of a tin cradle. As Eve

Sullivan observes, this early play with the camera and the Catholic narratives learned in

Sunday School today “seems loaded with the nostalgic irony of a lapsed Catholic’s

fantasy, and what might be regarded as a travesty of the colonizing faith” (234).70

Moffatt polished her sharp eye for staging visual ironies at the Queensland

College of the Arts in Brisbane, where she studied filmmaking and acquired a firm grasp of cinema history and art. Her studies in art and film clearly come through in her work

through the painterly quality of her moving and still images. After graduation in 1982,

she moved to Sydney where just seven years later she had her first solo exhibition with the photographic series that put her name on the international map Something More. The series has a vivid cinematographic quality, in that the still images feel like “moving images”71 and present a studio-like scenography full of strong colors and rich in narrative

ambiguities, characteristics that will mark most of her later series.72 During these years,

Moffatt combined her artistic and painterly experimentation with a strong passion for

American mainstream cinema and European auteurs, taking in “everything from schlock to the sophisticated” (Moffatt 5). Her encyclopedic knowledge and ironic perspective on

this globalized visual archive comes forth in her latest shorts Love (2003) and Doomed

(2007), both original collages of cinema clips. In Love, Moffatt turns her satiric eye to gender representations in commercial cinema, from Hollywood to Europe, Australia, and

New Zealand, creating a collage of fragments that move through famous kisses, punches,

love declarations, and kicks, in which the subjection of women in film is humorously underscored by the soundtrack.

Beyond making a name for herself in the contemporary art scene, Moffatt also worked with service agencies helping Aborigines like the “Aboriginal Medical Service

(AMS) in Redfern, Sydney, for which in 1987 she made Spread the Word on HIV/AIDS

awareness (Langton 16). In 1988, she also shot Moodeitj Yorgas, meaning “strong

women,” a short dedicated to the women leaders of Western Australia Aboriginal

communities and organizations.73 Both shorts are socially committed works that “were

experimental and avant-garde at the same time, with distinctive artificial sets, comedic

characterization, computer-generated art and rap music” (16).74 As these early works show and as Moffatt explains, she “was always very … political,” and her first national recognition was largely as a socially committed Aboriginal artist. Early in her career she often made news because of her forthright political views and demands for recognition; in 1987, for instance, she “withdrew” from a photographic project funded by the

Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, publicly denouncing the under-representation of Aboriginal photographers among the twenty selected, and the lower wages those few received compared to the white photographers (Higgins). Clashing with funding institutions once again in 1989, Moffatt had a public conversation with the Minister for the Arts and Health, Mr. Collins, requesting funding for her second short film and loudly complaining about the institution’s ghettoization of Aboriginal art projects as

“ethnic”(Howell 34). Furthermore, her early work was mainly featured in indigenous cinema retrospectives like Adventures in Paradise at the Fifth Pacific Festival of Art in

1988 (Collins “Film-makers Put Pacific in Focus”) and even when she presented her second short at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, she satirically points out that the

Australian films selected “were presented as the representatives of so-called Australian minorities with Lawrence [Johnston] as the gay boy, Pauline [Chan] as the Asian girl, and myself as the black!” (“Cries in the Night”).75 Because of this early pigeonholing,

Moffatt rapidly grew dissatisfied with being considered only as a social commentator, rather than an artist; she resented that her work would only be reviewed by left-wing political commentators or anthropologists, who completely dismissed or ignored her innovative aesthetics (Smee “Pushing the Right Buttons;” Higson; McNeil, Durand, Matt,

Portch, Greenstein). In most interviews, Moffatt thus started to disdain any ghettoizing

and labeling such as “Aboriginal filmmaker,” but also “feminist filmmaker.”76 As she explains to Sebastian Smee, she “had to say radical things like that in order to be written about as an artist” (“Pushing the Right Buttons”). Moffatt wanted to pursue her own artistic vision rather than work on “political documents” and she found support in her artistic endeavors from “few radical Aboriginal leader-types in the early days saying …

‘Do what you want.’ … [what she] just needed to hear” (qtd. in Smee “Multiple

Exposures” 3).

Her artistic and personal response to such an encouragement was to go on

directing experimental and avant-gardist films where she tackled some of the

contradictions and traumas of Australian history: from its colonial and sexist past (Nice

Coloured Girls 1987), to the conflicted relationship between individuals (mother and

daughter), ethnicities (whites and Aborigines), and time-frames (the legacy of the Stolen

Generation and the present) (Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy 1989), up to the many ghosts haunting white Australia (beDevil 1993). In these works, she has continuously problematized the boundaries of both still and moving images, of genres, of experimental and linear narratives, never letting her art be amenable to easy classification or her audience be homogenized. Similarly, she has been able to work independently while managing to attract financial support from the Australian Creative Development Fund as well as other state institutions. Thus, she has been able to distribute and exhibit her work both nationally and internationally at film festivals, Aboriginal Studies programs and media conferences, film institutes, Aboriginal Service Agencies, and “community Aid

Abroad seminars” (Jennings 75). The range of the avenues displaying her work attests to

her multiple commitments and engagements artistically, politically, and socially;

similarly, her interstitial cinematic practices and focus on hybrid identities emphasizes

the creolized aesthetics that will be the focus of this study.77

1.3 European Migration to Australia and The Politics of Whiteness: The Case of

The Italian Australians

Voluntary immigration to Australia started almost as soon as forced convict exile; indeed, since the “end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 significant numbers of the more

‘respectable’ parts of British society came to Australia” in order to invest in the wool industry and oversee colonial settlements (Sherington 29-35).78 The discovery of gold

served as a major magnet for immigrants to New South Wales and Victoria between 1850

and 1860: together with an increasing numbers of British immigrants, these colonies also

saw the arrival of numerous Chinese migrants eager to participate in the Australian gold

rush (65-66). During the same years, Indian, Kanakas,79 Japanese, Malay, and Afghan

indented laborers were also brought to Australia to work in the sugar and banana

plantations, in the pearl industry, and in outback transportation.80 This increasing

“colored presence” and the colonists’ hostile relation to Asian neighbors triggered the

1901 demands for protective legislation of the national identity (already conceived in

terms of its whiteness) of the newly constituted Federation. As reported in the nationalist

Bulletin:

It is impossible to have a large coloured alien population in the midst of a white population without a half-caste population growing up between the two. India proves that; … Spanish and Portuguese America show it. The United States show it. Queensland [by importing Pacific Island labour]

shows it already to an alarming extent. And Australia thinks highly enough of its British and Irish descent to keep the race pure. (Bulletin 22 June 1901 qtd. Sherington 91)81

Not surprisingly, the Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act (IRA) was the

very first act passed by the Commonwealth Parliament (7-9). This act became more widely known as the “White Australia Policy” established to guarantee a homogenous society for the newly constituted Federation. The policy excluded “Chinese, Indians,

Japanese, and other Asians” (Sherington 91), as well as, in Gwen Tavan’s words, all those “likely to become a charge …, idiots, insane, infectious disease, convicted of

crimes beyond small political offence, prostitutes” (Tavan 7-8).82 The White Australia

Policy was selectively enforced for 72 years, from 1901 until 1973, when Gough

Whitlam’s Labor Government suspended it (Hawkins 15);83 yet, its dismantlement left

many traces that still “influence public imagination” and provide an historical, political,

and social contextualization of the recent “treatment of unauthorized asylum-seekers

from Asia, the Middle East, and Afghanistan” (Tavan 1-5).84

As many scholars point out, the White Australia Policy and the calls for white purity that sustained it, were fomented “by the emergence of Social Darwinism and racial determinism” at the end of the nineteenth century (Tavan 11).85 These theories were then to inform the eugenicist theories that spread through Germany and Sweden in the 1920s and 1930s, eventually reaching also the United States and Australia (Pugliese 159). Anti- immigration restrictions and legislations were part of a discursive negotiation of whiteness within Australia, which, as Joseph Pugliese stresses, was marked by “historical dispersions, impure ethnic admixtures and chromatic variations” (153). To understand the

construct of whiteness in its historical specificity, it is thus necessary to trace the

pseudoscientific racism that underwrote the White Australia Policy and its heterogeneous

applications depending on the period, the ethnicity, and the races involved. As Pugliese

argues, this operation was necessary because whiteness as a construct is reinforced by the

“instability of borders” across and against which it is defined (153).86 In the following

sections, the brief sketch of Italian and Chinese immigration to Australia will provide a

discussion of some of the chromatic variations of the construct of whiteness central to the

constitution of an Australian national identity.

1.3.1 Italian Immigration and the Whiteness Test

The pseudoscientific racism informing the White Australia policy was strongly

influenced by the research carried out by the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare

Lombroso, whose theories were highly regarded in the nineteenth century (Pugliese 150).

This makes the case of Italian immigration particularly interesting, because it highlights links between racism in Southern Europe and in Australia. In his studies, Lombroso employed anthropometry to determine the criminal nature of races, regional groups, and individuals (155). His conclusions in terms of the Italian context systematically placed

Southern Italians, particularly Calabrians, as those most likely to display “the racial foundations of criminality” (156). Lombroso’s arguments were instrumental in reinforcing the colonial relationships between the North and South of Italy, which were to be documented and denounced by Italian historian and political philosopher Antonio

Gramsci in The Southern Question.87

As Pugliese emphasizes, criminality was defined by Lombroso in “in chromatic

terms, it is always the black or the yellow that colours the criminal subject;” color is here

read as more than an epidermic quality, as a trait that “seeps into the very interiority of

the body,” up to the brain (156). In this framework, deviance necessarily assumed “either

Negroid or Mongolian traits” (157) and this spurious discourse found fertile ground in an

Australia worried about racial purity. In his work, Lombroso had already established

parallels between Australian Aborigines and the Italian Southerners and his theories were also already known in Australia, where the newspaper The Worker published in 1928 his comparative studies on the physiognomy of Sicilians and Maltese (157). Prominent voices in Australia, like High Court Justice Albert Piddington, helped spread such views against Mediterranean immigrants, who were defined as “human derelicts and paupers,”

the rejects of American immigration (Wyndham 193). Italians from the South arriving in

Australia were thus already subject to discrimination based on these racist discourses that

had migrated before them and spread across the oceans. So, it is hardly surprising to find

cases of inspections like the one cited by Nino Randazzo and Michael Cigler, where

Sicilian immigrants would be denied entrance on the grounds of their blackness:

“Appearance unsightly. Looks like a cross between a Hottentot and a Fiji Islander.

Certainly not 75% European. Reject’” (qtd. in Pugliese 151). The grounds of the rejection

clearly establish a connection between Southern Italians, African, and Oceanic peoples,

simultaneously reproducing the common pseudoscientific discourses of racial

contamination that defined white Europeans as the “higher race.”88

As the inspection above illustrates, whiteness was measured in percentages and

color gradations; however, its elusiveness made the process of ascription difficult,

requiring a division of “the body into variegated racialised zones that signify particular racial types” (163).89 Particularly, in the post-war period with the arrival of increasing

numbers of immigrants “threatening” the purity of white Australia, government officials

sought screening methods to avoid aspiring immigrants passing for white. To such end,

officials devised “increasingly hystericised means of identifying genuine whiteness, and thereby screening out spurious impostors” (158). Partitioning the bodies of the immigrants in bits and pieces, officers looked for hidden body parts to guarantee whiteness, thus “the cuticles of the fingernails” were examined, and if the result was not satisfactory, the screening test extended to “the blackness of one’s arse” (158-60).90

Bodies were screened, debased, and objectified in a disciplinary practice that turned the

“body bits into commodities marked with an assigned market value in the racial economy

of segregation” (164). Despite being evaluated as “marketable,” the bodies of those immigrants who were allowed entry in Australia on the grounds that their “whiteness” was far from being immune to further screening and questioning. The “assignation of whiteness” at customs evaporated as soon as the new immigrants stepped beyond into the intricate texture of Australian society; migrants of non-English speaking background

(NESB) were soon re-assigned along color gradations, epitomized, in the case of Italian

Australians, in the ethnic slurs of dago and wog among others (166).91

As mentioned above, screening practices increased after WWII with the growth in

immigration applications, an increasing number of which were submitted by Italians.

Donna Gabaccia points out that Italians have been migrating since ancient times with mass migration waves that intensified after the unification of Italy in 1870. Yet, of the

“over twenty-six million people [who] officially declared their intention to leave Italy” after 1870, only a minority sought betterment in Australia. A small percentage, one per cent, of total Italian migrants, arrived in Australia after WWI, but most Italian Australians today descend from migrants escaping the economic calamity of post-WWII Italy

(Gabaccia Italy’s Many Diasporas 1-6, Baldassar and Pesman 14).92 Reviewing the available historical data and estimates, Gaetano Rando concludes that “ninety per cent of the present-day Italian-born population settled between 1947 and 1973” (“Italians in

Australia” 51). The massive migration of Italians in the post-war period was also encouraged and supported by “the new Italian republic [that] quickly negotiated bilateral agreements” to help relieve the economic and socio-political emergencies suffered by

Italy at the time (Gabaccia Italy’s Many Diasporas 156-57).

Most waves of Italian migration were reactions to social, cultural, political, and economic crises in the motherland: the first wave at the turn of the nineteenth century followed the unification of Italy in 1870 and the ensuing internal conflicts and adjustments, particularly between the North of Italy and the South; the second major wave came in the aftermath of WWI, marked by famine and post-war economic hardship, and finally the third exodus was driven by the aftermath of WWII. Given these different stages, which correspond to very different regional migrations and cultural and social heterogeneity, Gabaccia underlines that it is difficult to speak of a single Italian diaspora.

In fact, the first wave of migrants, and arguably the second, hardly identified as Italian,

the state being a foreign and distrusted entity. Nonetheless, as Gabaccia also argues, it is

useful to think of the various migrations as an Italian diaspora, because it reminds of the

enforced “transnationalism” that has come to define the dispersal of many working-class

families in the South of Italy. Most of these families have had relatives spread across the

oceans for multiple generations and many have never completely severed the contacts

with those who departed the “old country” (Italy’s Many Diasporas 11). Moreover, as

George Pozzetta and Bruno Ramirez contend, given the presence of Italian migrants across almost every continent, studies of Italian migration could offer important corollary

insights to a study of world history and the interconnections between multiple national

histories (ix-xi).93

The number of hyphenated Italians residing abroad currently exceeds the

peninsular Italian population and their voices are becoming more and more interesting to

people on the mainland. Italians have long discriminated against their fellow countrymen whom miseria forced to emigrate (Verdicchio, Viscusi). Yet, their established presence abroad has grown into a political, economic, and social resource courted by the Italian government and industry. The Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, a research institution in the social and human sciences established by the Italian car industry FIAT, for instance, instituted in 1993 a Center for Documentation of Italian populations and cultures in the world, issuing the journal Altreitalie. Moreover, in 2006 the Berlusconi government conferred voting rights to “Italians residing abroad,” and Italian cinema, literature, and culture are in general growing increasingly aware of the histories of migration that are

part and parcel of the history of Italy itself.94 This Italian interest follows with some

delay the longstanding study of Italian migrant hyphenation; as Renzo De Felice stressed

already in 1979, the pioneers in the field were certainly the United States and in particular

the work carried out at the Center for Migration Studies in New York. Italian Americans

are certainly the most visible hyphenated Italians abroad thanks to their many literary and

cinematic contributions. It is this flourishing of research in Italian hyphenation, as well as the increasing common visual repertoire that defines Italian descent that justifies studies of Italian diaspora. Indeed, as I will show in the course of this study, Pellizzari’s own

cinema is a product of such fruitful routes that from the Italian peninsula crisscross the

oceans in a constant cultural dialogue and exchange.

1.3.2 The Gender Politics of Italian Migration to Australia

As the previous data shows, migration studies documented Italian diaspora early

on; however, it took much longer for the voices and histories of Italian women to be

recorded and acknowledged, as was the case with most migrant women generally

(Morokvasic, Gabaccia “Immigrant Women: Nowhere at Home?”, Pesman, Tirabassi). In

this regard, Rosalyn Pesman points out that “official discourse was gender-blind;

migrants were single males; women were appendages as in the phrase ‘migrants and their

families’” (388). Yet, migratory patterns, policies and the ensuing cultural developments

have always been gendered (388).95 In the first phases of massive migration from Italy,

most emigrants were men leaving to find jobs and still nurturing some hope of soon

returning to the home country as wealthier men. When women joined in the adventure

from the start, it was a signal of an intention to settle in the new land (Gabaccia Italy’s

Many Diasporas 8). Australia’s case is particularly interesting in exploring the gendered

nature of migratory currents, because, as noted above, its government actively

participated in regulating the gender politics of the nation building process since its

earliest colonization phases. As with English convicts and settlers before, in terms of

(non)-European migrants, Australia was worried that a predominantly male migration

would trigger social unrest and disorder in the new colonies. Therefore, as early as 1914,

Australia actively encouraged family migration with the hope of forestalling “the sexual

menace and potential disorderliness of unattached men,” while also “guarantee[ing] a

permanent supply of European industrial workers as the immigrants had children in

Australia” (Gabaccia and Iacovetta 18). Following the increasing numbers of Italian

migrants after WWII, Australia in the 1960s started to “[sponsor] the migration of Italian women … to redress the gender imbalance in the migrant population, to provide wives

for the large number of single males of so-called Latin temperament who were seen as a

potential threat to social order” (Pesman 388).96 Numerous official reports and nationalist arguments claimed that single Mediterranean men were the cause of social unrest and troubles; marriage was considered as a tool to discipline them and regain social control.

Marginalized and discriminated within Australian society, Italian single men were not in

a position to propose and marry Australian-born, white women. The government, thus,

sponsored and facilitated the so-called “proxy marriages,” whereby Italian women would

celebrate their wedding in their Italian village and then join their husbands, whom they

often did not know, in Australia (Vasta).97 This custom was amply popularized in fiction and caricatured in Luigi Zampa’s successful 70s comedy Bello, Onesto, Emigrato

Australia Sposerebbe Compaesana Illibata,98 where famous Italian actors Alberto Sordi

and Claudia Cardinale play out all the comedic potential of these blind, pre-packaged

marriages across the oceans.

In this social regulatory role, the Australian government officially stressed the

need for Italian women to develop families in the new land of Italian migrants; yet,

Italian women were not just enlisted as reproducers of the family, but also as part of the

manufacturing workforce (388).99 Although their job contributions have often been

ignored, most Italian women who emigrated to Australia were active in the job market

(Tirabassi, Vasta); according to the 1966 census, 34% of Italian women worked versus

23% of Australian born women (Pesman 388).100 Moreover, statistics systematically

underestimate the work of women because they do not account for their contribution in

“family small-business enterprises,” where they worked alongside their husbands, fathers,

brothers, etc. (388-89).101 Generally, women’s contributions in the factory and in the family business went unrecognized despite their being members of unions and active workers; in the 1970s with the rise of the feminist movement globally, more and more research and attention turned towards the role of women in the labor market (Pesman,

Bulbeck 33).102 Many of the studies were carried out with the aim of empowering

women workers and motivating their active participation in social actions and demands.

The conditions of NESB women were also of interest to these studies, which, as Gill

Bottomley, one of these early women researchers states, “revealed the widespread

exploitation … in poorly paid jobs, with inadequate childcare and language-learning

facilities, as well as working conditions that would not be acceptable to Australian-born

workers” (60).103

Regarding Italian women workers, however, the emphasis tended to be on a

victimized image of immigrant women that cast them in passive roles (Pesman 390-91)

and ignored “the time and energy of many Italo-Australian women,” not to mention the

“political activism of women in Italy” that countered the common stereotype of complete

passivity and acceptance of patriarchy among Italian women (Bottomley 61).104 Not

coincidently, the essay dedicated to “Multicultural Feminism” in Australian Feminism: A

Companion – written by the evidently Italian/Australian Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli – introduces the many challenges faced by white, middle-class Australian feminism posed by NESB women with an essay provocatively titled “You can’t be a feminist. You’re

Italian” (232). As with most feminist movements of the 1970s, Australian feminism had consistently ignored differences among women and the specific concerns and constraints suffered by non-white women.105 However, in the 1980s “immigrant women and their

daughters began to speak out and to accuse Australian feminists of ethnocentricity”

(Pesman 391, see also Bulbeck 35-37). Their voices were supported by other organizations, like the Federation of Migrant Workers and families (FILEF) established in 1975. Women grew increasingly active in the organization, winning some battles “in the areas of child care and English language lessons;” in 1981 they participated in the

establishment of the Migrant Women’s Caucus and continued to make their stories

visible and heard in Australia (Pesman 391). In their attacks against Australian white feminists, migrant women were influenced by the activism of black women in the United

States who stressed that class and racial barriers were often more oppressive for them

than the patriarchy of their community that was, at times simplistically, denounced by

white feminists (hooks Ain’t I a Woman, Hull et.al., and Gaines).106 Despite the differences in the hierarchies of oppression, Italian women could relate to black women feminists, in that they were less concerned with “Italian patriarchy” than with “their class position, the isolation and loneliness intrinsic in the migration process, and Australian racism and structural patriarchy” (Pesman 392). The patriarchal Italian family was recognized as a locus of power and oppression, but Italian women were also vocal in presenting the ambiguities and contradictions in a close-knit community that partially supported them against their alienation and discrimination in white Australia (Pesman

392, and Vasta).

In 1985, the Italian-Australian Women’s Association was formed to make the voices of Italian women in Australia heard and also to counter the stereotyping of Italian families and women, who had been “homogenized into Mediterranean women, southern

European women, southern Italian women, Italian women” (393),107 with no acknowledgment of regional and cultural differences. The Italian-Australian Women’s

Association has tried to counter stereotypical representations of migrant women, by helping to publish and make their stories visible; they have promoted, for instance, national competitions like Forza e Coraggio with the aim of documenting the experiences of the first generation of Italian immigrant women. The competition also led to the publication of Growing Up Italian in Australia: Eleven Young Australian Women

Talk About Their Childhood with the support of the National Italian-Australian Women’s

Association, the Ethnic Affairs Commission, and Alitalia Airlines, testifying to the

Multicultural Agenda of the Australian Government in the 1990s and to the increasing

interest of Italy towards its communities abroad. Although bringing visibility to an important segment of Australian society, these projects often run the risk of further silencing contradictions and ambiguities in the experiences of women of Italian descent.

If white Australian feminists negated the attribution of any active role to migrant women, these accounts may at times uncritically celebrate both Australian and Italian culture, without acknowledging the racism and patriarchy that still plague both communities. As

Pesman argues, “representations of Italian women in Australia,” and beyond, have undergone many transformations, “from being invisible to becoming victims then protagonists, and from being overseas examples of eternal, passive earth mothers to individuals of widely varied experiences and perceptions” (402). Yet, many stereotypes still persist and further work is needed to delve into the contradictions of both dominant

Australian voices and of patriarchal ethnic perspectives. In the collection, Growing up

Italian in Australia, admittedly a manifestly celebratory publication with government sponsorship, of the eleven women narrating their stories, only Pellizzari confronts the contradictions of both white and Italian Australia, which also constitute the main focus of her filmic work.

1.3.3 Contextualizing Monica Pellizzari

In her contribution to Growing up Italian in Australia, titled “A Woman, A Wog and a Westie,” Monica Pellizzari tells of a childhood spent in the Western Sydney suburbs in “a cream coloured Corinthian-columned castle with … vegetable patch,” which she defines as the “Italian-Australian dream” (134). She expresses resentment against both the culture of suburban Sydney and the “Italian patriarchal tradition” that

would require a young girl of Italian descent to marry “a nice Italian boy, Northern Italian

only (Southerners weren’t to be trusted)” (134). Coming from the Northern region of

Veneto, Pellizzari’s family seems to embody the many prejudices within the

Italian/Australian community that reinforced the general stereotypes against the

Mediterranean, dark immigrants, or in a common Australian ethnic slur, “wogs,” a word

that she checked in her dictionary at the early age of eight and found defined as “western

oriental gentleman” (135).108 These were the words that Pellizzari remembers being waged against her family, who also suffered violent threats from the Anglo-Australian neighbors (qtd. in “Breaking down the Race Barrier” 41. “We Love Wogs”). In descriptions that recall passages in Italian/American novels like Helen Barolini’s

Umbertina and John Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Pellizzari tells of her shame for her “smelly gorgonzola sandwiches” that marked her as different in school; she relates of her father’s vigilance against boys and confesses her desire to change her surname “with a new anglicized version” (136-37). However, gradually in her adolescence she came to better appreciate her Italian ancestry thanks to a trip to Italy for a cousin’s wedding (138).

During her Italian stay, she delighted in discovering that her last name was very common in Palermo, Sicily, the very region her father so much despised (138). Simultaneously, she realized that despite her emotive connection with her Italian relatives, she was seen as different, “called La Cangura selvatica” (139); moreover, she rejected the lifestyle of

Italian small villages, where she found that patriarchy predominated.109 The Italian trip

thus helped her “realise that [she] could not feel totally comfortable in Italy, nor in

Australia” (140); in Italy she was too blond, blue-eyed, and Australian to be considered

Italian. In Australia, on the other hand, she could not connect with Anglo-Australian

girlfriends and spent her time with her Sicilian neighbor in a friendship seemingly fraught

with many of the contradictions and conflicts that mark North-South relations among

Italians.

Her hyphenated identity provided Pellizzari with a critical look onto Australian

society, which spurred her to become engaged in politics; she recalls the excitement of the 1970s under the Gough Whitlam’s government, which, for her, meant hoping to be able to attend school, to save her brother from being drafted, and seeing her mother finally enjoying free English classes (143). She goes so far as arguing that “for the first time we ‘wogs’ were made to feel close to being Australians” (143); when, after only one

year , the Whitlam Government was dismissed in 1975, Pellizzari lost any hope of a

political career. Discouraged and disillusioned by politics and by Catholic religious

institutions at the early age of fifteen, she decided to attend a public school where she had

her first encounter with girls from other ethnicities and creeds (143-44).110 However, she

maintains that because of this early political awareness, she later decided to undertake a

career in the film industry, telling stories that nobody had narrated on screen before

(Pellizzari “Il Cinema in Ottica Italo-Australiana” 24). Before opting for cinema

however, Pellizzari went on to study Political Science at the University of New South

Wales for a period, which for a resident of the Western suburbs meant “three buses, a one

hour train journey… and a decent stretch by foot” (145). Not surprisingly, few of her

neighbors went to the University where she “stood out for accent and clothes;” her

marginalization was worsened by the patriarchal rules in her family which led to strong

confrontations with her father, until she left the familial house for a “boarding house”

(146). Finally, her father gave up his “patriarchal plan” to marry her to a nice Northern

Italian boy, and let her continue on her own path that soon turned to cinema (147).

Her desire to work in the film industry was encouraged by the dearth of representations of Italian/Australian, particularly women (Pellizzari “Il Cinema in Ottica

Italo-Australia” 24); she wanted to “address [her] reality as a bi-cultural Australian” and the difficulties of growing up “ethnic” in a country that did not welcome diversity (qtd. in

Colbert “Bi-Cultural Visions” 23). Moreover, as I will discuss later, she wanted to respond to the TV and film images of hyphenated Italians that were mostly coming from the United States; she wanted to counter the Mafioso stereotypes and tell Italian women’s stories. Pursuing this goal, Pellizzari tried to enroll in the prestigious Australian Film,

Television and Radio School, but was initially rejected; with determination, she decided to “[hassle] producer Jim McElroy until he eventually weakened …, employing her as a production assistant on The Year of Living Dangerously (Weir, 1982)” (23). After her second rejection by the AFTRS, despite her increasing experience, she was accepted at Il

Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome (23-24). As will be shown in the next

Chapter, her formative years in Italy, working within and being exposed to the vanguard of creative Italian cinema, was instrumental to her subsequent work, just as surely as her early exposure to Italian/American cinema and early Australian film auteurs like Peter

Weir.

After her Italian schooling, she was finally accepted at the AFTRS, where she produced her first short films, soon gaining critical acclaim and recognition, despite

feeling ostracized within the predominantly “Anglocentric” and male environment of the

school (Pellizzari “Il Cinema in Ottica Italo-Australiana” 25). At the school, she directed

Velo Nero (1988) and Rabbit on the Moon (1988); the latter “attracted considerable

acclaim, garnering numerous national and international awards … [with its] melancholic,

black and white rendering of a bi-cultural childhood” (Capp). In these early shorts,

Pellizzari develops the striking visual and experimental style that will characterize her

later work like the short Just Desserts (1993) that won the award for Best Short Film at

the Venice Film Festival, and finally her feature film Fistful of Flies (1996) that won the

Elvira Notari Prize at the 1996 Venice Film Festival. Since then, Pellizzari does not seem

to have been active in the film industry, despite her early successes.

In her cinema, her resentment against and criticism of both Italian patriarchy and white

Australia come forth with angry and provocative humor; in the early nineties, she still

lamented those who would ask her “When are you going to make films about real

Australians?” (Colbert “Bi-Cultural Visions” 25), not recognizing the Australianness of the migrant and ethnic experience and of white discrimination against them. Her humor is also strongly reminiscent of Italian traditions, applied to food recipes, to songs, superstitions, and rituals, all draw on from her own life and familial experiences. Her eyes do not wonder far from her own ethnic community and conflicts, but they pierce through it to challenge its dominant patriarchy and whiteness from the subaltern perspective of a woman, an artist, and an ethnically-marked subject who constantly attempts to carve her own space in the interstices of her multiple heritages.111

1.4 The Chinese Presence in Australia: Modern and Past Diasporas

As mentioned above, the White Australia Policy was largely a nationalist

response against increasing immigration to Australia; as H.I. London observes, the

Restriction act “was nothing but a disguise for the protection of White Australia against

‘the yellow peril’” (13). David Walker in his Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of

Asia 1850-1939 well illustrates the extent to which the geographical proximity to Asia

has influenced Australian politics and nation building. Anxiety directed against the populous Asian neighbors accompanied the colonists almost since their arrival.112 At the end of the nineteenth century, in particular, numerous factors increased the perceived threat from Asia and served to support the eventual establishment of the White Australia

Policy in 1901. Around 1857-58, India saw the explosion of the Sepoy uprisings that were violently repressed and encouraged England “to instill imperial certitudes” (Walter

1).113 India started to develop as a threat to the Empire, while still exerting a strong hold on the imagination and admiration of many Western intellectuals and politicians, particularly of Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, whose book reminded

Australians and beyond that India was the origin of the Aryan race. At the same point in the 1850s, the first wave of immigrants from China arrived to seek fortune in the

Australian goldfields; this migratory flux “created a sharper realization of Australia’s

proximity to great Pacific neighbours” (1).

By the end of the nineteenth century, this increasing anxiety was further

heightened by the new literature on the “progressive Asianisation of Europe” that Charles

Pearson foretold in his influential National Life and Character: A Forecast published in

1893 (1-3). Pearson also argued that Australia was in a unique position to contribute to a

better understanding of Asia and that its future was tied up with that of the Asian nations.

Pearson’s book raised much concern and attention globally as well, being reviewed by

Theodore Roosevelt who shared the belief that Australia was a key player in the future

relations with Asia (46-47).114 By the 1890s, moreover, Japan had also reached “military

capacities and territorial ambitions [that] began to induce some anxiety over a looming

‘yellow peril’” (3).115 The threats coming from Asia were perceived as multiple and heterogeneous; anxiety reigned over fear of either military attack, mainly in reference to

Japan, which was seen as the most developed Asian nation, or over the threat of a gradual

take-over through population expansion by Chinese workers spreading across the globe

(supplemented by the arrival of non-White Indians).

The solution most commonly called forth to keep the Asian nations at bay was the

need to populate Australia with “white races” and thereby lay a definitive claim to the

territory. This belief was forcefully presented on the pages of the Millions Magazine on

July 1, 1921 featuring a map of Australia where on the empty inland space appears the

announcement “Millions of people are wanted to fill Australia’s empty spaces.”

Reinforcing this call is the superimposition of European countries along the Australian

coast with square miles and population data, exemplifying the potential of the Australian

land, and the final warning “Immigration our only salvation” (Walker Plate 22).

Similarly, on the pages of the same magazine on Oct 15, 1923, the warning was repeated

with increasingly threatening tone in the illustration “PEOPLE OR PERISH,” depicting

the vast white land of Australia with a white man at leisure under a tree in NWS, while

colored and mean looking representatives of the Asian menace surround this idyllic

picture. Represented are men from India, Java, Indochina, China (the closest and most

menacing), and Japan, providing the only man among them dressed in a Western tailored

suit (Walker Plate 1).116 Other images that recur on the pages of the nationalist

newspaper The Bulletin were, as Ouyang Yu points out, “‘The Mongolian Octopus’ in

Phil May’s cartoons or …‘Sin fat’ in Dyson’s stories” (65). These images of invading

Asians had already been popularized by Raymond Longford, recognized as the leading

director of Australian early cinema, who as early as 1913 directed Australia Calls, a tale

of invading Mongolians in Sydney that articulated the growing discourses of an “Asian

menace.” Although the “Yellow Peril” was constructed over the diverging identities of

the Asian nations neighboring Australia, the first, most vocal public outcries and

legislation were mainly directed against the Chinese.

1.4.1 Chinese Immigration in the Context of Asian/Australian Relations

Indeed, if anxiety over neighboring Asia was a motivating factor in the

establishment of the White Australia Policy, its direct models were mainly the anti-

Chinese “immigration laws” enforced in states like Victoria were many Chinese had

arrived to work in the goldfields (Cronin 2, Yarwood 1, Tavan 9-11). However, as Price documents, “’anti-Chinese’ agitation was also strong in South Australia, Western

Australia and Tasmania where Chinese were present in very small numbers, bespeaking a national anxiety” (235).117 Chinese workers were both needed as cheap labor (Cronin 5)

and feared because of their increasing numbers and the proximity of the very populous

Chinese nation. As early as 1880, J. Hurst published The Chinese Question and,

acknowledging the increasing calls to restrict Chinese immigration, countered them with

Adam Smithian political economic principles of free trade and competition. He argued for the need of Chinese workers and pitted unions as the real threat to Australia’s economy. Despite the early debate around Chinese – and general – immigration, political

discourse in this period generally foregrounded the fear for the yellow peril and the

expansion of restrictive norms aimed at maintaining Australia’s whiteness. By 1859, there were around 50,000 Chinese in Australia, but by 1887 restriction acts made immigration harder and harder (Walker 36);118 while Japan had bargained for less discriminatory tests over its immigrants, China did not have the bargaining power to help its waves of immigrants (Yarwood 3-4, 104-15).119

Anti-Chinese sentiment and legislation was reinforced by the growing narratives

and pseudoscientific racist claims about the Chinese as a people. Chinese immigrants, for

instance, were constructed as genetically indefatigable workers, with whom the average

white Australian could not compete. Their superiority for hard work, however, was

indirectly coded as a sign of their being a “lower race,” more apt to serve rather than to

fight or rule (Walker 36-49). As Edwards and Yuanfang observe in their study on the

Aboriginal relations with the other groups constituting Australian society, the racist

discourse outlined so far and the many restrictions they faced “belied the … systematised

racial discrimination against Aboriginals, Chinese and other non-European immigrants.

… [and] these two overtly distinct racisms were conceptually unified by their

unshakeable belief in European superiority, reflected in a common, colour-bound

lexicon” (6). Like Pugliese who drew parallels between Southern Italians and Aborigines,

Edwards and Yuanfang highlight the connections between anti-Chinese discrimination and the racist politics against the Indigenous populations of Australia. Yet, as Pugliese did in the first case, it is necessary to remember that all immigrant groups willingly and/or unwillingly, also contributed to further marginalize the Aboriginal peoples of

Australia. 120 By displacing employed Aboriginal Australians, immigrants, albeit

“subaltern subjects[,] often ended up implicated in those projects of expansion,

construction and extraction which displaced increasing numbers of Indigenous people”

(6).121 Edwards and Yuanfang point to some recurring narratives that pitted Chinese

against Aborigines in “sensationalist tales of Aborigines devouring new Chinese

migrants, or of Chinese goldworkers abducting Aboriginal girls” (5). Rather than relating

any true event, these myths reflected white Australia’s rooted obsession with

miscegenation and whiteness, already discussed in relation to the whitening of the

Indigenous populations and the policies discouraging Italian immigration. In such a

system, the possibility of friendly encounters and reproductive marriages between Asians

and Aboriginals was a particular source of concern.122 Neville, the “chief protector” of

Aborigines who had theorized the whitening of Australia in his Australia’s Coloured

Minority: Its Place in the Community (1947), encouraged marriages between “half-

blood” Aborigines, “quadroon,” “octoroon,” and working-class whites, so as to gradually

breed out blackness. For the very same reasons, he forcefully decried Asian-Aboriginal

marriage (Neville 59-65) and secured prohibitive legislation in this regard (Edwards and

Yuanfang 5, 14-15).123 The erotics of history were, hence, once more in the foreground

of political and social debates in the early days of the Commonwealth of Australia.124

The Chinese’s threat was further coded in pseudoscientific terms as a form of physical and mental deviance. In his book, Walker documents various authoritative voices that influenced the construction of the Asian peoples in the national imaginary; there was George Morrison, for instance, who wrote An Australian in China in 1895,

which despite compiling anecdotal, racist views of the Chinese, was packaged with an

aura of scientific authority due to Morrison’s medical training. Another prominent voice

was William Lane who wrote on the pages of the popular Boomerang, where he gave

further visibility to Morrison’s claims and posited the Chinese as corrupt and aberrant.

These voices generally constructed the Chinese as threatening company for a righteous

man’s soul; as Walker summarizes these depictions, the Chinese “were represented as

gamblers, drug addicts and sexual deviants. They lusted after white women. They were

diseased. They carried leprosy and all the poxes” (36). Maryanne Dever illustrates that

these representations fitted into a general typing of “Asian populations both inside and

outside Australia … as the locus of miscegenation, chaos, disease, pollution, and

immorality,” in other words they functioned as the symbolic outlet of “nineteenth century

obsessions with racial purity, social order, health and hygiene” (3). The pseudoscientific

constructions of Orientals as the epitome of the century’s fears and moral depravity, as

Tan observes, was predicated on a “racialisation” of the Chinese immigrants that also

shaped the sexual politics of the Australian nation building as well.

1.4.2 The Genderedness of Asian Migrations and Anxieties

As Walker points out, the vices attributed to the Chinese were marked by a

gendered discourse, whereby they were defined in opposition to “European vices:

drinking, tobacco smoking and betting on horses [which] were the pastimes of a virile,

manly race” (Walker 42). European manhood was constructed in opposition to the

feminine, sensuous, Oriental vices that could instead corrupt the soul with the pleasures of the body.125 Edward Said in his groundbreaking study of Orientalism had already pointed to the feminization of the Orient, both in terms of the Orient’s “penetrability” by the more powerful West, and in terms of the construction of a threat in sexual terms, where the menace came from the elusive sensuousness of the feminine Orient. As mentioned above, the anxiety over a Chinese invasion was not understood primarily in military terms of attack and battle, but rather as the invasion of an undifferentiated mass

armed with their indefatigable bodies, tantalizing sexuality, and vices that could

gradually contaminate the virile, righteous mind of white men and women. As Shirley

Tucker points out, “Oriental women” in particular have been contradictorily constructed

as either “the sinful and morally corrupt Asian femme fatale” or “the passive and

childlike oriental flower” (150).126 The dichotomous depiction of Oriental women

reflects both the attraction towards Asian cultures pointed out above and the fear of being

overwhelmed by the Oriental neighbors. Symbolic in this regard was the daunting figure of Tsu Hui, the Chinese Empress of Dowager who “became a figure in whom Western males could read some of their own darkest fears and fantasies about the ‘mysterious’

East and the nature of Woman” (Walker 140). Reptilian, exotic, and sensuous, the

Oriental woman epitomized the most feared vices of a femininity that was “beyond

Australian masculine control” (Tucker 150), symbolizing the threat to both the Australian nation and the ideals of white masculinity that sustained it. The centrality of such an ideal

to the construction of the nation is clearly reinforced by the common association of

Oriental threats with criticism of the first wave of feminism at the turn of the nineteenth

century. At his stage, feminism was read as “a sure sign of a culture so decadent and

commercial that it almost invited a cleansing invasion” (131).127 White women were

constructed as weakening the masculinity of the white Australian men who were called to

fight the impending Asianization; if Asian men were to a certain extent feminized, their

sensuousness was thought to appeal to “frivolous white women” accused of any

perversity in fictions such as Roydhouse’s The Coloured Conquest published in 1903 and

on the pages of the nationalist Bulletin (Walker 128-30). These misogynist and popular

demonization of feminism within Australia, directly connected to the external Asian

threat, were also supported by the positivist discourses of European thinkers and writers

like Otto Weininger who migrated to Australia (Walker 131). The infamous Austrian

philosopher in his Geschlect und Charakter (Sex and Character) presented a pseudoscientific argument for the gender divide, whereby men were to be active and women passive; in a whole chapter entitled “emancipated women,” Weininger went so far as to claim that active women were promoting a return to primitivism and to hermaphroditism, which would inevitably lead to a deviant society (57-65). Weininger’s pseudoscientific, misogynist discourse was “profoundly entangled with racial identities”

(Walker 131), as testified by Weininger’s arguments that Chinese, Orientals, black and

Jewish populations are necessarily inferior because of their feminized nature (Weininger

272-300). In Australia such claims found fertile ground and served to further cement the misogynist and racist discourses that defined both “emancipated” women and Orientals

as a threat to the nation and its borders. Such menaces also reinforced the mythical construction of the bushmen as first national heroes, who upheld the ideals of an active masculinity, while serving as guardians of the rough, empty Australian outback in the face of the sinuous Oriental advance (Walker 4-5, 130-132)

Interestingly, in Walker’s comprehensive discussion of the gendered, racist, and misogynist discourse of a nation struggling to assert a Western identity in the face of its

Eastern displacement, he does not point to the sad irony that sees Chinese women strangely absent from discussions of the Asian migratory threat. As Jan Ryan argues in her Chinese Women and the Global Village: An Australian Site, “women migrants’ economic and social contributions were considered trivial, as they were routinely viewed as dependants of male migrants or as passive participants in migration” (14). Certainly, the predominance of men in the early migratory fluxes partially explains such lack of discussion of the role of women. Yarwood reports that by 1901, there were 30,542

Chinese in Australia of which 96% were male (78);128 exemptions and restrictions were based on the demands for male workers in specific fields like in the pearl industry, or as laborers, gardeners, and cooks. For these reasons, Chinese women in the early stages of migration to Australia were relatively few and almost non-existent in policy regulations and migrants’ discussions, despite their prominent role in the dominant discourse on the

Orient generally.

However, Ryan shows that “from the 1980s women have outnumbered male immigrants to Australia” (16); the fact that the numbers of migrating Chinese women increased after the final abandonment of the White Australia Policy in 1973 is not

accidental. Migration under the Restriction Act dictated the desirable subjects accepted

for immigration on the basis of skills and physical qualities heavily defined in masculine

terms; women figured in the policies only as dependents. With the White Australia Policy dismantled, the restrictions on acceptance were redefined with “four broad eligibility

categories …: economic, family, refugee, and ‘other’ immigrants” (20). With more

flexible regulations, women migrants constantly increased in numbers, accounting now

for practically half of the Chinese population arriving in Australia. Today, Chinese

women constitute a significant percentage of the “fifty-five million men and women of

Chinese ancestry outside of mainland China,” although their voices are still much

silenced “in the current discourses of globalization” (1). By pointing to the predominant invisibility of migrant Chinese women, Ryan also questions discourses on the “Chinese diaspora,” reminding readers that such a label “is becoming less and less appropriate for the pluralistic nature of peoples bounded by the discourse” (4). There are certainly major differences between migrants arriving from the People’s Republic of China and those from Macau and Hong Kong; in the case of Australia, for instance, recent “Chinese” migrants are predominantly coming from Hong Kong. A peak in post-1973 immigration from Asia is to be observed in the early 1990s among Hong Kong migrants; this wave followed the tragic events of Tiananmen in 1989 and the impending transfer of Hong

Kong to the People’s Republic of China. This new wave is significantly different – in economic motivation, in class and cultural background, and many other respects – from the migrants that Australians learned to perceive as a threat in the early twentieth century.

However, these new migrants still have to come to terms with the embedded Orientalist

beliefs that have marked the public image of Chinese men and women for centuries.

1.4.3 Contextualizing Clara Law

It is to the latter wave of migration that Clara Law’s films speak; the focus of her

work as a filmmaker has consistently been the transnational diaspora of Chinese men and

women, particularly in reference to Hong Kong. As Law explains, the experience of

displacement is rooted in her life; born in Macau, she moved with her family to Hong

Kong when she was ten. After graduating in English at the University of Hong Kong and

working with the Radio Television of Hong Kong for four years, in 1982 she migrated to

London to study “film direction and writing at the National Film and Television School

in England” (Li).129 In interviews, she speaks of being alienated in Western London – a

feeling that she powerfully conveys through stylization, lighting, and color filters in her films. It was in London that Law nurtured her knowledge of ancient Chinese traditions

and philosophies to fill the vacuum she felt as the “first Chinese student admitted to the

prestigious National Film School” (Colbert “Voyage of Discovery” 16). While

rediscovering her own Chinese roots leading her from Macau and Hong Kong to the

Chinese mainland, Law also increasingly reflected on her personal rootlessness,

especially after much of her family migrated to Australian in the 1980s (Connolly,

Cawthorne). Since then she has come to understand “migration and dislocation [as] a

universal modern condition,” a theme that she has systematically explored in all her later

films (Berry 10), by representing the displaced and disjunctive experiences of Chinese

men and women in Hong Kong itself, in the U.S., and in Australia (10).130

Her sojourn in Western London concluded in 1985 when she graduated with the film essay They Say the Moon is Fuller Here, which already introduced what would become her main narrative thread in her later work “a Chinese woman living in a foreign culture” (Li). In her first Hong Kong movie, The Other Half and the Other Half (1988),

Law continued her exploration of the meaning of emigration, to Canada specifically, for a young Hong Kong Chinese couple. Li points out that the original Chinese title directly refers to “the so-called “astronaut syndrome,” where “astronaut” (taai hung yan), in the literature on Hong Kong, has defined “the wealthy trans-migrant who defies the gravity of place by maintaining an active presence in both Hong Kong” and the Western country of emigration (Mar 59).131 As already noted, this class of professional migrants emerged mainly in the late 1980s, as anxiety over the handover of Hong Kong increased. Law’s first films thus set the tone for her future filmmaking, which mainly addresses the history of migration that is part and parcel of the history of Hong Kong and explores the psychological consequences of emigration to Western countries with the often accompanying feelings of alienation between the native culture and the loved ones left behind. As Li observes, her first film falls into the “conventional slapstick and formulaic situations typical of Hong Kong nonsensical comedies” and goes for a clichéd happy ending. However, along the way, Law has fleshed out some of the threads that will return in later films with a more nuanced and experienced directing hand: the materialism of

Western culture, the pressure of assimilation, and the pull of tradition and affects on

Chinese men and women wishing to move forward. In 1990, Law will return to these aspects with Farewell China (1990), a film that follows its protagonist Hong to the

United States, where the desire to assimilate will result in a split personality Hong is not

able to control. The film was nominated in numerous categories, including directing, at

the Hong Kong Film Awards and has received mixed reviews. Certainly, the film already

presents the stark visuals that will characterize Law’s later films, with a stunning

manipulation of landscape to express emotions and fears; in contrast with her later films,

the film does not counter-balance its descent to the netherworld of New York (Teo Hong

Kong Cinema) with humor; the film is marked by an excessive melodramatic tone attacked by film critics (Li). It was with her following film, instead, full of nuances and interrogations, that Law gained international recognition and was acclaimed as one of the most prominent filmmakers of Hong Kong’s Second New Wave together with Wong

Kar-wai and Stanley Kwan. Autumn Moon (1992) reflects on the peak of emigration from

Hong Kong in the early nineties, after the events of Tiananmen and the impending

transition of Hong Kong to the Republic’s rule. The film clearly illustrates the global

transnationalism of most Hong Kong families through the eyes of a young teenage girl,

whose family is bound to emigrate to Canada in a year. All her friends are leaving or

have left to study in the United States, Australia, or Canada and she seems conflicted

about her imminent departure. We learn of her doubts and anxieties during her

conversation and developing friendship with a young Japanese tourist. Their dialogue in

tentative English reflects on what Law calls “rootlessness as the modern condition” of

human beings.

Law was soon to participate in the transnational migration she narrated for many

years, when in 1995 she decided to immigrate to Australia with her partner and

scriptwriter Eddie Fong. In interviews, she explains her decision partially as a rejection of the commercial film industry of Hong Kong, where she had been pressured to put out almost a film every year and where independent projects died before economic and commercial imperatives (Li, Millard, Mitchell “Clara Law’s Floating Life”). The decision to migrate, however, was also strongly motivated by Law’s fears over Hong

Kong’s sovereignty transition to the People’s Republic of China that she had addressed in

Autumn Moon. Once in Australia, she continued her exploration of the Chinese diaspora with the critically acclaimed Floating Life (1996), which won numerous awards including the Grand Prix at the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival. The film follows the

Chan family, separated by migration between Germany, Hong Kong, and Australia, and explores with nuanced humor the contradictions and tensions between tradition and assimilation, memory and forgetting/repressing. The film has been critically acclaimed and widely regarded as a groundbreaking filmic essay on Chinese transnationalism; however, it also constituted a more abstract reflection on disjunction and displacement as part of the human condition. This will become the focus of Law’s next film The Goddess of 1967 (2000), which returns to her previous reflections on uprootedness, materialism, and consumption, as well as in cinema genres, humorously confronting some staples of

Australian national cinema.

Throughout these projects, Law explores the condition, processes, and the psychological experience of displacement through a keen observation and reflection on sexuality as well as space and landscape. All of Law’s films present a sensuous treatment of sexuality and food; she seems to be exploring the alienation and disorientation of

uprooted subjectivities as it comes to be inscribed onto gendered bodies’ relations to the surrounding environment and subjects. Sex becomes a prism to explore the search for connectedness and the separation and alienation that accompany migratory subjects; food, on the other hand, serves as a reflection on memory, tradition, as well as planting roots in a new soil with different tastes and flavors. Law’s concern with the landscape, on the other hand, contributes to the striking visual imagery of her film work and allows her to address local perspectives of the global phenomenon of transnationalism indirectly. As mentioned above, Law repeatedly speaks to the human condition of uprootedness, but in her films she shows awareness of its local specificities and nuances. In her films scripted and produced in Australia, that will be the main focus of this study, it is clear how her own personal migration has influenced her overall concern with displacement. Law has localized within the Australian space her gaze onto global trends in cinemas and societies both in cinematic and thematic terms. Her ability to read the global against the local is most poignant in her latest film project Letters to Ali (2004). This “is her first documentary and the only Australian movie selected for [the 2004] Venice Film Festival”

(Phillips “Australia’s Inhuman Treatment”); it deals with the scandalous treatment of

Afghan asylum seekers under the right-wing Howard government in Australia. Typical of

Law’s cinematography, the documentary confronts such a divisive and politically sensitive issue through a personal story: Trish Kerbi’s discovery of the presence of detention centers for asylum seekers in Australia and her ensuing commitment to learn more about the issue and to get personally involved in making it public and offering some relief. Law had stated that her commitment to the project stemmed from her own recent

migration, her sense of connection with feelings of displacement expressed by Afghan asylum seekers, and her shock at learning of her new country’s scandalous approach to immigrants and refugees. Pressed by the plight of Afghan migrants and the approaching

Australian national elections, Law and Fong decided to self-fund the project instead of delaying it looking for a sponsor. Along the way, however, Law and Fong soon discovered that many shared their outrage over the situation and actually volunteered to collaborate for free, as did renowned composer Paul Grabowsky (Coslovich, Phillips

“Australia’s Inhuman Treatment,” Hawker “Stranded in Hell,” Teutsch). While dealing

with one of the most divisive political issues in Australia and producing independently

and collaboratively a text denouncing Australian governmental policies, Law stresses that

her documentary “is not about politics, it is about moral issues … it’s about human

beings and humanism” (Coslovich A3:7). In line with such a perspective, Law structures

the text as a personal journey, rather than a political film, continuing her own reflections

on the diasporic condition and producing an auteurist documentary of political

relevance.132

Law thus offers a fresh perspective on current migratory patterns and policies in

Australia, which reads them within the global transnationalism in which they participate.

Moreover, the mixed reception that her work has received and the many ambiguities of

her filmmaking provide for a significant test case for a reading that wishes to highlight

the possibilities for critical reflection hidden in the humorous third spaces created by

filmmakers. Law has been “likened to the great directors Antonioni and Kurosawa”

(Connolly 79), and by some European critics as “China’s most important female

director,” even a visionary auteur and the most influential woman director after Jane

Campion (Cawthorne 31). On the other hand, Law has also been harshly attacked for allegedly exploiting migration, discrimination, and male violence as mere narrative

devices for a purely formalist approach to film (Thompson, Phillips “Confused and Cold-

Hearted”, Villella, Barlett, and Banks). Given such a contradictory reception, heightened

by Law’s taking on such diverse projects as The Goddess of 1967 and the “political film”

Letters to Ali, Law’s films clearly present the contradictions that Pirandello’s approach to

humor helps to navigate, considering the transition from an aesthetic and individualist

approach to an understanding and reading of humor as social critique. In my analyses, I will thus investigate, highlight, and exploit these contradictions, illustrating what Law’s humor tells us of the ambiguous position of accented cinema itself, as a theme and cinematic style on the one hand, and as a critical tactic of intervention on the other.

2. A FRAUGHT NATIONAL CINEMA

2.1 Accenting National Cinema

No other cinema [than accented cinema] is so irrevocably implicated at one and the same time in the individual, communal and national definition and redefinition. (Naficy 94)

In the previous Chapter, I reviewed the histories of migration that have shaped

Australia’s cultural geography and that are part of the knowledges, memories, and visual archives which Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law bring to the screen. The particular displacements each has undergone, as well as the historical specificities of gender, inflect their cinematic accents. These migratory, divided, and hybrid qualities surface in their cinematic concerns and will prove an important inspiration and vector for their use of humor. Beyond the individual and collective histories of deterritorialization in which accented cinema is implicated, Naficy also points out the significance of the discourses circulating in the host nation, where it is conceived and produced, and to which it is often directed as a novel, accented perspective on the national construct and its contradictions.

Indeed linguistic or cinematic, acquire their meaning and connotation differentially, in contrast to the dominant accent in a national language or cinema. In this Chapter, I will thus focus on how the accented perspectives of the three filmmakers illuminate

Australian national cinema, bringing out the intersections between national discourses,

the histories of migration highlighted above, and the role that cinema has played in fashioning a dominant Australian national identity. As with the histories of migration inflecting the cinematic and world- view of these filmmakers, their interaction with

Australian national cinema will prove a target for the critical humor with which they infuse their texts, as Chapters Three and Four will reveal. Tom O’Regan has argued that, like all national cinemas, Australian national cinema is “a mundane, hybrid cinema that will always lack the purity demanded by social, aesthetic, and political problematization”

(Australian National Cinema 353). While purporting to reinforce the construct of the nation affirmatively and actively, national cinemas, as Thomas Elsaesser has observed, can only be defined relationally, in other words by negation and comparison with “other kinds of film-making, such as commercial/international, to which it supplies the other side of the coin and thus functions as the subordinate term” (“Putting on a Show” 25-26).

Incorporating elements of Hollywood commercial cinema, European auteurist traditions, and accented cinemas globally, Australian national cinema is a hybrid that is made to fit, as O’Regan points out, into multiple and “contradictory constructions,” which resonate with the geo-political, social, and economic discourses and tensions that I have already stressed in relation to the Australian nation and the migrations and positionalities that concern it. In O’Regan’s synthetic account, Australian national cinema has been variably described as “a European cinema, a new world cinema, a multicultural cinema, a diasporic cinema,” and none of these categories is completely sustainable or ignorable

(305). As O’Regan explains:

Those pushing Australian cinema as a New World Cinema run against the survival of various diasporic logics in public institutions, film-making and

society. Those pushing a diasporic cinema and multicultural cinema run against a settler culture of two hundred years standing with its own integrity, lifeways and traditions which have long ceased being diasporic and can be only expected … to attenuate their identities so far. … This variety of projects jostling for ascendancy ensures that Australian cinema produces a messy combination capable of different description and viewer uptake. (Australian National Cinema 305-06)133

Australia’s history, its settlement, Aboriginal populations, and diasporic communities

have been translated into commodities the Australian national industry can exploit to

create a cinema of “international spectacle for international success.” Indeed, as Elsaesser

argues, the marketing of national history for national cinemas that do not boast “a

continuous tradition of film-making” is a typical strategy to attain visibility in theaters

globally (New German Cinema 293). Reviewing the different phases of Australian

national cinema since the early twentieth century when cinema developed and planted

roots in Australia can thus also illustrate the which histories have been foregrounded or

erased in this “messy combination” and reflect on the reasons for such selection.134

Numerous studies and books dedicated to Australian national cinema, in particular Susan Dermody’s and Jacqueline Jacka’s two-volume history The Screening of

Australia published between 1987 and 1988, have already thoroughly presented the different stages in the development of a cinematic industry in Australia and the extent to which the state has actively participated in the establishment of a national cinema as a means to fashion a commodifiable national identity and reinforce a common national imaginary. The important survey first combined multiple methodologies – political economy, policy analysis, and cultural and textual analysis specifically – to document, in the first volume, the Anatomy of a Film Industry, and, in the second, the Anatomy of a

National Cinema and its participation in the construction of a “social imaginary” always pervaded by contradictions. Additionally, O’Regan’s Australian National Cinema is

arguably still the most thorough overview, weaving together the analysis of industrial

policies, institutional roles and constraints, as well as the national reception context, the

role of the film critic, and the analysis of film texts. Simultaneously reviewing the theory

on national cinemas and the literature on Australian national cinema specifically,

O’Regan has problematized the notion of a national cinema and unveiled the tensions and

contradictions that pervade the specific Australian context.135 Drawing on these studies,

but wishing to avoid a mere rehearsal of their findings, in this Chapter I set out to map

how these filmmakers relate to the histories, contradictions, institutional constraints, policies, and funding that undergird the Australian national cinema. My purpose in so doing is to focus on the three directors’ interstitial perspectives, informed by the histories of migration highlighted in the previous Chapter, and their (re)construction of both

Australian national cinema and history.

The assumption behind this approach is that nations are to an extent narrative constructs that purport to unite a heterogeneous population under a commonly recognized social imaginary and account of national History. From the time of Benedict Anderson’s recognition that the advent of print capitalism was a major agent in the formation of imagined communities sharing a common national ideology, there has been growing research into the narrativity of the nation, expanding and revising Anderson’s arguments on print capitalism to take into account the significance of visual technologies and industries in fashioning an imagined national identity (Shohat and Stam 101-02).136 In

Nation and Narration, Bhabha explores the “transitional social reality” with which

nations are inscribed and that defies the historians’ attempts to define and pinpoint the

“origins” of nations neatly (1). In their explorations, the contributors to the volume

illustrate how the “foundational fictions” constructed around nations “turn out to be as

much acts of affiliation and establishment as they are moments of disavowal,

displacement, exclusion, and cultural contestation” (5). Unveiling the histories of those

who have systematically been excluded in the foundational historical narratives of

nations, the authors thus emphasize the “instability of knowledge” that characterizes the

process by which nations “come into being” as “systems of cultural signification” (1-2), where the discourses sustaining the “unity of the nation” are always exceeded by the voices that articulate “cultural difference” (5).

Bhabha together with the other contributors to the volume is obviously relying on the Foucaultian theorization of the power-knowledge coupling, where the nation could be understood as a “discursive formation,” which is intrinsically pervaded by incoherence and contradiction.137 In Foucault’s model of discursive power, “far from being an

appearance or accident of discourse, far from being that from which it must be freed if its

truth is to be revealed, [contradiction] constitutes the very law of its existence: it is on the

basis of such a contradiction that discourse emerges” (The Archeology of Knowledge

151). With Frederic Jameson we could say that discourse has its own “strategies of

containment” to neutralize the threat of contradiction, which it can however never escape

and through which it constantly evolves. In the moment when cracks come to the fore or

are forced to the surface, however, an opening for dissenting voices emerges; it might be

closed again by the ever-changing and supple power networks, but in that interval there is some space to develop a counter-discourse.138 This counter-discourse can build on the

“subjugated knowledges” that can emerge from the interstices opened by the contradictions in falsely unitary discourses. “Subjugated knowledges” refers to two distinct cases: “the buried knowledges of erudition and those disqualified from the hierarchy of knowledges and sciences” (Power/Knowledge 82). What connects the meticulous work of research and unburying of silenced meanings in official documents and the emergence and assertion of the silenced voices of marginalized individuals and social groups is their common concern with “a historical knowledge of struggles” that can problematize unitary discourses like those on which the construct of the nation is predicated (83).139

To retrace subjugated knowledges, Foucault seeks alternative paths to historicize discursive power, turning to genealogy for reconstructing the origin and development of discourses (83). His genealogical method “operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times”

(“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 139).140 It is an operation that seeks to recuperate that which we deem “without history … sentiment, love, conscience, instincts” (139-40) and articulate its significance in the development of dominant discourses as well as of the resistance against them. Such reworking and contextualization makes space for what was deemed ahistorical or unworthy of historical investigation because superfluous or

“primitive,” i.e. constructed at a basic stage that supposedly does not know any development or change. Foucauldian genealogy is a horizontal movement that

incorporates daily routines and affective dimensions, because they participate in the

production, reproduction, and, at times, interruption of discursive practices and power.

The horizontality of Foucault’s genealogical approach undermines the verticality of

arborescent models of history that Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze also rejected in their

Mille Plateaux, proposing, instead, the model of the rhizome. This resonates with the voices that from the margins are uprooting arborescent historical accounts and making us

see them through a kaleidoscope, thus multiplying the knots, roots, and blooms that

articulate the development of discursive practices and formations.141

Combining national cinema studies and accented cinema approaches, I wish to uncover both forms of subjugated knowledges, erudite and disqualified, that cinema has,

directly or indirectly, articulated. Indeed, almost since its inception, cinema has served

both to reproduce national and imperial ideologies and, conversely, to promote an active

political and revolutionary consciousness. As Shohat and Stam argue in Unthinking

Eurocentrism, cinema can well relay “projected narratives of nations and empires” (101),

first by drawing on a common imaginary to construct a national identity and interpellate

individuals into national subjects positions, and secondly by bringing us the visual

spectacle of the other (common since the first Lumiere’s shorts from around the world).

The work of national cinemas theorists like O’Regan and Elsaesser is one of uncovering

the sites of contradiction and struggles buried in the cinematic, historical records of a

nation. Simultaneously, filmmakers and cinema theorists have long recognized the

potential of the moving images to instruct and call its viewers to action, as exemplified by

early Soviet cinema. Moreover, alternative uses of cinema have brought to the surface the

“disqualified knowledges” of the subaltern, challenging the “foundational fictions” upon

which national discourses have rested. In the investigation of how Moffatt, Pellizzari, and

Law use humor in accented cinema to disrupt dominant national discourses, it is therefore

necessary to see how the disqualified knowledges they have inherited through their

participation in the migratory histories highlighted above intersect with the “erudite

knowledges” of scholars of (Australian) national cinema. In combining such insights, the three directors challenge dominant discourses through the use of humor (as the later chapters will attest). Borrowing from Bhabha, I thus argue that Moffatt, Pellizzari, and

Law produce “borderline work[s] of culture [that create] a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present” (The Location of

Culture 10).

Such works of “cultural translation” move inbetween cultures and reject unitary paradigms; they constitute exercises of and calls for what Anzaldua termed mestiza consciousness, through which women can “[put] history through a sieve, [winnow] out lies, [look] at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of. Luego bota lo que no vale, los desmientos, los desencuentos, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio, hondo y enraízado, de la gente antigua” (81).142 This process of decomposition/

recycling, and reconstruction/re-assembling is necessarily gendered according to

Anzaldua. Additionally, this process is inevitably local; the challenging of borders can

only be effective if it simultaneously targets the physical borders in their concrete and

local existence and in their global context, where they resonate with multiple local histories of marginalization, exclusion, and resistance. Nor is such cultural translation a matter of formula, for as Donna Haraway warns readers and cultural critics of the

“serious danger of romanticizing and appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions” (583-84). Specifically referring to the notion of subjugated knowledges, Haraway maintains that “to see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic” (583-84); there is no generic, subjugated perspective on history that a cinema can voice or a cultural critic can unveil – such claims would be inherently contradictory, further marginalizing the disqualified knowledges, necessarily local and often hence devalued, they allegedly seek to celebrate. For this reason, Haraway calls for an attention to the “situated knowledges” through which to construct “an optics” as “a politics of positioning,” i.e. speaking from one’s own local positionality, marked by notions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and religion, and pointing to the cracks in discursive power as they are inscribed locally. For this reason, in the following sections, I will be navigating the histories of Australian national cinemas through the situated perspectives of the three authors, looking at their take on national cinema, discourses of the nation and masculinity, and at their position within the Australian cinematic industry.

2.2 Tracey Moffatt: Tearing down the Nationalist Canvas of Classic Australian

National Cinema

In her photography and film work, Moffatt has consistently tackled issues that are central to Australian national discourses. Her filmmaking has addressed the early anthropological and ethnographic representations of Australian Aborigines and has

directly confronted the history of Australian national cinema and its role in shaping the

discourse on race and the Indigenous populations. Simultaneously, her films have refused

to isolate Aboriginal subjects, speaking to multicultural Australia as well. For the present

I will thus focus on Moffatt’s situated knowledge of Australian cinema and nation as expressed in her films, placing them in the context of some of the main stages in the

development of a cinematic industry in Australia. I will attempt to contextualize

Moffatt’s film work within the production of ethnographic films in Australia, within the active government intervention to promote an Australian national identity through

cinema, and within the most recent strategy of state film funding aimed at marketing the

Australian nation as a model of multiculturalism.

2.2.1 Early Filmmaking in Australia and The Ethnographic Film: A Critical Vision

through Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls

In her first short film, Nice Coloured Girls, released in 1987 and funded by the

state branch of the Creative Development Fund, Moffatt chose to confront the sexual

history of Australian colonization discussed in Chapter One, showing the continuities of

oppression between Australian colonialism and capitalism. The short follows three young

Aboriginal women in modern urban Sydney, who “fish for captains,” i.e., white men with

money, and lure them into buying their dinners and drinks. Against this contemporary

background, Moffatt also re-stages the colonial encounter between Aboriginal women

and early colonizers like Captain-Lieutenant Watkin and of Lieutenant William Bradley,

whose moralistic diaries are read in voice-over against the images of fhashily dressed

“coloured girls” in contemporary Sydney. Skillfully playing with film conventions like

the male gaze and the objectification of the other, Moffatt deconstructs such early colonial discourses through innovative, sometimes Brechtian, techniques that insert a humorous and critical perspective in the short, as I will analyze in Chapter Three. Her experimental and provocative play with film conventions garnered much critical acclaim and also won “the prize for the Most Innovative Film at the 1988 Festival of Australian

Film and Video, Frames” (Rutherford 147).143 Moffatt works here in the tradition of many feminist and accented filmmakers and scholars who have deconstructed anthropological discourse and ethnographic cinema both in their writings and in their films. Critic filmmakers like Sri-Lankan/Australian Laleen Jayamanne and

Vietnamese/American Trinh Minh-ha, together with the Indonesian/American Fatimah

Tobing-Rony are arguably the most recognizable voices in this context.144 In their films and writings, they have constantly exposed intersections between colonialism and sexism, bringing attention to the sexual politics of all colonial endeavours. Simultaneously, they have illuminated the role that ethnographic film has played in popularizing racist and sexist anthropological discourses. Moffatt, Jayamanne, Minh-ha, and Rony, among others, have drawn attention to the parallelisms between “a hypersexualized ‘other’ in scientific discourse … [and] cinema’s scopophilic display of aliens as spectacle” (Shohat and Stam 108).The deconstructive approach of each of these filmmakers varies from the parodic de-composition of an iconic ethnographic documentary as carried out by

Jayamanne in A Song of Ceylon (1985), to the more generic attack on the logocentric monologues of the fathers of anthropology performed by Minh-ha in her text Women,

Native, Other and film Reassemblage (1982).145 In The Third Eye, Rony joins them in

tearing down is the pretense of scientific objectivity put up by ethnographic and

anthropological discourse; they emphasize instead the centrality of spectacle to the

objectifying and othering ethnographic gazes, reminding viewers that, as Shohat and

Stam argue, cinema, “as a product of both science and mass culture,” has always

“combined traveling knowledge with traveling spectacle” (108).

With her first work, Moffatt illuminates this dimension by focusing on the

ethnographic film tradition and its influence on Australian narrative cinema. Studies on

Australian national cinema tend to concentrate on the feature film industry and largely

ignore the Australian ethnographic tradition;.Yet, as one of the founding figures of

ethnographic filmmaking, Jean Rouch, declared, the history of ethnographic film actually

begins not in his backyard, Africa, but in Australia.146 Specifically, it starts with Baldwin

Spencer’s footage of the Aborigines of Central and Northern Australia shot on the fourth

of April 1901 (qtd. Heider 19).147 Since that early date, Australia has boasted the “longest tradition of ethnographic film” of any nation, presenting a remarkable continuous production, lacking instead for its feature film industry (Heider 42). Spencer continued filming until 1912, demonstrating the growing interest in the spectacle of alterity, as an urban culture grew in city metropolises; additionally, the 1910s also saw the development of mission films documenting the work of the church with the Indigenous peoples “as a means of raising revenue” for the Christian missions (Leigh 81).148 In the 1920s, Brooke

Nicholls popularized the ethnographic film further with his footage of the Native

Australia that “concentrated on the quirky or ‘exotic’ … often in a burlesque style”

(Leigh 81). The 1930s evidenced a peak in ethnographic filmmaking thanks to the Board

for Anthropological Research at the University of Adelaide that, in collaboration with the

South Australian Museum, financed film projects by Australian anthropologists like N.B.

Tindale and Dr. H.K. Fry (Hawes 2, Dunlop 13, Bryson 5-6). The South Australian

Museum also financed the first ethnographic film with sound and color Walkabout, shot by renowned anthropologist C.P. Mountford in the Central Australia of 1940. As British ethnographic filmmaker, Ian Dunlop, observes, the film was a mixture of “personal travelogue … [and] much detailed ethnographic material” and went on to infect the imagination of many Australians (14). Other eminent anthropologists took along a film camera during their field work like A.P. Elkin and his Maraian Ceremony in 1949 and

T.G.H. Strehlow who assembled an impressive amount of ethnographic footage during the 1950s (Dunlop 14, Hawes 2-3, Michaelis 218). Strehlow’s film was edited and financed with the Collaboration of the Commonwealth Film Unit that “between 1945 and

1970 … was virtually synonymous with film-making in Australia” (Cunningham and

Jacka 111). Indeed, while feature film production was practically non-existent in

Australia for twenty years following World War II (Dermody and Jacka 48), the documentary and ethnographic film tradition continued to thrive thanks to state financing from the Commonwealth Film Unit and, since the 1960s, to the major support of the

Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies. The two state entities funded the successful ethnographic films by the independent director Cecil Holmes and, in 1965, the most ambitious ethnographic project in Australia yet undertaken, Desert People, directed by

Dunlop. As Stanley Hawes, the producer in chief of the Commonwealth Film Unit, argues, this state funding agency has produced an enormous number of films up to the

1960s, which, despite not being strictly ethnographic films, contain plenty of

ethnographic material and have continued to promote the interest in the study of the

Australian Aborigines since the beginning of cinema in Australia (3).149

With her fictional short mocking objectifying ethnographic discourse, Moffatt is

pointing to this history of filmmaking in Australia and to the fact that, as O’Regan also

observes, “Australia’s indigenous peoples – probably the world’s most anthropologized

people – … have exercised the European imagination for the past 200 years and are

central to the Western sociological archive” (Australian National Cinema 93). Moffatt

and Jayamanne recapitulate the history of ethnographic film in Australia, locating it as an

integral and significant part of the history of Australian national cinema. As O’Regan

argues “there is hardly any aspect of Australian film-making – fictional or experimental –

which has not been touched in some way by the documentary filmmaking in Australia”

(170). Furthermore, the promotion of documentary and ethnographic film was directly

engineered by the state and its efforts to promote a sense of national identity. Already in

the 1940s, both Tindale and Mountford were calling for “more publicly viewable

versions” of their ethnographic films, and Mountford also explicitly encouraged white

writers to recognize the potential in Aboriginal myths to create an Australian (white)

literature that would draw from the epic qualities of Aboriginal mythology, translating it,

though, into the known forms of classical Greek epic, so as not to challenge the

contemporary Western Weltanschauung (Roberts and Mountford 14). Tindale’s and

Mountford’s films assured a continuous and growing interest in Aboriginal stories and

spectacle; partially as a result of their curiosity for alterity, the Australian Institute of

Aboriginal Studies was established, which, as Ian Bryson illustrates, was an “explicitly nationalistic” endeavor (10). The need for such an institute was sustained by William

Charles Wentworth, who used their efforts to advance evolutionary arguments about

deepening the knowledge of human beings and documenting the existence of a race that was dying out. Yet, as Bryson argues, part of Wentworth’s project was also “to incorporate the ‘classic’ past of Aboriginal people into a totalizing narrative about what

was to be an Australian” (10); Wentworth was hence claiming, like Mountford before him, a sense of the “antiquity of Aboriginal Australia” for white Australia.

As I will discuss in the next section, the Australian national feature film industry is also heavily indebted to Aboriginal beliefs and meanings, which were never amenable to containement in the allegedly scientific films of Australian anthropologists and ethnographers, because, as Rony argues, “the boundaries between the cinema of science

(cinématographe) and cinema of entertainment (cinématoscope) were never clearly drawn” (Rony 65). In her extensive study of the many (colonial) contacts between ethnographic and entertainment cinema, Rony has shown that ethnographic footage was mainly exploited for commercial rather than strictly educational purposes. Interestingly, to support her claim, Rony refers back to the “sensationalist fashion” in which Spencer used his field experiments with the kinematograph (64): his emphasis on ceremonies, dances, and images of “crudeness and savagery” was clearly aimed at turning his pseudoscientific footage into a source of spectacle and entertainment for white

Australians (64-65). Such a commercial goal comes as no surprise, considering that

Spencer was sponsored by the Australian daily newspaper The Age, for which he wrote

articles directed at a “general audience” on a regular basis. Alison Griffiths documents

that this commercial financing clearly skewed Spencer’s descriptions and accounts away

from pseudoscientific reports and more towards entertaining travelogue (161-62).

Conscious of “the popular fascination with Australian Aborigines,” Spencer did not shy

away from sensationalizing his films and accounts, especially in the lecture tours he

organized with the help of a “theatre entrepreneur” and advertised “in the entertainment

pages of local newspapers” (162).150 With no anthropological training, Nicholls similarly

targeted “a popular audience” for his ethnographic films, as shown in his intertitles that

emphasized the primitiveness of Aborigines described as “anthropoid ape-like man”

(Dunlop 13). Bryson inserts Nicholls’ films in the “Flaherty mode” of ethnographic

filmmaking that was “narrative-driven” and intended “for general cinematic release” (5).

In an attempt to enhance the commercial potential of such films, Mountford advocated for more public screenings and exploitation of Aboriginal myths, going so far as

approaching Walt Disney in the attempt to find a more extensive, commercial outlet for

early Australian film ethnography (Bryson 6, Leigh 84).

Although Mountford’s project did not come to realization, ethnographic film in

Australia did receive more state funding and commercial viewing over the years, offering for at least twenty years the only source of “indigenous” cinematic entertainment for

Australian audiences. This strand of filmmaking was promoted by the Commonwealth

Film Unit in an effort to nurture the promotion of a national cinema, by following the example of the National Film Board of Canada and the film philosophy of renowned documentary filmmaker and producer John Grierson, who proposed, organized, and

directed it before founding the British Documentary Movement (Cunningham and Jacka

111). A strong admirer of Robert Flaherty and the producer of one of the movement’s acknowledged classics, Basil Wright’s 1934 The Song of Ceylon (parodied with equal finesse by Jayamanne in 1985), Grierson strongly influenced the Canadian state financing of documentaries on Canadian “native themes.” His pupil at the National Film Board of

Canada, Hawes, was then hired to supervise the Australian “News and Information

Bureau in the Federal Government’s Department,” soon known as the Commonwealth

Film Unit. Transplanting the Griersonian and Canadian model, Hawes soon extended the funding for documentary and ethnographic projects of Australian national interest

(Bryson 6).151 These trans-continental cultural exchanges determined “the dominant aesthetics operating in Australian film of the seventies,” which according to Dermody and Jacka are, on the one hand, the “social-problem film with its origins in Grierson- inspired Commonwealth Film Unit values,” and, on the other, the “AFC genre” focused on the landscape (48-50).152 Beyond the already discussed connections between

Australian ethnographic cinema and “Grierson-inspired” films, it is interesting to note that the “AFC genre,” to a certain extent, also harkens back to the indigenous spectacle of early ethnography. In his analysis of the intertextual construction of the Australian nation,

Gibson documents how the “landscape film” in Australia partially rests on Aborigines’ understanding of the “south land,” which ethnographic film and research popularized.

Thus, I would argue that the continuous and significant tradition of ethnographic filmmaking in Australia, with its inherent blurring of the boundaries between pseudoscientific study and ethnographic spectacle, anticipates the Australian national

cinema’s own common “blend of fact and fiction” and the fact that “documentary is

never far away in Australian cinema” (O’Regan Australian National Cinema 238).153 In this sense, ethnographic filmmaking should be considered a considerable actor in the

“intertextual invention” of Australia that saw Aboriginal myths and narratives appropriated for the sake of fashioning a dominant national identity and image (Shohat and Stam 67).154

Certainly, Moffatt thinks that early Australian ethnographic films and

photographs over-determine the representation of Australian Aborigines; for this reason,

with her short film she chooses to distance herself from such a tradition. Although,

according to Deb Verhoeven, she admired the films of previous Aboriginal filmmakers

like Essie Coffey’s My Survival as an Aboriginal (1979), she lamented the fact that

“Aboriginals [are] always seen as anthropological and documentary subjects” (Moffatt

The Bulletin). For this reason, Moffatt refrained from making Nice Coloured Girls a social documentary, opting for an experimental short that could effectively challenge ethnographic discourse and its central role in the construction of an Australian national identity and cinema. In the film, Moffatt successfully challenges the power relations reproduced in classic ethnographic filmmaking, by having the girls collaborate with the camera to turn their male customers into ethnographic spectacle. She thus accords with

Rony’s observation that the gaze at the other always contained the threat of being returned;155 although cinema about the Other has worked hard to mask the structure of

the gaze so as to avoid such a risk, subaltern groups have long seen the potential of

looking back and appropriating the cinematic medium. Thereby, Aboriginal filmmakers,

artists, and activists carry out what anthropologist and filmmaker Faye Ginsburg calls a

“resignification” of early ethnographic filmmaking: if for Spencer and his followers early

ethnographic footage indirectly signified the prompt extinction of the Indigenous peoples

of Australia, that same footage can be used today to signify the resilience and survival of

Aboriginal peoples (“Screen Memories” 92).156 In her later work, Moffatt reinforces the

layered and multiple connections between the ethnographic tradition and the development

of a national feature film industry, pointing to their shared deployments of Indigenous

bodies and myths.

2.2.2 Australian Feature Film and the Spectacle of Alterity: Moffatt’s

Resignification of the classic Jedda in Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy

In line with her belief that the “the most interesting artists” are those who possess

“a keen awareness of history” and who are not fearful of “borrowing” from other artists and from the global archive of images, Moffatt continues to tap into the visual archive of

Australian history in her later work (Moffatt “Letter to Lynne Cooke”). With her second short film, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), Moffatt moves to directly targeting the national feature film industry by borrowing from an acclaimed classic of Australian national cinema, Charles Chauvel’s Jedda (1955), the only post WWII commercial success of the Australian movie industry of the 1950s. With the film, Chauvel tackled the subject of inter-racial relations, then even more controversial from now, in Australia and of the assimilation of Australian Aborigines; the plot focuses on the young Aboriginal orphan, Jedda, whom the McMann settler family takes in and tries to raise within white culture. In the film, Chauvel stages a debate between the assimilationist policies of

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Neville espoused by Sarah McMann, the white mother, and the contradictory “smoothing

the pillow of a dying race policy” indirectly sustained by Douglas McMann’s attitude to

Aborigines as untamable “noble savages.” Torn between the white and Aboriginal worlds, Jedda falls prey to the attraction for the “full-blooded” Marbuk, a black “Tarzan,” representing the “’real primitive’ … [who] refuses to submit to civilization” (Langton

59).157 Yet, her white upbringing has doomed her survival in the Aboriginal world and

the film’s tragic ending, with Jedda’s and Marbuk’s death, ultimately reinforces the

predominant belief of the time that Aboriginal cultures were destined to die out.

In Night Cries, Moffatt provocatively re-imagines Jedda, bringing her back to life

as the only surviving custodian of her fragile and disabled white adoptive mother.

Although Moffatt “cannot bring [herself] to say that Jedda was an ‘important film’” – she

regards it, in fact, as “overblown,” “melodramatic,” and “racist” (qtd. in Matt 66), she

clearly understands its influence on the construction of an Australian national film canon

and of media representations of Aborigines. Exploring the ambiguities, contradictions, and tensions in the colonial and filial relationship at the center of the film, Moffatt unveils the many intertextual layers that constitute Chauvel’s representations. Her short exaggerates and parodies the two main influences at work in Chauvel’s text: on the one hand, the Australian director fashioned a Hollywood-like interior scenography, which

Moffatt describes as “very American, very Bonanza, from the era when Australian films were trying to be like American Westerns” (qtd. in Murray 22); on the other hand,

Chauvel was eager to celebrate the Australian exterior landscape that features almost as a character in the film (O’Regan Australian National Cinema 66) and serves to reinforce

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the “sense of national destiny” that Chauvel believed Australian cinema needed to

promote (Lewis 11). Moffatt deconstructs these two, partially contrasting, aspects of

Chauvel’s aesthetics by defamiliarizing and interrupting her re-invention of Jedda with a

manipulation of the mise-en-scéne reminiscent of Albert Namatjira’s paintings. Namatjira

was the first Aboriginal painter to gain national and international success, so much so that

he was granted citizenship rights in 1957, ten years before the national referendum on the

inclusion of Aborigines as full citizens. There are no documentary-like sequences in this

short as there are in Nice Coloured Girls; on the contrary the most striking feature is the

artificiality of the scenography, which, I would argue, constitutes a direct comment on the

dominant Australian tradition of the “landscape film” I have discussed and its relation to

the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Australia.

To a certain extent, the emphasis on the landscape typical of the “AFC genre” of

the 1970s, dates back to the very beginning of Australian national cinema, which, in no

way secondary to Australian ethnographic filmmaking’s historic relevance, boasts the

first indisputably feature-length narrative movie in film history, The Story of the Kelly

Gang shot in 1906 and released at approximately 4,000 feet.158 The film revolved around the exploits of renowned Australian outlaw Ned Kelly and contributed to the consolidation of the heroic bushranger myth. The Tait brothers, producers of the film, recognized the potential of this “indigenous melodrama” to tap into the market of narrative films that had been exposed by the “knock-out” success of the Christian film

“lecture,” Soldiers of the Cross, produced by the Salvation Army in 1900 (Shirley and

Adams 13-14).159 As Graham Shirley and Brian Adams point out, the Tait brothers were

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aware of the “capacity of film for naturalism,” which convinced them to use many

“outdoor locations,” naturally coupled by “horses, guns, [and] trains” for further

sensationalization (Graham and Shirley 17). Thus, since the very first Australian feature

thus, the outback proved a bankable source of cinematic spectacle and “was to remain

dominant on Australian film screens for almost half a century” (25), especially in the popular bushranger films, which were eventually banned in New South Wales in 1912 with the accusation of making “a mockery of the law and glorify[ing] outlawry” (Pike and Ross 4). However, as Pike and Ross observe, a focus on the Australian land was generally encouraged by producers, who, during the golden age of early Australian cinema between 1906 and 1912, preferred “subjects with open-air Australian settings – stories of the convict days or of the gold rushes, sporting dramas, station life in the outback” (3).160 Although this early insistence on the Australian landscape did not always include representations of Aborigines, their erasure in many of these pictures is arguably equally significant. The “most important and prolific director of the Australian cinema’s silent era,” Raymond Longford, for instance, never filmed any footage featuring

Aboriginal Australians and made many movies in urban locations.161 However, he shared

the belief in the “naturalism” of the cinematic medium and always preferred shooting on

location. In his most famous feature The Sentimental Bloke (1919), he intersperses a

typically urban story in Sydney, various natural scenery sequences celebrating the beauty

of Australian beaches, dawns, and sunsets. The moralizing tale concludes with Bill’s

redemption through his marriage to Doreen and with their eventual move to the country,

where, finally, “from the ashes of a ne’er-do’well a bloomin’ farmer’s blossomin’ like

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‘ell!!.” emerged. The redemptive narrative functions as a nationalist tale of a settler

society, encouraging its new citizens to give up the excitement of outlaw life to conquer

the Australian land, by farming and populating it; this storyline resonates with colonial history. The nationalist undertones of the Sentimental Bloke emerge in full force in

Longford’s next film, On Our Selection (1990) that follows the adventures of

“Australia’s favourite family, the Rudds” and their struggle to make a living on the land.

The film even opens with the dedication:

Pioneers of Australia! To you who gave our country birth / to the memory of you/ whose names, whose giant enterprise, whose deeds of fortitude and daring / were never engraved on tablet or tombstone: to You who strove through the silences of the Bush-lands and made them ours.

As echoed in these lines, the preeminence conferred to the Australian landscape and its farmland since the very beginning of Australian feature film is directly associated to the colonization of Australia and, arguably, to the doctrine of terra nullius, where the land was presented as unoccupied territory and therefore free for settlement.

Simultaneously, the uniqueness of the land, its stark difference from any European landscape, turned it into an instrumental sign of “Australianness,” “a myth sustaining a national character and identity” (Gibson 6). Such a sign, however, to claim legitimacy and take hold in the national imaginary, required the secondary incentive of

“uniqueness.” Thus, settler narratives of colonial landscapes, devoid of Aboriginal inscriptions, went hand in hand with another popular trend in Australian commercial cinema that extended well into the 1960s, namely the travelogue, figured as voyage of exploration (Pike and Ross 4). In a constant desire to conquer and catch the most “‘real scenery’” on film, filmmakers often traveled across the land encouraged by the

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“enormous public following for “portraits of little-seen corners of Australia” (4); exemplary in this regard was Francis Birtles’s Across Australia shot in 1911 as a

travelogue of the director’s adventurous touring of the homeland. In the 1940s, Chauvel seems to have performed a synthesis of these two trends in Australian cinema, fashioning

settler epics infused with the same nationalistic, pioneering spirit championed by

Longford, but also exoticized and further localized through his own semi-ethnographic explorations of the Australian land. Chauvel was a “bushman from Queensland” who with his South-African wife and collaborator, Elsa, traveled across Australia to search for actors, stories, and scenery to include in his Australian epics. The couple documented their explorations in their book Walkabout that was also to become Chauvel’s last film,

Australian Walkabout (1959), a documentary produced for Australian TV. As the title suggests, Chauvel’s adventurous spirit was “indigenized,” by relying on the term used to

refer to the Aboriginal ritual re-tracing of their sacred songlines, a term popularized by

Mountford’s early ethnographic film of the 1940s and later by the successful British

production of Nicholas Roeg’s film Walkabout (1971).162 The Chauvels open their

travelogue explaining that “for four long years we have literally followed in the footsteps

of the Stone Age men and women with our cameras” (XI) and that unfortunately, “the

mighty black men of these mountains, the aborigines, have gone” (16). As in their film

Jedda, the Chauvels confirm here their belief in the noble savage myths and in the

“extinction” of the Indigenous peoples of Australia.163 They recall that during six months

of these four years, they traveled through the “northlands” to search for “the aborigines

and the backgrounds” of Jedda. As their daughter Sausanne Chauvel Carlsson documents

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in a biography of her parents, the concept for Jedda had actually been suggested to

Chauvel by an “American reporter” who argued foreign audiences wanted “something

uniquely Australian,” and nothing was more so than the “Aboriginal race” suggested the

journalist (151). As his biographies and travelogues illustrate, Chauvel was convinced of

the commercial value of the exotic spectacle I have been discussing above; his

explorations of native Australia constituted a conscious and nationalistic endeavor to

appropriate enough “local myths and color” to serve his settler epics. He thus wove the

storyline of Jedda out of stories heard during his trips; he recruited actors in the outback

and involved them in the creation of the scenography as well (Carlsson 95, 151).164 As

Elsa and Charles proudly boast, Jedda was an international success, so much so that soon afterwards, Elsa could report that “the painted country of the centre is advertised by the

Travel Bureaux as Jedda country” (161). The Chauvels in this way exemplified the formula for successful entertainment, a canny blend of American production values, nationalist narratives, and ethnographic/exotic spectacle,165 one that has proved

successful ever since as attested to by the highest grossing success of Australian Cinema,

Peter Faiman’s Crocodile Dundee (1986) (Reid 5), which, as Leigh argues, is not as

distant from the “curio-pastiche” that informed early ethnographic and feature cinema in

Australia (83).

With her re-imagining of Jedda and re-enactment of the landscape tradition,

Moffatt performs a criticism of the early appropriation of Aboriginal mythology and

lands by the Australian realist filmic tradition.166 She draws attention to the commodification of Aboriginal cultures and land as tourist attractions, as well as to the

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hypocrisy of their simultaneous dispossession and appropriation.167 In the initial shots of

Night Cries, Moffatt juxtaposes exterior shots of a painted and artificial red landscape

with a close-up of Jedda (played by Aboriginal anthropologist Marcia Langton) reading a tourist brochure with an attractive photograph of the fascinating red country, the “Jedda country,” described by Elsa. The tourist brochure seems out of place in a solitary homestead in the outback and starkly contrasts with the artificiality of the setting. Such an incongruous association brings to mind the many commercial artefacts and images used to sell “things Australian”: red land, didgeridoos, boomerangs, tribal Aboriginal dancing, and so many more. These advertising strategies constitute, as Maurie Scott observes, an “outright theft of indigenous art and the appropriation of Aboriginal iconography for commercial purposes” (141).168 To an extent, Moffatt unmasks and

challenges such exploitative uses of Aboriginal signs, pointing also to the complicit role

played by Australian national cinema and industry in reinforcing national discourses

constructed on the back of the pre-existing Indigenous cultures. In this sense, Jayamanne

argues that Moffatt’s artificial painted landscape constitutes “a sign of a sign,” (4),

because it simultaneously rejects the dominant white appropriation of the landscape and

(re)visits Aboriginal cultures. I would add that the artificiality of the setting could also

signify the Aboriginal conception of the country as a text, where all physical features are

“worked upon by people to make them meaningful” (Muecke 7). With her first and

second shorts, Moffatt symbolically (re)takes possession of the ancestral land, by bringing out the traces of its lived existence before colonization.169

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2.2.3 Accented Cinema in Australia: The Ghosts of Moffatt’s Bedevil and the

Discourses of Australian Multiculturalism

Moffatt’s feature film, beDevil, is her third and most recent contribution to

Australian cinema;170 it was released in 1993 and was “nominated as an Official selection

for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival” (Summerhayes “Haunting Secrets”

14). However, the film received mixed reviews, with Australian critics like John Woidylo

arguing that it was too obscure and formalist, a view that seems partially shared by film

scholars Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs. Others, like critics John Conomos, Raffaele

Caputo, Carol Laseur, and Catherine Summerhayes praised its surrealism and complex

perspective on Australian society. Moffatt maintains that her feature “blurs the

demarcation somewhat, between art gallery as a source of inspiration and the film

industry” (31). This is well exemplified by the narrative thread that connects the three

stories in which the film is divided, “Mr. Chuck,” “Choo Choo Choo,” and “Loving the

Spin I’m In”; they are all “inspired by family ghost stories [she] heard as a child,” thus employing a popular film narrative of haunting (qtd in Conomos and Caputo 28). While partially banking on the eerie sensation imparted by popular horror films, Moffatt is here also employing the trope of the ghost that surfaces in the work of numerous diasporic and marginalized artists and writers, who have seen in this figure a means to (re)write themselves into history.171 In its immateriality, the ghost becomes a means to speak to the

present and the future, providing an alternative account of history. Laseur argues that

Moffatt’s title, beDevil, addresses both “content and reading positions,” in that the ghost

functions as a figure of bedevilment for the spectator, but its insertion also allows

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Moffatt’s stories to bedevil official history, as “an ongoing interventionist practice into a

destabilizing of white Australian history as a master narrative.” In beDevil, Moffatt

illuminates how the ghosts of colonialism, but also neo-colonialism, have always haunted

the founding myths, narratives of Australian national cinema. Through these

disembodied, haunting memories, Moffatt also opens up an oblique perspective on

Australian society in the 1990s and the controversial policies and discourses of this

period, such as the launch of multicultural policies, the land rights legislation, and the

Stolen generation scandal. Considering the historical context of beDevil’s production, I

would argue that, despite the critical accusations of excessive formalism, Moffatt actually

reminds us of the contradictions of Australian national discourses on multiculturalism

that the state actively promoted with its financing of the film industry.

beDevil was produced with a budget of 2.5 million Australian dollars mainly

thanks to the sponsorship of the Australian Film Finance Corporation; the funds were

partially a response to the success of her second short Night Cries (Summerhayes

“Haunting Secrets” 23n2) and to the launch of the Multicultural Agenda in 1989.172 This was the second time the Australian government sponsored a major push towards film production in Australia; as already mentioned, the first time was in the mid-1960s and resulted in the national and international success of Australian New Wave cinema. The successes continued for much of the 1970s, but in the following decade, apart from the exceptional box-office success of Crocodile Dundee in 1985 and the release of the third, less successful sequel Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, featuring Mel Gibson’s Mad

Max character, in the same year, Australian cinema was once again overpowered by

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Hollywood production and its 1980s blockbuster sequels. The Multicultural Agenda in

the nineties was thus modelled on the successful government subsidization of the film industry in the 1970s and pursued the same goal of countering the dominance of

Hollywood products in the domestic market. Phillip Adams, the head of the Australian

Film Commission, who had been one of the key players in swaying the right-wing

Liberal Government led by Prime Minister John Gorton to launch state funding for the

film industry in the 1960s, spoke out again in June 1985 on the Saturday column of The

Australian to “castigate Australians for so uncritically accepting American culture”

(Lewis 24), a complaint that had first motivated him twenty years earlier. In her first story, “Mr. Chuck,” Moffatt indirectly comments on Hollywood’s impact in Australia, by focusing the narrative on a missing American GI. It is his ghost that haunts the construction of the “poxy cinema above that stink'n' swamp,” as the young Rick, an

Aboriginal boy protagonist of the story, describes it in his prison cell; it is from here that he re-tells the story of his infection by the bad vapors of the swamp. The presence of the

American GI is visualized also through film-like posters of an American soldier, recalling imagery of the 1960s and the Vietnam War. Moffatt seems here to address the impact of

American culture on Australian society and cinema, having a movie theatre being constructed over the swamp that hides an American soldier’s corpse, and hence, indirectly, on “the memory of the U.S. culture of the 1960s” (Wojdylo 46). As Laseur also suggests, by including the movie theatre and the American GI, Moffatt points to the fact that “a place that generates stories [the swamp] has now become the site for another type of story-telling.” Moffatt is here appropriating the Hollywood stylistic conventions

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and imagery she assimilated during her childhood, turning them into tools to tell her own hybrid stories, where the ghosts of the Australian colonial past haunt every frame.

Beyond responding to Hollywood’s domination of the Australian film market, the

Multicultural Agenda was also responding to the increasing demands by the many immigrant groups in Australia (Molnar).173 If the 1970s Australian films “sold” an image

of a vast, mysterious, and spiritual land, the 90s brought Australian suburbia and its

ethnic minorities to the silver screen. Multiculturalist state policies started with the

official termination of the White Australia Policy under the Whitlam Labor Government,

whose Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, “issued a statement entitled A Multi-

Cultural Society for the Future in 1973” (Stratton and Ang). Initially, the new program

was “aimed at accommodating the existing, principally Southern European, cultural

diversity” (O’Regan “Introducing Critical Multiculturalism”), recognizing the failure of

previous assimilationalist policies (Stratton and Ang). However, as Jon Stratton and Ien

Ang argue, multicultural policies were “not just a pragmatic response to problems

encountered with the absorption of migrants,” but also a “(politically self-conscious) shift

away from” an imagined homogenous community, in order to emphasize instead “the

productivity of cultural difference – located in ethnicity – rather than in the old emphasis

of race as the marker of national cultural limits.” The Multicultural Agenda was part of

this refashioning of the concept of the Australian nation, becoming “a state-underwritten

blueprint for the ideal Australian national identity as unity-in-diversity” where “minority

cultures are now welcomed and celebrated as enriching Australian national culture rather

than threatening it” (Stratton and Ang).174 As with many similar projects in other

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“multicultural countries,” this kind of “heritage politics,” or “minority politics” often serves more to celebrate a state’s symbolic pluralism, rather than to empower subaltern voices concretely, which gain brief visibility while being safely contained (see Shohat and Stam, Miller et.al., and Appadurai).175

As a matter of fact, multicultural policies in Australia have often ignored the nation’s Aboriginal populations; on the one hand, this is due to the Indigenous people’s own understandable refusal to be considered “‘another ethnic minority,” as Moffatt herself in conversation with the Minister for the Arts and Health as early as 1989 complained, noting that Aboriginal art projects could erroneously find funding only as

“ethnic projects” (Howell 34). On the other hand, these instances prove the inability of political multiculturalism to come to terms with the racist colonial history of Australia, which the ideal of “consensual unity-in-diversity” tries to erase (Stratton and Ang). Given the fact that the intervention in the film industry was launched just one year after the bicentennial celebrations of the founding of Australia, its colonial history was, however, impossible to ignore completely. Facing numerous demonstrations against the celebration of an anniversary that for the Indigenous peoples of Australia symbolized the beginning of genocide, the state actively attempted to shrug off its past of colonialism and racism, promoting the project of reconciliation. In this spirit, the AFC sponsored Hidden

Pictures, a touring project, which “promot[ed] an indigenous cinema whose beginnings are located in collaborations between non-Aboriginal film-makers and Aboriginal actors and individuals” (O’Regan Australian National Cinema 75).176 To an extent, the series supported the view that contemporary filmmakers, film institutes, and their funding

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entities are now making up for the past. Such a framework seems to overshadow the harsh battles that Aborigines themselves had to fight to obtain recognition, while ascribing both the guilt and the merit to white Australians and institutions.177

In beDevil, Moffatt directly addresses the multicultural make-up of Australian society, pointing to its inner tensions and conflicts. The main characters in “Love the

Spin I’m in” are the Greek/Australian Dimitri, who owns a building he is trying to sell to the Asian businessmen Conos and Fong, yet he cannot conclude the deal because of the

Aboriginal woman Emelda who refuses to vacate the building. As this brief synopsis already suggests, Moffatt presents us different phases of Australian migratory patterns, by presenting the second or third generation of Greek immigrants who have assimilated to Australian society, but who are now facing the new challenges of a globalized economy, which, in Australia, is strongly associated with the increasing economic and political relations and exchanges with the neighboring Asian countries. Emelda literally stands inbetween these two phases of migration to Australia, while the ghosts of her people haunt the building, refusing to be ejected and forgotten. While discussing the business deal with the Chinese entrepreneurs, Dimitri’s attempts to reassure them of the building’s vacation are ironically challenged by the arrival of an impersonation of Frida

Kahlo, the Mexican surrealist painter, who has become a feminist icon. I will discuss the comic value of this masquerade in Chapter Three, but here I would like to suggest that the evocation of Kahlo seems to throw the multicultural picture of Australia under a new light. The interruption of the somewhat linear narrative through this ambiguous performance suddenly inserts into the (post)colonial world of multicultural Australia the

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memory of another fighter for proletarian and indigenous rights. The excessive artificiality of Kahlo’s entry in the filmic frame forces the viewer to speculate on how

Kahlo and her artistic and political work can comment upon the Australian context. The masquerade allows Moffatt to represent Aboriginality as it develops in dialogue with other cultures within and outside national borders;178 it inserts the discussion of multiculturalism into the global context discussed above, refusing to hide the inequalities that underlie cultural differences. Moving beyond multicultural Australia to establish symbolic connections with marginalized groups around the world, Moffatt seems to suggest that in terms of power relations, exploitation, and discrimination, Aborigines have more in common with the histories of indigenous peoples of other nations subjected to settler colonization, rather than with the ethnic minorities gaining visibility in Australia in the early 1990s.

Forcing viewers to reflect on the contradictions of the celebrated national drive for multiculturalism, Moffatt insists that too many colonial ghosts still haunt Australia for the history of dispossession and genocide to be set aside and easily “reconciled.” In fact, the ghosts evoked by Moffatt indirectly relate to the two historic re-assessments of

Australian colonial history that took place in the 1990s: the cultural shock provoked by the Eddie Koiki Mabo’s court victory against the State of Queensland which “overturned the nation’s founding doctrine of terra nullius” (3),179 and the publication of the previously discussed Bringing Them Home report in 1997. While not fully fitting what

Collins and Davis define as “post-Mabo” cinema,180 given the fact that the film was released just one year after the groundbreaking decision and before its full impact could

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be felt, Moffatt seems to anticipate the “concepts of shock, recognition and trauma” that

will characterize “post-Mabo” cinema (9).181 Indeed, all three stories focus on haunted

houses built on previously inhabited terrain; the cinema’s erection above the corpse of the

American GI can indirectly remind us of the many battles fought by Aborigines to protect

the resting grounds of their ancestors; the young Ruby of “Choo, Choo, Choo” is chased

out of her house by the ghost of a white girl and the sound of the impending train

symbolic of white colonization; finally, in the third story, Indigenous peoples are forcibly

vacated from their home in the name of corporate business. Thus, even though Moffatt

never directly addresses the issue of land rights, it is always possible to read it as a

subtext in her stories. Moffatt seems also to anticipate the scandal of the Stolen

Generation, which erupted five years after the release of her film, but that was already

much debated in the early nineties, by focusing on the figure of the ghost, who, in the

film, is often embodied by a mysteriously missing child. As in her two shorts, Moffatt

establishes continuity between past colonial oppression and present economic pressure.

By constantly shifting temporalities, merging and blurring past and present, Moffatt reminds us that the past is self-constructed, drawn by our memories and voices and therefore always conveying a sense of artificiality, while the present is never fixed, bearing the tensions of the past; for this reason, it is often interrupted by those voices that were once repressed. As shown in this brief overview, Moffatt’s oblique reappraisal of founding myths and histories directly correlates with her engagement with the history of

Australian national cinema and its complicity in the attempt to suppress the ghosts of the

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country’s past, which she instead lets freely bedevil national discourses and film practices.

2.3 Monica Pellizzari: Recovering an Ethnic Identification through Migrant Film

Schooling

If Moffatt and her work have offered a first introduction into the national policies implemented by the Australian film industry since its beginnings, and delved into its inner tensions and contradictions, Pellizzari’s films contribute to a further investigation of governmental programs, while containing echoes, conversations, and reactions across the oceans. In this section, I will further illustrate the relation of the Australian film industry to Hollywood cinema and its domination of the Australian market, which led Pellizzari to recognize the need for domestic representations of her community as a response to the common stereotypical representations of Italian Americans in cinema. Furthermore, I will discuss how the active financing of a local film industry to counter the U.S. giant spurred the development of funds and training for women filmmakers. This attempt at removing the hurdles faced by women filmmakers is clearly acknowledged by Pellizzari, who presents her work as a response to the dearth of women’s filmic representations and an appreciation of the few women filmmakers who made it in the commercial industry like

Hungarian Marta Meszaros, and the Polish director, Agnieszka Holland. Beyond the inspiration of a global women’s cinema, Pellizzari’s filmmaking also owes much to

Italian cinema, to which she was drawn because of her training, but also perhaps her descent. Briefly reviewing these intersecting local and global connections, I intend to bring out the multiple accents that make up the layered aesthetics of Pellizzari’s cinema.

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These, however, are also linked to the hybrid position of Australian national cinema and

society and their ensuing struggle towards self-definition.

2.3.1 Global Hollywood’s Hold Down Under: An Italian Australian Responds to

Italian/American Stereotyping

Pellizzari started to make films because she “wanted to tell stories from [her] roots and to represent people who had migrated as three-dimensional characters, not just

Mafiosi or greengrocers with heavy accents and greasy hair” (qtd. in Colbert “Bi-Cultural

Visions” 23). These were the dominant representations she grew up with, watching

Australian TV and films, as well as heavy doses of imported American programs and movies. Certainly, Pellizzari has, in all her film work to date, focused on depicting the

lives of common, working- and middle-class Italian/Australian women who have been

largely invisible on both small and big screens. Her stories relish the fragmentariness of

memories and the charm of well-executed, daily routines that are rarely deemed worth

filming; she zooms in on women cooking, working, and struggling with their own

marginalization. Her cinematic style alternates a neo-realist celebration of common lives

with a fresh, irreverent, humorous, and cinematically formalist attack on realist and

stereotypical conventions; she thus directly rejects the many cinematic clichés of Italians

as well as more general Hollywood cinematic conventions. For this reason, Pellizzari’s

filmmaking needs to be contextualized within a discussion of the impact of American

movies on Australian national cinema and on the dominant representations of hyphenated

Italians across the oceans.

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Pellizzari recalls that as a child she “couldn’t understand why everyone spoke with an American accent” and “for a while [she] wondered if we were actually part of

America” (qtd. in Litson 66). Pellizzari’s satiric and provocative recollections point to the very real position of Australian film and television vis-à-vis Hollywood. In spite of the

Australian film industry’s successes in the very first years of the twentieth century,182 by

the 1910s, American entrepreneurs emerged as key figures in the field: J.D. Williams, for

instance, founded one of the most popular nickelodeons in Australia (Lewis 9), the

Crystal Palace, which was extolled as “the handsomest” by the Bulletin and became

“Australia’s first continuous cinema” (Shirley and Adams 23).183 During the 1920s,

Australia continued producing films, including enduring successes like The Sentimental

Bloke (1919), but the national production declined and American movies increasingly infiltrated the market (Lewis 8, Pike and Ross 65), thanks to Hollywood’s “ascendancy”

“during the war years” (Pike and Ross 64).184 As studies of Australian national cinema

point out, this increasing domination of American products in Australia in the 1920s

triggered numerous nationalist debates about Australian culture and production that

culminated in the institution of a Royal Commission in 1927-28 (Graham and Shirley 74-

80, Pike and Ross 115-26). The commission was appointed to investigate the erosion of

“values of the British ruling class … by the twin menace of ‘Americanism’ and

‘Bolshevism’” (Blonski et.al. 33).185 Despite the increasing denunciation of Hollywood’s

domination of the Australian film industry, the former continued to flood Australian

screens and, by the 1950s, Hollywood also started to shoot large-scale productions in

Australia thanks to “taxation incentives” and lower costs (Miller et.al. 143). After WWII,

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Australian film production practically disappeared for twenty years (Dermody and Jacka

48); simultaneously, however, Australian television started a push towards

Australianization to counter the overwhelming import of American culture through film

and TV products. Ensuing pressures for more “Australian content” finally found an

official response in the setting of quotas in 1962 (Lewis 56). This first state intervention

anticipated the launch of subsidized film production in 1969 (56) “through state subsidy,

investment and tax concessions (in the 1980s), private (non-film and television industry)

and industry capital” (O’Regan Australian National Cinema 13).186 It is these measures

that led to the renaissance of Australian national cinema in the 1970s.

Yet, Pellizzari’s first acculturation to cinema and her desire to become a

filmmaker resulted from her negative exposure to U.S. cinema and television, in particular from her dissatisfaction with the stereotypical representations of Italian

Americans that crossed the ocean and marked her as “wog” in the eyes of her

Anglo/Australian neighbors and classmates (qtd. in Colbert “Bi-Cultural Visions” 23, “Il

Cinema in Ottica Italo-Australiana” 24, Conomos 33-34). With about four million

Italians arriving in the U.S. since 1890, double as many Jewish immigrants (Daniels 189),

Italian Americans made an early entry into Hollywood cinema, where they served as “the quintessential example of European immigrants” (Cortes 90). Summarizing various studies of Italian/American stereotypes from drama to cinema, the traits that seem to have been cemented as “Italian” on screen are low-class status: often expressed in terms of inarticulateness, criminality, violence, machismo, female passiveness and dependency, and the excessive enjoyment of food and wine.187 By the 1930s, Italian Americans had

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been constructed as “undesirable icons” (92) and “served as extreme examples of moral

corruption, revenge, sexual license, and wild jealousy” (Lourdeaux 81). Two of the most

significant and successful movies in this period were Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar

(1931) and Howard Hawks’s Scarface: the Shame of a Nation (1932). As Pellegrino

D’Acierno observes, these two films “established once and for all the (im)proper place of

the figure of the Italian American in the American imaginary” (568), and, I would add, in

the global cinematic imaginary pointed out by Pellizzari’s own story. In the years after

WWII, representations of Italian Americans diversified;188 in addition to the ever-present

gangsters, Italian immigrants and working-class men of Italian descent appeared, the

most beloved and famous being Marty, the naïve and good-hearted butcher who

conquered the Academy Awards in 1955.189 These movies belong to what Tom Zaniello

terms the “ethnic working-class cycle of films” (154), which runs parallel to the dominant

gangster one and includes the long tradition of Italian cinematic boxers, culminating with

the ever popular Rocky (1973) and Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), and the reincarnation

of Rudolph Valentino as numerous cinematic “guidos” made famous by John Travolta’s

iconic performance as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977).190 These cinematic

Italian/American men have been marked by stereotypical traits like stupidity,

inarticulateness, vanity in hair care and clothing, womanizing, machismo, and

violence,191 a representational baggage that directors of Italian descent had to confront when they conquered the U.S. cinematic stage in the 1970s, a period supplied with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, and Michael Cimino

(Cortes 98). Thanks to their work, in the second half of the twentieth century,

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Italian/American cinematic representations became more complex, nuanced, and layered,

stemming from inside the Italian/American community rather than conceived by the

Anglo/American establishment. Yet, the gangster stereotype was not to disappear soon;

on the contrary, it could be argued that it was cemented in the global imaginaries thanks

to Coppola and Scorsese, who have largely dominated the discourse of Italian/American

cinema (Casillo 374) and established “its two primary ‘genres’: the epic or large-scale

gangster film as art, and its gritty, more obsessive and visceral street-bound variant, the

‘mean streets’ film” (D’Acierno 679).192

Coppola’s operatic mafiosi and Scorsese’s gritty anti-heroes have migrated all

over the globe; they have inspired the next generation of young American directors like

Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee, to name but a few, and also younger filmmakers of

Italian descent.193 Pellizzari, for instance, names Scorsese as one of her cinematic

models, albeit lamenting his depiction of women; she actually sent him her short Just

Desserts for feedback and received back a letter of encouragement, which to her “was

‘like getting a message from God, saying ‘it’s okay. Proceed.’” (qtd. in Colbert “Bi-

Cultural Visions” 22). If Italian Americans shaped the public identity of many hyphenated Italians beyond U.S. borders, it should not be forgotten that other national cinemas were also in the business of exploiting ethnic stories and stereotypes for cinematic production. However, given that Italian migration to Australia started much later than to the Americas, Australian national cinema has a much shorter record of cinematic and televised hyphenated Italians. Pellizzari actually recalls that beyond the

American media stereotypes of greasy mafiosi, in Australia there were “one million of us

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‘Italians’,” but that Italian Australians were invisible in the few Australian television products (qtd. in Litson 66).

Indeed, in his essay “Migrant Images in Italian Australian Movies and

Documentaries,” Gaetano Rando argues that prior to the 1970s, Italians were hardly involved in the movie business in Australia, apart from director Thomas Marinato

(Sydney’s Darlings, 1926) and few actors like Ernesto Crosetto in the 1910s and Joe Valli and Charles Zolli in the 30s. The most popular representation of Italian migrants emerged instead in the late 1960s in direct collaboration with the homeland; in 1966, the British director Michael Powell filmed They’re a Weird Mob that starred Italian actor and comedian Walter Chiari. The film was based on John Patrick O’Grady’s novel by the same title, which told the story of Italian journalist Nino Culotta and his gradual assimilation into Australian society. Contrary to the stereotypes mentioned thus far,

Culotta is an educated man, who quickly learns the Australian ways and language to merge eventually into white Australian society by marrying “the daughter of a respected

Sydney builder of Irish descent” (Rando “Migrant Images”). Another successful cinematic Italian in Australia is Amedeo played by one of Italy’s most famous comic actors, Alberto Sordi, in the already-mentioned Italian-produced film Bello, Onesto,

Emigrato Australia Sposerebbe Compaesana Illibata (1971). Amedeo comes perhaps closest to the American Marty, a good-natured Italian man, whose physical appearance, shyness, and lack of social status encumber his relations with women; however, Amedeo is not clinging to his possessive Italian mother as Marty does, and during the journey through Australia he is given the opportunity to show a three-dimensional personality.

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The lack of an established mold for cinematic Italian Australians, as well as the

disparities in the histories of migration towards this continent, might partially explain the

lack of the gangster film among the productions of Italian/Australian directors.194

Arguably, the most prominent among them is Giorgio Mangiamele (Ninety Nine Per

Cent, 1963; Clay 1965), who started directing in Italy and emigrated to Australia in the

50s.195 He directed various films in the late 1960s focusing on the lives of working-class

men of Italian descent and is today considered by Australian film critics as a prominent

and early voice in Australian independent cinema (Tourneur, Lampugnani).196 Yet, his

films remain largely unknown to in Australia and abroad; his poetic representations of

Italian working-class lives in Australia, however, seem to have influenced, or at least

anticipated, the second generation of Italian/Australian filmmakers who emerged in the

1980s, numbering among them Luigi Acquisto (Spaventapasseri, 1986), Franco di Chiera

(La Scala, Lo Scalone, 1985), Nicolina Caia (For a Better Life, 1990 and Bread, 1991),

and Elvira Vacira (Il Frutto del Nostro Lavoro, 1989).197 As the titles suggest, Italian

Australian directors are far less removed from their ethnic origins than their American counterparts; for this reason, their films are marked by a frequent use of the Italian language and cultural references to a post-WWII Italy. Pellizzari belongs to this tradition,

but adds to the class perspective an emphasis on women’s cinema and the need to

challenge the heteronormative machismo of both Australian and Italian/Australian

cultures, as well as of the hyphenated Italian culture she might have inherited from the

Italian/American cinematic tradition outlined above. With her feminist re-reading of the

Italian/Australian family and Australian society, Pellizzari seems to be responding to the

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erasure of hyphenated Italian women’s stories from both the Hollywood tradition and the shorter celluloid history of Italian Australians.198

2.3.2 Pellizzari’s Hybrid Schooling and Cinema: The Role of the Short Film in

Women Accented Filmmaking

As illustrated above, Pellizzari’s work needs to be contextualized against

Hollywood’s impact on the Australian film industry and national imaginary; such an influence directly affected the public identity of Italian Australians, by overdetermining it with the popular cinematic representations of Italian Americans that were already well rooted in global visual cultures by the 1970s when Italian Australians became a significant minority in Australia. Pellizzari’s filmmaking challenges such stereotypes, but also the invisibility of women’s voices in Hollywood, in mainstream Australian cinema, and especially in Italian/American cinema. As she provocatively declares, she “was born a woman, a wog and a westie, the three worst things you could be in Australia” (Sunday

Telegraph). Pellizzari acknowledges the necessary genderedness of her body, as well as its social construction: “westie” being a term commonly used to disparage those living in the lower-class, western suburbs of Sydney – marked body. She thus acknowledges the intersections of different dimensions of her identity, which all accent her filmic perspective and speak to the wider social forces shaping Australian discourses. In particular, Pellizzari recognizes, to paraphrase Teresa de Lauretis, the heterogeneity within every individual and the fact that we are all necessarily gendered social subjects

(“Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women's Cinema” 171); for these reasons,

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it is important to contextualize Pellizzari’s work within women’s cinema globally and locally.

Following colonization, Australia has constructed a “masculinist image” of the nation through both literature and cinema (French “On Their Own Merits” 14, Turner

National Fictions 149-50) to the extent that “Australian virtues” are consistently

conflated with “male virtues,” as Dermody and Jacka argue (65). Yet, Australian national

cinema is today recognized internationally, beyond its Ned Kellys, Crocodile Dundees,

and sentimental larrikins; in spite of these masculinist images, it has actually acquired a

“reputation for producing exceptional women filmmakers” (French “On Their Own

Merits” 14). Since the late 1970s, Australian women directors have counted among the

most visible names Australian cinema has exported internationally: from the early

successes of Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career 1979, Little Women 1994, Oscar

and Lucinda 1997), to the adopted New Zealander Jane Campion (The Piano 1993, Holy

Smoke 1999, In the Cut 2003), to Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof 1991), Cate Shortland

(Somersault 2004), Shirley Barrett (Love Serenade 1996), and Sue Brooks (Japanese

Story 2003). Actresses have contributed to an even greater commercial success with star

power like Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts, Toni Collette, who work in

Hollywood but regularly participate in Australian projects.

Australian women have not always been as visible within the Australian film industry, although they did enjoy an early start; women filmmakers were indeed a visible

presence in 1920s Australia, when between 1921 and 1933 “sixteen feature films were

either produced or directed by women” (Speed “Voices from the Silent Era” 25).199 The

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actress Lottie Lyell, for instance, is today credited with a major role in the successes of

Longford, her contribution extended beyond acting into the production and making of the films. Louise Lovely was another actress, who after a short career in the U.S. returned to

Australia to direct, although she was soon disappointed by the lack of access for women

filmmakers and stopped after her first feature Jewell Nights (1925). Paulette McDonagh

succeeded in directing four feature films, Two Minutes Silence (1933), The Cheaters

(1930), The Far Paradise (1928), and Those Who Love (1926). McDonagh worked

together with her sisters, Isabel who acted in all her films, and Phyllis, who was

responsible for the production and art direction. Thanks to their family wealth, the

McDonagh sisters were able to finance their own films and are today credited as among

“the finest of Australian silent filmmakers” (O’Regan Australian National Cinema 72).

Their films are suburban, romantic dramas, often revolving around troubled love relationships and marriages; yet, as conservative as their films might have been, the

McDonagh sisters together with the other early women filmmakers were aware of the fact that they were breaking the normal boundaries of a male industry and society (Bertrand

34-38). They became feminist icons retroactively, when women filmmakers in the 1970s sought to establish a tradition for a women’s cinema long ignored.200 For many

Australian women filmmakers and critics, it was a search for “Our Founding Mothers,”

as Ina Bertrand appropriately titles her essay, in order to establish a continuity as well as

seek explanations for the absence of any woman filmmaker in Australia between

McDonagh’s last film in 1933 and Armstrong’s breakthrough film, My Brilliant Career,

in 1979 (Speed “Voices from the Silent Era” 36).

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Beyond recuperating the forgotten stories of women actively working in

Australian cinema at its beginning, Australian feminists during the 1970s exerted

pressure for more representability within the film industry. The initial stages of state

intervention into the film industry did little to favor women’s access in the field; Jocelyn

Robson and Beverley Zalcock, for instance, report that during the first year of the

Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) established in 1973 to promote

the training and development of domestic film talents, “there was a reluctance to recruit

women since, as one lecturer observed, they would end up as butchers’ wives in the

suburbs” (31). Although Campion did gain entry into the school, it took some years

before a “strong women’s perspective became a hallmark of the school” (31). The shift in

attitudes and policies was forced through by the activism of groups like the Sydney

Women’s Film Group, a part of the Sydney Women’s Liberation Movement. Women

activists organized the first conference on cinema and women in 1974, the Womenvision

Conference, and the first Australian women’s festival, Womenwaves in 1977.201 Prior to the festival, women activists succeeded in pressuring the state to establish the Women’s

Film Fund in 1976, which had already been a heated topic of discussion during the

International Women’s Year in 1975 when the first guidelines had been written down.202

The first years of the fund were very productive also thanks to the visibility of

Armstrong, who by 1979 had already acquired an international reputation (which

indirectly supported the demands for more access to film for women). The 1980s,

however, saw a conservative backlash, which affected the subsidization of the WFF as

well; from being administered independently, the fund was moved under the control of

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the AFC and its Creative Development Branch, which meant a competition for funds

between women’s cinema and experimental cinema (Stott 8, 17-18). The existence and

“necessity” of the WFF had been under scrutiny since its very inception until it was eventually suspended in 1988 (Robson and Zalcock 3).203 Despite its cancellation,

Robson and Zalcock report that in 1995 women still received “50 per cent of the official

funding available” (3), attesting to the central position that women filmmakers have

conquered in the Australian film industry (Stott 22).204 Thanks to the strong voices of

Australian women filmmakers, the masculinist image of Australia has been challenged,

deconstructed, and re-read in light of “the absences, the experiences of the women as the

mothers/wives/daughters of the down-to-earth, good, keen blokes” (Robson and Zalcock

7). Many of these women’s histories explore the “dark side” of Australian nationalist

discourses with a healthy dose of humor as Pellizzari does in her own films (Robson and

Zalcock 7, Collins “Brazen Brides”), an aspect to which I will return in Chapter Three.

Furthermore, these explorations have often targeted dominant cinematic

conventions, in search of what Claire Johnston famously defined as a counter-cinema; the

vehicle that has been most instrumental in this endeavor for feminist filmmakers in

Australia has been the short film. As Robson and Zalcock observe, short film “as a film

form … has traditionally articulated (and continues to articulate) voices from the

margins. The voices of feminists, women of color and latterly of lesbians, speak through

the short film” (30). Australian film scholar Anna Dzenis has argued that shorts serve as a

preparation ground and a selling point for the feature film industry, but also as a site for

experimentation outside of the confines guarded by conventional cinema.205 In terms of

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the short film in Australian national cinema, Robson and Zalcock document its role as “a

conduit for crossing over into the commercial sector, either through direct state subsidy

or big budget private financing” (31). Their findings in Australia confirm that for most

directors down under the short functions as practice towards feature directing; indeed,

shorts are easier debut projects to finance for women and independent filmmakers.

Particularly in the 1970s, shorts were more readily supported by the “cultural centres of

Sydney and Melbourne,” the Sydney Film Makers Co-op (32), and the Independent Film

Fund administered by Film Victoria (French “Short Circuit” 109). Additionally, shorts could garner visibility in the many short film festivals that proliferated throughout

Australia, as French, who herself directed the St. Kilda Film Festival dedicated to the

short, argues in her review “Short Circuit” (106). Despite such production and distribution advantages, short films still obtain much less support than features; their subordination is strictly linked to their low value as revenue bringers, since they do not drive audiences to the movie theatres (Bluher and Thomas 10).206

The production, distribution, and heterogeneity of short films point to the fact that

their place and role in the film industry is still much open to debate; many filmmakers,

for instance, dispute the argument that short films are preparatory for feature film

production. Campion, who has made both short and feature films, points out that short films constitute an art form in their own right, as Luis Buñuel’s extremely influential short Un Chien Andalou (1929) well exemplifies (qtd. in French “Short Circuit” 107).207

According to Edmond Levy and his guide to young filmmakers on making a “winning short,” the court-metrage is accepted as a vehicle to emphasize the command over what

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Christian Metz terms cinematic codes, that is montage, cinematography, and elements of

mise-en-scéne. Thus, shorts are “highly visual,” contain less dialogue, more action, and

define their characters through images. Although this might well be true, further study is

needed into the aesthetics of the short film and its significance for the development of female and accented perspectives, to which Robson and Zalcock only briefly hint. The

Italian/American studies scholar Anthony Tamburri seems to share the belief that short films constitute a significant vehicle for accented filmmakers; simultaneously, Tamburri laments the “barren terrain” of critical neglect that confronts the short film, contrasting it to the proliferation of studies in short fiction (4-5).208 Despite the data and historical

accounts that prove the key role of short films in favoring the entry of women into the film industry (Robson and Zalcock 30, Rich 44), little has been done to account for this historical function. Certainly, part of the short film’s relevance for voicing subaltern perspectives is due to the fact that filmmakers pushed at the margins have to operate outside of the mainstream industry and hence find in the short film a more manageable and affordable form of expression. However, this aspect does not completely account for

women and accented filmmakers’ interest in the short film since many continue making them even after they have achieved success. Most scholars agree on the heterogeneity of short films, in style, structure, function, commercial value, etc. (French “Short Circuit”,

Bluher and Thomas, Robson and Zalcock). Yet, French argues, one can discern in them a

“thematic inclination” towards “reflections on identity and sexuality – from a female perspective” (“Short Circuit” 116). Additionally, she remarks, there is “an interest in outsiders: an awareness of women (and minorities) as ‘Other’ and a consequent push

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towards plural discourse and emphasis on women’s difference” (120). Being on the margins of commercial cinema, short films seem to offer a greater space for experimental freedom as well as narrative freedom. The recourse to narrativity has long been criticized and challenged by women filmmakers and theorists from Laura Mulvey and Claire

Johnston to Teresa de Lauretis (Alice Doesn’t) and Kaja Silverman, because of its oedipal imperatives. If we agree with Levy and the conventional wisdom that shorts are often more visual and less plot oriented, they can offer a key tool for tearing apart dominant narrative conventions, to explore multiple and heteroglossic perspectives that challenge the unitary, and usually male, gaze of commercial narrative cinema. Furthermore, I would argue that, in relation to accented filmmakers, the short provides a perfect format to investigate the fragmentation ensuing from the diasporic experience. The necessary concision and brevity of the short can well voice the incompleteness of recollections; it can visualize the brief intensity of the “tactile memories” that distinguish accented cinema, according to Naficy (28-29). In this sense, the short can also constitute a useful counter to dominant historical accounts by interrupting them with the subjugated knowledges that can only find expression in the interstices of dominant discourses, in the fragmentariness and transience of spaces for dissent.

Pellizzari has certainly exploited this potential of the short film, channeling it towards a systematic undermining of the masculinist image of Australia as well as of the

Italian/American family and community. As I will illustrate in Chapter Three, her short films make ample use of flashbacks, oneiric sequences, provocative voice-overs, graphic images, and critical humor in its various forms, in order to voice the submerged histories

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of hyphenated Italian women. Her short films can certainly be described as “essay films,”

where Pellizzari, as called forth by feminist film criticism, demystifies the dominant male

gaze and the narrative suture that favors the reproduction of the oedipal myth, while

working within and against the dominant modes of filmic representation; she is able to

invoke and contaminate the tradition of cinema d’auteur and of Australian national

“quality cinema,” exposing their erasure of female voices. She does so through intertextual and stylistic references to male auteurs like Weir and Cox, but also to art- cinema directors like Fellini, Scorsese, and the Taviani brothers, and, concomitantly, to the female auteurist tradition of the 1970s with directors like Meszaros and Holland (qtd. in Colbert “Bi-Cultural Visions” 25).209 As with many feminist filmmakers, her shorts are a practice in what Rich terms “corrective realism,” “which successfully adapt[s] an

existing cinematic tradition to feminist purposes, going beyond the ‘positive role model’

in their establishment of a feminist cinematic environment within which to envision

female protagonists and their activities” (40). Juxtaposing, intersecting, and

contaminating these opposing and contradictory traditions, Pellizzari is able to address

her multiple identities as a woman, a filmmaker, and an Italian Australian. She moves

beyond the localized space of Italian Australiana to speak to the global concerns of

women’s cinema; simultaneously, she eschews essentialist approaches to feminist

cinema, translating the lessons of early feminist film criticism and practice through her

own “situated knowledge,” which includes her local and diasporic histories and accents.

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2.3.3. An Artistic Journey: Criss-Crossing both Australian and Italian National

Cinemas

Pellizzari’s feminist counter-cinema directly challenges cinematic realism, raising

the concerns that most feminist film theorists and filmmakers have addressed since the

1970s, regarding the politics of gender representation in realist films (Rich 40, Mayne

97).210 Yet, like Meszaros and Holland, Pellizzari does not abjure realism, but reinvents

its best tradition, both as theory and practice, drawn from André Bazin and Italian

Neorealism. An analysis of the Italian/Australian director’s relationship with realism serves to illuminate her feminist agenda, but also her stylistic kinship with Italian cinema, which she came to appreciate both as a filmmaker and an Italian Australian. Through

Pellizzari’s re-invention of realism, I wish here to analyze her complex relationship with

Italy, which reveals the contradictory discourses circulating about Italian culture and

Italians in Australia and sheds some light on the relations between Australian and other national cinemas. As a result of Australia’s multiethnic cultural map, Australian national cinema entertains a particular relationship with other “foreign cinemas,” like the Italian, which present “a hybrid identity and commercial viability as ‘art cinema’ and ‘ethnic cinema.”211 The Italian cinema gained currency on the world stage during the 1950s and

1960s with the international appraisal of Neorealism first and subsequently with auteurs

like Antonioni, Fellini, and Visconti.212 In this sense, Italian cinema belonged in the art house; however, imported Italian films in the 1970s were categorized “as for ethnic consumption” (O’Regan Australian National Cinema 80-81). For these reasons, Italian

Neorealist cinema, I would argue, presents an interesting case in the ambivalence of the

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“Italian sign” that Italian/American literary scholar Robert Viscusi has emphasized in his book Buried Caesars, where he analyzes the many contradictions and self-contradictions that populate Italian Americana. Viscusi argues that the “Italian signifier” is marked by the nobility of a history and cultural tradition tied to the classical Roman and Greek heritage, which still globally places Italy within the discourses of high art and culture.

However, the “Italian signified” has always constituted the dark counterpart to that enlightened heritage; it has stood for miserable economic and social conditions, uncontrolled emotions, unreliability, aggressiveness, and many other of the attributes translated into the stereotypes discussed above that have plagued Italian migrants throughout the globe.213 Neorealist cinema, I suggest, occupies an interstitial position

within this contradictory Italian sign; it certainly belongs in every anthology of film theory and criticism and is credited with a longstanding cinematic impact on filmmaking globally. Simultaneously, the telos of neorealist aesthetics establishes a connection to ethnic cinemas and ethnic, subaltern voices given its celebration of the lowly. Pellizzari, within the Australian national cinema, occupies a similar interstitial position; she is considered, on the one hand, an “ethnic filmmaker,” because of her ethnic and marginal stories; yet, she is also renowned for her experimental and art-house cinema (O’Regan

Australian National Cinema 80-81).

Pellizzari draws attention to the ambivalence of the Italian sign and of her own position within Australian national cinema and society by re-inventing the neorealist tradition and interweaving it with feminist cinematic influences, as well as intertextual references to Italian auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini.214 In this

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context, I would like to suggest that Pellizzari’s counter-realism is informed by Pier

Paolo Pasolini’s radical challenge to conventional realism. While Pellizzari does not

include Pasolini among her cinematic “mentors” (whereas interestingly Moffatt does), his

film theories and their development in Maurizio Viano’s A Certain Realism can serve to

further unravel Pellizzari’s ambivalent relation to realism. Like many filmmakers of the

1960s, Pasolini developed a certain distrust for realism, literary and cinematic; as Viano

argues, his cinema is known as il cinema delle metafore, where myth plays a prevalent

role (53); yet, his films do present elements of style that harken back to a neorealist

aesthetics. Explaining his rejection of naturalism, Pasolini suggested that he introduced

instead “a certain realism” (qtd. in Stack 129) whose political dimension indicated “the desire to refer to a social reality” (Viano 57), but that went against the belief in an objective representation of such a reality.215 Pasolini’s “certain realism” finds concrete expression in his theorization of a “cinema of poetry,” where the poetry arises out of the tension between realistic social representation and a formal and highly individual style, which acknowledges the imprint of the director’s subjectivity. In a Pasolinian cinema of

poetry, the story and the characters are often a pretext because “the creation of a

‘language of film poetry’ … implies the possibility of making pseudostories written with the language of poetry” (Pasolini 184). The typical device of a cinematic language of

poetry is the device of “free indirect speech” that allows the filmmaker to plunge into the subjective reality of his/her characters and speak indirectly in the first person through them. As Viano has well illustrated in his analysis of Scorsese, through the lens of

Pasolini’s “certain realism,” such an approach intersects realist elements of mise-en-

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scène, the grittiness of the neorealist affreschi, and Scorsese’s mean streets, with an expressionist use of camera movements, framing, lighting, and acting. Kolker argues that the expressionist elements prevent Pasolini’s “certain realism” to slip into the naturalism of Neorealist cinema (66) and I would argue that Pellizzari’s filmmaking follows in this tradition. Furthermore, Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” also interrupts the realist representation with an “interplay of citational and self-expressive layers” (Viano 149), which makes the fictional manifest and culminates in “a celebration of the medium, of a cinematic community” (171). In this sense, the “reality of the text” mixes, and, I would submit, becomes creolized through the “cinematic reality” constructed by the filmmaker’s own situated knowledge and approach to film in general (173).

The cinematic community that Pellizzari weaves through and around her films, thanks to her descent and training, enables her to construct films, where her local, social, and national stories and accents are always already creolized by her global and transnational perspective. Her feminist counter-realism comes to the fore with a provocative attention to the male gaze, which she satirizes and transforms into a feminist oppositional gaze and expressionist film techniques that mark her personal imprint on the filmic text. On the other hand, her neorealist representation of the grittiness of the

Italian/Australian community and culture aims at challenging the patriarchy that still oppresses the “reality” of many Italian/Australian women. Her preference for black and white in many of her shorts similarly stems from her admiration for Neorealism and from the desire to represent (by citing the classical technology of representation) the marginality of the Italian Australians living in the working-class neighborhoods of white

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Australia. In the first short that gained her international recognition, Rabbit on the Moon,

for instance, she underscores the neorealist depiction of her parents’ difficulties with

putting food on the table – mainly the rabbits raised in the family’s backyard – and

assimilating to a culture whose language they still have to master, with the imaginative

qualities of a fairy tale. As Rose Capp and Anna Maria Dell’Oso point out, Pellizzari’s

ability to infuse the realist grittiness with the lyric poetry of folk stories and tales is

reminiscent of the Taviani brothers, in whose cinema the Italian film critic Gian Piero

Brunetta recognizes a formalist exploration, where “la componente naturalistica coabita

con suggestioni espressioniste” (233).216 In particular, the short recalls the Tavianis’

adaptation of Kaos (1984), based on a selection of Pirandello’s novelle, and its reliance

on visual techniques oscillating between reality and fairy tale (Brunetta 235).217 In Just

Desserts, Pellizzari plays more provocatively with the neorealist aesthetic, using black and white to represent the faded memories of the “big occasions” in one’s life – like the onset of menstruation, the first kiss, and the earliest sexual encounter – and color to represent, instead, food (the present), as “a constant part of living” (qtd. in Colbert “Bi-

Cultural Visions” 24).218 While black and white is indeed commonly used in

contemporary cinema to present a past and detached reality, the subjective nature of our

memories is usually coded in colors, which can be manipulated to express the slight

deformation that our memory always performs on past events. Yet, Pellizzari wishes to

emphasize the transience and fragmentary nature of memory, rather than its “coloring” of

the past; the neorealist black and white she so much appreciated is thus employed against

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the grain to convey the inaccurateness of the reality represented, while still powerfully

rendering the grittiness of the working-class and immigrant experience.

The sensuousness and erotic energy of the color imagery that Pellizzari juxtaposes

in split screen to the black and white shots attests, instead, to the Fellinian influence she

claims. Pellizzari represents here the erotic fantasies of the young girl Maria Stroppi and

does so with an imaginative quality that calls forth the most famous Italian cantastorie,

Italy’s most famous storyteller who was able to create from his always “provincial”

world a cosmoslogia of dreams, memories and emotions that has conquered audiences

globally (Brunetta 118-19).219 Such intertextual references increase in Pellizzari’s feature

film, where the protagonist, again a young Italian/Australian girl, who feels alienated from her family and community as suggested by her name, Mars, playfully discovers her sexuality. Her explorations are expressed through oneiric sequences that represent her inner fantasies and channel again Fellini’s visionary cinema and his daring journey in the individual, as well as Italian collective, unconscious (Brunetta 273). Film critics Mike

Nichols and Colbert emphasize the connections to Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti and

Nichols points out that “the visions and voices which appear to its heroine … seem to haunt Pellizzari’s film” (11). However, Pellizzari re-works the erotic and visionary imagery of Fellini’s films to voice a feminist perspective that harshly criticizes the patriarchy of the Italian/Australian community, but also of the Italy Fellini so powerfully represented. Fellini’s influence on Pellizzari also comes forth in the critical humor she employs in her films to contaminate high and low dichotomies, film genres, Australian and Italian national discourses, as well as the Catholic religious discourse she shows as

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complicit with the oppressive Italian patriarchy. As for Italian women’s humor and

laughter, Pellizzari was a strong admirer of Lina Wertmueller, one of the only three

female directors to be nominated for an Academy Award with her controversial

Pasqualino Settebellezze (1975). She appreciated Wertmueller’s “political punches,” her

commentary on the relations between the “North and the South” of Italy, which she

herself experienced in the displaced Italian/Australian community, and, particularly, her

skillful use of humor. Wertmueller’s cinema, as Brunetta points out, “ignora i semitoni, le sfumature e le mezzetinte ... è un cinema aggressivo, urlato” (252),220 a description that

can partially describe Pellizzari’s films as well, especially her feature film Fistful of

Flies, and that explains some of the common criticism the two women directors have

suffered for their “angry” films. Interestingly, when given the possibility to work on the set of one of Wertmueller’s later films, Notti d’Estate (1985), Pellizzari herself was disappointed to witness what she felt was the desiccation of the originality and humorous inventiveness of the Italian director (Conomos 36).

These intertextual auteurist references contribute to the certain realism that I argue establishes Pellizzari’s relation to Italy, but also constitutes her accented perspective onto Australian cinema and society. Indeed, among her other filmic influences, Pellizzari mentions Weir, whose cinema is replete with the lyricism and poetry she invokes in her most subjective and visionary sequences. However, she inflects this Australian cinematic tradition through the “unrefined” qualities of Italian Neorealism

and the bodily laughter of feminist and Italian humor. Such a trajectory in and out of

Australian and Italian national cinemas reflects her own film schooling as an assistant to

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Weir, a student of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and an eager assistant or extra for the likes of Fellini, Bertolucci, and Wertmueller during the 1980s. Arriving in

Italy as an already keen admirer of Italian cinema, Pellizzari curiously learned in the land of her parents to further appreciate the cinema of her country of birth. 221 There, she discovered to her surprise that “Italians were more fascinated with Australian film and

Peter Weir and George Miller” than to discuss with her the classical Italian cinema that had inspired her desire to enter the film industry (qtd. in Colbert “Bi-Cultural Visions”

23). Pellizzari’s filmmaking thus offers a transnational perspective onto Australian national cinema and finds in critical humor a powerful means to interlace the multiple cultures she grew up with and to challenge Australian monologic discourses.

2.4 Clara Law: Inbetween National, Diasporic, and Commercial Cinemas

This Chapter has so far reviewed the birth and development of the Australian national film industry through the lenses of Moffatt’s work and her ability to stress the key role that cinema played in the racial and gender politics in the constitution of

Australian nationhood. Furthermore, turning to Pellizzari, this Chapter has analyzed the pressures faced by the domestic film industry in a global market dominated by

Hollywood, emphasizing how such dominance goes far beyond an economic dimension.

Pellizzari’s films illustrate how the domination of Hollywood extends to our global imaginaries and how it should be factored into the analysis of “ethnic cinemas” across the oceans. By looking at the work by Clara Law, I wish here to further investigate the tensions between national, ethnic, and diasporic cinemas, addressing the notion of a transnational cinema. First, I will address Law’s dual relation to Hong Kong and

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Australian cinema, pointing to some of the complexities in the relations between these two industries and in the discourses of nationhood in both territories. Having illustrated the odd positioning of Law within Australian national cinema, I will discuss her anomalous situation within the Chinese diaspora in Australia and the history of representations of Asian men and women in Australian national cinema. Law’s work in

Australia since 1994 does indeed strongly depart from former depictions of Hong Kong and China and from the numerous characteristics of ethnic cinemas within Australia.

Finally, I will review the development of Law’s filmmaking within Australia, which presents an interesting trajectory indicative of her gradual interaction with both

Australian society and the tradition of Australian national cinema and of her ability to stay focused on issues of migration, displacement, nomadism, and alienation.

2.4.1 Hong Kong Cinema’s Uncanny Signification on Australian Cinema

If Pellizzari’s filmmaking illustrates Australian national cinema’s complex relation to another festival cinema like the Italian one, Law’s career raises the question of how to define borders between transnational and national cinemas altogether. Born in the

Special Territory of Macau and raised in that of Hong Kong, Law gained international recognition for her films while working within the Hong Kong movie industry, but decided to relocate to Australia as a consequence of Hong Kong’s annexation to the

People’s Republic of China and her desire to work within a less commercial film industry. As already mentioned, her films, from Farewell China (1990) to Floating Life

(1995), deal with the feelings and conflicts that pertain to the Chinese and, specifically,

Hong Kong diaspora; however, her narratives, style, and personal trajectory, departing

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from the local migration out of Hong Kong, speak to global concerns with issues of dislocation, alienation, migration, and uprootedness. She highlights the conflicted relationship of Hong Kong to the mainland and simultaneously addresses the increasing globalization affecting Hong Kong and cinema in general; the title of her first film as diasporic subject, in fact, well describes the situation of Hong Kong itself, which, as

Ackbar Abbas argues, presents a “‘floating’ identity” (4).222 Poshek Fu and David Desser once explained the conundrum of Hong Kong national cinema, remarking that it was “a

Chinese community under British rule, a cinema without a nation, a local cinema with international appeal, … the third most active film industry in the world” (5). Law’s filmmaking and personal story speak to all of these dimensions and interrogate the increasing transnationality of cinema, thereby also shedding new light on Australian national cinema and culture.

Law’s perspective is deeply enmeshed with the complex geo-political history of

Hong Kong and its cinema; on the one hand, Hong Kong film production could be considered as a national cinema in terms of its history as an independently produced, institutionalized film industry with a recognizable cinematic output. On the other hand, a

Chinese territory first, a British dependent territory for ninety years, and a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China since 1997, Hong Kong has never enjoyed national sovereignty. Since 1900 and the first film production in Hong

Kong, its film industry has thus undergone numerous upheavals following the intense redrawing of the world’s socio-political geography in the closing decade of the twentieth century (Chu, Fu and Desser, Morris et.al). First considered a Chinese national cinema

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until the 1950s, Hong Kong cinema turned into mainly a diasporic cinema targeted for

the Chinese abroad after the constitution of the People’s Republic of China (Chu 1-21).

Dresser argues that the basis for Hong Kong cinema’s current relevance should be traced

back to this period that saw “Hong Kong cinema [enter] into this transnational and

globalized capacity in part due to the massive Chinese diaspora” (“Hong Kong Film and

the New Cinephilia” 219).223 Increasingly, after the 1970s, however, with changing

political and economic relationships with South-East Asian neighbors like Malaysia,

Singapore, South Vietnam, and Taiwan, Hong Kong cinema saw its market in these

national spaces diminished. Furthermore, after years of work and struggles for assimilation, the Chinese diaspora had significantly changed in terms of overall class status, education, language, and its relationship to both Chinese and international cinema.

Hong Kong thus started targeting less an “ethnic Chinese market” and investing more into the local market and into international appeal (Chu 21-41). For this reason, after the

1970s, Hong Kong cinema has been theorized more as a Chinese cinema, which during these same years gained increasing international recognition and visibility among cineastes thanks to a new generation of directors, known as the Hong Kong New

Wave.224

This young generation of filmmakers started out in a film industry, which, since

the 1970s, worked to reinforce the domestic market, but also “to penetrate the global market and shift away from the diasporic audience” (Teo “Wuxia Redux” 195). Among

the “strategic moves” undertaken to reach such a goal, the Hong Kong production

company Golden Harvest first invested in Bruce Lee’s films (The Big Boss, 1971; Fist of

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Fury, 1972, The Way of the Dragon, 1972), which put Hong Kong cinema on the

international map and started the “kung fu craze” of those years (Fu and Desser 3, Teo

“The 1970s: Movement and Transition” 97-98, Chu 51-52).225 Following these

successes, at the beginning of the 80s, Golden Harvest began to produce “American

Films,” such as the first Jackie Chan’s American movies The Big Brawl (1980) and The

Cannonball Run (1981). Given the proven cross-national appeal of its action films, the

company also started to tailor its productions to different markets by releasing multiple

versions of a film, as it did with Jackie Chan’s The Protector in 1985 (Chu 56).226 These

productions and the rise of the Hong Kong kung fu genre reinforced the perception of

Hong Kong cinema as mass-produced and made “for money’” (Fu and Desser 1; cfr. also

Teo “The 1970s: Movement and Transition” 100). As Stephen Teo points out, however,

in spite of the stereotypical commercial reputation that the kung fu genre attached to

Hong Kong cinema, the genre also created the conditions for its “modernization” (99-

100).227 Indeed, thanks to its international visibility and the production system developed

to sustain it, the late 1970s, and particularly the early 1980s, saw the emergence of the

Hong Kong New Wave. Its directors, many trained in the U.S. and in London, were able

to draw on their local cultures while employing the “virtuosismo tecnico e formale

occidentale” (Fofi et.al. 346).228 Directors like Tsui Hark (Dangerous Encounters – 1st kind 1980), Allen Fong (Father and Son 1981), Patrick Tam (Nomad 1982), and Ann Hui

(Boat People 1982) took global cinema audiences by surprise with their innovative

“narrative styles,” which voiced a renewed “socially meaningful” perspective lacking in the previous kung fu films (Teo “The 1970s: Movement and Transition” 90). As Teo

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illustrates, these directors were able to rework the “strains of fantasy and realism, rollicking comedy and serious drama” that were all contained in the kung fu genre and to combine them with their knowledge of Western cinemas (105-06),229 and with Hong

Kong cinema’s “older tradition of social realism” (Lau 159). The New Wave showed a

new facet of Hong Kong cinema to the world, which finally started to recognize the

talents emerging from this fast-developing movie industry; however, partially because of

this expansion, the New Wave directors were soon “absorbed into the commercial studio system” (160).

In reaction to such commercialization of Hong Kong auteur cinema, a Second

New Wave emerged with directors like Wong Kar-wai, Mabel Cheung, Law, and Stanley

Kwan,230 who came to prominence during the heated Sino-British negotiations over the

future of Hong Kong that in 1984 established the handing over of Hong Kong to the

People’s Republic of China in 1997. Given the historical and geo-political conjuncture,

the Second New Wave’s films became “a forum for the construction, exploration, and

questioning of Hong Kong’s sense of nationhood” (Chu 43).231 Pervaded by an anxiety

over the indeterminacy of Hong Kong’s future, the films of this period still shared many

themes and styles with the first; as Audrey Yue points out, for instance, both waves

engaged in a cinema that was eager to capture the social reality, but also committed to a

project of aesthetic innovation that would also reinvent realism (“Asian-Australian

Cinema”).232 In this sense, Yue observes that this new generation “inherit[ed] from its

predecessors … an instructive didacticism which treats social issues such as youth,

unemployment and illegal immigration validated in a presentation of a contemporary

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urban reality” (“Migration-as-Transition”). Given the historical and geo-political context

of Hong Kong’s handover to China, however, the second generation of Hong Kong’s

New Cinema distinguished itself from the first through a keen interest in transnational issues. Additionally, this second generation filmmakers also more eagerly targeted both domestic and international audiences, aware of the increasing diasporic communities to

which their texts could speak.233

These authors express the sense of alienation and liminality that has characterized

Hong Kong as a city composed primarily of migrants, which has constantly “floated”

“between the political grids that link Chinese and British history” (Pettman 69). Pettman,

interestingly, finds a parallel in the understanding of Hong Kong as a liminal, floating

community and Gelder’s and Jacobs’s theorization of Australia as an “unsettled society,”

where notions of “place” and “home” are made strange and unfamiliar. Gelder and Jacobs

draw here on the Freudian notion of the “uncanny,” which describes “the experience …

of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously,” a condition they see as fitting a post-

Mabo Australia, where the ghosts and traces of Aboriginal Australians are finally

unsettling white Australians’ claims to the land (23-25). According to Pettman, Hong

Kong also constitutes an “unsettled society” because its colonial dependence on both the

Chinese mainland and the British Empire has constructed a society that has always

inhabited a liminal position among national constructs. The uncanny of unsettled

societies, in Gelder’s and Jacobs’s framework, relies on the entangled relation between

modernity, tradition, and sacredness (1-5). If in Australia this means the re-centralization

of what Gelder and Jacobs define “Aboriginal sacredness” to the construction of a

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modern Australian nation, in Hong Kong the interdependency of modernity and tradition points to the constitutive tension between Chinese traditions, memories, and rituals and an increasingly globalized and Westernized society.234 This is a tension that is well represented in the films of the Hong Kong Second New Wave, which focus on liminal identities, on “those who exist beyond the clichéd collision between tradition and modernity (and yet retain a secular connection to sacrality)” (70).

Following Pettman’s argument, Law’s Hong Kong aesthetics transplanted to

Australia is able to speak to national, (post)colonial, and migratory tensions that traverse the geopolitical spaces she bridges. Law unsettles national discourses across the oceans, voicing a migratory, transnational perspective through the stories of women’s daily interaction with their new home. In her essay “Bringing the Ancestors Home,” Collins finds a commonality of tropes and themes between Floating Life and Moffatt’s Night

Cries, pointing out that both films are “familiar yet foreign to a national cinema uneasy with history, wary of women and Others and unused to happy endings” (114). Both filmmakers center their narratives around mother-daughter relationships, thus already challenging the “white masculine landscape tradition” (115). In these films, the women are the ones shaping and transforming the space around them; they are the ones calling forth the voices of the ancestors who can unsettle the common construction of the

Australian suburbia and outback as places outside of history. Both films invoke the voices of a “sacred” past to contest the present of nationalist discourses, “opening up the space for the ghosts of history to re-animate the landscape of Australian cinema” (115).

Mitchell expands on this aspect, arguing that Floating Life “expose[s] the narrow

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provincialism of traditional notions of the Australian nation-state” (“Clara Law’s

Floating Life 292); in this sense, Floating Life belongs to what Morris terms “the worthy

periphery of national cinema,” where she positions Moffatt and Vietnamese/Australian

Pauline Chan among others whose narratives “centered on the experience of women and

children shuttling or shuttled around the world, … internationalize local knowledges of

national tensions rather than helping to build a cohesive ‘population’ in one place”

(“White Panic” 256). These are films that reject the “phobic narratives” of Australian

films like Mad Max and with them the reproduction of the “white panic” of Australian

immigration laws. In their rejection, however, these films do not call for an identity

politics encased in the ethnic community, but instead unveil the already embedded

transnationality of Australian spaces and histories. In this sense, Law’s first feature film in Australia is also able to unsettle notions of Australian national cinema, “situat[ing]

Australia within a Hong Kong-Chinese migrant diasporic context, rather than the other way around” (Mitchell “Boxing the ‘Roo” 106).235

2.4.2 Asian Transnationalism in Australian National Cinema and Society

(Dis)placing Australia within the migratory histories of Hong Kong men and

women, Law has been able in her first “Australian feature” to point the finger to a lacuna

in Australian national cinema, in which, as Christos Tsiolkas maintains, “the politics of

migration (and again, I am referring to a migration across local as well as national

borders) have largely been ignored or made tangential to the concerns of the Australian

film industry” (45). The claim finds support from other film critics like Keith Connolly of

The Age who laments that Australian filmmakers ignore the changes of modern

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Australian society of which “the migrant influx” is probably the major determinative social force (78). As mentioned in the previous section on Pellizzari, “ethnic cinemas” have long been a niche-market, although a not very profitable one, within a multiethnic

Australia that tried to appeal to its different constituencies.236 To this end, “foreign films” were imported and marketed both as auteur cinema and as ethnic texts for the minorities making up Australia. Although catering to a diasporic audience, these films, however, rarely addressed the issue of migration itself, which Australian national cinema also largely ignored. With the launch of the Multicultural Agenda, the projects financed definitely changed and ethnic, suburban, marginal stories started to appear on the big

Australian screens; SBS –TV also “supported the production of short films and parts of feature films and mini-series in NES languages” (O’Regan Australian National Cinema

81). The stories of Greek Australians and of ethnic discrimination were told in The

Heartbreak Kid (1993), the Italian/Australian community and its stereotypes were caricatured in Gino (1994), and Baz Luhrman’s depiction of the Spanish/Australian community conquered domestic and international screens with Strictly Ballroom (1992).

Most of these films, however, focus on the ethnic conflicts and tensions between already settled immigrant communities; they focus on the second or third generations of hyphenated Australians and on the fixity of certain cultural stereotypes. What Tsiolkas, instead, emphasizes in his discussion of Floating Life is its depiction of the process of migration, adjustment, and negotiation with a new territory and society. Together with

Moffatt’s beDevil, according to Tsiolkas, Law’s Floating Life takes exception to

Australian national cinema and “imaginatively suggest[s] the fluidity and conflicts of a

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multi-cultural world” (45).237 He specifically credits Floating Life for creating “a new

cinematic iconography for suburbia,” which, with its “alienating and exhilarating”

attributes, rejects the common construction as “static and homogenous” to inscribe

instead the fluidity of migratory movements and “fractured communities” at its core

(45).238

If Tsiolkas sees Floating Life as a sort of fresh and promising new direction for

Australian national cinema because of its ability to visualize the hybridity inscribed in the

Australian land, these other film critics have also defined the film as a “turning point in

Australian cinema” because “it establishes a signpost towards a still nascent movement in this country, which is the creation of an Asian-Australian cinema” (Teo “Floating Life”).

Generally, film critics and scholars have pointed out a dearth of representations of Asian

Australians in cinema; since the racist The Birth of White Australia in 1928 animated by fears of the “yellow peril,” few films have directly dealt with Asian representations

(Stratton Race Daze) and those that have persist in a racist, Orientalist discourse, which, as Siew Keng Chua points out, denies the “possibility that viewers may be Asian-

Australians,” and ultimately ensures that “Asian subjectivities as constituent of

Australian identities are screened out” (“Reel Neighbourly” 28).239 The emergence of an

Asian/Australian cinema, symbolized by Floating Life, thus partially constitutes a success

in terms of the multicultural policies introduced for the Australian film industry; these

directly funded Law’s project, and responded to the necessity of a national cinema in

need of gaining recognition to be simultaneously “prestigious” but also “mundane” and

“other.” In this regard, O’Regan notes that “Australian cinema has its ‘Others within’ and

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‘without’ that it defines itself in relation to and seeks to incorporate. Pauline Chan’s

Traps becomes of central interest to the Asian cinema journal Cinemaya principally

because she is Vietnamese as well as Australian” (Australian National Cinema 141).

O’Regan’s comments indicate both the place that a transnational text like Floating Life

occupies within the national industry, but also the fact that at the beginning of the 1990s

other Asian/Australian directors were actually also emerging on the national stage.

Chan’s Traps, for instance, came out in 1994, but displaced the exploration of a biracial

heritage by returning to the place of origin of the protagonist (and director), namely a

Vietnam still under French occupation. In 1991, Malaysian/Australian filmmaker Teck

Tan had already gained recognition with his short My Tiger’s Eyes, focusing on a

Chinese family’s adaptation to the new Australian homeland.240 According to Yue, Chan

and Tan belong to the first phase of Asian/Australian cinema, whereas Law would be a representative of the second phase together with Tony Ayres, who gained recognition with his first feature Walking on Water (2002) and his second, The Home Song Stories

(2007).241 What distinguishes Law and Ayres for Yue is the fact their films “[reflect] the

rise and fall of Asia, [inflect] the Asian turn in Australia, and [articulate] a discourse of

transnational Asian mobility.” In this sense, in Law’s and Ayres’s cinema, “post-ethnicity

interrogates Australia’s Euro-centric postcoloniality,” and repositions it in an Asian-

Pacific context (“Asian-Australian Cinema” 190). 242

Floating Life is now accepted as the point of departure for this new phase of

Asian/Australian cinema, but also for a new Australian national cinema (Hessey “Think

global, film local” 55). The film has become so emblematic of the Asian diaspora in

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Australia that Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair invoked it in the title of their study of the media and Asian Australian representations, Floating Lives: The Media and Asian

Diaspora. Their study mainly focuses on television use and reception, and it “underlines the ongoing and inescapable interpenetration of ‘Asia-in-Australia’” (25). There is no actual discussion of Law’s film in the study, but the authors’ investigation into the

Asian/Australian community and its relation with the media does shed some light on the multiple positions, audiences, and discourses that a film like Floating Life serves in the

Australian context. As Cunningham and Sinclair point out, because of Australia’s geographical position practically within Asia, “the sources, socioeconomic backgrounds and circumstances of Chinese immigrant arrivals in Australia have been much more diverse than those of Chinese communities in the other great contemporary immigrant- receiving countries such as the United States” (37). Indeed, as noted in Chapter Two, the history of Australian-Asian relationships, and specifically the massive Chinese migration to Australia, started at the end of the nineteenth century. Over the years, a predominantly economic migration of lower class Chinese men and women in search of jobs in Australia gave way to the professional migration of the 1990s; simultaneously, later generations of

Chinese Australians have climbed the social ladder of Australian society and established thriving ethnic communities. As Cunningham and Sinclair have documented, Chinatown businesses and networks have played a key role in distributing Chinese films in Australia, catering to the Chinese diaspora in the country (61). However, given the increasing popularity of Chinese and Hong Kong cinema in the arthouse circuit, an “interesting … cultural and commercial exchange … occurs between the arthouse and Chinatown

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circuits” (62). Films by recognized auteurs like Wong, Hark, but also Law, remaining within Hong Kong cinema, “tend to bypass the Chinatown circuit altogether” and are distributed, instead, through the arthouse cinema circuit. Yet, the Chinatown circuit still profits from these filmmakers’ increasing popularity by picking up films made by these auteurs before their international success. The commercial relationships behind the distribution of Hong Kong cinema and specifically Law’s films, thus, demonstrate how her cinema can still serve the purpose of reaching the ethnic community of Chinese

Australians, in spite of the differences in the experiences of migration between her

generation and the majority of Chinese Australians.243

Simultaneously, Floating Life functions as a powerful signifier for Australian

multiculturalism and the film industry. Given my previous contextualization of Law and

Floating Life specifically in the context of Hong Kong cinema, it is interesting to

consider how the film succeeded in becoming such a landmark for Australian national

cinema for many critics. As Tony Mitchell observes, Law’s film fits an:

anomalous and displaced position in Australian national and international cinema. An arthouse film lauded by some as an important landmark in Asian-Australian cultural representation and identity politics … it was nominated for three Australian Film Institute Awards. … but it was seen by few in Australia – it ran to largely empty cinemas for little more than two weeks in the main cities, despite being acclaimed at the 1996 Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, and subsequently screened three times on the multicultural TV network SBS. (“Boxing the ‘roo” 104-05)244

Thus, Law’s Australian debut elicited the international recognition and visibility that the state funding of Australian national cinema hopes to promote; not only did the film win the Creteil International Women Film Festival and the Gijon International Film Festival,

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but it was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign film, the first time that an Australian film was selected for that category (Mitchell “Clara Law’s Floating

Life”).245 Yet, the film also proved a commercial failure because the Australian audience

could not relate to a text spoken predominantly in a foreign language and representing

non-Chinese Australia exclusively through the eyes of its Chinese/Australian population

(Mitchell “Boxing the ‘roo,” Stein, Cunningham and Sinclair).246 Such domestic

commercial failure had been anticipated by the members of the AFFC, who initially tried

to stop the project, as Bridget Ikin, the producer recalls. The first draft was actually

rejected with the “offending clause” that “the FFC will not invest in any drama project

that is predominantly in a language other than English unless the marketplace

attachments are sufficient to ensure the FFC has a level of investment commensurate with

its risk” (qtd. in Cochrane 21). Luckily the FFC guidelines were not enforced and the film made it to the theaters and since then it has been used to support a new creative line of

Australian accented cinemas and it has garnered the international attention and exposure

that national festival cinemas need in order to thrive, as pointed out by O’Regan.

Yet, box-office figures seem to support the FFC’s evaluation of the film’s

commercial potential. Indeed, Floating Life was rejected by most Australian viewers as a national text, undermining Law’s contention that her film would resonate with Australian audiences in general because of its focus on families and the struggles to keep them together (qtd. in Berry 10). Some critics also questioned that Floating Life was part of

Australian national cinema, describing it instead as “a good example to study a Hong

Kong national film which explores the Hong Kong experience” (Mitchell “Boxing the

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‘Roo” 105).247 Yet, even as a Hong Kong text, the film has been the target of much criticism because many in the Hong Kong and Chinese diasporic community saw it “as a betrayal of the migrant experience” (106). Renowned Chinese/Australian writer Yu, for instance, has often criticized Chinese diasporic authors, literary and otherwise, for creating texts where the Australians are invisible and a nostalgic “Sinocentrism” emerges

(qtd. in Barrowclough 47). Envisioning the optimistic possibility of fashioning a new life and identity in Australia and of exerting a critique of Hong Kong materialism and culture as well, Law seems to escape such Sinocentrism. However, Law’s focus on the displacement process, rather than on the interaction with the host nation and population raised many negative responses. Indeed, critics have claimed that Law’s approach is

“consistent with a tendency in Chinese-Australian literary and popular discourse to either ignore or present ‘unflattering images’ of Anglo-Australians, sometimes even using common derogatives like yang guizi (foreign devils)” (109). Given the astounding impact that Law’s first Australian film had on Australian national cinema and multiculturalist debates, as well as on discussions of Hong Kong diasporic cinema and community,

Floating Life can certainly serve as a useful model to analyze the role of cinema in

(de)constructing the conflicted discourses on multiculturalism circulating in Australia since the late 1970s. Furthermore, the debate over the film’s transnational aesthetics and national significance for a multicultural Australia go a long way to prove, as Naficy argues, that “accented cinema not only constitutes a transnational cinema and identity but is also a constitutive part of the national cinemas and national identity” (95). In Chapter

Three, I will analyze how the humorous lenses through which Law addresses these

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discursive and social tensions undermine binarist discourse in favor of more ambiguity and complexity.

2.4.3 Australian National Cinema in Light of Diaspora: Claiming a Tradition

After her breakthrough with Floating Life, Law has continued to produce films in

Australia that have provided for national debate and international attention; whereas her first film – its production, distribution, and reception – constitutes a useful case to disentangle and analyze what O’Regan calls the “messiness” of national cinemas

(Australian National Cinema 71), Law’s later films provide a lens into a filmmaker’s integration into her new nation’s film industry and with the nationalist debate circulating in the country during the last fifteen years. Describing the first two features Law shot in

Australia, Teo argues that Floating Life and The Goddess of 1967 are “two idiosyncratic and challenging works that cross national-ethnic boundaries but yet are still quintessential

Clara Law pictures (and in a sense, quintessential Australian pictures too)” (“Autumn

Moon”). If Floating Life marked a new development within Australian national cinema,

The Goddess of 1967 represents Law’s deeply personal take on the nation’s film genre and themes. The film follows a Japanese man, J.M., from Tokyo on his journey to

Australia to buy an iconic pink 1967 Citroën; this leads him to meet a white blind,

Australian girl, B.G., who is left in charge of the car after the owner kills his wife and commits suicide. With the excuse of having to find the previous owner, the two embark on a road trip throughout Australia that drives them more and more into the outback and inside their own traumas and fears. Law’s personal style is particularly manifest in her play with film conventions, from the Kafkaesque and Brechtian labels in place of proper

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names, to her fragmented narratives and use of color filters to complicate our perception of space and character. This formal experimentation with cinematic codes has accompanied Law from Autumn Moon until her latest Letters to Ali; what distinguishes

The Goddess of 1967 is that she uses it in service of a reflection on Australian national cinema’s tropes and genres. As Collins and Davis point out, the three most popular genres of Australian national cinema have been the “landscape film,” best exemplified by

Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the “purgatorial narrative,” popularized by the

Max Max trilogy (1981), and finally the Australian comedy, especially with its cast of grotesque characters (77). With The Goddess of 1967, Law tries her hand at all three

Australian staples, contaminating them all with her transcultural perspective and deconstructing each through humorous juxtaposition, as I will analyze in Chapter Four.

Albeit deeply enmeshed in Australian national narratives, the film still displays the auteurist touch of the Hong Kong director both in its style and its themes that strongly recalls her first internationally acclaimed film Autumn Moon. As the very brief synopsis above already anticipates, the film deals with themes like consumerism and materialism, which Law first analyzed and developed with a dire outcome in Farewell China, but also and most prominently identity. In her comments on Floating Life, Law indeed maintains that her film is not just about migration, but “about finding [one’s] bearing,” about the necessary interior journey to “fix your own interior impoverishment” (qtd. in Honegger

11). The film has received mixed reviews, although it was enthusiastically received at the

Venice Film Festival (“Screen Goddesses” 7), where Rose Byrne unexpectedly won the best actress prize (Barber “Rosier Future,”, Colbert “Bouquet for Rose”), and at the

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Toronto Film Festival, where a further screening was added to satisfy the interest of the audience who then participated in an animated question and answer session (Cremen 11).

In spite of such initial success and a general appreciation for the cinematographic finesse of the text, numerous critics have actually deemed Law’s treatment of these themes in

The Goddess of 1967 as postmodern posturing, translated into an aesthetic of narrative clichés (Thompson, Phillips “Confused and Cold-Hearted”, Villella, Barlett, Banks,

Demetrius, Hall “The Goddess of 1967”).248 Yet others, like Italian film critic Coccia, contend that with this film Law has finally faced the unpleasant flip side of the motif of journey and migration, which has fascinated her in all of her films. According to Coccia,

Law was destined to confront “la dimensione piú oscura e precaria del fenomeno quella che trova tragiche corrispondenze nell’epoca e soprattutto nell’epica dei migranti, quell’epica straziante della povertá, che non sceglie di mettersi in viaggio, ma vi é costretta.”249 While arguing for Law’s genuine interest in the personal and collective traumas of displacement, Coccia ignores the fact that Law had already addressed the direst outcomes of forced economic migration and discrimination in a foreign land in her first Hong Kong film, Farewell China. That first cinematic exploration was the result of

Law’s migration to London for study, and her sense there of alienation in a Western culture. In her reflections on British society and migration, Law also displays a critical awareness of the power relations that shape migratory flows and postcolonial societies.

Once in London as a subject from a colonial society where “the British were always just a privileged class,” Law recalls how “much pleasure” she felt in seeing English “people working in the streets” (qtd. in Honegger 11). Although her films after Farewell China

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have concentrated on middle-class migration and personal trajectories, Law’s humor, I will argue in Chapter Three, has maintained a critical view of relations of power as they are defined in the national, transnational, and patriarchal context of Asian/Australian exchanges.

Certainly, Law’s critical perspective emerges with renewed force in her 2004 film

Letters to Ali, which encountered the approval of the same critic of the World Socialist

Web Site that scolded the director for her “cold and misanthropic” The Goddess of 1967

(Phillips “Confused and Cold-Hearted”). Furthermore, with this last film, Law confronts the colonial and racist history of white Australia, reflecting on her own gradual acculturation to her new homeland.250 If Goddess represents her working through

Australian national cinema, Letters embarks on a journey through the history of

Australian democracy. As already noted in Chapter One, Letters to Ali is Law’s first documentary, in which she looks into the scandalous treatment of Afghan refugees in

Australia, following its “mandatory detention policy to all asylum seekers” (Phillips “A

Sincere and Evocative Protest”). The documentary bears the traces of Law’s idiosyncratic style: it opens with shots of Hong Kong’s hyper-modern architecture, from its vertical skyline to its crammed spaces, and contrasts them to the horizontal, green, and vast landscape of suburban Australia.251 Her autobiographical intertitles introduce the viewer to the filmmaker as a person coming from a small island and emigrating to Australia in

1995. She thus inscribes her own personal story of immigration, which leads her to feel personally connected, if not with the abusive experiences, with the desires, anxieties, and fears of the Afghan migrants detained in Australia. First, however, Law admits to her

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fascination with Australia, subtly also pointing to its affluent society; she presents us with static, empty shots of her spacious house, “with more rooms than the people living in it” she notes, and a “garden of [her] own,” where she can savor the luxury of being “so close to the earth” for the first time. She continues with shots of a green, peaceful, and empty park, quiet, suburban roads, and close-ups of the new flora and fauna she encounters. In short, the first five minutes of Letters to Ali indirectly acknowledge Law’s naïve adaptation to this idyllic and “laid-back” society, which she “first thought … was very free and democratic” (qtd. in Phillips “Australia’s Inhuman Treatment”). However, Law then starts recalling “signing hundred pages of legal documents instead of handshakes,” and voting hopefully for a “new government” with no success. These initial sequences allow Law to emphasize her individual and transnational perspective, while indirectly preparing the stage for a harsh criticism of the newly elected Howard’s government and its discriminatory policies rooted in the history of Australia’s white panic. White

Australia’s fear against the other and its paranoia, mobilized by the Howard government over job loss and other economic calamities due to uncontrolled immigration are indirectly ridiculed in these first shots of Australia’s wealth, both economic and territorial. Law’s own initial admiration for Australian society was soon shattered, when she read an article by Trish Kerbi in the newspaper, where the Australian doctor tells of her shocking discovery that Australia has set up detention centers for asylum seekers.

Acting on her conscience, Kerbi established contact with Ali, a 15 year old Afghan refugee detained in Port Augusta and worked for his release. Beginning with Law’s discovery of Trish’s story, the film proceeds through interviews with the Kerbis,

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intertitles voicing thoughts Ali shared with the family in letters and telephone

conversations, and through other interviewees commenting on the Australian policies

sanctioning mandatory detention. Few historical details are provided and these mainly

through interviews with Ian Macphee, who was Minister of Immigration and Ethnic

affairs between 1979 and 1982, and Malcom Fraser, Prime Minister during the same

years. For this reason, Phillips reproaches the film and its director or a lack of historical

perspective on the history of white Australia (“Australia’s Inhuman Treatment”).

As a matter of fact, Law’s documentary does not offer any contextualization of

Australian anti-immigration policies, particularly those that have discriminated against

Asian immigrants; nor does Law include historical details or archival images from such racist films like The Birth of White Australia, in order to trace the historical roots of anti-

Asian policies and sentiment in white Australia.252 These images would have been

pertinent to frame the re-emerging anti-Asian rhetoric during the Howard Government

years and its reliance on stereotypes and racist imagery developed in Australian literature

and film since its early colonization years. Ommundsen, for instance, recalls how the

legacy of this racial “popular imagination” was exploited during the notorious Tampa

episode in 2001, when, running for re-election, Howard succeeded in framing the

refugees asking asylum to Australia as morally degenerate (104-06). The episode

concerned a Norwegian cargo ship that rescued hundreds of Afghans in international

waters and tried to land on Christmas Island, the Australian protectorate, but was denied

entry. The dispute went on for some days and it saw the deployment of an Australian

Special Force Regiment to try and keep the boat off shore. Under pressure from the

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international community, Australia was forced to let the refugees land, but it soon

responded with the “Pacific Solution” which conferred to the government the authority to

transport the asylum seekers to detention camps on small off-shore islands. The

government lied about the ruthlessness of the asylum seekers, fabricating a story about throwing children overboard (Ommundsen 105). The media and government framing of the refugees exploited the centuries-long racialization of Asian migrants as immoral and depraved. It also voiced the increasing “ethnic division along an Asian/European line” that found its most outspoken representative in Pauline Hanson and her nationalist party

(O’Regan Australian National Cinema 308), which employed instead the rhetoric of resource depletion – the usual “they” are taking “our” jobs rhetoric.

As O’Regan points out, this rhetoric could rest on the narrative construction of

“Australia’s Europeanness” (310), a “mundane fact” that Law’s Australian films have challenged with ease. In her fiction films, Law contaminates Australian European identity by displacing Australian cinema within a Hong Kong aesthetic and migratory movement.

In Letters to Ali, she reaches a similar goal, by curiously asking the Kerbi family and Ali to think about ancestors. Although their accounts are definitely colored differently, the

Kerbi’s stories about Irish, Celtic, and Jewish ancestors subtly remind viewers that white

Australia is actually entirely immigrant. As much is stated by Prime Minister Fraser in his interview, briefly recalling the early colonial appeals to populate Australia through increased immigration.253 Indeed, the interviews included in the documentary, albeit not

really historicizing Australia’s current policy, do effectively point to the Howard

government’s political manipulation of issues of immigration.254 Recounting the arrival

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of many Vietnamese refugees during the war, Macphee recalls that at the time it would

have been easy to exploit such an emergency to revive the white panic Australia had just

tried to overcome by abolishing the White Australia Policy. Yet, the labor government

refrained from such politics of fear, which the Howard government has eagerly channeled

in its ten years in office.255 Furthermore, Law indirectly deconstructs the anti- immigration arguments predicated on state expenses and job losses, pointing instead to the cost, for Australian taxpayers, of the scandalous court procedures carried out to ensure the detention of underage refugees like Ali. Law’s cinematic style also subtly contributes to undermine such nationalist discourses; as already mentioned, the initial shots and intertitles are designed to disarm any position predicated on white panic and to voice Law’s criticism and transnational perspective. In addition, as in her fiction films,

Law relies here more on constructing a personal narrative that seeks to move viewers; her focus is not so much on historical, social, and political explanations, but rather on imagery and sounds that convey the abusive experiences suffered by the Afghan refugees in Australia. To this end, Law effectively exploits the contrast between the vast

Australian outback, its red sunsets and dawns, and the constrictive, barb-wire ringed spaces of detention centers, which she is only allowed to shoot from the outside. The theme of absence and invisibility becomes a motif in the film, as Hawker points out, where Ali, the epicenter of the journey and the documentary, is never to be seen. Apart from the need to protect his identity, Law thus succeeds in making us aware of the anonymity and invisibility of most refugees in Australia (“Stranded in Hell” A3:6). With her documentary and Kerbi’s personal engagement, Law is directly attacking the erasure

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of the refugee mistreatment in Australia. To such a stylistic and emotional appeal, Law juxtaposes the “matter-of-factness” of present policy details, which she communicates

through intertitles superimposed on colored bars, “remind[ing] us about the nature of

word and law” (A3). Debunking the racist arguments of anti-immigration parties in

Australia through a personal and moving story and through an uncompromising imagery

denunciative of abuse and discrimination, the documentary, as Phillips himself concedes,

succeeds in translating the personal history of the Kerbi family and of Ali into a narrative

that can connect with most viewers, in spite of political, racial, religious, and cultural

differences. With Letters to Ali, Law continues her exploration of issues of migration and

diaspora, but further embeds them in the local space of the country she adapts to and

adopts through its cinema.

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3. CREOLIZING COUNTER-CINEMAS WITH CRITICAL HUMOR

3.1 Theorizing Critical Humor

The ‘Pirandellian mode’ produces metadiscoursive narratives that are self- reflexive, eccentric, and hypercritical, and pursue a true repositioning of the various ‘parties’ involved in the discoursive practice. (Gieri 11)

In the previous chapters, I have wandered along and through the films and life

stories of Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law, contextualizing their situated and cinematic

storytelling within the histories of migration that they have been handed from the

multiple communities to which they belong and with which they identify. Similarly, I

have illustrated how their critical perspectives shed new light on the construction of the

Australian nation and the national film industry established to (re)produce it. This

trajectory in and out of their personal stories, their filmic interpretations, and the private

and public histories they call forth has highlighted many sites of tension and

contradiction in Australian national cinema and history. In the two remaining chapters, I intend to illustrate how humor thrives in these tense and contested sites and turns into a critical mode of filmmaking that encourages dissenting voices. As already mentioned, this study aims at weaving together humor theories with feminist and postcolonial studies, highlighting their points of convergence and looking for their application in the

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field of film studies. The first hurdle when dealing with humor is the sheer number of

theories, studies, and approaches to the subject, extending from philosophy, psychology,

linguistics, literature, and sociology. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of forms falling into the semantic field of humor – from slapstick, comedy, jokes, parody, irony, puns, but also malapropisms and inadvertent sources of humor – has long complicated the definition of humor. This study participates in such a blurred field by focusing on cinematic texts that certainly do not fall within the genre of comedy and present different humorous instances varying from parodic to ironic elements. Whereas there is now a consistent body of work on the reception and translation of humor on screen and on film comedy as a genre, these studies mainly focus on verbal humor, as expressed in dialogues and scripts, on the slapstick and visual humor of many cinematic comedies, and on their stock characters and tropes.256 In this study, however, dialogue and classic notions of “verbal humor” will

not be the main object of analysis, just as the filmmakers selected do not privilege

dialogue but image-making. Yet, I refrain from defining the main object of analysis as

“visual humor” because such a label would oversimplify cinema’s capacities. I

understand cinematic humor within a conception of cinema as a language following

Christian Metz’s theorization of a grand syntagmatique, which illustrates how cinema has created a “body of specific signifying procedures,” relying on the combinatory rules of shots (Film Language 95).257 Metz identifies eight main syntagmas specific to cinema, in

other words eight large units of meaning that are created by cinematic techniques such as

cross-cutting, dissolves, fades, continuous or discontinuous shots. Hence, in my analyses

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of the films I will look at how humor can be inserted within the cinematic text, by playing with specifically cinematic codes and with the combinatorial rules of shots.

My focus will thus be on the structural significance of humor within the signifying practices of the cinemas of Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law, accounting for its function as a signifying practice that relativizes meaning and opens up spaces for critical reflection. As observed in the introduction, the starting point for my analysis of humorous techniques in cinema is Pirandello’s essay Sull’Umorismo; among the major theorists and theories of humor, from the classical (Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal) to the present

(Freud, Bakhtin, Bergson), Pirandello’s theorization applies perhaps best to the films I am examining. As Umberto Eco well points out, Pirandello’s definition of umorismo as il sentimento del contrario (the feeling of the contrary) is vague enough that his essay

“becomes a metaphysical treatise that could be called Everything (but Nothing Else)”

(Limits of Interpretation 165). Even so, it is the most appropriate for my purposes, first because, as Walter Geerts observes, Pirandello’s approach to humor relies on all three components of literary production: author, reader, and message/text (68-69). Indeed,

Pirandello’s reflections on umorismo only briefly and incompletely address interrogatives regarding the causes of humor; most of the essay is instead focused on the description of humorous texts in terms of their structural features and on observations regarding the effects of humor on its perceiver.258 Pirandello’s achievement is to offer a framework that concomitantly addresses the composition of texts, the strategies of humorous address, its functions, as well as its possible effects on audiences. As Attardo argues, theories of theories can be divided among “essentialist theories” that look for the “sufficient

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conditions for a phenomenon to occur,” “teleological theories” that focus on the aims of humor, and “substantialist” theories that are more descriptive, in that they concentrate on

“the concrete ‘contents’ of the phenomena (1). Pirandello addresses these three categories with special acuity and thus highlights the lacunae and problematics in each approach.

They seem especially pertinent to the films of these three directors because interviews and statements by the filmmakers confirm the significance of humor as a mode of address in their work and style overall. Hence, the selection takes into consideration both the authors’ humorous intention and the overall reception by critics who recognize their humorous intent.

A further reason to rely on Pirandello’s theorization of humor is that Moffatt’s,

Pellizzari’s, and Law’s uses of humor well relate to Pirandello’s metaphysical idea that humor results from “the existential condition modern man experienced and, to a certain extent, still experiences, a condition defined by specific motifs such as fragmentation,

division, and thus alienation or estrangement” (Gieri 11).259 In their vocal rejection of

attempts to ghettoize them as indigenous and/or ethnic filmmakers, Moffatt, Pellizzari,

and Law foreground the “universality” of their art and of their stories as pluricultural

women resisting marginalization and alienation. Simultaneously, they critically

contextualize postmodern theories of de-centeredness, which find a significant, modernist

antecedent in Pirandello’s humorous reflections (Gieri 74), by drawing on their situated

knowledges and perspectives. In The Pain of the Others, Susan Sontag has strenuously

reminded us that it is necessary to go beyond the mediated experiences of the wealthy

and white West, to understand the concrete link between visual culture and the pain of

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those that are usually objectified or erased from it. Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law seem to

respond to such a call by drawing attention to a whole space where experiences retain

their bodily texture and where identity and identification as a group – either defined by

class, gender, race, ethnicity, or sexuality – is still necessary to gain visibility and agency.

Through their situated, accented cinema, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law give voice to

bodily experiences of marginalization that are rarely featured on screen; they have opted

for a more auteurist and less socially committed approach to filmmaking, but have

retained a strong, situated knowledge of the power relations that have shaped their voices.

Similarly, Pirandello foregrounds the existential humorous condition of “man”

without losing sight of the social constraints and power relations that inform the

perception and enjoyment of the comic. The relation between the individual and society

is actually the pivotal point in his theorization of the transition from the comical to the

humorous, which uniquely positions him within conventional categories of comic

theories and constitutes the third rationale for relying on his approach.260 As Jan

Hokenson observes in The Idea of Comedy, the discourses on the comic that have

dominated the debate until today start from the underlying premise that moral or social

opposition are at the heart of our enjoyment and experience of the comic. Hokenson

groups theories of the comic in two broad macro-categories she defines as “satiric” and

“populist.” Satiric accounts of the comic can be traced all the way back to Aristotle and

stress the feeling of superiority that the comic engenders against the butt of the laughter,

whereas populist theories go back to Aristophanes and stress the identification with the comic hero and laughter as a sign of solidarity rather than superiority. What ultimately

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both satiric and populist categories share is the contention that “the figure of comedy

disfigures something that is usually referred to as the ‘norm’” (24). Most theories of the

comic see this disfigurement as ultimately contained by the laughter and enjoyment of the

comic, which acknowledges and to an extent reinforces the norm. Pirandello’s theory

belongs instead to those few approaches to humor where, as Eco claims in “the Frames of

Comic Freedom,” “the relationship between the rule and violation is differently

balanced” (7).261 Pirandello, distinguishing between the comic and the humorous, defines

humor as a sentimento del contrario, a feeling of the contrary, whereby the humorist is able to perceive the comic in the tragic, and the tragical in comedy. Unlike the comic, humor does not necessarily provoke laughter, but rather a bittersweet smile, a feeling

paradoxically triggered by reflection. Humor is thus defined as double and divided; in it,

sadness and mirth coexist and fluctuate, as do reflection and empathy.262 In his often

quoted example of the elderly woman with dyed hair and too much make-up, Pirandello

explains that we first laugh at her, perceiving that she represents exactly the opposite of a

“fine lady.” This moment constitutes for Pirandello the comic, which is the perception of

the opposite. However, if after the first laugh, we pause and reflect, then we might see, or

rather feel, that the old lady does not enjoy the masquerade, but is rather putting it up in

the desperate and self-deceptive attempt to hold the attention of her younger husband; at

this point, Pirandello argues, we start feeling the opposite and move from the comic to

humor (149). Commenting on this passage, Eco devotes attention to the difference

between the comic and humor, where the former only entails laughter at the character, in

consonance with superiority theories, and the latter acknowledges this sense of

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superiority and contaminates it “with a shade of tenderness” (8). Laughter is turned into a smile, when we mix it “with pity, without fear” (8). This understanding of humor leaves some space for an acknowledgement of social norms, in that when we laugh we perceive that the comic character eschews the standards of behavior, appearance, and propriety dictated by any given society; yet, our derisive laughter is toned down and transformed into a smile that does not necessarily seek to reassert the norm.263

Thus, Eco maintains, (Pirandellian) humor “does not act in order to make us

accept that system of values, but at least it obliges us to acknowledge its existence” (7-8);

we perceive the “contradiction between the character and the frame the character cannot

comply with. But we are no longer sure that it is the character who is at fault. Maybe the

frame is wrong” (8). Through humor, we perceive the pressure of the frame and are made aware of the impulse of enforcing it through laughter, but then in detached reflection we

refrain from reinstating the norm and start feeling a pull in the opposite direction, a questioning of the norm and its validity.264 Pirandello’s challenge to dominant literary

and social conventions does not however resolve the contradictions it helps to unveil; instead it creates a space for an oblique perspective that can foster a critical reflection on the subject’s own participation in the relations of power.265 For this reason, I would

contend that Pirandellian humor can constitute a critical intervention in the Foucauldian

sense of a “critique [that] doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes

… It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal” (“Questions of

Method” 84).266 Through its refusal to be contained within social and literary

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conventions, Pirandellian humor questions the validity of the systems of knowledge in which the subject – usually in the position of being the butt of the joke – participates.

Therefore, in this study I argue in this study for the congruencies between Pirandellian humor and postcolonial and feminist aesthetic projects; in particular, I refer to Glissant’s pensée de la trace that foregrounds the local encounters between cultures, languages, and societies that lead to the increasing, and unpredictable, creolization of systems of knowledge as well as aesthetic forms and to the systematic deconstruction of “la fausse universalité des pensée de système” (17). Such a project also resonates with de Lauretis’s feminist deaesthetic, which eschews the double-bind between woman and women and instead foregrounds feminist cinema as “a space of heterogeneity,” where no singular

“aesthetics” is priviledged, but a decomposition of dominant forms is performed

(Technologies of Gender 143). Like these projects, Pirandellian humor challenges dominant systems of knowledge, not in order to replace them with alternative universalist frames, but rather to celebrate and foster the multiple relations and local encounters that can emerge from the deconstruction of binarist, masculinist, and Eurocentric discourses.267

Finally, beyond relying on Pirandello because of its unique, and to an extent

intermediary, position within theories of the comic, this study also argues for the

Pirandellian model’s effective translatability to film studies. Pirandello’s most significant

contribution to the study of humor is his analysis of the narrative mechanisms through

which humor is inserted in the texts and of the effects this has on the writing and reading

process, the result being a constant interrogation of the relation between the subject and

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the social. Pirandello’s humorous strategies, decomposizione, reflection, and the masks

that the subject wears and with which humor plays, can (as I intend to show) contribute to

film theory and to its feminist and accented theorizations.

As mentioned in the introduction, such counter-hegemonic practices as feminist

film theory, Third Cinema theory, and accented cinema challenge the discourses that

mainstream cinema (re)produces by dissecting dominant filmic conventions. The aim of

such counter-practices is to create a space for critical detachment, where viewers can start

to feel the constructedness of the “common view” and to experience cultural dissociation

and heterogeneity. Such is the worth of humorous texts, which Pirandello describes as

"scomposte, interrotte, intramezzate di continue digressioni” (155)268 because humor

“scompone,” meaning decomposes, disassembles (51). In the decomposition of literary

and cinematic language into its basic units, Pirandellian humor unveils the contradictions within and between the codes that constitute the cinematic, literary utterance. In this sense, Eco, drawing on Pirandello, argues that humor “is always, if not metalinguistic, metasemiotic: through verbal language or some other sign system it casts in doubt other cultural codes” (8). Pirandellian humor offers a break in the signification process, where we can reflect on the norm and choose either to question or to reinforce it. Such a break in the signification process, I would argue, connects back to the theorization of third space by Bhabha, in that Pirandello’s distinction between humor and the comic inserts a time-lag of reflection, which offers to the subject an oblique perspective on his/her split subjectivity between the subject of the proposition, who laughs at the improper disfigurement of the norm, and the subject of enunciation, who instead recognizes his/her

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own conflicting relation to the norm. In this theorization, humor forces the subject out of

the frame, to perceive and feel a contradiction in the situated world of the referent;

indeed, as Giovanni Capello points out, Pirandellian humor differs from irony because it

relates to an incongruity that is not only verbal, but “real” (38). Pirandello views irony as

a predominantly rhetorical strategy that emphasizes fictitious contradictions, while humor

points to real ones in the material world of the subject of enunciation. Humor forces us to

transcend the system of signs and question it by looking back at the actual world of

reference and its heterogeneity that is, always inadequately, contained in the world of

signs (14-18).269 For this reason, Eco argues that Pirandellian “humor works in the

interstices between narrative and discursive structures,” i.e., it articulates the relationship

between the text and its cultural, social, and political background as it comes to be solidified in narrative frames that humor seeks to undermine (8). Although Pirandello mainly focuses on the aesthetic mechanisms of humor, his theorization also acknowledges that humor necessarily moves beyond the aesthetic space of the text, to address the discursive space of its production.270 This movement connects Pirandellian

humor to Bakhtin’s laughter where “there is [also] a continual passing beyond the

boundaries of the given, sealed-off verbal whole” (“Forms of Time” 237). Laughter and

critical humor can draw attention to the fact that language is, as Robert Stam summarizes

Bakhtin’s view of language, “always imbricated with asymmetries of power” (Subversive

Pleasures 8). Language is continuously negotiated among its speakers who bring to the

speaking act different social, individual, ethnic, gender, and class accents. There is a

continuous movement within language between the dominant code, what Bakhtin calls

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“unitary language,” and its centripetal forces – that aim at centralizing powers and

swallowing away dissenting accents – and the centrifugal forces of language that instead aim at decentering it, bringing out the multiplicity of social accents (“Discourse in the

Novel” 272).271 Critical humor, like Bakhtin’s “comic style,” can expose the centripetal

forces of language and relativize meaning by pointing to the dialogism of language.

Decomposing the language of a text, humor voices the contradictions between its

constituent parts and puts them in dialogue with one another; thus, it opens a third space,

where subjugated accents can be articulated, interrupting the performance of the present of proposition with the historicized moment of enunciation. In the first section of this

Chapter, I will illustrate how through (Pirandellian) humor, the interstitial perspectives that Moffat, Pellizzari, and Law bring to the screen deconstruct cinematic codes, making the basic units of film clash, and so unveil the contradictions that exist in the experiential

world that informs their art. The three filmmakers’ work, in fact, illustrates that

Pirandello’s emphasis on the break of the system of signification resonates not only with

Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, but also with feminist critiques of Jacques Lacan’s

structuralist theorization of the role of language in the process of subject formation. The

“decomposition” carried out by the three filmmakers forces the viewer to question the

language he/she is familiar with, to experience discomfort or what Roland Barthes calls

jouissance, and hence to feel the tension between the dominant linguistic norm and the

necessarily gendered, colored, and sexed bodily experience of the viewer. Relying on

Julia Kristeva’s elaboration of jouissance and other feminist approaches to humor, I will

illustrate how Pirandello’s emphasis on “reflection” in his theorization of humor presents

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many congruencies with Lacan’s notion of the gaze, but also with its criticism by

feminist theorists.

As a matter of fact, the Lacanian mirror is central to Pirandello’s understanding of

humor, as it is to film studies and the theorization of the subject-other dichotomy. As I

have pointed out, Pirandello’s transition between the comic and the humorous relies on a

third space of reflection, which interrupts our laughter and forces us to confront the

object of laughter and relate to it. Reflection should here be understood both as an

interval in perception, where we stand back and consciously ponder the scene before us,

and as a mirror reflection, whereby we come to see part of us in the other. Pirandello

argues that “nella concezione umoristica, la riflessione è, si, come uno specchio, ma

d’acqua diaccia, in cui la fiamma del sentimento non si rimira soltanto, ma si tuffa e si

smorza” (155)272 In other words, in the “reflection” we (mis)recognize ourselves in the other and we therefore partially identify and empathize with the person/event triggering

the laughter. There are echoes of a Lacanian understanding of subject formation in such a

reading, where our identity is formed in the exchange of gazes with the other and humor

relativizes our sense of superiority or inferiority towards the other. Visuality and the

problematic relationality of the gaze, which grounds much of film theory, proves a

determining factor also in the development of a humorous attitude that learns to question

the subject-object relationship on which the gaze is predicated. For this reason, in the

second section of this Chapter, I will address how Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law redefine

the cinematic gaze in their films, endowing their accented, female protagonists with the

power to look back and so directly force viewers to come to terms with the subjugated

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stories, experiences, and voices they bring to the screen. In playing with the structure of

the cinematic gaze, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law humorously comment on the conflicted

position of accented subjects in the discursive web of social relations. They visualize

what Rony defines as a “third eye,” through which subaltern subjects learn to see themselves through the eyes of the others who objectify them. This oblique perspective onto the power of the gaze resonates not only with postcolonial theories and writers,273

but also with Pirandello’s own existential reflections on the relations between the subject

and society. Pirandello, it should be noted, argues that we are necessarily a fragment of a

collectivity that both nurtures and represses us:

Vive nell’anima nostra l’anima della razza o della collettivita di cui siamo parte; e la pressione dell’altrui modo di giudicare, dell’altrui modo di sentire e di operare, è risentita da noi inconsciamente: e come dominano nel mondo sociale la simulazione e la dissimulazione, tanto meno avvertite quanto piu sono divenute abituali, cosi simuliamo e dissimuliamo con noi medesimi, sdoppiandoci e spesso anche moltiplicandoci. (173)274

The author of Uno, Nessuno, and Centomila and Sei Personaggi in Cerca d’Autore has

extensively written on the fragmented subjectivity of individuals whose identity is

necessarily defined in relation with the others and the gazes that fix one’s identities and

enforce conformity.

Pirandello’s subjects are thus masters in simulation, in putting on masks to

conform to the social frames they are constrained to inhabit. In the case of Pirandello’s

dolled-up woman, for instance, the comic laughter transforms into a humorous smile, not

only because the subject comes to realize that the frame the old lady seeks to inhabit

might be wrong, as Eco argues, but also because he/she identifies with the failed attempt

to shape one’s body and image into a solid and socially accepted cast, into a mask of

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social conformity. The subject is both smiling with the woman and at those masks that

he/she puts on and knows to be often unfitting and not necessarily right. Robert

Dumbrovski argues that “feeling the contrary” serves to “liberarci dalle maschere e dai meccanismi sociali che ci tengono ‘intrappolati’ o ‘prigionieri’” (61).275 As Pirandello

maintains, “il vestiario … compone e nasconde: due cose che l’umorismo non può

soffrire” (185);276 humor inevitably perturbs the process of assembling a well-tailored

identity and mask; it thrives in the details of daily lives, in the material contradictions that can ridicule the idealized, social shells that encase us (186). Pirandellian humor and its ability to decompose aims at denudare, according to Roic, in other words divesting us of our robes of conformity, not so much to unveil a true essence beneath them, but to multiply the masks that we can put on, hence challenging the accepted roles we are required to perform (83). Pirandello’s emphasis on humor’s ability to pull away at accepted social masks, but also his acknowledgement of the lack of a true face behind them, well translates to gender studies and particularly to feminist film theory. In her book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has offered an extensive analysis of the performativity of gender and its construction through the repetition of signifying acts.

Drawing on both Foucault’s analysis of power and subject formation and Jacques

Derrida’s insights into logocentrism and the iterability of language, Butler argues that

“the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found … in the possibility of a failure

to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of

abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (141). Parody in Butler’s arsenal

becomes a tool to subvert the dominant discourse, to recontextualize, deconstruct, and

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thereby displace the dominant gender masks we have learned to wear. Mary Ann Doane

proposes a similar act of subversion within the field of film studies, writing of the

subversive possibilities of a “masquerade,” which “flaunting femininity holds it at a

distance” (235). Parodic repetition and masquerading in these approaches resemble the

Pirandellian multiplication of masks, aiming to undermine the spurious naturalness and

wholesomeness of conformist (dis)guise. In the third section of this Chapter, I will

illustrate how Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law display a certain virtuosity in subversively masquerading stereotypical representations of ethnicity, femininity, and masculinity;

thereby forcing the viewer not just to laugh at the parodied subjects, but also to feel

his/her own complicity in upholding and reproducing them. Thanks to their interstitial

perspectives, they can speak from an oblique third space from which they can play with

the multiplicity and constructedness of the national masks. There is indeed, as I will

discuss in the third section, an uncanny congruence between feminist theories of

masquerade and parodic repetition and with Bhabha’s reflections on colonial mimicry,

where the mimic can unmask the performativity of such constructs as race and gender.

These forms of masquerade are predicated on conflicting and nuanced understandings of the power of mimesis, an idea also central to an understanding of cinema as a mimetic art, in Benjamin’s terms.

I hope to have illustrated in this brief overview of Pirandello’s analysis of humor that it can function counterhegemonically in cinema by fragmenting film’s composition

(in an art where editing and assembling are cornerstones of the narrative construction), questioning its visuality and looking relationships (for a medium predicated on the power

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of vision), and finally by relying on masquerades (in the masterful masked ball of cinematic artifice). In this Chapter, I will thus focus on how humor participates in these basic components of cinema and illustrate how it can be inserted into the fabric of film, by exploiting its grammar and syntax. Simultaneously, I will point to the crisis of subjectivity occasioned by the humorous strategies of Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law.

3.2 Pirandellian Humor: A Decomposizione of Cinematic Codes

In Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion, Gieri has already shown the extent to which Pirandello’s emphasis on humor as a narrative strategy applies to cinema. Reviewing the conflicted relationship of Pirandello to film,277 Gieri argues

that the playwright soon realized the centrality of the editing process in the construction

of film narratives, which coincided with his emphasis on structure and composition in the

literary text. Gieri explains that Pirandello believed in “the idea that unity lies in the

relation between parts, and that by juxtaposing two images a totally new image is born”

(42). Such a view of textual composition echoes the influential theorization of film by

Eisenstein, who argued that in cinema “the idea DERIVES from the collision between two

shots that are independent of one another” (163).278 Furthermore, many of the conflicts

that Eisenstein theorizes as methods of montage – metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and

intellectual – can easily be exploited for humorous purposes, as in sketches where the

forceful and earnest rhythm of a battle is slowed down to resemble the lightness of a

classical ballet, or where the seriousness of a funeral procession is sped up to a comic

march of black puppets. Thus, Pirandello’s attention to the assembling processes of

narrative texts, be they literary or cinematic, well translates into accepted theoretical

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frameworks. Pirandello clarifies that umorismo works through “decomposition” and

constitutes the “true structuring principle of the mise en scène, a dramatic strategy that

produces dislocation of space and time, but also of the character and of the fabula itself”

(Gieri 73). Decomposition can occur in any aspect of a film text: it can be introduced

through the scenography, the lighting, the camera filters, the acting style, the sound and

the soundtrack, and certainly the montage of all the parts.

Independent of the form it takes, decomposition ultimately aims at disassembling

a text in its constituting parts, making them clash and making the viewers/readers

experience that Pirandellian feeling of the contrary, which is necessary to trigger the

reflection and questioning of the norm that differentiates humor from the comic.

Pirandello’s theorization of humor as a strategy that interrupts the performance, in order

to shake the viewer into humorous reflection, resonates with Brecht’s famous

Verfremdungseffekt theory; indeed both writers describe humor as a form of aesthetic

distance.279 With Verfremdungseffekt, the German dramatist theorized an “epic theatre,” where viewers are detached from the action and made to feel estranged through defamiliarizing techniques.280 Pirandellian humor and the narrative decomposition it

serves, I would contend, can be understood as a tactic of Brechtian estrangement, because

such humor inserts that space of critical reflection, which Brecht called forth, in order to

transform a theatre of escapist entertainment into a theatre that could “die Dialektik zum

Genuß … machen … der Witz der Widersprüchlichkeiten (vol. 7: 59).281

The pleasure of productive contradiction that connects Pirandello with Brecht can

certainly be felt in the works of Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law, who construct their films as

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“essays in refusal,” to recycle Eco’s description of Pirandello, of dominant film and discursive conventions. Because of their insistence on aesthetic distance and innovation, however, the three filmmakers have been criticized for being too experimental, avant- gardist, and elitist. Interestingly, the Marxist Brecht had to face similar attacks as well; responding to criticism that his theatre was too ironic to appeal to the very people it wished to reach,282 Brecht recalled the works of Aristophanes, Cervantes, Shakespeare,

Dante, and Gogol, as well as Lenin’s concept of “kämpferischen Humor” (fighting

humor) that had always been embraced and understood by the people (vol. 6: 297-98).

Working in a globalized, media-saturated world, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law fend off

such criticism by deploying an intimate knowledge of popular culture, from American

mainstream cinema and TV shows to Hong Kong and Australian commercial genres. The

resultant creolization of low and high genres and discourses in the three directors’

filmmaking will be analyzed in detail in Chapter Four; here, I wish instead to point out

that Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s insistence on auteur cinema and on a formalist

conception of the medium parallels Pirandello’s own approach to literature, in that they

all avoid an overbearing conceptualization of art as political practice.

For this reason, Pirandello’s aesthetic theorization of humor coincides with

Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s own practices, which make of humorous

decomposition one of the assembling principles of their films, leaving the task of

ideological critique to their viewers. In other words, the three directors’ humorous tactics

create those third spaces of reflection discussed above, where dominant discourses on

gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion can be challenged. However, they leave up to

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their viewers the task of connecting the fragments, of listening to the submerged

knowledges voiced in the filmmakers’ jarring fragmentation of dominant narratives.

3.2.1. Moffatt’s Parodic Treatment of Multiple Film Tracks

Moffatt is mainly renowned for her innovative aesthetics and serious play with provocative issues and film styles; however, most commentators also note her ability to bring humor to her often tragic subjects and gloomy images. Describing Moffatt’s sensibility, Smee comments on her “dark, erotic, romantic” spirit, stressing that it is

“balanced by large dollops of humor and irony” (“Pushing the Right Buttons”). Ewen

McDonald argues that it is her “independence” from fixed categories that “allows her to

focus on important issues with sensitivity and humor.” Similarly, Wark McKenzie maintains that Moffatt inhabits an interstitial position, which eschews any pigeonholing

as an “Aboriginal” or “feminist” filmmaker; he also warns against defining Moffatt as a

marginal artist, because her work defies binary discourses of “margin against the center.”

McKenzie concludes that Moffatt, albeit speaking from the margin, does so in a

“universe of margins” where her work challenges any notion of a serious center. In this

process of multiplying the fringes of enunciation, McKenzie regards Moffatt’s greatest

ability as “the proper use of irony of the juxtaposition of images” (40), 283 which, as

discussed above, constitutes the principle of Pirandellian humor as well. Since her first short, Moffatt has experimented with the elements constituting film, disentangling them so as to force them into a dialogue that continuously highlights the opposite side of any given discourse. Critics who have taken notice of Moffatt early on were struck by this

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play of juxtapositions, noticing the persistent “sound/image disjunction” in her films

(McNeil 3).

Contrasting images against sound, voice, soundtrack, as well as intertitles, Moffatt

creates a conversation between the planes of the cinematic text similar to the

groundbreaking style of Yvonne Rainer and her A Film about a Woman Who (1974), a

seminal example of 1970s feminist counter-cinema.284 In her experimentation, Rainer emphasizes a “playfulness,” which resonates with Moffatt’s filmmaking. Rainer foregrounds Brechtian “interjections of materials” to break viewing habits (82) and maintains that “time and space must be played with – for comic relief, for disruption, for foregrounding the ‘apparatus,’ for allowing analysis and commentary” (270). Humor, she argues, serves different functions within her texts, where scenes of laughing women interrupt the flow of images to offer relief with a contagious sense of friendly merriness, and intertitles perform a systematic humorous negation of the characters’ statements or the image’s wholesomeness. In Rainer’s approach, humor fashions an entertaining text and inserts a space for reflection and criticism. Such a dual aim coincides with Moffatt’s own approach to film, in that she wished to offer a critical perspective on representations

of Australian Aborigines, while “avoid[ing] the didacticism” of most previous films on

the matter (qtd. in Colbert “Captained Souls”), by being “unconventional … but at the

same time entertaining” (qtd. in Turner “Expect the Unexpected” 11). The connection

between Rainer’s and Moffatt’s uses of humor points to the central role that feminist

filmmakers like Rainer in the 1970s have played for many accented women filmmakers

who have later appropriated techniques and ironies of feminist counter-cinemas, to which

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they added their accented perspectives, as Jayamanne argues (“Speaking of ‘Ceylon”).285

Jayamanne has made the humorous decomposition of a classical and hugely influential

film text in A Song of Ceylon, which, released in 1986, precedes Nice Coloured Girls by

a year and first introduces parodic practices that Moffatt also employs in her short. The

very title, in Jayamanne’s own words, “generates itself by parasitically appropriating” a

key text in ethnographic filmmaking, namely Basil Wright’s 1935 documentary Song of

Ceylon (“Speaking of ‘Ceylon’” 150).286 By repeating the title with the additional qualification of the indeterminate article, Jayamanne verbally inserts a “critical distance,” thus undermining the authorial legitimacy of a film claiming to be representative of a whole country. Jayamanne thus uses this formal intervention to construct the text as a parody, which Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Parody, defines as a “form of imitation with critical difference” (6). Hutcheon understands parody as a self-reflexive and critical recontextualisation of the backgrounded texts, which entails continuity, and so constitutes

a meta-commentary that does not transcend the text to address social concerns, a

direction that according to Hutcheon is instead the province of satire (57-75).287

Jayamanne’s parody certainly contains “satirical impulses” by employing humor to decompose ethnographic film conventions, but also the anthropological and

psychoanalytic discourse of Sri Lankan-born Princeton anthropologist Gananath

Obeyesekere’s celebrated text titled “A psychocultural exegesis of a case of spirit

possession in Sri Lanka” (“Speaking of ‘Ceylon’” 154).288

Nice Coloured Girls recalls A Song of Ceylon, in that it similarly draws on early

ethnographic accounts in order to recontextualize them through juxtaposition with other

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elements of the film text. In Moffatt’s case the recycled texts are excerpts from the diaries of Captain Lieutenant Watkin and of Lieutenant William Bradley, recounting their encounters with Aboriginal women when they arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in

1788 (Summerhayes The Moving Images 28). Moffatt parodically overlays these texts with the urban landscape of contemporary Sydney, specifically its nightlife neighborhood of King’s Cross. Against the shots of Sydney’s skyline and the initial sounds of car horns,

Moffatt juxtaposes sounds of sighs and paddling, establishing a time bridge to the superimposed written quote of Bradley’s diary entry of the twenty-ninth of January 1788 in A Voyage to New South Wales: “one of them came into the water to the side of the boat, we ornamented this naked beauty with strings of beads and buttons round her neck, arm, and waist.” The excerpt is an authoritative introduction to the sexual history of colonization as sketched out in Chapter One, recalling the eighteenth century pseudoscientific racist discourses that conditioned the Lieutenants’ view of the

Aborigines. Their accounts fit in the many early constructions of “black women … [as] sexually lascivious" (Mirzoeff 180), predominant in pseudo-Darwinist discourses that anatomized and measured “primitive” women’s genitalia and made a spectacle out of the

Hottentot Venus, the Knoi San Saartje Baartman, who “was exposed on the entertainment circuit” for her alleged “racial/sexual anomaly” (Shohat and Stam 108).289 Such colonial discourses and images, however, are soon displaced by the camera cutting to a low-angle shot of the legs of three modern “coloured girls” who parade through Sydney’s King’s

Cross, attracting male gazes with self-assurance, reinforced by the loud heels whose pounding resonates over the sounds of colonial boats in Sydney cove. The parodic and

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satirical sentimento del contrario is heightened when the Lieutenants’ recollections take

the form of a male British voice-over, narrating of “timid, shy” girls, while the camera

turns onto the faces of these modern girls laughing among themselves while consciously inciting the desire of the surrounding men. The satire of the white males fascinated by the exotic beauty of Aboriginal girls is finally completed when Moffatt adds a fourth dimension – beyond the urban images, colonial voice-overs, and beach sounds – with the insertion of subtitles voicing the three girls’ thoughts,290 revealing that they are out to

“fish for captains,” i.e., white men with money, luring them into buying them dinner, and

drinks, and taking their money.

The dissociation between sound, scoring, image, and subtitles in this first

sequence introduces humor by having the authority of the white male voice, typical of

ethnographic films, irreverently negated by the girls’ performance – in terms of gesture,

facial expressions, clothing, etc. – and thoughts. Moffatt repeats the discourses that have

long defined Aboriginal women, as well as the male gaze that feminist critics have long

criticized in cinema, but she parodically displaces them by looking back and further

fragmenting the flow of images with the appearance of the titles. McNeil points out that

these techniques of distantiation create a “split subjectivity,” in that the girls “become

objects to ‘look at’ in the ethnographic sense, but also they become subjects because they

‘speak’” (3). Moreover, such contrasts historicize the colonial past of Aboriginal women

in the context of present-day multiculturalist, capitalist, and globalized Australian

society, the scar of history that national discourses wish to keep at bay. By trans-

contextualizing the colonial voices of British settlers and the film conventions of early

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ethnographers, Moffatt demonstrates how critical humor implies not only the intersecting

and blurring of genres and narratives, but also the constant movement in and out of the

textual borders to encompass “the entire enunciative context” (Hutcheon 34).291 While

Hutcheon mainly refers to the need to specify the “encoding intent” to verify the ultimate

decoded meaning (thereby relating producers and consumers of texts), I understand the site

of enunciation as also embracing the sociopolitical and historical context, informing both

the author in the construction of the text and the spectator in its re-construction through interpretation. Critical humor thus wants to establish a connection between author and

spectator over the necessity of interrogating and questioning dominant discourses. Humor

plays with time and space, as Rainer insisted, so that past, present, and future are not

neatly arranged in a line pointing to the right, but instead intersect in the performative

space of the film’s chronotope.292

In the time-space unity of Nice Coloured Girls, Moffatt inserts discontinuity and

fragmentation by disentangling the syntactic units of film; the time-lags created in this

process allow the subaltern voices that had been silenced in the black spaces of colonial

history to re-emerge. Appropriately, it is often laughter that serves as a sound bridge

between the past and present of Australian Indigenous marginalization. When Moffatt stages re-enactments of colonial encounters in front of a framed nineteenth-century

painting of Sydney Cove, for instance, viewers see the arms of white males and black

females wrestle for a bag of money.293 Once the woman’s hands get hold of the coins, her

laughter resounds and transports us to the contemporary Sydney pub where the girls are

about to empty the modern “captain’s” pockets. The humorous connection between the

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Aboriginal women taking advantage of white men’s sexual fantasies in the colonial past and globalized present illustrates Moffatt’s nuanced representation of black women and the sexual history of Australia. Far from simply positioning the women in the role of victims, Moffatt purposefully depicts them as “resourceful … [with] a sense of humour, comradeship” (cf. French “An Analysis of Nice Coloured Girls), but also with vices and

“nasty” habits.294 Acknowledging the intersections between “Imperialism, Capitalism,

Patriarchy and Racism” (147), Anna Rutherford points out that Moffatt establishes connections between colonial sexual politics and contemporary economic marginalization of Aborigines in a globalized Australian society. As Karen Jennings and David

Hollinsworth argue, Moffatt “establishes a dynamic interplay between a number of binary oppositions: nice girls/nasty girls, white culture/black culture; the past/the present; predator/prey; exploiter/exploited.” Her response is to invert such dichotomies, mocking the oppressive discourses of colonialism and patriarchal capitalism and simultaneously rejecting the construction of Aborigines as necessarily passive, marginal, disappearing victims of such systems. On the contrary, she celebrates the resilience of Aboriginal women in the face of adversity, despite their nasty survival strategies; like Anzaldua’s

“new mestiza,” these women have developed “a tolerance for contradictions … ambiguity,” so that “nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly” (79).

Reinforcing such ambiguities, as well as the continuities between past and present, Moffatt adds yet another dimension in the play between cinematic units with the insertion of the soundtrack made of popular African/American pop songs. In the nightclub, for instance, the girls waiting for the captain to collapse, so as to steal his

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wallet, dance to the rhythm of Prince’s “Nasty,” sung by Vanity 6. Here Moffatt

establishes a dialogue between the lyrics asking “Do you think I am a nasty girl?” and

such girls indirectly responding in the subtitles that they “don’t feel sorry, because he

should be home with his family.” The drunken, ridiculed figure of the white John

(frequenter of prostitutes) losing control juxtaposed with Prince’s songs and the girls’

unapologetic laughter at the contemporary “captain” constitutes a prime instance of

critical humor in the film. Thereby, viewers participate in the girls’ enjoyment of the

game, but are also allowed a humorous distance to reflect on the reproduction of colonial

relations in this contemporary sexual game. Similarly, at the end of the short, after the

girls, escaping in a taxi with the captain’s money, declare that “it has usually been a good

night,” Moffatt returns us to colonial times with the voice-over adopting a nostalgic note

over the black screen. The final colonial recollections tell of the most beautiful “black

woman,” whom the Fleet “offered … several presents, all of which she readily accepted,

but finding our eagerness and solicitude to inspect her, she managed her canoe with such address so as to elude our too near approach.” To the white lieutenants’ disappointment,

Moffatt answers with the beat of Aretha Franklyn singing “I’m an evil gal,” in a final act of laughing back at the objectifying, colonial, patriarchal, and racist discourses

represented in the short.295 If we are to agree with Australian art critic Margaret Dawson,

the repeated references to evil gals can also be a self-reflexive and humorous

commentary on Moffatt herself, who is known as a “‘bad [gurrl] in the art world,”

because she “raid[s] and invade[s] the hallowed halls of photography, film and art,”

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refusing to be contained in the boundaries of each and unwilling to play along with a

prescribed, politically correct game of identity politics.

The music score of Nice Coloured Girls also attests to Moffatt’s interest and

fascination with African/American culture and art, long a model for Aboriginal writers

and filmmakers alike. Moffatt admits to being influenced by “black directors like Spike

Lee and John Singleton” (Urban 20) and being an eager reader of “black voices,” from

the authors of the Harlem Renaissance to Alice Walker’s biography of Nora Zeale

Hurston (qtd. in Stretton “Reading Tracey Moffatt” 284).296 Moffatt displays her

knowledge of African/American pop in her choice of imagery and narrative for the music

video she directed for the INXS song The Messenger (1993). The Australian popular

music band had “commissioned as part of a $500,000 marketing strategy for the …

album, Full Moon, Dirty Hearts” videos of all the tracks (186) and Moffatt took over The

Messenger, creating a narrative video with “INXS being kidnapped and slapped around

by a bunch of black girls” (qtd. in Portch 6). Interestingly, in her version, Moffatt

employs a play between subtitles, images, and soundtracks similar to Nice Coloured

Girls, stressing further the parodic and humorous dimension, so much so that the video has been described as a “combination of Batman, Benny Hill and the Beatles” (6). The video actually recalls blaxploitation movies with the black girls’ tight 70s outfits, “big hair,” and “bad-assness.” The leader of “the baddest chick hit squad,” as featured in typical newspaper clip inserts, is presented as a “mama boss,” proudly biting into a cigar.

The girls of the gang brandish oversized plastic guns in pink and yellow colors and are portrayed in the “torture chamber,” following the mama’s commands of the order of

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“paint his nails.” As in Nice Coloured Girls, the subtitles voice the black girls’ point of

view, but here Moffatt goes all-out with big-size fonts and electric colors and a flashy

masquerade of “evil gals.” Alternating images of the hostage scene with video footage of

“training camps” where the black squad practices shooting and kung fu under the lead of

a “kung fu doll,” the video finishes with the evil black gals escaping on a boat, while the

INXS men plead for them to come back because they love them. Alan McKee, in “The

Message of the Messenger,” cannot decide whether Moffatt’s video “features women using their sexuality for political ends; or … features political women made sexy for male fantasies” (187). McKee recognizes the parodic impulses of the video in its repetition of

media conventions such as “the opening shot of the Aboriginal ‘noble savage’ … quickly

transformed into parody through a trendy and confident dance movement, and the

presence of a gun” (192). However, McKee sees the incongruous transposition of a

“recognizable trope from the history of Aboriginal representation” as a form of

depoliticization, as is the domestication of the “phallic mothers” through their inoffensive

plastic weapons (192). Speculating on Moffatt’s authorial voice in the video, McKee

recognizes that, in line with Nice Coloured Girls, there can be a celebration of the

survival strategies of black women and thus an inversion of the “wanton strumpets”

stereotype (195), climaxing in the INXS leader’s melodramatic love confession. Yet,

McKee maintains that, given the nature of the video, Moffatt’s agency is actually erased

and the INXS members function as the “guarantors of the correct reading of the video”

(191). Although Moffatt’s authorial agency is indeed subordinate to INXS (her name

does not appear in the video at all), I would contend that Moffatt’s parody does offer a

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counter-reading to the song. Contrary to McKee who claims there is no relation between

Moffatt’s narrative and the pop song lyrics (186), I would argue that Moffatt’s trans- contextualization of blaxploitation style to Australia and repeated parody of popular media constructions (such as the sexy Asian fighting beauty and the Aboriginal noble savage), does counter the song’s refrain of “don’t you put the blame on the messenger.”

To an extent, Moffatt seems to be turning the lyrics into a playful comment on the media as the messenger that (re)produces patriarchal and racist discourses. Simultaneously, however, Moffatt pays tribute to the aesthetics of blaxploitation texts despite their machismo, refusing once again to draw prescriptive conclusions in favor of a nuanced and ambiguous rethinking of past traditions. Moffatt hence employs humor to investigate this thin boundary of critical reflection inserted between a-critical celebration and a- historicized dismissal. As for the “baddest chick hit squad,” there is no denying that

Moffatt relishes masquerading and role-playing, a continuous thread in her photography and film work that I will discuss in section three.

3.2.2 Pellizzari’s Sensuous Satire through Associational Montage

Among the three filmmakers analyzed in this study, Pellizzari is arguably the one who, although never really making film comedies, comes closest to the genre, be it with echoes of the Italian popular film genre of la commedia all’italiana or of grotesque

Australian comedies, a generic kinship that I will discuss in Chapter Four. Thematically,

Pellizzari concerns herself with traumatic experiences of domestic male violence and ethnic discrimination, but stylistically she counter-balances the oppressive claustrophia of her Italian/Australian enclaves with an unruly and provocative laughter. Her women

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protagonists follow in the tradition of the “unruly woman” described by Kathleen Rowe as “an ambivalent figure of female outrageousness and transgression” (10).297 According to film critic Jo Litson on the pages of The Australian, such a style well reflects

Pellizzari’s own personality, whom he describes as “a larger-than-life character, outspoken, irreverent, opinionated and fiercely committed to her filmmaking, yet with a warmly brusque sense of humour.” Most critics agree with Capp that humor is “a central component in Pellizzari’s films” and that she displays a keen sense “for the comic possibilities of character and situation, in conjunction with an idiosyncratic visual style” that ranges “from the bittersweet irony of Rabbit to the sly, wry humour of Just

Desserts.” Dell’Oso stresses that Pellizzari is “able to move easily between humour and pathos” (17); like Moffatt, who wished to distance herself from didactic “Aboriginal movies,” Pellizzari argues that her films are “unlike films of that kind (i.e. ethnic films or whatever you want to call them) in that there [is] a lot of humour” (Conomos 34).

Referring to her first short, Rabbit on the Moon, Pellizzari explains that “it looks at

Italians but it does so in a very absurdist way, which lends itself to a lot of comedy” (34).

Such a description fits all of her subsequent projects as well, where the gritty and tragic realities of marginal, working-class Italian Australians inspire Pellizzari to mix a dreamy pasticcio of material conflicts and contradictions sweetened by her visionary, humorous, and unruly women protagonists. Not surprisingly given her cinematic style, Pellizzari claims that a sense of humor and satire are very important to her filmmaking, although at times her humor has provoked negative reactions from critics and producers as in the case of No, No, Nonno! (1990), a comic look at aging and Italian men, where “i burocrati del

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mondo artistico” found the use of humor to tell ethnic stories inappropriate (“Il Cinema

Italiano in Ottica Italo-Australiana” 25).298 Despite the criticism and ostracism she

encountered because of her unruly humor, both in the predominantly Anglo environment

of the AFRTS and in the Australian film industry generally, Pellizzari asserted her belief

in the possibility of telling the truth of ethnic discrimination with a healthy dose of self-

reflexive and provocative humor, so as to be “both instructive and entertaining”

(Conomos 33).

Although reviews and critics show that Pellizzari’s style is more explicitly comic,

her films can still be read through the lenses of Pirandellian humor because, structurally,

her humorous perspective is still predicated on the sentimento del contrario, a

dissociation that allows for an oblique perspective within Australian society and

hyphenated Italian identity. Specifically, Pellizzari also employs humor to disassemble the film text, to incite critical reflection, and to look beneath the masks of Italian

Australiana, both as it has been represented in the media and lived on the streets. In this

section, I will concentrate on Pellizzari’s innovative approach to the decomposition of the

film shot, which is best exemplified in the first short she made after graduation, namely

Just Desserts (1993). Just Desserts depicts the sexual coming-of-age of a young

Italian/Australian girl, Maria Stroppi, through a continuous juxtaposition of her

experiences and Italian culinary specialties. As Maria struggles between her desire for

independence and sexual pleasure, trying to escape the constrictive frames of her

Italian/Australian home in an Anglo/Australian society, viewers can savor the sensuality

of Italian food, while being introduced to its contradictory pleasures. The short is divided

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into 5 segments, each named after a Venetian culinary specialty, “Broth/Brodo,”

“Venetian Fritters/Frittole,” “Cornmeal/Polenta,” “Dumplings/Gnocchi,” and “The Pizzas

Are Sleeping.” As the sub-segments show, contrary to the title, only one section actually

refers to a dessert, which could in itself be an ironic commentary on the bittersweet memories and experiences of growing up Italian in Australia. The film’s many international awards appeared to establish Pellizzari as an Australian filmmaker with a bright future. Scanning through the reviews, the feeling emerges that Just Desserts won over audiences and critics thanks to its striking visuals and its humorous approach to filmmaking and ethnic stories alike. Vicky Roach describes the film as a “dark and quirky comedy,” which, in spite of its ethnic perspective, “struck a universal chord” thanks to its focus on the link between food and sexuality (“Monica Sweet”). Mary

Colbert adds that Just Desserts dispenses “sensuous servings of food … alongside provocative explorations of sexuality and a critique of Italian patriarchy spiced with liberal helpings of idiosyncratic humour” (“Bi-Cultural Visions” 24).

Critique and humor serve as the defining features of the short that accomplishes

its aims, by splitting its very text in two. It is constructed through either cross-cutting

between the parallel worlds of Maria and her mother, or, at times, through a split screen,

where the left half represents Maria’s adventures in black and white, and the right half the process of cooking Italian delicacies in vivid colors. Given this editing style, it could be

argued that the short and its humor mainly rely on Pellizzari’s accented inflection of the

Eisensteinian category of intellectual montage.299 Whereas in Eisenstein’s theory, the synthesis between the two juxtaposing shots gives meaning to each, in Just Desserts,

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Pellizzari establishes a three-way dialogue. Each frame constitutes an independent clause

with its own meaning, but the juxtaposition of the two clauses inserts a third meaning that

modifies the other two. Additionally, while creating a contrast in metaphorical meanings,

according to intellectual montage, Pellizzari inflects this abstract connection with the

sensory concreteness of culinary and sexual imagery. The parallel events unfolding on

split screens also establish a dialogue between daughter and mother, who almost

consistently share the screen, with the mother at times invading the black and white space

of Maria’s memory. Both women are constricted by tight framing, and their voices, looks, and actions signify on each other and inflect the other’s experiences with a humorous counter-emotion.

Just Desserts foregrounds sexual taboos as they relate specifically to female

sexuality: Pellizzari, for instance, shows Maria’s first menstruation, humorously

decomposing discourses of the abject body (a topic I will discuss in section three), as well

as female masturbation, lesbian love, and earliest heterosexual experience, ending with

Maria exiting the film frame and with it the constraints of her Italian/Australian

upbringing. The titles for each segment already give a sense of the humorous associations

constructed by Pellizzari; “Broth/Brodo” deals with menstruation, where bodily fluids

and boiling hens well serve to mock the abjection of the woman’s body; “Venetian

Fritters/Frittole Venete” represents Maria finding her own clitoris and reaching the crispy

climax of an orgasm, while her mother fries sugary Italian treats in the shape of “Little

Vaginas;” “Cornmeal/Polenta” follows Maria’s early infatuation with an

Anglo/Australian girl and the discovery of their timid lesbian kiss brings to the surface of

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a boiling polenta the suppressed voice of an Italian lesbian aunt; discouraged from pursuing her sexual self-discovery with girls, Maria experiments with heterosexual sex in

“Dumplings/Gnocchi,” where the phallic but flabby rolls of potato dough deliver a satiric

blow to notions of virility and heterosexual romance. Finally, the last installment, “the

Pizzas Are Sleeping” signifies the possibility of finding spaces of dissent in the

interstices of dominant discourses and practices.

The bilingual titles of each segment thus already inscribe a satirical element in the

film text: on the surface, the titles simply denote the Italian specialty being cooked during

each segment, but it is through the level of connotation that they signify Maria’s

experiences. The viewer is supported in the process of humorous meaning production by

Pellizzari’s skillful use of cross-cutting, whereby each sexual discovery by the chastely-

named Maria is juxtaposed with the mother’s culinary production of sensory pleasures. In

“Frittole Venete,” each bounce that Maria takes on a shrieking chair in search of her

clitoris is counter-pointed by Maria’s mother kneading, shaping, and cutting the dough,

climaxing with the mother’s evocative slow-motion sugaring of the fried frittole.

Pellizzari withholds the image of Maria’s face at the climactic moment, a direct counter-

movement from mainstream cinema where it is usually always the female face that

symbolizes the culmination of, mostly heterosexual, bliss. Pellizzari chooses instead to let

us only see the circular movement, in black and white, of the girl’s legs hanging above

the ground, displacing her pleasure in the image of the mother’s skillful orchestration of

sensuous bites.

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Apart from the tongue-in-cheek quality of Pellizzari’s associational montage, such

juxtaposition also serves to create a sensory pleasure and bliss that viewers can feel by

evoking memories of tastes and smells, rather than of erotic images. This game of sensory pleasures at the heart of Pellizzari’s re-molding of the visually-explicit medium

of cinema constitutes a paradigmatic example of the “tactile optics” that Naficy argues

characterizes accented cinema. Predicated on multiple spaces, temporalities, voices,

bodies, and senses, this “tactile optics” represents the fragmentariness of the diasporic

experience, while also pointing to its potential of (re)establishing connections among

separate segments of one’s life, thus (re)creating a sense of place and belonging (28-29).

Similarly, Pellizzari fragments the cinematic screen, but allows a continuous “dialogue”

between the frames that defies the borders of each and actually foregrounds the

possibility of movement, of connecting across spaces. The image of food similarly serves

to recall sensory experiences, triggering reminiscences of faraway places and homes,

creating affective connections. As James Kellner points out in his study of food

representation in cinema, not being actually consumed by the spectators, food on screen

can only function metaphorically; therefore it ultimately foregrounds the absence of the

referent, just as the image of ethnic cuisine as metaphor reinforces the distance from the

ancestral home. Yet, as sensory memories can re-connect, cinematic food can actually

challenge the predominance of sight over the other senses, reminding us of alternative

paths to knowledge such as smell, taste, and touch. In The Skin of the Film, Laura Marks

argues for an “embodied” understanding of vision, where all the senses are necessarily at

play in the experience of seeing (162-64). Such an understanding is central to her

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theorization of “intercultural cinema” and, I would contend, to the definition of an

accented women’s cinema;300 moreover, the embodied vision will prove significant for the mimetic qualities of critical humor that I will discuss in section three.

Returning to the specific displacement of sexual pleasure from the black and

white left frame, to the colorful right frame representing the mother’s virtuosity in

cooking, it is clear that Pellizzari here establishes a movement beyond the single frame

that gives a semiotic significance to the relationship between mother and daughter. Most

interestingly, such bodily and visual dissociations seem to create a critical space for

reflection on the experience of hyphenated Italian women in the kitchen. On the one

hand, confining Maria’s mother to the constricted space of la cucina, Pellizzari seems to

comment on the repressed sexuality of many women of Italian descent raised and

disciplined within the confines of a patriarchal family, where food was their chain to the

male domus. Maria’s mother is portrayed regularly scolding her daughter for exploring her bodily and sexual pleasures, a theme that will become even more prominent in

Pellizzari’s feature film Fistful of Flies. On the other hand, viewers see the mother unleash her sensuousness and bodily pleasure in the act of cooking, sugaring the frittole, energetically kneading the dough, and thus performing actions whose movements

Pellizzari constantly parallels with those of a sexual act. Such a strategy allows Pellizzari to criticize the ideal of domesticity in a patriarchal Italian/Australian culture, while celebrating the talents of the hyphenated Italian women who often found in cooking an outlet for their creativity and bodily pleasures. As much is conveyed in the satirical ending of the segment “Venetian Fritters/Frittole,” when the mother catches Maria in the

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act of masturbation and, after calling her a “whore” (a common Italian insult being

“puttana”), eagerly bites into one of her own frittole, or rather “little vaginas,” as Maria’s

Anglo/Australian friend calls them. Given the associations created by Pellizzari between

fritters and female genitalia, the mother, while venting her disdain, figuratively repeats

the sinful act committed by the daughter, establishing a further connection between the

two generations of hyphenated Italian women. Such emphasis on the sensuous qualities

of Italian women’s cooking seems to establish a diasporic connection between Pellizzari

and the new generation of Italian/American women filmmakers, particularly Nancy

Savoca and Helen De Michiel.301 Like Pellizzari, they have also (re)appropriated the

domestic space and turned it into a site, where the patriarchy of the Italian/American

community can be unveiled and criticized, while the creative resistance of

Italian/American women can be celebrated.302 In particular, there is an interesting

resonance between Pellizzari’s experimental montage and some Brechtian elements

found in Tarantella (1996) by her Venetian compatriate in the U.S., De Michiel.

Although Tarantella greatly differs in style and narrative from any of Pellizzari’s films, it

is interesting to observe that both authors have found in Italian food imagery a vehicle to

introduce humor in the text, as well as a provocative critique of Italian patriarchy.303

The humorous attack on physical and discursive frames is the structuring principle of Just Desserts and its five segments, thanks to Pellizzari’s associational montage and occasionally disorienting camera angles. From the initial shot, Pellizzari makes the contours of the filmic frame dynamic, by floating fragmented images on the screen, before re-assembling them into one single shot, which remains over-determined

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by the tension between its foregrounded parts. Depicting the young protagonist’s entry into womanhood, the first segment, “Broth/Brodo,” starts with a close-up of female feet stomping grapes appearing on the left side of the screen; following suit, a shot of the extract streaming into a glass still appears on the right side of the screen. The screen remains black between the representation of the action and its results, but is soon filled by a close-up of Maria’s eyes. The initial two frames evoke stereotypical Italian patriarchal signs of sensuality, of women stomping the grapes for their men, an impression reinforced by the appearance of Maria’s father, instructing her on how to stomp his wine correctly. The insertion of the middle frame with Maria’s eyes, however, humorously disrupts such ethnic signs; in extreme close-up, Maria’s eyes trump the other two frames and assert her subjectivity, while her voice also counters the representation of traditional

Italian womanhood, as she is mumbling the 70s Australian hit song “Living in the 70s.”

The contrast between the static images of traditional Italian ethnic signs and the contradicting eyes of Italian youth rocking away is heightened for those familiar with

Australian rock music by the intertextual reference to the cult 70s band Skyhooks.304

Famous for its flashy and provocative masquerades during live concerts, the association between Maria and the Skyhooks anticipates her unruliness within the Italian/Australian patriarchal family structure, and Pellizzari’s own willingness to violate screen taboos.305

Pellizzari’s most direct attack on patriarchy sees her take on Freudian psychoanalytic discourses in order to satirize notions of the castration complex. Having been punished and humiliated for her exploration of lesbian sexual desires in

“Cornmeal/Polenta,” in the next episode, “Dumplings/Gnocchi,” Maria is shown having

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her first sexual intercourse atop a surf board on a white Australia beach. Pellizzari mocks

here the popularized signs of Australianness, by cramming them into the tight left frame

of Maria’s memories and stripping them of their much advertised beauty: the heavenly

blue skies and the white splendor turn gritty in the black and white cinematography.306

Furthermore, Pellizzari heightens the sexual innuendoes in this short by counter-pointing each stage of the sexual act with each phase in the making of the gnocchi, represented on the partial frame on the right side of the screen. Whereas the former is represented in alienating high-angle shots that emphasize the increasing displeasure expressed on

Maria’s face, the latter is depicted in colorful close-ups that do lead to the desired

outcome. Foreplay, penetration, deflowering, and male orgasm are statically represented

from a detached high-angle perspective. Yet, the juxtaposed close-ups dynamically and

sensually connote such phases, moving from burning expectations to bitter disillusion;

our senses are thus titillated by the hot, smoking potatoes, the mother’s careful peeling

off of the potato skins, and the slow motion breaking of an egg yolk in the white flour.

From this point on, the close-ups start focusing more on the hands and face of the mother

who seems to be directly responding to the clear displeasure felt by her daughter. As

Justin, her lover, continues to override Maria’s vain protests, the mother replicates, beat by beat, his back and forth movements, while squeezing the dough into nicely formed gnocchi rolls, which at the moment of Justin’s climax, she energetically proceeds to cut into pieces. From the symbolic, satirical castration of Justin, Pellizzari restores the full screen to reveal an unsatisfied Maria, who provocatively stares back at us and ridicules

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the virile Australian laid-backness of Justin; in a final mockery of phallic power, Maria is

then portrayed eating, “for the last time” as she declares, the flaccid and sticky gnocchi.

As illustrated in these few scenes, Pellizzari performs various dissociations in the

short, allowing the viewers to think through associations and critically reflect on the

dominant Italian signs disseminated in the media, as well as on the heteronormative

construction of womanhood. In the fifth, “The Pizzas Are Sleeping,” she confronts the

ethnic bonds that tie her to the patriarchal home. The final segment does not feature split

screens and colors, but it is shot entirely in black and white; Maria does not experience

any sensual pleasure in this last part, but seems instead to reach an intellectual resolution

matured through the physical and psychological experiences of the previous segments.

Resting on her bed, seemingly because of the recurrence of her menstrual period, Maria is

besieged by her mother, who surrounds her with neat balls of pizza dough, because they need to rise with her bodily warmth. For the first time, food is here represented in black and white, conveying the impression that the pizzas, rather than evoking the sensuality of

food, symbolize bars that suffocate the young girl in her bed. Pellizzari conveys this

sense of claustrophobia by overtaking the image of the supine Maria with the

multiplication of superimposed close-ups of Maria’s scared face. Brushing away the

growing sense of entrapment, Maria abruptly rises to sit on the bed and, after staring

between her legs, stands up and leaves the pizzas behind, sleeping in her bed. Gesturing

us to be quiet, Maria seems to have found in her own body and in the silent resistance of

her female ancestors the strength to venture on a new path. Pellizzari inserts here a

further humorous comment with the final soundtrack of different regional versions of

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popular Italian ninna nannas, instructing young Italian girls to behave properly. Instead

of soothing the unruly Maria to sleep, however, the witches and boogie men of Italian

folk lyrics sing back to the pizzas, and by extension to the very same oppressive

discourses from which they emerged. Finally, by closing in to show us the abandoned

pizzas as well as the items hidden beneath Maria’s bed , such as a scientific drawing of

the vagina and her running shoes, Pellizzari points to the subjugated knowledges that

have helped Maria question the system of knowledge in which she grew up and

participated. Refusing to help the suffocating Italian pizza dough rise with her bodily warmth, Maria to a certain extent begins to unsettle the ethnic and patriarchal ties that have constrained her since childhood. Through critical, humorous reflection, Maria and, with her, the audience are encouraged to think beyond the conventional frames and associations, to create new connections and explore alternative and hybrid cultural paths, neither fully Anglo/Australian nor entirely Italian.

3.2.3 Law’s Humorous Disjunctions: Emphasizing Cinematic Kinetics and Haptics

Humorous dissociation can take multiple forms; Moffatt in Nice Coloured Girls exploited the potential conflict between the five tracks of cinema that constitute a film to fashion humorous oppositions and thus incite viewers to connect past and present forms of marginalization for Australian Aboriginal women. Pellizzari in Just Desserts, on the other hand, relied on associative montage for creating a juxtaposition in colors, symbols, and meanings that affected a bridge between the worlds of daughter and mother, and the humorous contradictions of identifying as Italian/Australian, while rebelling against the very definition of hyphenated Italian culture. Both authors emphasize a formalist

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approach to film, where humor arises out of the manipulation of cinematic codes and

eschews binary discourses in favor of a nuanced, oblique critical reflection. Law follows

this approach in that she also favors a humorous decomposition of cinematic signifying

units to voice the ambiguities and conflicts of diasporic and marginal subjects. As

happens with Moffatt and Pellizzari, film critics often describe her work as triggering

contrasting emotions and balancing humor and drama. Reviewing Law’s filmography,

Stratton for instance cites as a feature of Law’s style her ability to “[treat] the themes as

dramas imbued with sardonic humour” (“Genre-Bending” 22). Keith Connolly describes

Floating Life as “both dramatic and moving – and also at times very funny” (79). Pauline

Webber notes “its mix of humour, melodrama, irony and understatement” (21) and

considers it a paradigmatic example of accented cinema. Susie Eisenhuth emphasizes the film’s “humanity and humour,” which, in her view, makes it a powerful counter-text to

the anti-immigrant rhetoric and divisive politics of Pauline Hanson (77).307 Andre Hanos

credits Law with a highly formalist approach to film which, in spite of the criticism

leveled against it, is “balanced by humor, whimsy, absurdist wit, dramatic potency, an

ability to create rounded, three-dimensional characters, and an original, highly disciplined

visual style” (“Floating Life beats the dud torpedoes” A14). Various critics ascribe the

film’s humor to its outsider perspective on Australian society; Caroline Chrishom, for

instance, appreciates the “hilarious glimpse of Australia through the eyes of ‘new

Australians’” (37) and Colbert describes it as “a wry urban observation juxtaposing

lifestyles and migrant adaptation” (“Screen Goddesses” 7).

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Commendations of Law’s ability to treat serious themes like migration and

alienation with humor and emotional intensity are usually accompanied by enthusiastic

descriptions of Law’s mastery of cinema’s language and style. Ron Banks, for instance,

notices that “Law … constructs her films as a series of montages, each fragment adding

to the overall impact of the film. She avoids the more conventional linear narrative in

favour of [a] chopped-up technique” (6). Law supports such readings, claiming that she

usually foregrounds cinematic structure over narrative and dialogue; for Floating Life, for

instance, Law maintains that the script needed to float like the life of its characters, so as

to express the multiple points of view and experiences that the process of migration

entails (Palace Films).308 Fragmentation becomes a structuring principle through parallel narratives, flashbacks, and episodic divisions; Sandra Hall describes “the structure of the

script … [as] jagged … it’s like a tree – a family tree, but one under stress and fast losing

its leaves” ( “In a Harsh New Light” 18).309 The family tree drawn by Law has its roots in

the houses that the family has or will inhabit and these come to symbolize the

(dis)harmony felt by their inhabitants in constant movement. Through the space of the

home, Law engages universal themes of alienation and uprootedness with the local

experiences of migration and geographical and cultural adjustment (Mitchell “Floating

Life”). Floating Life is articulated in six long segments, “A House in Australia,” “A

House in Germany,” “A House in Hong Kong,” “A House in China,” “A House without a

Tree,” and “A Big House.” As this subdivision already anticipates, the film is focused on

place, or rather on finding one’s space in the mobility of modern life.310 In Law’s text,

spaces and landscapes, exterior as well as interior, mediate the expression of emotions,

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are causes of conflicts, sites of resolution, and serve as expressions of global and national

concerns within a layered and embodied spaces of the local. Law’s humor, therefore, seems inextricably linked to the notion of space; it is through the manipulation of landscapes that Law performs a humorous decomposition, which invites a critical reflection on Australian national discourses, as well as Chinese identity and diaspora.

Indeed, most film reviewers and scholars invariably comment on the very first shots of the film, which, as Mitchell points out, introduce the “comical defamiliarisation of

Australian suburban spaces” (“Boxing the ‘roo” 108). Jim Schembri maintains that Law’s

“meticulous eye for nuance and irony … can make a suburban housing development look like the Sahara during a water shortage” (“Floating Life” 4). Michael Fitzgerald agrees that “Australian suburbia has never looked so strange or familiar, brimming with light and toyland architecture,” so that the Chan’s family seems “as alien as Priscilla’s drag queens in the desert” (84). Barber weighs in on the excellent work of cinematographer

Dion Beebe, whose over-exposed shots of Australian suburbs well serve to convey “with much humour” the alienation of geographical disjunction as expressed in differences of light and space between Law’s two countries (“No Foreigner” 15). Floating Life, as the first film that Law actually shot on Australian soil, foregrounds her embodied vision of the country’s landscape and exploits it to translate in the natural and suburban spaces of the new land the sense of alienation experienced by migrating subjects.

This embodied, visual approach to physical space connects back to the “tactile optics” of accented cinema discussed above. However, Law seems to veer slightly from the main chronotopes identified by Naficy;311 for a film focused on “journeying,”

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Floating Life presents viewers with no pictures of airports, seaports, trains, or even baggage. On the contrary, Law contains most of the film within domestic milieus, where the actual process of fashioning one’s space in the new land is embedded into the fabric of everyday life. The exterior sequences function, instead, as humorous representations of the physical and affective disjunctions triggered by geographical displacement. Through her manipulation and humorous decomposition of spaces, Law seems to pursue two goals; first, making viewers feel the bodily sensation of being displaced, and, secondly, experimenting with the visuality of the medium so as to appeal to all the human senses.

In such a process, Law indirectly offers insights into the participation of cinema in the construction of our sense of geography, architecture and movement. In Atlas of Emotion,

Giuliana Bruno has illustrated how cinema, as inscribed in its Greek etymology, constitutes a means of “motion” through which immobile spectators can move through.

Cinema is a means of “transport,” in that it is a fabric of (e)motions for its viewers (6).

Whereas most theories stress the visuality of such imaginative journeying and feeling,

Bruno proceeds to argue for “film” as a “haptic [matter]” like architecture (6). If accented cinema foregrounds the “tactility of cinema,” Bruno shows that film has always been particularly apt at conveying the sensory qualities of migration because “cinema was born of a topographical ‘sense’ and has established its own sentient ways of picturing space”

(8). Rather than turning spectators into voyeurs, Bruno wishes to foreground “the position of a film voyageuse, for the haptic as a feminist strategy of reading space” (16). Law enables such a viewing/reading position, by structuring the text around the haptic qualities of migration, thus emphasizing the power of cinema, in representing diasporic

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perspectives and experiences, where spectatorship is constructed as an “embodied and

kinetic affair” (Bruno 17).312

How are the sensory qualities of diasporic disjunctions and memories rendered and turned into a humorous sign in Floating Life? Cinematographer Beebe points out that

Law “likes the locked-off frame … she doesn’t really go for big camera operation, nor does she follow the action” (Hibiscus Films). Indeed, in conveying the theme of journeying and being displaced, Law does not rely on mobile frames; on the contrary, she insists on static homes and neighborhoods.313 The film opens with a static shot of fast

moving individuals, which signals the buzz of Hong Kong, while keeping it at a distance

through an arresting slow-motion, a foggy cinematography, and a traditional Chinese

soundtrack. Such suspended time and movement break into the diegetic present, when the

glass door of the restaurant is opened and spectators enter the world of the Chan family

engaged in their last minute hectic shopping for the migration journey to Australia. Law

constructs space in Hong Kong through its uses: the density of cooking vapors that turn

surfaces opaque, the warm interior colors that emphasize the intimacy between customers, restaurant owners, and servers, and the heat and lack of air felt through the high-angle shots of a fan that does not seem to provide any relief. Viewers can sense the bodily proximity that is part and parcel of living in the crowded and hectic spaces of

Hong Kong. From this shot packed with sensory qualities, Law, bypassing the actual traveling stage, cuts to a wide-angle shot of an unidentified Australian suburb. She

accomplishes the “comic defamiliarization” that many critics observe by over-exposing the exterior scenes, so as to convey the “starkness” of the Australian sunlight that strikes

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a foreigner upon landing (Hibiscus Films). Such a landscape of sharp colors and vivid

contours seems even stranger because it is completely deserted; a spread of houses and

well-kept lawns, which has the stasis of a painting or a freeze-frame, rather than the

mobility of a living city. Hall goes as far as claiming that the first shots in Australia “are

enough to bring on agoraphobia” (“In a Harsh New Light” 18).314

Law creates humor by counter-pointing the visuals with the voice-over of the two

younger brothers, who describe their first impressions of the neighborhood as “cold, sunny, thousand trees like a movie … Basic Instinct, Terminator, Jurassic Park….” The

threats evoked by such titles contrast with the quietness, cleanliness, and orderliness of the cinematic neighborhood. The two brothers invoke three American mainstream

movies, which, though they vary in genre, share the depiction of an alienated world, in

which human contact is rare and mistrusted. If Basic Instinct (1992) with its mysterious

sexual murders behind the mask of urban propriety could, for the brothers, represent the

hyperreality of Floating’s Sydney neighborhood, Terminator (1984) suggests the

possibility of the intrusion of futurist threats into the quiet spaces of the past. Jurassic

Park (1993), however, with its prehistoric theme park set on a tropical island, seems at

first an awkward intertext. I would argue, however, that such a description of suburban

Sydney can be read as a satiric comment, which points to cinema’s role as an

“architectural practice,” whereby the “streetscape is as much a filmic ‘construction’ as it

is an architectural one” (Bruno 27). Bruno illustrates how cinema, from German

expressionism to Italian Neorealism, has long defined our perception of cities,

metropoles, and increasingly of suburbia, by virtually guiding us through these spaces.

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What Law seems to satirize is the extent to which “Western suburbia,” has been

constructed as an artificial movie-set that can be reproduced in different geographical

territories and that already inhabits our cinematic, architectural, and geographical

imagination as the ideal site for thrilling mysteries and catastrophes. More to the point,

the terra Australis, in particular, has often served as an empty canvas for Hollywood; its

white beaches, urban city landscapes, and immense stretches of land have often

substituted for Californian beaches, Western locations, and metropolitan drama (Miller et.al. 143-47).315

Such a reading of Law’s humorous decomposition of Australian suburbia as a

space of Western cinematic imagination seems validated by her repeated meta-cinematic

construction of space. This is manifest in what is arguably most famous scene of the

movie that also served to package it for the home video market, namely the elder Mr.

Chan’s wandering in the threatening spaces of suburbia. Alone in the midst of deserted,

clean streets lined with standardized suburban housing, Mr. Chan is confronted by a tall

red kangaroo and responds to its raised fists by demonstrating a few kung fu moves. Law

shoots the scene from a high angle, which distorts the landscape and emphasizes the surreal image of “boxing with the ‘roo,’” which as Mitchell points out, “becomes a

metaphorical embodiment of the family’s struggles to adapt to their new environment”

(“Boxing the ‘roo” 108). I would add that Law is also humorously playing with two

iconic signs of Australian and Chinese identity and cinema. The high-angle shot

emphasizes the shadow of the kung fu fighting Mr. Chan, transforming it into a mock

shadow game of the most popular and commercial image of Hong Kong martial arts

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films. Law left for Australia to escape the pressures of having to shoot kung fu films and

might be here acknowledging the expectations of viewers when watching a Hong Kong

director’s film.316 Law seems to satisfy the common and stereotypical association of

Chinese culture and martial arts, precisely in order to decompose it through juxtaposition

with its Australian stereotypical counter-part, the kangaroo. Indeed, from the Qantas

airlines logo, to tourist brochures and Australian films (some which depicted kangaroo

boxing), kangaroos have come to symbolize Australia in the global imagination; yet, as

any Australian could testify, kangaroos are not easily spotted in suburbia and, certainly,

are very seldom to be seen on the outskirts of Australian cities like Sydney or Melbourne.

Thus, Law seems to mock stereotypical representations of Australia, while perhaps

expressing the Hong Kong family’s perception of spacious Sydney as a non-urban space.

Reviewing “settlement practices” between Hong Kong and Sydney, Phillip Mar found

that many recent immigrants from Hong Kong reported their feelings of estrangement in

transplanting from the congested, fast-paced Hong Kong to the slow-paced and spacious

life of Sydney.317 Most interviewees stated that the “Australian suburban locations” do

not seem urban at all compared to Hong Kong and Law seems to voice such feelings by

humorously blurring the boundaries between Australian urban spaces and its iconic

outback.

Beyond satirically pointing to cultural and ethnic stereotypes on both sides of the

Pacific Ocean, Law is here also using the mise-en-scène to translate her characters’

perceptions and emotional relationships with their new space.318 The critics’ repeated

references to Law’s comic construction of Australian suburbia rely as much on the

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cinematographic defamiliarization of space mentioned above, as on the agoraphobic

response to the country by the younger sister living in Australia. Instructing her recently

arrived parents and siblings on the perils of Australian society and landscape, Bing

creates a space of deadly sun rays, poisonous spiders, ferocious dogs, killer wasps,

murderous and greedy children, and fragile and unsafe wooden homes, which provokes

Mr. Chan to exclaim in amazement, “so many people killed in Australia!” Bing’s exaggerated phobias are the source of many comic gags in the first twenty minutes of the film, where the imaginary threats she created come into being in a humorously relativizing fashion. So we have incongruous scenes of the parents and siblings fearfully staring out of a door window, feet away from the glass and armed with sunglasses, followed by their first outdoor adventure. Running away from Bing’s home in fear of the blasting house alarm, the whole family soon encounters another menace in the deserted streets in the shape of an unleashed dog. “30,000 Australians” are bitten every year, Bing had warned them, and the Chan family runs for its life in the face of a tiny Jack Russell

Terrier. Are these funny vignettes just examples of comic relief commenting on the alienation of interacting with a new environment, as most critics seem to suggest? What are viewers to make of Law’s humorous view of Bing’s exaggerated phobias and hard- boiled character? Is she merely a quirky individual or is Law making a statement on

Australian society as well? In Chapter Two, I have pointed out that hyphenated Chinese have criticized Floating Life for its negative portrayal of Australia and indulgence in

Sinocentric discourses. However, many film critics have also noted how Law avoids depicting any interaction with (white) Australians and attacking the discrimination faced

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by immigrants down under, hence conveying the impression that Bing’s phobias are signs

of her own weakness.319 Gina Marchetti has argued that “ethnic self-deprecation marks

Bing as mentally unbalanced” (“The Gender of GenerAsian X” 79), a characterization

that, in Marchetti’s argument, fits Law’s “postfeminist sensibility” (81). This would be

reinforced by the ending of Floating Life and its re-affirmation, in Marchetti’s reading, of

a Chinese Confucian, patriarchal order, in that the disturbed second sister, Bing … has

been recuperated through traditional Chinese means” (77). Marchetti refers here to the

final sequences of the film, where Mrs. Chan shakes Bing out of her depression and

finally succeeds in “mak[ing] her pregnant.” Marchetti hence concludes that the absence of any consideration of class and ethnic discrimination in Australia, together with the final resolution within the family, diminish any “political critique” that a film on the

Asian diaspora from an Asian perspective might have exerted in Pauline Hanson’s

Australia (80).320

The film’s resolution certainly seems to suggest a Confucian influence, which co-

writer Fong also acknowledges (Hibiscus Films); if some critics like Marchetti (“The

Gender of GenerAsian X “) and Yue (“Migration-as-Transition”) read this as an

inevitable reaffirmation of Chinese patriarchy, others like Mitchell understand it more as

upholding notions of ancestral wisdom and celebrating Chinese ancient culture and

philosophy (“Clara Law’s Floating Life”), without necessarily legitimating patriarchal

thought. In fact, Fong and Law argue that their emphasis on Confucius’s “ethics of family

life and human relationships” is mainly predicated on their need to counter the colonial

education they were exposed to, in Hong Kong for Fong and in London for Law, by

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embracing and studying Ancient Chinese texts (Hibiscus Films).321 Law’s Confucian

influence thus seems to be an ambiguous sign in the text, on the one hand contrasting the

Westernization of diasporic Chinese culture, and on the other, problematically inscribing

patriarchal nostalgia in the narrative. To an extent, though, Law seems to temper such

meanings by stressing the emotional strength of the Chinese women represented in the

film, including the mother, who, ultimately, is the vector for Bing’s change and for the

family’s fashioning of a sense of home (Collins “Bringing the Ancestors Home”). In

terms of hiding racial discrimination and class exploitation of immigrants in Australia,

Law herself acknowledges that she is representing “immigrants with a strong economic

background;” she is dealing with the professional diaspora from Hong Kong, not with the

mass migrations of Asian men and women out of poverty. She points out that Hong Kong

and Taiwan citizens who have immigrated to Australia had to be “good in English, have a

university education, and [be] not more than 40 years old … [have] professional skills …

which means most can’t immigrate to Australia” (qtd. in Hanos “A Different Like in

Australia” 4). Law is here displaying a clear critical awareness of the class dimensions

involved in migratory policies and waves to Australia; moreover, considering her previous film, Farewell China, on ethnic discrimination, exploitation, and violence in the

U.S. and her later films, Goddess of 1967, a hybrid reflection on materialism, and Letters

to Ali on Afghan refugees in Australia, a thematic thread emerges that adds complexity to

Law’s representation of diasporic alienation in Floating Life.

I would contend that the comic defamiliarization of Australian spaces, through

cinematography and dialogue, and its reinforcement in the comic sketches described

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above can be read differently thanks to the Pirandellian framework embraced in this

study. For Western viewers, the apparent self-disparaging comic qualities of the Chinese

characters in the film can turn into a humorous reflection on Western discursive frames and phobias, with which they can identify and from which they can critically distance themselves. In this reading, Bing’s fears actually function as a sign of her assimilation into local Australian discourses on beauty, health, and public safety: she reads like local news reports chronicling the darkest cases of domestic family violence, warning against sun-induced skin cancer, against drugs, and promiscuous sex, and, above all, against the fat and cholesterol of her mother’s Chinese cuisine. These phobias are amplified by a myriad of advertisements for skin protection products, or digestive tablets against “ethnic foods” rich in saturated fats, among others. Like Bing’s two brothers’ perceptions of

Australian suburbia, Bing inhabits the imagined phobic space of Basic Instinct and

Hollywoodiana, comprising its displaced production in Australia. Such an interpretation seems reinforced by the only (white) Australian characters appearing in the film, who are invariably seen from the two brothers’ perspective. Confirming their cinematically mediated perception of Australia, the two brothers’ eyes only pause on the blond and good-looking Lolita living next door and sun-bathing by the pool, the blond jogging beauties that pass them on the otherwise completely deserted streets, the athletic boys who shame them in the gymnastic lesson, and finally the tall blond, bikini-clad girl walking on the beach in Baywatch style. Interpellated by these stereotypical constructions of white Australia, mediated through its association with Hollywood cinema and TV as a globalized sign for Western societies, the two brothers, eager to conform to Australian

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masculine perceptions of beauty, seek the advice of a plastic surgeon. If, satirizing gendered media discourses, Bing is obsessed with “fat,” the two brothers develop, instead, a preoccupation with height, with dominant standards of male beauty and virile masculinity.322 Listening to the surgeon’s enthusiastic pitch for a painful procedure, which, cutting and reassembling their limbs, can make them grow to the desired height, viewers are encouraged to think through the parody of Western discourses on masculinity and femininity. Precisely by constructing a film from a Chinese perspective, Law is offering to Australian audiences a humorous version of dominant discourses on beauty, sexuality, and social norms of behavior represented in Western and Australian media. By satirizing the potentially devastating results that their assimilation can bring, Law seems to be encouraging a critical reflection that, beyond representing the alienation of hyphenated subjects displaced in an image-saturated Western world, speaks to a wider criticism of cultural globalization and materialism.

3.3 Pirandellian Reflection: Playing with Cinematic Looks

In the previous analyses of how Pirandellian humor functions as a defamiliarizing device that allows the decomposition of film texts, I have emphasized how the resulting humorous fragmentariness and discontinuity transforms viewers/readers into active participants in the construction of meaning. In this sense, I would argue that a humorous text as theorized by Pirandello resembles the Barthesian text de jouissance, which pushes the boundaries “jusqu’à la contradiction” and becomes “‘le comique qui ne fait pas rire’, l’ironie qui n’assujettit pas” (Le Plaisir 44).323 In such theorization, the writerly text seems to convey that same feeling of the contrary that characterizes the Pirandellian

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humorous text, a feeling that disorients viewers as the films of Moffatt, Pellizzari, and

Law certainly do, and encourages multiple viewings. Like Pirandellian humor, the texte

de jouissance makes viewers/readers doubt their centerdness within social configurations;

it “met en état de perte, … déconforte (peut-être jusqu’a un certain ennui), fait vaciller les

assises historiques, culturelles, psychologiques, due lecteur, la consistance de ses gouts,

de ses valeurs et de ses souvenirs, met en crise son rapport au langage” (Le Plaisir 23).324

Indeed, central to both Pirandellian humor and the texte de jouissance is the play on

language – equally applicable as we have seen to cinematic language – which forces the

audience to reflect on its “linguistic” competence and on the extent to which language is

already saturated by relations of power.

For the purposes of a study focused on accented women’s voices, such a critical function performed by humor becomes even more significant because it goes to the heart of feminist critiques and reflections on the structuralist theorization of language from

Saussure to Lacan. Feminist theorists like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia

Kristeva, who in the 1970s significantly contributed to the attack on Lacanian structuralism and understood the comic as a move away from the symbolic language of the father.325 Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva called for an écriture feminine, which would

challenge the direct and unitary relation between signifier and signified and where

laughter constituted one of the signs of the break in the process of symbolic

signification.326 It is a laughter that rejects notions of Freudian linguistic puns, of a verbal joking that ultimately reinstates the rule, in order to instead celebrate the multiplicity of meaning.327 For this very same reason, however, Susan Purdie, in her Comedy: The

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Mastery of Discourse, dismisses feminist approaches to laughter, arguing that there can

be no joking in écriture feminine, because the rules that joking needs to break are rejected

(141). Purdie thus criticizes post-structuralist calls for forms of “clowning” which

celebrate “the capacity to unfix meaning” because they do not account for the fact that

our identities are “discursively constituted” within symbolic language (166).328 Yet,

Purdie also acknowledges that, even if the comic ultimately reinstates the Law and serves

to affirm mastery over others, there is still a possibility for a resistant use of joking,

because “discourse … is not itself a representation, it is an actuality. In actuality joking

can – and sometimes does – confirm relationship and identity beyond the miserable limits

of patriarchy” (148). It is in the break between the system of representation and the

subject’s own resistance to it “in actuality” that there is a potential for employing joking

in oppositional ways.329 This is the space where, as I have illustrated, Pirandellian humor

emerges, providing a means to interrupt the narrative performance with contradictory

points of view grounded in those actual experiences that are systematically marginalized

in dominant discourses.

As Gieri has already noted, Pirandellian humor does indeed resonate with

Lacanian notions of the gaze on which symbolic language rests (57). Yet, if the comic is

predicated on the subject-object dichotomy that defines the Lacanian gaze, humor

requires a relation between subjects, who recognize in the mirror image both the norm

and its other. It is this shared recognition of a crack in the frame, triggered by the excessive deviations “in actuality,” which forms the potential of questioning the

discursive construction of the norm. Pirandellian humor’s inflection of the Lacanian gaze

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is particularly relevant for film studies, in that the visual technologies that have defined modernity have long been theorized within a Lacanian framework. From Metz’s theorization of the “imaginary signifier,” which explored the identification processes whereby viewers were interpellated into social structures by the cinematic medium, to feminist film scholars like Mulvey and Johnston and other denouncers, cinema has predominantly been defined in terms of visuality and its objectifying mechanisms. In the previous section, I have pointed out how later film theories have challenged such a construction, pointing to cinema’s sensual qualities, which I will also address in the next section in relation to the medium’s mimetic qualities. Yet, these theories still have to come to terms with the visuality of the medium and with cinematic practices that have accustomed viewers, film critics, and theorists to reflect critically on the gaze mechanisms at play in cinematic representations. Similarly, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law, while foregrounding the haptic qualities of cinema, also address the laden politics of the gaze and turn them into sources of humorous reflection in order to question the objectification of women in cinema. As women filmmakers like Maya Deren and

Dorothy Arzner have long proved, the objectifying male gaze has always implied the possibility of reasserting subjectivity by disrupting the power dynamics implied in the unidirectional gaze.

Moreover, thanks to their accented perspective, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law perform a further rewriting of female perspectives, eschewing the inherent essentialism of feminist theories of écriture feminine and of the male gaze, and foregrounding instead the

“oppositional gaze” of accented women, as initially defined by hooks.330 As I discussed

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in reference to ethnographic cinema and Australian mainstream cinema’s construction of

Australian Aborigines and “darker” immigrants, the visual technology of film has long offered a powerful means to turn others into objects of our gaze, a spectacle for the enjoyment of Western eyes.331 The three filmmakers’ cinemas present an awareness that women and subaltern others have both been subject to the Lacanian objectifying gaze; as

Rey Chow argues, “the production of the West’s ‘others’ depends on a logic of visuality that bifurcates ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ into the incompatible positions of intellectuality and spectacularity” (Writing Diaspora 60). Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law blur such a binary, first by centering their films around the voices and stories of women who look and laugh back, asserting their accented subjectivities, and, secondly, by doubling and displacing the spectacle of the other through a humorous masquerade, which erodes dominant stereotypical constructions. In this section, I will analyze how the filmmakers engage in a direct humorous decomposition of dominant theories of the gaze, while in the next I will address how they play with the spectacularization of the other, turning it into a distorted humorous reflection that invites questioning of the very rules of the play of representation.

3.3.1 Moffatt Laughs Back: The Ethics of Looking Out and Beyond

Resisting the temptation to claims of comprehensiveness, critical humor can be a valuable tool in the development of alternative aesthetic and theoretical practices, producing a jouissance of fragmentariness and contradictoriness. Part of the process of appreciating the contradictory pleasures of a writerly text, Barthes avers, is the act of re- reading, which can also disrupt the linearity of a text and challenge its normative

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consumption. With Nice Coloured Girls, Moffatt engages in such an act, by re-reading

the diaries of early colonial settlers, disrupting their structure and authorial voice, to affirm instead alternative meanings through juxtaposition.332 Part of Moffatt’s disruption

of colonial texts is her emphasis on the continuities in past and present forms of

marginalization, whereby the present critical perspective of Aboriginal women resignify

the supposed actions of lascivious tribal women, to re-read their actions as survival

strategies. Simultaneously, the laughter of Aboriginal women performing a re-enactment

of colonial sexual encounters re-reads the modern game of “fishing for captains” by

urban Aboriginal Sydney girls. The laughter as a sound bridge between past and present

is reinforced in the sudden jump cuts to scenes on a white beach outside the diegetic

space, where a tribal woman gazes into the camera and establishes a looking relation with

her young descendants. Playing with the cinematic gaze, structured as predominantly

male and colonial, Moffatt constructs a sisterly looking relation between present

Aboriginal women, the Aboriginal grandmothers, but also the viewers who are

interpellated by the tribal woman smiling back. As McNeil notes, such as smile is

informed with an “ironic 200-year-old awareness” (2) of the perilous games played by

Aboriginal women to survive white colonization first and then white capitalism. The

laughter and smiles echoing across cinematic and historical spaces and times highlight

here a different function of humor, as a boundary and solidarity marker, which serves to

highlight shared experience and maintain boundaries between the in- and out-group

(Hay). Indeed, the ancestors’ smiling look is amplified by turning back towards the white

captain and inviting viewers to laugh at him for his gullibility. Moffatt’s play on looks

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thus first invites viewers to join the Aboriginal girls’ and ancestors’ game, so that once it

turns back on their male quarry, viewers become complicit in the derision of the white

butt of the joke. As many film scholars have noted, Moffatt reverses the male gaze in the

short, turning the white captain into a passive to-be-looked-at prey (French “An Analysis

of Nice Coloured Girls”, Kaplan Trauma Culture, Langton, and Mellencamp). In other

words, he inhabits the position that throughout Australian history and cinema has been

forced onto Aboriginal women. As viewers, we see the captain through the eyes of the girls, who mobilize his lust for their gain. Such a dichotomous relationship enforced through comic derision, however, is complicated by Moffatt, for she counter-points it with reflexive humor that acknowledges the Aboriginal girls’ own problematic position.

If the tribal ancestor smiles with the women in shared knowledge, she also reproaches

them, as the girls explain in the subtitles, for engaging in the same games that inevitably

perpetuate the asymmetries of power of colonial Australia. In order to reduce their

“captain” to a derisory state, staggering drunk, they actually have to reproduce the role of

“wanton strumpets” that colonial discourse inscribed onto the bodies of Aboriginal

women. Moffatt acknowledges such contradictions, with the numerous music references to “nasty girls” and “evil gals,” which remind viewers that laughing and looking back can only be the initial step in a process of critical questioning that needs to do away with binarist discourses. The girls’ comic laughter can thus ensure comic relief and a “good night” in a Sydney pub, but the silent humorous look of the tribal woman breaking the fourth wall is what reaches out to viewers and invites them to reconnect the fragmented

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histories and voices of the film, in order to challenge Australian dominant construction of

the nation and of its Indigenous populations.

Moffatt has continued her explorations and humorous manipulations of the cinematic gaze in her first feature film, beDevil (1993), and particularly in the first two

stories making up this trilogy, “Mr. Chuck” and “Choo Choo Choo.” The film has

received mixed reviews, but most critics agree that the film is, or at least attempts at

being, simultaneously humorous, scary and melodramatic (Conomos and Caputo,

Mimura, and Wojdylo). Summerhayes, who has widely written on Moffatt and edited the

first monograph on the now internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker,

acknowledges that beDevil is a difficult film to sit through and enjoy. However, she

points out that it presents “a rare quality of humor and compassion,” illustrating “how,

when allied with humor, distress experienced during performances of filmic reception can

be directed towards ‘different ways of looking’ rather than a ‘turning away’” (15). As a disjunctive humorous text, Moffatt’s feature film demands multiple viewings and actively encourages spectators to further fragment, re-assemble, and thereby come to terms with, the text. As Moffatt claims, humor serves to entice viewers, to a certain extent, to ease the jolting trip through Moffatt’s bedevilment of film conventions, Australian spaces, and history (Conomos and Caputo, and Moffatt The Bulletin). Most importantly, however, as

Summerhayes hints at, humor serves in beDevil to reflect on the power of the gaze, not

just in cinema, but in the realm of social relationships, where looking can mean the difference between inaction and commitment.

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Moffatt pays particular attention to the historical inequities associated with forced

adoption and Land Rights through ghosts that bedevil official history – an American G.I.,

a blind young girl, an Aboriginal love couple – reconstructed through multiple acts of

storytelling within each story. Many of the people recounting the traumatic past represent

those who looked on, who are still there to recount their version of the now mythical,

tragic events, but who were not there at the time to stop them. Moffatt’s insistence on the

power of looking can be better understood within Kaplan’s discussion of the “ethics of

witnessing;” whereby she understands witnessing as an active act of “bearing witness”

and feeling responsible for the injustice committed and seen (122).333 Moffat encourages such an active viewing, which asks the audience to step back and (re)consider its own passive acquiescence in acts of violence, expropriation, abuse, oppression, and marginalization. Extending Kaplan’s conclusion to Moffatt’s Night Cries to her filmography, I agree that the Australian director “leave[s] the viewer with an uneasy, disturbed feeling, but with the sense of having been moved empathically and ethically”

(135).

Pirandellian humor as a distorting practice that asks spectators to look back and question their initial perception through a critical distance assumes empathetic and ethical

spectatorship. Repeatedly in beDevil, Moffatt exploits humor’s potential to deconstruct

the looking relations that construct her ghosts. In the first and second story, Moffatt relies

on the interview format typical of documentaries to piece together the story; such a

structure allows her a dynamic play with cinematic gazes, which can move within the

diegetic space of reconstructed memories out towards the invisible and unknown

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interviewers, and across the borders of the frame in an indirect dialogue with those being

interviewed beyond the frame. The very act of constructing these marginal stories as

reportages raises the question of who is the intended listener, who is the interviewer and

what is he/she seeking. Moffatt does not resolve the mystery; at various points, subjects

interviewed seem to repeat questions posed by the documentarist, but spectators are left

to speculate as to the nature of such field research. The very format seems a parodic reference to ethnographic and anthropological filmmaking, in that such discourses have

long been the only ones devoted to constructing narratives of Aboriginal history and

customs. However, Moffatt’s interviews do not provide any folkloric or ethnographic

content, or any resolution for that matter, humorously debunking the very purpose of

making a documentary.

In the film’s first parodic documentary investigation of an unresolved mystery,

“Mr. Chuck,” Moffatt structures the narrative around looking relations in the past and

present and the desires they convey. There is an exchange of looks between the young

Aboriginal boy, Rick, who looks on enviously as white constructors build a movie

theatre, and the annoyed and distrustful returned looks of the workers and children, who

want to keep their distance.334 There is a voyeuristic examination of the abuses of the

young Rick and his sisters played out for passive white observers;335 but mainly we see

through the perspectives of the two narrators of the story, the older Rick, and Shelley, a white woman of the island. It is on their recounting of the story that Moffatt performs a humorous decomposition in Pirandellian terms; the older Rick is first introduced laughing heartily at the recollection of his adventures in the swamp, a segment that concludes with

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the dead-pan proclamation “I hated that place … that island.” Thanks to the initial

sequences showing the young Rick and his horror adventure in the “stinking swamp” and

to his endearing laughter as a sound bridge to the present time, viewers are already

positioned to empathize with the older Rick’s account of the story, even more so since his

story is the kernel of the narration.336 Therefore, the abrupt cut to a middle-class home

and medium shot of the white, well-dressed Shelley, saying “I always loved this place, our island place,” works to humorously undermine her version of the story. Both characters look sideways into the camera, as if speaking to an unseen interviewer, but their narration directly involves the viewers; the juxtaposition of the two contradictory voices, perspectives, and statements on the island works to create an ironic distance from

Shelley’s authority as “witness.” This is further questioned by the camera’s continuous disruption of her testimony by wandering around her house to contextualize her account.

Moreover, her relationship with the young Rick seems riven by various ambiguities, emphasized again by an ironic undermining of the authority of her account.

When she recalls that “people never knew how sweet he could be,” the camera cuts to a flashback of Rick scaling a wall and breaking into her house; the incongruous association between her description and Rick’s action is further emphasized when during the flashback the camera interjects a brief shot of Shelly from the future of the voice-over, looking at us with complicity and admitting that “[she] would always catch him.” Back in the space of the flashback, she proceeds to sit the young Rick down and offer him a drink; the camera here creates a sense of static tension, in that it repeatedly fragments

Shelly’s body. Her face is cut out of the frame and her body is fractured in close-ups of

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her well-manicured hands, hair, and dress; the fragments are not clearly shot from Rick’s

perspective, but re-read through Shelley’s previous statement regarding the boy’s

sweetness. The tense scene seems to suggest a vivid interest on the part of the white woman. We could speculate that Moffatt is here pointing at the power-laden sexual relationships between Whites and Aborigines, humorously inverting the relations and commenting on the middle-class, white woman’s own toying with the “exotic.” Shelley’s account of the story is further relativized and questioned by the camera often panning away from her and at times shooting her from a distant aerial perspective. Calling from

the veranda to the overflying camera, she unsuccessfully and comically attempts to catch

its attention; however, after a brief pause, the camera flies away, leaving Shelley behind

with her picture and challenged perspective.

In the second story, Moffatt seems to comment on the collective inability to see

through the traumas of the past. Starting like the previous story in the constructed space of past memories, “Choo Choo Choo,” as suggested by its onomatopoeic title, revolves around a ghost train that killed a blind girl on the tracks, a train that everybody can hear, but nobody can see. The act of retelling the events in this story is enacted principally by the older Ruby, but also by various side characters like a Chinese shopkeeper and a lonely, elderly white man. These voices directly address the camera eye to pause and listen to them; many sequences in the episode are shot with a wandering eye that tracks

through the city, where the inhabitants seem all too eager to attract its attention. From greetings and smiles directed to the camera, school boys, shopkeepers, passersby move on to mimic the train arriving and gesticulate the “cuff ear, cover eyes” sign (Mimura

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119). The interaction with the camera is comically awkward, with the entire city standing

on the streets to address the camera and its unidentified bearer directly. Like in the

previous story, Moffatt relies here on the interview format, but it is unclear who is calling

the shots.

Juxtaposed to these unidentified bystanders, Aboriginal women emerge as the

actual bearers of past memories and knowledges; they burst on screen directly out of the

re-enacted past, to lead us into the present of fragmented narration aboard a pick-up truck, dressed in modern, sporty clothes and wearing large, wraparound, flashy sunglasses. The camera eye seems to be part of this group, and sequentially closes in on the faces of each of the women enjoying the ride, until Ruby signals to approach and

starts talking into the camera.337 Auriel Andrews, playing the older Ruby, introduces us to her “netball team” and, with all laughing and dancing to the tunes of a country song,

they drive us to the haunted house of the story. The older Ruby continuously addresses

the camera, at times to re-tell the story, but just as often to divert our attention from that

ghost story and perform defamiliarizing and parodic enactments of outback life.338 In the midst of tin houses and spinifex, Ruby and her women savor white wine in fine glasses and prepare nouvelle cuisine using the ingredients drawn from the “primitive” Australian outback. Such images recall the photographic portrait of famous Aboriginal actor David

Gulpilil, whom Moffatt shot in the 1980s on the predominantly white Bondi beach of

Sydney. There Moffatt provocatively mimicked common images of white Australians at leisure by inscribing Gulpilil’s body with signifiers of ethnic color, from the Aboriginal body painting on his face to his trendy Hawaiian shorts. Placing him aboard a yellow

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pick-up truck enjoying a beer and the music from his big stereo, Moffatt fills the frame

with consumer products, alcohol, technology, and cars, which take on different meanings

when associated with dominant discourses about black or white Australia: alcoholism and

primitiveness in the former against leisure, civilization and capital in the second. Moffatt,

however, rejects these dichotomies, even as she draws attention to them, by clearly

positioning Gulpilil as being at leisure in terms usually overdetermined as white, hence reclaiming his right to inhabit white colonized spaces and times, without having to forgo the hybrid perspective. Similarly, in the bush of “Choo Choo Choo,” Moffatt carnivalizes representations of outback Aborigines living in tin houses, which usually serve stories of poverty and abuse, indirectly reinforcing the gap between white and black cultures. In that very same frame, she reclaims the Aboriginal women’s right to be at leisure, drink wine, and provocatively look into the camera to challenge the viewers’ prejudices evoked

by signs associated with degradation.

Moffatt extends the satirical parody of fossilized discourses relative to the

Aboriginal other in a long segment structured like a cooking show, where Ruby assists the eldest woman in the group with the preparation of such delicacies as wild pig marinated in berries and fresh herbs, and an entrée of yabbies (freshwater prawns). The performance at times takes the format of a comic duo, with Ruby playing the more outgoing character (being constantly rebuked by the older and sterner sidekick). For instance, when she explains that they are cooking yabbies, with “canola oil, a pinch of chili and garlic,” she is interrupted by the Queen Victoria of Bush Cuisine, as Ruby calls her, angrily adding “thyme”; at another time, she is strongly reprimanded for incorrectly

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decorating the entrée porcelain plates. When two Aboriginal women appear in the

distance with a snake, an animated conversation in an Aboriginal language is followed by

Ruby’s surprising explanation that the chef just told them she will cook the snake the

following day and transform it into a “snake terrine with walnut vinaigrette.” The

dialogue and sketch become humorous and surreal for they completely disrupt the

standard script of documentaries shot in the outback. Indeed, the whole performance of the “Queen Victoria of Bush Cuisine” functions as a parody of anthropological discourses

that, as mentioned in Chapter One, defined Aborigines as primitive, emphasizing their

rudimentary survival strategies, which to Western eyes did not include the more civilized

practices associated with agricultural and cooking practices. Inhabiting the space of a still

barren outback, Ruby and her team challenge the camera eye that so often objectified

them in ethnographic films, to affirm their self-disparaging and satiric humor.

Furthermore, I would suggest that Moffatt’s insertion of such a segment serves also as a

testament to the sophisticated use of visual technologies by many remote Aboriginal

communities who have produced successful TV programs like Bush Mechanics. The

originality of such programs, which present a highly mongrel aesthetics blending

Aboriginal rituals with MTV-style editing and cinematography, certainly contrasts with the conventional Australian TV programs. These also become the target of Moffatt’s humor, in that she satirizes conventional “cooking shows,” displacing one in the desert and choosing as a host an irreverent Aboriginal woman who interacts freely and

provocatively with the camera, at one point wiping the screen as if it were a cooking

surface. Interestingly, the humorous performance of sophisticated “bush cuisine” seems

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to have anticipated the current popularity of “bush tucker” in Australia and figures like

Mark Olive, the Aboriginal celebrity chef who now leads the popular TV program The

Outback Café airing on the Australian Lifestyle Channel since 2006.339 Decomposing

dominant constructions of Australian Aborigines by appropriating the power of laughing

back at anthropological discourses, wiping them off the screen with humorous

performances, Moffatt establishes an active relation between viewers and her characters.

Through the humorous performances of Rick, Ruby, and her team, as well as through the wandering camera eye, she forces spectators to reflect critically on such defamiliarizing perspectives and become witnesses and participants in meaning production.

Moffatt has pushed her exploration of humorous and provocative looking relations further in her most exhilarating video work Heaven (Versloot), which she claims to have conceived out of boredom during her fellowship at the Dia center. Desperately looking

for a new project, Moffatt spent her days in the beach house where she was housed,

eagerly observing the male surfers changing into their swimsuits. The result is a

documentary that testifies to Moffatt’s keen interest in notions of voyeurism, both in her photography and in her films (Mendelssohn). As Susan Hapgood observes, “Heaven

begins with surreptitious voyeurism, then develops into on camera flirtation, and becomes invasive and aggressive by the end.” Moffatt is here far away from her native

Australia and its cinema, but her new project connects to her previous film in the innovative manipulation of the gaze. Carrying a small video camera, Moffatt seeks a voyeuristic look, which does not shy away from zooming in and out of the most intimate parts of the surfers peeping out of their hideouts behind cars and towels. Moffatt,

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however, does not repeat the objectifying gaze of male cinema; on the contrary, she relates flirtatiously and provocatively with the men, reaching out with her hands to strip

them of their protective shields, the towels. Moreover, she multiplies the female gazes by

editing together footage shot by women friends and cinematographers, whom she had

also endowed with the voyeuristic, portable technology to play with male bodies and

beauty. If Moffatt’s accented perspective is here subdued, her humorous decomposition

of the workings of the gaze in cinema offers yet another example of her engagement with

feminist film theory.

3.3.2. Pellizzari’s Unruliness: Constructing a World of Female Perspectives

The humorous and provocative attack on the patriarchal gaze seen in Moffatt’s

Heaven certainly finds resonances with the abrasive and unruly humor of Pellizzari’s Just

Desserts, which is very much structured as a satire of psychoanalytic discourse on the

one hand, and an affirmation of female voices on the other. If the associative montage

constructs a conversation between mother and daughter and a juxtaposition, whereby

normative heterosexuality is fragmented, Pellizzari’s manipulation of the gaze contributes

to such a conversation, by multiplying the ways of seeing and looking. Mother and

daughter continuously defy the contained cinematic world of the frame, to look beyond

its borders, either beyond to the viewers, or out into parallel frames/worlds. In the first

segment “Broth/Brodo,” Pellizzari stages the first confrontation between the daughter’s

and mother’s world, when Maria has her first menstruation while trampling her father’s

grapes. As she looks between her legs at such a novelty, Maria is promptly rebuked when

the mother shouts “Chiudi/Close your legs.” Juxtaposed on the split screen, the eyes of

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mother and daughter meet at the center of the frame and Pellizzari humorously forces the mother and the viewers to look at Maria’s disruption of patriarchal norms and heteronormative sexuality. Similarly, in “Venetian Fritters/Frittole,” Pellizzari parodies cinematic voyeuristic looks because, in her short, it is the mother who looks through the peephole and catches Maria in the act of pleasing herself with the encouragement of her

Anglo/Australian friend Mona. The unruliness is here doubled by Maria’s sharing her sexual experimentation with a female friend. In this scene, the mother as voyeur does not control the daughter as prey of the look; on the contrary, Maria literally looks back through the peephole at her vexed mother biting lustily into one of her frittole.

Humoring Maria’s mother’s domestic frustrations, Pellizzari challenges the ideal of domesticity she is subjected to in the patriarchal Italian/Australian home; however,

Pellizzari avoids a stereotypical depiction of the Italian/Australian woman as passive, summoning an unruly female aunt for Maria. In “Cornmeal/Polenta,” punished for her first lesbian kiss, Maria learns of a silenced, paternal aunt, who killed her husband with an ax and was rumored to be a lesbian. Reciting the rhyme “She killed a man with forty whacks,” Maria seems to be evoking Lizzie Borden,340 a provocative reference to an infamous woman who has inspired many a Gothic story, a source of inspiration for

Pellizzari’s films and many other women filmmakers like Campion. The infamous name was also appropriated by critically acclaimed American avant-garde director Lizzie

Borden, who changed her first name as a form of jujitsu. Like Sandra Gilbert and Susan

Gubar’s re-appropriation of the “madwoman in the attic” in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane

Eyre, Borden, the filmmaker, and Pellizzari, seem to be reappropriating the Lizzie

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Borden legend in an attempt to give voice to the “evil gals” of the past, to maintain

Moffatt’s own forms of jujitsu. The nasty aunt in the closet of the Stroppi family arises from the smoke of the polenta cooking on the stove; as a ghost, the aunt interrupts the performance of the present and, by exchanging looks with the young Maria on the split screen, reminds her of the many subjugated voices of (Italian) women who did not conform with Catholic dogma or family patriarchy. Like many women and gay writers and filmmakers of Italian descent who revisit their ethnic, gender, and sexual identities through the unvoiced histories of strong aunts, grandmothers, and godmothers, Maria finds support for her present marginalization in the voices and knowledges that re-surface in the kitchens of many Italian/Australian families.341 Such a reinvention of the past is

performed in the exchange of looks between the old ghost and the young Maria, who

once again looks beyond her frame to establish relations obliquely with the past and outwardly with the audience, complicitly looking back.

Just Desserts’ irreverent playfulness with the cinematic looks is less evident in

Pellizzari’s subsequent work, paving for a more embittered satiric perspective, where the

Italian/Australian director relies more on the distortion of dominant gazes and a humor

that becomes increasingly blasphemous. In the short Best Wishes (1994), ironically titled

given its subject of domestic abuse, Pellizzari draws attention to the masculine

imperatives reproduced in dominant male cinema. Filming mainly from the young

Angelica’s perspective,342 Pellizzari often creates distorting camera angles that, through a view from below, enlarge adult figures – mainly the Italian/Australian community pushing Angelina towards Christian confirmation – out of proportion, creating a

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claustrophic sense of entrapment for the young girl and the viewers who look through her

eyes. Pellizzari also well expresses how adults can manipulate children’s playfulness and naiveté for their own abusive sexual desires, as when she anticipates the male violence in a play of hide and seek. The young Angelica, her eyes bandaged in a black cloth, is seeking her soon-to-be godfather in the backyard; Pellizzari cross-cuts between high- angle shots of the players circling each other and point-of-view shots of the partial world that Angelica can see above and below the black band. The camera follows the other children with much more freedom; in distinction to the partial and fearful look in the male-girl game, when Angelica enjoys a game of twister with her “Anglican” friend, the camera playfully oscillates between high-angle shots of the entangled bodies of the two girls and reverse shots of them staring down into the camera/pavement on top of each other, until they all tumble down together. The girls then end up with her heads close to one another, staring at the ceiling/camera, in a typical shot of female friendship and conversation. The twisting camera movements turn humorous when associated with their casual dialogue, which spans from what it means to be an Anglican to what sex is; there is no break in continuity between religious and sexual discourses, as if these were playing a game of twister of their own. Such motifs and juxtapositions are well synthesized in the very first shot of Best Wishes, where Angelica dressed like a sposina for confirmation, as

the gossiping Italian/Australian women around her remark, poses for a group picture.

Brandishing a big knife to cut the “wedding” cake, Angelica looks into the

(photographic) camera and eyes of the abusive godfather and, in the time of a

photographic click, we see the knife rammed down into the cake inches away from the

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Christian spouse; both gestures form an anticipatory sign of Angelica’s satiric unruliness, against patriarchy and the church, in the face of abuse.

With her first feature film, Fistful of Flies, Pellizzari uses a similar style to depict

the world of the adolescent Mars, who stubbornly clashes against the frames of

patriarchal and religious hyphenated Italian cultures. The title, as Pellizzari explains,

comes from the Italian saying un pugno di mosche, and “basically it means that any girl who follows her wild spirit will end up with a fistful of flies, [a notion she] want[ed] to challenge that notion” (qtd. in Roach “Monica Sweet on Her Just Desserts”). Pellizzari packages her attack in “a black comedy with a surrealist edge and underlying serious themes,” as she describes it in the press kit (Southern Star). Critics agree that the feature is marked by “stylistic surrealism and comedic excesses” (Capp) in an uncomfortable drama where “relief comes through moments of simple humor peppered liberally throughout the angst and frustration” (Zolanius 4). Sexuality and the power of the gaze remain major motifs in the film, with its very first scenes focused on the young Mars’ eyes and her shock at Bobby, the family dog, covering another dog in a sexual embrace.

Her unintentional voyeuristic, fuelled by the desire to “see who wins,” is promptly punished by her mother, who covers Mars with a burlap sack. If the initial scenes are humorous in their surprising and unusual juxtaposition of a young, white-clad girl, two copulating dogs, and a pregnant mother on a tractor, the tone soon changes into the serious, with Mars’s punishment and humiliation. Throughout, the visually monochrome film oscillates in tone from the funny to the satiric, to the blasphemous, then to the serious, and eventually to the tragic. Behind closed curtains and shut doors, acts of

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domestic abuse are committed in the name of Christian and familial propriety, abuse

which Pellizzari renders with stark intensity, through soundtrack, slow-motion, and

associative montage.343 These depictions of abuse, however, are always countered with

satiric and abrupt juxtapositions, like the statues of the Seven Dwarfs sitting in front of

the house with wide eyes, an image of alleged childhood innocence that Pellizzari

repeatedly exploits for comic relief and ironic commentary. During the film, the Dwarfs

are the protagonists of surreal sequences that interrupt the narrative, creating a mysterious

and estranging parallel storyline; cutting away from tragic scenes of abuse, Pellizzari

often interjects comic scenes of cloaked man stealing the Stroppi dwarfs at night.

Towards the end, we will discover that the mysterious robber is the father, offering the precious plunder to his lover, who is competing for the Guinness Book of records for the

“most dwarfed courtyard.”344 The dwarfs thus become witnesses and symbols of the

father’s betrayal. In a further humorous act Pellizzari makes the beaten daughter, holding

a white milk bottle between her legs to soothe the pain from beatings (another conflation

of signs of Christian purity and sin), the witness to such acts; it is her unabated and

unruly act of looking that eventually unveils the father’s and community’s hypocrisy.345

Pellizzari also connects Mars’s sinful bending of patriarchal rules to her color,

commenting on the North-South divide in Italy and more generally on notions of

whiteness. Mars’s body and face are often the object of an inquisitive male gaze, whereby

the father concludes that her skin color is worryingly becoming darker, as her sins

increase, suggesting “a bit of mongrel in her.”346 Marked as different and colored, Mars

attempts a last desperate measure to whiten her skin and corneas with lemon juice,

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squeezed in her eyes and rubbed on her face.347 Yet, if the adolescent Mars gives in to

disciplining her body in front of the mirror of social norms,348 Pellizzari undermines her

attempts and humorously anticipates her unruliness with an abrupt cut to the past and a fearless young Mars, adroitly catching a fly and defiantly eating it, while staring into the camera. Such defamiliarizing disruptions of the film’s linearity recur during the film, a reminder of the young girl’s unabated spirit; thus often, when Mars is punished, she pauses to stare at the camera, inserting a break in the flow of the film and its temporal linearity. Another such cut to the past depicts the young Mars staring humbly down at her

still undeveloped body, picked on by classmates heard in voice over, only to then rebel at

the sound of thunder by drumming on her tummy to make flies emerge from the eye of her belly. Pellizzari is here paying homage to the Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, whose insect imagery and penchant for anti-church blasphemy find many echoes in

Pellizzari’s film. The last provocative cut-away to Mars’s childhood comes towards the

end, following the harshest and most disturbing corporeal punishment, when her mother

vigorously brushes away Mars’s sins with a vinegar “cleansing” of her intimate parts.

Reacting to the abuse, Mars takes a rifle and puts on her mother’s wedding dress; before

showing her final intentions, Pellizzari leaps up again with humor into a non-diegetic

past, where the young Mars sits at her school desk. Neatly dressed in her school uniform,

the young, innocent-looking Mars stares down at a fly and then calmly proceeds to tear

away its wings, a defamiliarizing anticipation of the adolescent Mars’s drastic final act.

The flies, replacing Buñuel’s ants, are a recurring motif throughout the film and function

as a symbol of Mars’s abjection, with a clear parallelism between the father obsessively

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crushing the insidious insects and with his repeated abuse of his daughter. At the same time, however, the flies become a symbol of defiance, inevitably returning even with severed wings. Thus, Pellizzari ends the film with the iconic image of a naked and smiling Mars standing among trees, looking into the camera, and slowly opening up her fistful of flies, setting them and herself free, and thereby resignifying the disparaging

Italian proverb of the title. Once again as in Just Desserts, the young Italian/Australian girl seems to have found the strength to affirm her identity as a dark-complected, freckled, sexually curious, independent woman through the re-emerging voices of older hyphenated, and unruly, Italian women. Indeed, the last poetic image is preceded by a final scene of reunion and female bonding between nonna, mother and daughter; abjected throughout the film for her criticism of the patriarchal father and apparent lesbian love, the unruly nonna, like the aunt of Just Desserts and the many witches and befane of

Italian stories, is finally welcomed back, into a house where patriarchal authority has been evicted and the space is reshaped by proud “evil gals.” Foregrounding female looks at the end of the film, Pellizzari thus invites the viewers in, with Mars’s breaking the fourth wall and asking spectators to see the flies through her eyes and through Pellizzari’s surreal and ironic cinematography. Displacing the poetic and sexually charged imagery of flying butterflies, Pellizzari turns the annoying and despised flies into an image of iconic beauty.

3.3.3 Law Looks at Celluloid Sex: Fetish Humor

Compared to Moffatt’s and Pellizzari’s continuous rupture of the fourth wall and of the borders of the frame, Law seems to play less with the cinematic gaze; she

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manipulates landscapes through camera angles, color filters, and focus, but rarely

challenges the camera eye. In Floating Life, she fashions a female perspective by structuring the film around women’s experiences of assimilation in a new geographical and cultural home, leaving them in charge of planting new roots for a new hybrid consciousness. Law does play with the male gaze in the film to the extent that she reproduces dominant representations of the Western “slender body,” as Susan Bordo describes dominant constructions of the female body, in the rare and staged appearances of blond, white women in the deserted spaces of Australian suburbia discussed above.

While acknowledging Law’s humorous decomposition of dominant patterns of gender representations, it is necessary to consider the many discursive ambiguities that pervade

Law’s filming of women and hyphenated subjects. Indeed, the Hong Kong/Australian director shuns discernable feminist themes and film conventions, and has repeatedly argued that making films predominantly for women and about women would be limiting.

Moreover, at times Law seems to reproduce women characters as mere devices for masculinist discourses, as with the characters of Gar Ming and Apple in Floating Life.

Law’s ambiguous and ambivalent position within a feminist film theory framework come best to the fore in her representation of sexuality because of her explicit portrayals, which according to Colbert help “injecting a new erotic female sensibility into her work”

(Colbert “Voyage of Discovery” 16). Her most direct exploration of eroticism and sexuality on screen so far has been her short film Wonton Soup directed for the collection

Erotique (1994), and one of four women filmmakers’ perspectives on sex. The very concept of the anthology raises the issue, as Creed points out, of “whether there is a

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‘female’ sexual psyche that is different from that of the male. What is erotica for

women?” (“Erotic Fantasies” A1T). The answers have varied; some, like Linda Lopez

McAlister on her radio show “The Women’s Show” in Tampa, FL, have denounced the

text as “unfeminist” and maintained that the directors “seem to have built [their stories]

around a masculinist conception of sexuality.” Rita Kempley shares a similar view,

arguing that, in the anthology Erotique, the filmmakers “have rendered [sex] every bit as

degrading, mean-spirited and sexually exploitive as any male-made fantasy from the

Hollywood mainstream.” Finally, Caryn James starkly criticizes the collection, because its women filmmakers prove that “women can be as trite as men.” Certainly, shooting a sex scene constitutes one of the trickiest tasks for a woman director, as admitted by many of the acclaimed women filmmakers interviewed in Marie Mandy’s documentary Filmer les Desir (2001). Questions regarding the gaze, nudity, the position of the camera; staging and the very representation of pleasure are all over-determined in light of the debate over the male gaze raging in feminist film theory since the 1970s. The approaches to sexuality on screen among women filmmakers vary, but most agree that how they decide to position the camera and deal with sexuality is a political decision that will inevitably expose them to conflicting criticism. In interviews, Law has explained her own stance on the matter, explaining that her approach to sex on screen is similar to how she deals with violent scenes, because she feels that:

If [violence] is needed to convey the hurt, damage or the pain, you know, I want the spectator to feel as much pain as the character who is experiencing it. It’s the same with sex: I want the audience to reflect on what they have done or what they want to do with their own lives through the experience of seeing it on film. It is the same as when I want to use sex as something that is very warm and life fulfilling … Sex can be used as an expression of love or as a selfish thing, it can

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fulfill just one person and not two, or it can even damage the other person or yourself. It can be realized in a lot of forms” (qtd. in Honegger 14)

In Wonton Soup, Law explores multiple sides of sex ranging from love, sexual pleasure and practices, and separation; in particular, she spices her images with much humor; critics agree that her segment is “farcical and stylish” (Creed “Erotic Fantasies”

A1T), “explicit and erotic [and] also high-spirited, comic” (James), while being a “slight comedy” (Kempley). Greg King enthusiastically maintains that “her exploration of sexual positions results in some of the funniest scenes in an Asian film since Sex and Zen;” and thanks to its humor, James spares Law’s segment the harsh critique she extends to the others. Appreciating its “sense of humor,” McAlister instead maintains that, worse than the other filmmakers in Erotique, Law does not even tell her story “from the woman’s point of view.” Certainly, Wonton Soup is atypical in the collection, because it does not focus exclusively on sexuality; in fact, sexuality is arguably subordinated to a concern for issues of migration and hybridity. Critics like Mick LaSalle indeed complained that

Law’s contribution is “the least sexy of the three films and the only one that doesn’t hinge on the notion of sex as an issue;” he thus states that Law’s segment should rather be described as a “meditation on culture and race.” As a matter of fact, Law exploits sex in the segment as a means of exploring ancient Chinese culture and the changes that migration and acculturation in a foreign culture can have on a relationship. Wonton Soup follows a heterosexual couple, a Chinese/Australian boy and a Hong Kong/Chinese girl, meeting again after months of separation in Hong Kong. The comic tone is set from the start through the contrast between Law’s defamiliarizing and stylistically stunning

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camera angles of Hong Kong’s hypermodern space and the burst onto this monochrome blue landscape of the flashily clad Chinese/Australian boy. Law then proceeds to mock the typical romantic airport meeting scene by exaggerating the re-union passion to a parodic climax, where the boy, raising his girlfriend off her feet and turning around enthusiastically, throws down onto the ground and back on the escalator all the surrounding people. Further veering away from the tone of romantic comedies, Law immediately and abruptly cuts to an explicit sex scene, foregrounding the carnality of the encounter. From here, the segment alternates between scenes where the girl gives the boy a tour of a rainy Hong Kong and sex scenes in an empty room on the twenty-fourth floor, floating in the sky. However, the humor and actual sexual crescendo starts only once the girl announces she wants to end the relationship and the boy becomes convinced it is because he is not “Chinese enough.”349 With the help of an uncle, a connoisseur of old

Chinese culture with a French girlfriend working in the art business, the boy learns the art

of aphrodisiac cooking, because a “hamburger sperm” cannot be conducive to good

sexuality, and the practice of the thirty sex positions discovered by ancient Chinese men

millennia ago. Initially, such teaching seems to confirm the already wedged critique that

Law’s films are nostalgic of Chinese patriarchal culture, of a time when men had to

“satisfy” up to ten women a night, as the uncle says. However, Law’s humor, I would

contend, problematizes such nostalgic readings; while reviewing the sex positions, for

instance, the Australian-raised boy mockingly performs them all, looking more like an

ape than a pleasing sex performer. Certainly, he has more success when he is joined in his

attempts by the Chinese girl; yet, here as well, Law’s camera is humorous; shifting in and

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out of the shadows, the entangled bodies are never portrayed in static positions. What starts as a passionate sex act increasingly turns into an acrobatic performance, where the

girl laughs more than she sighs, the boy counts the penetrations to make sure to insert two

deep strokes after every seventh, and the bodies are caught in more and more intricate positions, from a twisted entanglement between the bars of the bed’s iron foot to a

climactic walk through the room on the girl’s hands. The whole sequence is shot in

middle to long shots, with no close-ups; both bodies are under the gaze of the camera, but

the focus is rather on the movement and at times laughter, rather than on any one of the

two bodies. In this sense, Law refrains from a male gaze and objectifying sexuality,

showing a young couple freely exploring sex, if not always with success, at least with

playfulness. Furthermore, the boy’s performance in Chinese cooking and sex is not

portrayed as an easy solution to the couple’s problems; contrary to his affirmation after

the exhaustive acrobatic night, that she cannot leave him now, the Hong Kong girl does

not change her mind. Demanding the reasons for her decision, the girl jokes that it might

be because he never brought her to eat wonton soup; when he is about to oblige, the girl

explains that such a thing does not exist in Hong Kong, because it is a product of Chinese

food packaged for Western consumers. Titling the segment Wonton Soup, Law seems to

be already humorously pointing to the miscommunications and hybridity resulting from

migration and diaspora. In this light, the return to centuries-old Chinese traditions and the

uncle’s reference to sexually athletic ancient Chinese men seem less a nostalgic

celebration of a vanished-patriarchal society, and more an encouragement to re-discover

old cultural practices, from cooking to sex, adapting them to one’s modern life. The gaze

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of the camera becomes central for its explicit voyeurism, yet, rather than simply objectifying either male or female body, it is transformed into a humorous lens on

cultural disjunctions through sexual play.

Law’s ambiguous explorations of femininity and masculinity on screen continues

in The Goddess of 1967, a film that centers once more on an encounter between a

heterosexual male and female from two different cultural traditions, Japanese and

Australian in this case. Enthusiastically received at the Venice Film Festival (“Screen

Goddesses” 7), the film has also collected negative reviews, which generally share

Banks’ complaint that the text “never knit together to make a coherent statement,”

ultimately only evoking "irritation,” in spite of, or perhaps also because of, Law’s

“strange kind of humour” (6-7). The positive commentaries earned by the film rest

instead on critics’ admiration for Law’s visual style, whose proficiency at times indirectly

supports the critiques of over-reliance on formal techniques. Certainly, Law’s own

statement in advertising the film provides fodder for accusations of postmodern hype, by

thriving on uncertainties like “neither silent or (sic) moving, neither perceivable or (sic)

imperceptible, neither nothing or (sic) everything, a state of mystery, paradox, ambiguity,

that is what I tried to capture in this film” (Crayford 10). Her objective seems to have

been reached, when Banks describes the film as too “crowded” because of the narratives

it interweaves (7), despite it actually being focused on empty spaces and silent scenes of

floating in a Déesse, a pink 1967 Citroën. What neither Law’s statement nor the reviews

mention is the centrality of humor in navigating the indeterminacy the author

foregrounds. As in Floating Life, where the occasionally problematic insistence on the

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universality of the theme of migration is balanced and localized by the humorous rendering of how migration is concretely felt in its cultural and geographical situatedness, in The Goddess of 1967 Law’s humor parodies discursive conventions as well as her own formalism. Few reviewers like Demetrius point out that the text mixes “off-beat incongruity and macabre to come” (105) and Hawker goes further in stressing that the film is “an exhilarating journey of mystery reports … [that] is dazzling and visually inventive and embraces artifice: it’s a vivid juxtaposition of styles, themes, images”

(“Law and Disorder” 3). As Hawker’s observations briefly highlight, humor in the film infuses the métissage of styles and themes that I will discuss in Chapter Four, but it also serves for defining the characters and problematizing the gaze of the camera.

Law’s parody of fetishistic scopophilia is clearly on display during the first encounter between JM, the Japanese man, and B.G., the blind girl; in Australia to conclude a heavy-duty online transaction, J.M discovers a bloodied house and an attractive red-haired girl who incites him to enjoy the gory spectacle left by her cousin’s domestic murder. Setting up viewers with thrilling expectations, Law satirizes the voyeuristic and male gaze of crime mysteries, when J.M.’s impatience to “see” turns out not to revolve around “the bodies,” as B.G. first thinks, or the girl’s body, but rather the presiding Goddess, that the slow camera gaze caresses in all her pink splendor and plumpness at the sound of a romantic string melody. Forced to contemplate and touch his object of desire under a dim light, J.M. receives the keys from B.G.’s hands in a close-up that erotically plays with slow motion and shadows to increase the excitement of inserting the key in the lock, opening the door triggering the interior lights, and,

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climactically, turning the Déesse on to feel her rise beneath him, a crescendo that brings blissful tears to J.M.’s eyes. The sequence’s camera angles, rhythm, tone, and symbolism, all contribute to the exhilarating parody of clichéd sex scenes in mainstream movies; the camera gaze is literally displaced from the Freudian fetish to Marxist commodity fetishism. Throughout the film, J.M.’s obsessive relationship to the car is parodied in a continuous juxtaposition between shots accentuating the artificiality of the passing landscape so as to convey the feeling of “flying” J.M. experiences when aboard the

Goddess, playing against the gritty, grounded world through which the car actually moves.

Law’s subtle parodic displacement of the male gaze is even more evident when comparing how she places and maneuvers the camera over female and male bodies instead of the fetish-vehicle. Scripting a blind female protagonist, Law can extend the haptic aesthetics of her landscapes by similarly using her camera angles and cinematography to convey the plasticity and sensuousness of the body, rather than its iconic beauty. In the most striking and lauded sequence in the film, for instance, B.G.’s body becomes the object of the gaze as she learns to dance, but the camera, as in

Erotique, is not an objectifying eye, but a participant in the feeling of freedom of movement and rhythm. The sensuosity of dance is first conveyed as B.G. and the camera pan over J.M.’s body, from his shoulders, butt, and legs to sense every bending of his muscles with the music; having touched what dance means, B.G. launches into a dreamy dancing performance where her movements are spotlighted against the black background.

Through B.G., viewers are repeatedly encouraged to consider sight as just one means of

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sensing a world accessed through touching and smelling. The protagonists’ first real

meeting, for instance, takes place while they are already on the road towards the outback

to reach the car’s owner. In a dark motel room, B.G. asks J.M. to let her “see” him

through her hands. Reflecting the blind girl’s prehensile, multi-sensory touch, Law films

the scene disrupting the fixed frame with circular camera movements that envelop the

two protagonists while her fingers move in multiple directions across his face and neck.

B.G. continues her process of familiarization by starting to lick J.M, a humorous take on

the embarrassing clash between two different systems of knowledge and respective

normative behaviors. J.M.’s body is thus scanned both by the camera eye and by B.G.’s

hands and tongue; similarly, their first sexual encounter sees B.G. using his body for her

own pleasure. Law skillfully plays with the emotional register here, continuously shifting

from the humorous to the serious and the tragic; the exchange starts with B.G. wishing to

experience sex, for the first time voluntarily and in her adult life, only to be met with

J.M.’s initial refusal. He agrees to cuddle with her though, to feel the contact between

their two naked bodies; Law films the sequence in long shots, with the moonlight

illuminating only the profile of the two bodies. The eroticism is first diffused by the

humorous dialogue where B.G. notices that “it’s getting very hard” and J.M. apologies,

confessing that he does not have any control. But he still refuses to have sex. At this

point, B.G. calmly jokes that she might “make love to it after you’ve fallen asleep, do you

mind?” Contrary to traditional gender relations in mainstream cinema, it is J.M.’s body that is objectified, but not in a reversal of roles that simply alternates who is on top and maintains the hierarchy of power. On the contrary, Law shows B.G. having sex with “it”

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while J.M. remains passive and lets her confront her past and her sexuality through his

body on her own terms.

Contrary to mainstream clichés, where the heterosexual male is regularly deemed

capable of comforting a hurt woman with kisses and life-saving intercourse, Law reveals

that an act of making love between J.M. and B.G. can only take place if she first independently faces her hurt sexuality. Having transited from the humorous joking on sexuality, to sadness, Law transports us into eroticism with a gaze that is too close to be voyeuristic, distorting B.G.’s body in a beam of moonlight where shapes become unrecognizable. Law’s emphasis is on a relationship between subjects who come to the act of love overburdened with their past, and its baggage of expectations, and fears; together they learn to respond to one another’s different exigencies. The filmmaker’s eye emphasizes making love with a person, rather than to an object, which defines instead

J.M.’s relationship to the Déesse, as the camera gaze clearly emphasizes. Simultaneously,

Law does not construct the sexual act as the resolution of B.G.’s tragic history; in the humorous coda to their first act of sexual intercourse, J.M. and B.G. lie neatly under the covers of their separate beds, and, despite their previous intimacy, begin to interact again with the formality of two acquaintances; B.G. thanks him for helping her face her sexuality, and J.M. responds politely. Certainly, a change has taken place as Law seems to suggest with the next scene of J.M.’s washing his beloved Goddess; gone is the

previous idealization and fetishistic gaze; his eyes now fall onto the dead insects on the

windshield, whose death-plops had fascinated B.G., rather than on the plump contours of

the Déesse. His fetish relationship with the object of desire seems now evolving through

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his investment in a two-way subject relationship; conversely, B.G. takes a first step away

from her destructive fascination with death by shooting at the radio and her favorite

program, the obituaries. Despite these first, incongruous and humorous signs of the

change the journey will affect, B.G.’s confrontation with the past will need to take place

independently from J.M., defying any easy resolution through heterosexual bliss.350

Ultimately, the humorous parody of the male gaze in the film involves its displacement from the female body to the fetish body of technology and consumerism: such a parodic scopophilia can serve as a criticism of relations predicated on possession and domination.

3.4 Pirandellian Masks: Doubling the Mimetic Plays

Foregrounding fragmentation and the process of assembling to construct meaning through juxtaposition and breaks in the time-space continuum, Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and

Law’s texts seem to partially function as, what Benjamin called, a “dialektisches Bild,” which is “dasjenige, worin das Gewesene mit dem Jetzt blitzhaft zu einer Konstellation zusammentritt” (Passagen-Werk N 2a,3). 351 Dialectical images are assembled, edited

together out “of forgotten objects or pieces of commodity culture that are ‘blasted’ out of

history’s continuum,” and come together in the Jetztzeit of their reception (Diamond 146-

47). Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s structural emphasis on juxtaposition and humorous

manipulation of looks, spaces, and voices allows for a reading that historicizes their

individual stories of migration through the past and present images that they dialectically

interweave, and, most importantly, through their construction of texts that necessitate an

act of dialectical reading. In this sense, the three filmmakers exploit the critical potential

that Benjamin identified in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological

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Reproducibility,” which can destroy the “aura” of uniqueness of the original, providing

instead the means to “bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens

… [or to] place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot

attain,” thereby allowing for a separation and questioning of tradition and authority (103).

Certainly, such features can play into humorous practices of decomposition, as

well as of parodic trans-contextualization, which, I would argue, constitute a further tool in technological reproduction’s potential to hold a critical mirror up to the automatization and fragmentation of experience in industrial societies.352 As Michael Taussig reminds us

in Mimesis and Alterity, “at the depth of habit is radical change effected,” so much so that

“the revolutionary task could thus be considered as one in which ‘habit’ has to catch up

with itself” (25). Could we not describe Pirandellian humor as a means to awake from

habit?353 In the time-lag where, through reflection, the comic transforms into a humorous feeling of the contrary, are spectators not asked to face the gap between representation and “actuality,” to stand back and question the frames in which the human body is stiffened?

So far the analyses have shown how humor is exploited in the texts of the three filmmakers to interrupt habitual narrative construction and viewing/reading habits, so as to historicize representations of gender and ethnicity in Australia and beyond. A further facet of the three directors’ play with representation, however, involves their manipulation of characterization and acting style, in other words, how they represent and

play with the human bodies inhabiting their frames. Reflections on the role and

performance of actors were indeed central to Benjamin’s theorization of the potentialities

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of the mimetic faculty in cinema. He identified in this medium the ability to raise

awareness of the subject’s alienation in industrial society thanks to its doubling of such

relations at its very core. Actors, Benjamin argued, produce “test performances” that are

expressions of their estrangement “in the face of the apparatus;” the actor’s performance

is never unitary, but necessarily the “result of editing” because it is “assembled from

many individual performances” (“The Work of Art” 112-15) and manipulated by the

montage of multiple frames, which fragment and resignify on the body of the actor.354

Benjamin himself observes that the estrangement of the actor resembles Pirandello’s description of “the estrangement felt before one’s appearance [Erscheinung] in a mirror”

(113); both are elicited by a distorted and fragmented reflection, which, however, has the potential to undo the pretense of unitary masks sutured together, so as to hide the inevitable cracks in the reflecting surface. Benjamin notes that film, which is both a technology and an aesthetic form, has its roots not in cult, in the attempt to “master nature,” but rather in play, aiming “at an interplay between nature and humanity” (107).

Film can awake its audience to the great Spielraum available for their actions in an industrial world that first “seemed to close relentlessly” on the individual (117).355 By

“further[ing] insight into the necessities of our lives by its use of close-ups, by its

accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace

milieux,” the camera can magnify the breaks, cracks, and interstices, where subjects can

start to play against habitual automatization (117).356

The human figure trapped in the filmic frame and its mimetic performances are

central to such a critical potential because, as Taussig reminds us, “the ability to mime …

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is the capacity to Other” (19). Yet, in such a process, predicated on the other’s lack, there

always remains a “sensuous excess whereby the ‘minorities’ spill out, escape the grid of

the normative” (Taussig 67). The mimetic masks forced upon the other always retain the

threat of turning back, of pointing to the partiality of any mask, thus “rearticulat[ing] the

whole notion of identity alienat[ing] it from essence” (Bhabha The Location of Culture

127). Bhabha describes this process as a “doubling of mimicry” that “repeats the fixed

and empty presence of authority by articulating it syntagmatically with a range of

differential knowledges and positionalities that both estrange its ‘identity’ and produce

new forms of knowledge, new modes of differentiation, new sites of power” (171). If

Bhabha and Taussig contribute to a theorization of mimesis and double mimicry, which

resonates with Benjamin’s analyses of the critical potential of mimetic arts like cinema,

Brecht offers a theorization of a “gestische spielweise” (gestural acting) that concretely

describes how a performance can turn into a disruptive, critical mimesis (vol. 3: 19, see

also vol. 2: 79).357 With “sozialer gestus” Brecht referred to “mimische und gestische

Ausdruck der gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen …, in denen die Menschen einer bestimmten Epoche zueinander stehen” (163).358 In Brecht’s understanding, gestures

emphasize the automatic, routinized in our lives; the objective is to awake viewers to

their own bodies disciplined by habit.

Drawing on Brecht’s theorization of gestural acting and Benjamin’s insights into

the critical potential of the act of mimesis, in this section, I will explore how the three

filmmakers use male and female bodies and actors in order to draw attention to

disciplinary practices and encourage, through humor, a critical reflection on such

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embodied habits.359 The doubling of mimicry is here understood as a practice that alerts

viewers to the mimetic practices that each subject performs unconsciously in his/her enactment of various social masks. As postcolonial and feminist theorists have long

shown, the conscious performance, as a practice of doubling, of “the native” or “the

woman,” serves to displace such masks, to break the stiffened viewing and performing

habits apart, multiplying the play, den Spielraum, with representation and action, and

hence opening up an interstitial space for alternative forms of imagination and

knowledge. In looking at how Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law play with the critical mimetic

potential of film, the focus will be on how they challenge through humor the dichotomy

of body and mind, how they restore the sensuousness of mimesis and visual technologies,

in other words, how they re-insert the human body with its own points of fracture and

blemishes within the cinematic text. It is also important to remember that, as Diamond

observes, mimesis has a double meaning “as representation, with its many doublings and

its unraveling of model, subject, identity (Irigaray, Derrida) … [and] as a mode of

reading that transforms an object into a gestus or a dialectical image (Brecht, Benjamin)”

(ii). My task is thus both to highlight the humorous doublings, mirrorings, and instances of mimesis with which Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law play, and to offer a model for what

Diamond theorizes as “gestic criticism,” that is “to read a gesture, a line of dialogue, or a tableau gestically is to draw into analysis the author’s history, the play’s production conditions, and the historical gender and class contradictions through which stage action might be read” (xiv). Pirandellian humor resonates with such a gestic criticism in that, as

I argued in the introduction, it can describe both a practice of filmmaking and an act of

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reading, where the former foregrounds dissociations, critical reflection, and dialogic

discourse, and the latter approaches a text through a parallel process of fragmentation and

decomposition, which aims at multiplying the dissociations hidden in the fabric of the

film text.

3.4.1 Moffatt’s Masquerades of Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality

As her precocious experiments with a photographic camera anticipate, Moffatt

has always displayed a predilection for role-playing and masquerading. As a young girl,

she took pleasure in re-enacting nativity scenes and rock star shows in the outback

courtyard with the help of her neighbors. Certainly, their masquerades attests to her

fascination with the glossy pictures she devoured in library books and on television; however, in these outback performances, there are already traces of her later humorous decomposition of classical art, auteurist and commercial cinema, as well as television.

The act of staging a nativity scene with a Black Madonna, in retrospect, reads like an

early statement against the eviction of black women to cultural peripheries. Since these

early re-enactments, Moffatt has continued to produce “moving images” that uniquely

represent the plasticity of the human body and its mimetic inscription with contradictory

texts and performances. In her series Some Lads, Moffatt photographed the male

Aboriginal body, debased in Australian national discourse by having dancers expose their

naked and muscular torsos, while miming dancing positions that echoed the news scandal

of increasing deaths in custody of Aborigines. In Pet Thang (1991), she put her own

naked body under the scrutiny in eerie juxtapositions of her profiled breasts and face

against a sheep on a black background; as Summerhayes observes “pet thang” might

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angrily comment on the associations between a “fluffy toy [and] a pretty dark woman” in

colonial discourse. Summerhayes also finds in the series traces of the humor that will

mark Moffatt’s work in the “country-western music overtones mock[ing] colonial

powers that wrested land … away from Aboriginal people in order to grow sheep”

(Moving Images 85). It is a humor that manipulates the photographed body through

intertextual associations that bring forth the sediments of history that constitute it; this is

true of her series Scarred for Life (1994) modeled on Life covers. Staging once again

daily scenes, Moffatt plays with expectations by juxtaposing surprising masquerades with ironic written commentaries. What are we to make of Wizard of Oz, 1956, where a young

boy dressed like Dorothy confronts a stern father brandishing a pipe and pointing to a

clock? Is he angry because of his son/grandson’s improper transvestism? Apparently not:

Moffatt evokes such a transgender “sin,” but displaces it with the ironic commentary, “he

was playing Dorothy in the school’s production of the Wizard of Oz. His father got angry

at him for getting dressed too early,” an inscription that potentially confronts viewers

with their own prejudicial associations. Another image in the series depicts two young

boys with one giving birth to a black doll, described by Moffatt as “his mother caught

him giving birth to a doll. He was banned from playing with the boy next door again.”

The restrained response of the mother plays satirically against the stark evocation of the

abusive colonial history sketched in Chapter One.

In all these re-enactments, Moffatt uses mimetic performances to draw attention to

a colonial history that has invested the bodies of white, black, and Asian Australians,

among others, with unequal relations of power and lasting scars. Moffatt’s predilection

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for masquerades, however, is best represented in her willingness to play with her own

body, as she does in Pet Thang, in her performance as the “Asiatic doll” in Something

More (1989), but also in her impersonations of famous icons like Dorothy Dandridge,

Hillary Clinton, and Oodgeroo Noonuccal in her recent Under the Sign of Scorpio (2005).

As Summerhayes explains, the recent series features prominent women born under the astrological sign of Scorpio (The Moving Images 249); the Australian film scholar who

edited the first monograph on Moffatt has written numerous essays focusing on the

Australian photographer and filmmaker’s use of her own body. Analyzing her as a

performance artist, Summerhayes has illustrated the ways in which Moffatt “becomes for

us an interpretation of her own memories” (15). In the Scorpio series, Moffatt seems to

be directly commenting on the act of performing, of choosing to make one’s

body/persona public, in that “Moffatt’s expression of their being crosses between their

public personae and the private arena that is the space from which these women look out

at a world that looks in at them” (252). Such an interpretation understands that, as

performance theorist Rebecca Schneider has articulated, a performance artist occupies “a

space at once exceedingly private, full of located and personal particulars of reading, and

radically public, full of socially inscribed dreamscapes” (52-53). Furthermore, this

layered understanding of the performance artist well relates to the situated knowledge

that this study argues shapes Moffatt’s filmmaking and humor; in her film work, Moffatt

has consistently put her own histories and body in play, in order to speak back from her

own particular, interstitial position to the national and global discourses that have shaped

(neo)colonial policies and representations. Masquerading, as in her picture series

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highlighted above, certainly features among Moffatt’s privileged techniques to repeat

with a critical distance the discourses that she ultimately parodies. This is also confirmed

by her film work so far, from her re-imagination of Jedda in Night Cries, to the

masquerades of black power girls in her INXS video, and to the explicit case in beDevil

that I will discuss below.

Masquerade in Moffatt’s work seems to retain the full range of meanings as

identified by the OED; it certainly constitutes a “a motley or fantastic collection of things

(material or immaterial), likened to a masquerade,” where Moffatt always interweaves

personal and public, local and global memories and signs.360 Moreover, Moffatt’s

masquerades can be understood as a “a ball at which the guests wear masks and other

disguises,” in that her series and her films always convey that joyous sense of playing

with representations; every character is felt as a participant in the play on masquerades

that Moffatt likes to direct like a skillful maestro di cerimonie. At the same time, such a play with masks always retains the sense that we are dealing with disguises, with performances; Moffatt is always careful to foreground the formal play with representations; her narratives are marked by artificial landscapes, but also by an overtly gestural acting that does away with any illusion of realism. This gestural drama, marked by the ambiguities of humor, can finally also be described with the rarer meaning of

“masquerade” as a “grotesque imitation, a travesty,” a sense that is already at play in the above-mentioned Life picture series and that will become more prominent in the discussion of beDevil. All these senses are also subsumed to an extent in the theorization of masquerade by Mary Ann Doane in feminist film studies; here, masquerade is

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understood as “an excess of femininity … constitut[ing] an acknowledgement that it is

femininity itself which is constructed as mask” (234). In other words, masquerade

becomes a disguise of a disguise, a double mimicry to an extent, which is assembled

together by performing the gestures and putting on and displacing the multiple masks that

define femininity locally, nationally, and globally. The conscious excess in performance

is what defines this masquerade as doubled and distinguishes it from Joan Riviere’s first

theorization of masquerade within psychoanalysis. Riviere argued that “womanliness …

could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to

avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it.” Feminist scholars have relied

on Riviere’s insight to prove the constructedness of gender and called for a doubling of

the masquerade, which in its overt and excessive parody can do away with notions of

“woman” as essence. As Rowe emphasizes in her study of the “unruly woman” as

masquerade, such a performance “retains the distance necessary for critique, but a

distance that is Brechtian and politicized, created by the subject between herself and

various forms of representation” (6-7).

Certainly, in beDevil, Moffatt offers various forms of womanly masquerades;

putting her own body into play again, Moffatt performs Ruby, in the constructed past of recollection, with a sense of excessive domestic femininity, in that she wears a stereotypical Sandra Dee-like dress out of 1950s American comedies and performs with

overtly careful gestures the feminine tasks of serving tea, hanging clothes, and cleaning.

Her character never steps out of the confines of the perfect housewife waiting for her

husband to come home from work. Yet, her performance strikes a humorous cord by

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being played out in the deserted Australian outback, where the husband comes home

from a hunt, rather than an office job, and the seemingly last railway outpost is managed

by a black family, rather than the white settler adventuring in the wilderness of American

Westerns. Moreover, Moffatt’s performance as the perfect fifties housewife is contrasted

by the presence of the overtly masculine woman worker helping her husband, who

already inserts a different performance of waomanhood, further heightened by the

splitting of the Ruby character across time frames. Moffatt’s own performance is

displaced by that of Andrews as the older Ruby, who, far from any Hollywoodian allure,

challenges the eye of the camera, is surrounded only by women, is never contained by

domestic space, and transforms the domestic cooking rituals in a parody of cooking

shows and table etiquette. Moffatt is here not just performing a masquerade of femininity,

but exploiting the politicized, Brechtian distance of her juxtaposition of gestic

performances to perform a double mimicry of Aboriginality as well. In beDevil,

masquerading becomes a ball with hundreds of masks marked by ethnic, racial, gender

and sexual attributes; such a play is made most evident in the last story “Love the Spin

I’m in,” where the ghosts are a heterosexual couple. Beba and Minnie, his “crazy hippie

girlfriend” as Moffatt describes her in her script summaries (Summerhayes “Haunting

Secrets” 16), are translucent figures who inhabit the screen mainly through movement

and their excessive gestural performance of jealousy and passion. Minnie is excessively

feminine in her red dress, long dark hair, and erotic movements, a ghost who speaks to the many sexualized and exotic femme fatales who have crossed the screens across the

oceans.361 As Summerhayes argues, their story, and the third final segment of beDevil, is

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unfinished, since no one character is in the position of retelling the whole tragic event

(18); Dimitri, the owner of the haunted movie theater where the couple died, has his own version packaged for calming the businessmen interested in buying the house; and Voula, his wife, has a different account to tell her son, which focuses more on the couple’s passion and especially on the pain of the mother Emelda, the one person who knows most, but keeps silent.

However, there is an additional, improbable voice who seems to be re-enacting the violent passion that has doomed the couple; Moffatt inserts in the multicultural space of this outback movie theatre run by Greek Australians and haunted by Torres Strait

Islanders a displaced Frida Kahlo performed by Luke Roberts, an Australian actor whose stage show also deploys such a masquerade (Summerhayes “Haunting Secrets” 17). This masquerade of an international icon for feminist, indigenous, and anti-capitalist movements worldwide literally crosses the filmic frame, interrupting the heated business transactions of Dimitri with Conos and Fong and, upon looking at the trio and into the camera, enters the haunted space of the abandoned movie theatre. No explanation is provided for this disorienting appearance, which adds a further sense of disguise to the artificially constructed space of Moffatt’s ghost story. Throughout the segment, the Kahlo character is shown standing at the window and observing Dimitri’s desperate attempt to sell the place and remain on friendly terms with Emelda and her Aboriginal community.

Placing the figure within the window frame, Moffatt clearly evokes Kahlo’s numerous self-portraits and, indeed, Summerhayes argues that Moffatt is here commenting on the recurrent use of her own image in her photography and films, which reminds us of

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Kahlo’s own aesthetic. Drawing on Deleuze’s theorization of the “time image,”

Summerhayes points out that both artists employ their bodies as a connection to the past

and the stories of colonialism (“Haunting Secrets” 17). Beyond such connection, however, Moffatt also plays on the renowned and tormented love story between Kahlo and Mexican painter Diego Rivera, a relationship replete with sexual ambiguities and gender tensions. During the short, not only are we made to look at the moving performance of a Kahlo painting, but we are also asked to listen to the clearly masculine voice of the performer staging a dialogue between the two famous Mexican artists: “I’m not alone … If you’d only listened to me … No, I’m not having an affair with Trotsky …

I know you think I did, but I am not … what about you? Who are you seeing? Don’t you

know it? I’ve seen you with her. What number is she?” The dialogue comments as much

on the fascination with the many controversies that surrounded Kahlo as artist, activist,

and woman, and the unfinished story of Beba and Minnie that everybody described as a drama of jealousy. The humor comes from the displaced reproduction of Mexican, political, and feminist signifiers on the body of the male performer and their resignification into the reconstructed past of Moffatt’s ghosts.

At the same time, Kahlo’s ghost also intervenes in the performance of the present, in that it seems to comment parodically on contemporary national discourses of multiculturalism. As Laseur points out, the third story with its ethnically mixed characters purposefully foregrounds the national debate on Australian multiculturalism and becomes an “emblematic, sardonic parody … where discourses of multiculturalism are stripped of

their rhetorical meanings.” In other words, Moffatt might paint the picture of

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multicultural Australia where the Greek/Australian Dimitri befriends his Torres Strait

Islander workers and where businessmen can be of Chinese and Greek origin; yet power relations are in the end still reinforcing the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples. Dimitri might comically celebrate with his Torres Strait Islander friends despite his assurances to the contrary to his business partners, but in the end the only ones being evicted are

Aborigines, and their stories, their voices, and dramas are the ones that ultimately haunt

Moffatt’s Australian allegory. For this reason, I would argue that the Kahlo masquerade not only establishes an artistic connection between two performance artists across the oceans, but it also functions, as maintained in Chapter Two, as a reminder, in the transgeneric space of Moffatt’s story, of Kahlo’s militancy. Through Kahlo’s masquerade, Moffatt is offering a sardonic look back at Australian multicultural policies and, by extension, at debates on multiculturalism across the oceans and their meaning for indigenous populations in (post)colonial nations. Not accidentally, Emelda’s vacating of the old house is followed by Roberts/Kahlo’s own exit from the scene; Moffatt further multiplies the masks here, stripping Roberts of the Kahlo’s clothes and attire, only retaining her characteristic make-up, hairdo, and shawl that starkly contrast with his business male suit. Taking down part of the mask, Roberts’s body is still inscribed with the controversial sexual, ethnic, and political signs brought into play by Kahlo; Moffatt hence forces multiple masks to co-exist and collide in a continuous humorous play.

3.4.2 Pellizzari’s Medusan Humor and the Female Grotesque

If Moffatt privileges impersonation and ethnic and gender masquerades, my analyses of Pellizzari so far have highlighted a penchant for playing with grotesque

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masks, giving a voice to women like Maria, Mars, and their many nonne and zie, who are

too often evicted from Italian/Australian narratives. Rowe retraces the trope of the

“unruly woman” through such figures as Ursula the Pig Woman, from the seventeenth

century play Bartholomew Fair by Ben Johnson (36), to modern day unruly women like

Miss Piggy and Roseanne Barr. Such female unruliness can best be understood through the Bakhtinian rediscovery of the grotesque realism of medieval and Rabelaisian folk humor and its subsequent theorization within feminist studies through Kristeva’s theories of abjection, Cixous’s reappropriation of the monstrous Medusa, and Mary Russo’s theorization of the “female grotesque,” among others. The sensuousness of Pellizzari’s cinema directly stems from this ambivalent and contradictory history of bodily laughter and grittiness, which provides the Italian/Australian filmmaker with the tropes to undo the masks of patriarchally-determined womanhood.

The roots for the outrageous, defiant, and improper women populating Pellizzari’s stories lead back to the carnival rituals and folk humor that Bakhtin documented in

Rabelais and his World, where he uncovers the longstanding but ignored “canon” of grotesque realism.362 Best epitomized, according to Bakhtin, in the image of the “senile hags laughing” on the Kerch terracotta (25), grotesque realism performs a structural

“degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” (19).

“Lowering” should be understood literally as bringing back to the earth, where death and

birth meet; in this tradition, degradation is regenerative because it “digs a bodily grave

for a new birth.” The grotesque body is thus always in the process of transforming,

degrading, and regenerating; it is never complete and always “transgresses its own

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limits,” emphasizing the “apertures or the convexities” through which it always evolves

in open contact with the earth (26). This was the matrix, “the maternal womb” as Bakhtin

puts it, for much of the humorous literature and folk forms during the Middle Ages, which the Russian theorist distinguishes from modern forms of the grotesque, in that the

latter have foregrounded the destructive aspects of the grotesque at the expense of its

regenerative functions (27).

Indeed, feminist theorists have taken up where Bakhtin stopped, in order to

analyze the “destructive constructions” of the female body as grotesque; in particular,

Kristeva interweaves Bakhtin’s documentation of grotesque realism with Lacanian theories of subject formation, to theorize the abjection of the female body (see Russo The

Female Grotesque 7-10). Testifying to its genealogical relation to grotesque realism, the abject is marked by its association with the lower stratum, with that which inhabits the border between degradation and regeneration, such as bodily secretions like menstruation and amniotic fluids. The abject is tied to the earth and marked by tropes of uncleanliness, but, as Kristeva observes, “it is … not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, and order … [t]he in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (The Powers of Horror 4). Indeed, like the Bakhtinian grotesque body, the abject is necessarily incomplete, defying borders to foreground those bodily thresholds, where exchange with the earth is consummated. Banned and despised, the abject “does not cease challenging its master” (2); it always resurfaces to threaten the symbolic order of the Law; by performing a synthesis between Bakhtin and Lacan, Kristeva accounted for the abjection of the female subject in language, while retaining the possibility of

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turning it into a disruption of discourse.363 This has been accomplished, according to

Mary Russo in Female Grotesque, by feminist artists like Cindy Sherman and filmmakers like Ulrike Ottinger who have recuperated the regenerative aspects of the grotesque and its origin in the female womb, so as to make the laugh of the senile hags audible again and to raise the question of why they are laughing (“Female Grotesques” 2).

In this tradition, Pellizzari redeploys the taboo imagery of the female grotesque so as to disturb the masculinist discourse reproduced in the cinema of auteurs that influenced her stylistically, as well as in the very theorization of auteurist cinematic mastery. Pellizzari’s first short, thus, Just Desserts, engages in a technical and aesthetic experimentation that only heightens Pellizzari’s provocative depiction of menstruation on screen as a response to the ridiculous fact that “fifty-two per cent of the world is made up of women, yet it is such a taboo to talk about periods” (Anderson-Ribardeneira 49). The opening segment “Broth/Brodo” directly confronts viewers with the onset of menstruation paired with the crushing of fruit (grapes) and satirizes Italian folk myths, which invariably associate periods with the ability to cause the degeneration of plants, wine, and all that thrives. Not for nothing does Maria’s father upbraid her not to spoil

“his” wine and turn it sour as unruly girls do and does her mother rush to contain the damage, by brandishing a white gauze and a humorously large safety pin. The scene leads to Maria’s fainting and is played with an expressionist distortion that caricatures every gesture and phrase associated with the abjected imagery of menstruation. In a humorous crescendo, Pellizzari uses a split screen to contrast the abject Maria’s legs with the dead hen’s feet cooking for the Italian brodo. As every Italian knows, gallina vecchia fa buon

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brodo (an old hen makes good broth); Pellizzari seems here to be playing on the ambivalence between the degenerative and regenerative properties of the grotesque as they are inscribed onto the female body, from its first sign of birthing potential to its ultimate degradation.364 Pellizzari reinforces such association with the cautionary tale of the old spinster aunt who had spoiled a batch of tomato sauce by visiting when she had her period; yet, the abjected figure of the vecchia gallina is recuperated when in the third segment, “Cornmeal/Polenta,” she turns out to be the unruly paternal aunt who disgraced the family with an act of lesbian vengeance when she killed her husband with an ax. Like the Bakhtinian senile hag, Pellizzari shows us the vecchia gallina, if not laughing, smiling with the young Maria in a bond suggesting that uncontainable female bodies will always threaten the borders of dominant discourses, Pellizzari’s answer to the question of why the senile hags are laughing.

Pellizzari’s satire, explored further in her feature film Fistful of Flies, seems to have struck an uncomfortable chord with many critics. Indeed, if the film was partially appreciated for its surrealist style as mentioned above, and enthusiastically received at the

Venice Film Festival where the The Daily Telegraph reported “the 1300 film goers who did get in [gave] it a five-minute standing ovation” (“Venice Abuzz at Fistful of Flies”

13), the general tone of the reviews was far from appreciative. The most common criticism seems to be a differently voiced accusation of having gone too far, either by being “too angry” (Hessey “All the Buzz” 15), or by pursuing a “Freudian surrealism”

“beyond her abilities” (Thomas), ultimately ending with an “unrealised vision” (Roach

“Unrealised Vision” 40). Hall seems to be alone in extolling the film’s “grotesque jokes”

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and “earthy humour” (“Small-town Obsessions” 14). Certainly, Pellizzari moves deeper into the tradition of grotesque realism with this black comedy, serving to her viewers many an uncomfortable spectacle of bodily excess. With Fistful of Flies, Pellizzari’s relation to the grotesque also becomes more prominent; clear are the echoes of feminist

Medusan humor, as Rich defines it relying on Cixous (39), but also more evident becomes the Italian folk substratum that informs Pellizzari’s grotesque as well. In his review of grotesque realism, Bakhtin had already discussed its relation with the Italian tradition of Commedia dell’Arte (34-35)365 – whose Harlequins, maschere, and macchiette resurface in various modern masks of the commedia all’italiana – and with the Roman saturnalia that already inspired much of Fellini’s carnivalesque cinema.

Influenced by Fellini and Italian cinema, Pellizzari’s humor is hence steeped in Italian folk, and often grotesquely humorous, traditions, which also peppered Pirandello’s novelle366 and surfaced in the “loud, histrionic Italian comedies of the 1960s (such as

Seduced and Abandoned),” pointed out by Australian film critic Adrian Martin (“Self-

Loathing” B4).

If the Italian grotesque finds expression most clearly in Pellizzari’s blasphemous humor that I will analyze in Chapter Four, the female grotesque pervades the film with its exploration of Mars’s unruly sexuality. In a reminder of the grotesque’s predilection for the body’s apertures and convexities, Pellizzari repeatedly presents Mars in an improper and provocative posture with spread legs; in these scenes, she often employs a bird’s eye view, which seems to emphasize Mars’ defiance of norms, confronting the world from the bottom up and claiming the whole space of the frame with her extended body. At

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times, however, Pellizzari even more provocatively centers the eye of the camera

inbetween Mars’s legs, usually reinforcing her acts of humorous unruliness, as when she

protests her first imposed date with a local Italian/Australian boy by taking refuge in the

chicken coop and sitting with her legs crossed, swearing she will not get married with

various birds resting on her head. Pellizzari exploits this first rebellion against the

directives of patriarchy, by re-evoking the taboo of menstruation and renews the

association of the female body with the animalesque. Derided in her desire to become a

lawyer (because too much education will not get her a husband), Mars shows off her self-

crafted earrings only to be met by the shocked screams of all those invited. Proudly

hanging on her ears are white tampons which stand in stark contrast with the

“agricultural” proper dress her mother was hoping could subdue Mars’s unruly tom-boy

character. Interestingly, the grotesque jewelry also serves to introduce us to Eno, the

Italian/Australian boy who seems to represent a promising new generation of hyphenated

Italian men, gravitating away from the dominant machismo of the community.367 With no outraged sign of disgust, the young boy deflates Mars’ angry spectacle by simply asking

“aren’t they meant to be bloodened?” Eno’s lack of revulsion seems to recognize the normalcy of female menstruation in the bodily cycle. In spite of the heated criticism by male critics labeling her text angry and bitter, Pellizzari refrains from demonizing the

Italian male; against the abusive father, she counter-points the young Eno, who does not seem scared of the unruly female body. He is the approving spectator of Mars’s spectacle in the chicken den, the admirer of Mars’s freckled and not-so-white skin, who stands on

Mars’s side in the final confrontation with her father. If Eno is “saved” by his

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appreciation of the female grotesque, both the abject physical body and its unruly subjectivity, Mars’s father and his body are pitilessly scrutinized by the camera. Pellizzari seems to re-code the destructive side of grotesque realism by representing the degeneration of the male body through the giant pimples Maria’s mother is forced to burst open on her husband’s back, and through the crass satire of masculinity in the mother’s dictum that: “men are all like toilets, either all engaged, or pissed off, or full of shit, so just be nice to them, ok?!” The two opposing images of Italian masculinity are again juxtaposed at the end of the film through a symbolic play with bodily signs of virility: menacing her father with the rifle to let go of his belt, and thus his pants, Mars forces the male body to become a public spectacle for the community’s ridicule.

Reinforcing the symbolic castration of patriarchy through its satiric degeneration, Mars also shoots off the gigantic genitals boasted by the proudest of the dwarfs stolen from the mother’s garden. However, Pellizzari leaves space for a different masculinity, not only in

Eno’s standing by Mars’s side, but in her young brother, who in the concluding scene finally meets the evicted nonna. The final scene suggests that this new generation of hyphenated males will be raised in a matriarchal family, which will do away with the myth of the Italian stallion, as the satiric image of the young boy shaving an undressed plastic Ken seems to suggest.

Beyond the grotesque male body and humorous reappropriation of the female abject, Pellizzari’s humor is further embodied in her play with the taboo of female sexual gratification; from the first scene of Mars’s tentative voyeuristic curiosity to her avid experimentation in front of a mirror to the sound of rock music, Pellizzari relentlessly

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exploits the pursuit of “sexual bliss” as a source of conflict and laughter in the

community. Indeed, the Sun Herald argues that the “funniest and paradoxically tense

[sic] scene” of the film is Mars’s first attempt at finding bliss (“Pellizzari Projects Rural

Life on Mars”). Here like in Just Desserts, the girl’s free experimentation, once again heightened by Pellizzari’s use of a floating bird’s eye view, is juxtaposed with the repressed sexuality of the older generation of Italian women who catch her in the act of

masturbating on the day of the Immaculate Conception. If this first blasphemous contrast

ends in tragedy with the first expression of male violence, Mars’s resilience in playing

with her “trigger button,” as the mother calls it, offers the pretext for many comic

sketches. Such is the case when Mars’s flirtations with the kitchen table lead from the

mother’s complaint of “crisping her tablecloth” to a mother-daughter chase around the

table, a torero-like performance by the mother, and the final realignment of power

relationships in the home, with the mother starting to stand up for her daughter and

herself against the father. Through the daughter’s sexuality, the mother is indeed re-

attuned to her own abjected body; however, such regeneration must first degenerate into

the tragically grotesque. The mother is complicit in the disciplining of Mars’s sexuality

throughout the film; she calls on a doctor to make sure that her “trigger button” will not

“become abnormal if she keeps touching it,” and she turns into the object of the woman doctor’s satire when the doctor responds “you mean, will the world freak out because she’s discovered her treasure palace?” However, the mother’s repressed sexuality turns from the comic to the humorous when she asks if her “onion” will “shrivel up if it doesn’t

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get used,” a query juxtaposed with images of her beloved dog running around with a

ridiculous plastic muzzle.

The mother’s transition from an enabler of patriarchy to an unruly woman is probably best represented in Pellizzari’s satire of the phallic mother, of whom Mars

dreams after her first beating; through an oneiric blue haze we see the father cleaning a

long rifle held by the mother in such a position that is transforms her into the bearer of

the phallus, the enforcer of the social order. From such phallic imagery, however, the

body of the mother is increasingly degraded, by showing her urinating in front of the

camera and turning her into a public display in front of the entire community, where she

raises her skirt to ask her adulterous husband and the complicit neighbors what is wrong

with her onion. This ultimate act of unruliness and the public abjection of the female

body is, however, displaced by the satiric degeneration of the male body pointed out

above and the final coming together of three generations of Italian/Australian women

who have stood up to reclaim the pleasures of their bodies and their independence. Once

again the vecchia gallina who irons out her wrinkles in an aluminum mirror, who has

endured domestic violence on being accused of not being a virgin, and the abjection from

the community and her family from the hands of her own daughter, is the one who gives

the courage to Mars to laugh back.368 As the nonna explains, women “spend the first half

of [their] life not knowing what’s between [their] belly button and [their] knees and the

second half watching babies walk through it,” but the new generation of hyphenated

Italian women has learned to reclaim the pleasures and impurities of the female

grotesque, the Lupis as well as the Pellizzaris.

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3.4.3 Law’s parodic Gestencharaktern

The analysis of Law’s film style so far has emphasized her preference for a play

on forms that relishes excessive stylization of landscapes and movements, both those of

the camera and of the bodies performing in front of it. Critics of Law’s cinema like

Marchetti argue that in her films “style dominates time, space, and character,” hence

presenting “a flatness and reliance on the surface of the image” (From Tian’Anmen to

Times Square 192-93). For this reason, Marchetti defines Law’s films as “pastiche[s] of

popular formulas (e.g. melodrama and romance),” which ultimately signal a form of

depoliticization and “postmodern acceptance of moral ambivalence, political vagary,

nostalgia, fragmentation, and uncertainty of identity” (192). My reading so far of Law’s aesthetics, while acknowledging its ambiguities, has tried to show that, in the Hong

Kong/Australian filmmaker’s humorous play with cinematographic processes and camera movements, it is possible to read a sharp parody not only of cinematic techniques, but

also of national and global discourses on capitalism, immigration, femininity, and

masculinity. Rather than being pastiche, the ironies that Law emphasizes through her

excessive stylization are not purely generic and aesthetic, but rather grounded in the

experiential; they point to discursive contradictions and, through a gestic criticism,

encourage critical reflection on national constructs, on the media, and on the effects of

globalization. Given Law’s own migration history and the peculiarities of Hong Kong’s

diaspora in the 1990s, it is true that her films tend to focus on middle-class and

professional migrants and individualist reflections on feelings of alienation and cultural,

geographical disjunctions, rather than on the exploitation of the working-class immigrant,

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as Marchetti laments (204). This does entail a certain political and textual ambiguity,

which stirs away from outright political and ideological critique even in a social documentary like Letters to Ali, exposing at times a perhaps naïve over-emphasis on the

universal commonalities among migrants (at the expense of considering local tensions and hierarchies of oppression). Not surprisingly, among the three filmmakers analyzed in

this study, Law has worked relatively more within the industry, starting out in Hong

Kong commercial cinema and learning to secure good production budgets and

distribution by appealing to multiple, national, and international studios. Clearly less

artisanal in means and aesthetics, her films might raise more suspicions of postmodern

formalist posturing. Yet, her repeated commitment to a non-commercial cinema and her

cross-appeal with Chinese diasporic audiences differentiated by social, economic,

cultural, and political differences, as well as with international film buffs and critics

supports a reading that would draw attention to the critical potential of her fragmented and ironic texts.

This is evident, for instance, in how Law’s humor affects her characters’ construction, since most of the criticism leveled at her cinema directly relates to what is perceived as a conservative character evolution. Since Farewell China, Law and Fong’s stories have certainly been character-driven, in the sense that narrative structure and linearity have been subordinated to a journey into the yearning and longing of individuals

in states of transition, through geographical borders as in Farewell China and Floating

Life, but also through personal traumas and conflicts as in Temptation of a Monk and

Goddess of 1967. Somewhat awkwardly for such a focus, Law’s characters have also

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been characterized as lacking psychological depth and insight. Marchetti notices a

“Brechtian alienation from the characters,” for instance, which she attributes to “the use of voiceover commentaries removed from on-screen events, the mediation of technology in interpersonal relationships …, and the multiple and contradictory roles played by several of the principal characters” (192). The intrusion of recent technology in the form of telephones, e-mails, chat-rooms in the definition of interpersonal relations is a peculiarity of accented cinema, which comments on the affective disjunctions caused by migration that, before technology, were best represented in epistolary form (Naficy).

However, Law’s insistence on technology is as much a commentary on contemporary materialist obsessions, where it becomes a new tool for appropriation, as it is for the character Tokyo and the girls he chases in Autumn Moon and for J.M. and the Déesse in

The Goddess of 1967. The contradictory roles played by Law’s characters, in fact, emphasize cultural disjunction and alienation through obsessive and excessive performances. These have been criticized as a tendency towards caricature and simplification, as in the case of the rare Australians of Floating Life or the formulaic characters of The Goddess, from the abusive father to the wounded and hysteric mother.

However, I would contend that this excessiveness actually constitutes part of Law’s parodic play, which critically comments on dominant, more naturalistic representations of femininity, masculinity, and Chineseness. There is a Brechtian quality to this excessive acting and characterization, which becomes the source of both anguish and humor in her films.

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Law’s appreciation for masks and gestural acting is already manifest in her first

film Farewell China, where the pursuit of the American dream by the Chinese

mainlanders, Li Hung and her husband Zhao Nansan, is thwarted, as they become the

grotesque impersonation of migrant fears and stereotypes. Although the film does not

present any humorous dissociations, it is worth noticing how Hung’s character anticipates

Bing in Floating Life. As a wife sent ahead to settle in a Western country, Hung is asked

to remain loyal to her Chinese origin and family, while enduring the economic hardships,

racial discrimination, and violence of a migrant life. Such impossible demands will

transform Hung into a psychotic character, irremediably split between her traditional self

and a relentless drive towards assimilation. Maggie Cheung’s intense interpretation overplays the hysterical and sentimental oscillations of her character. The inscription of

the traumas of migration onto the female body of Cheung/Hung is problematic, in that, as

pointed out in Chapter One, women have often been exploited as symbols for the wounds

of a nation without a real concern for their material exploitation and abuse (Shohat,

Chakravarty, Modleski). This is even more pertinent when speaking of China, which has

largely been constructed as the “other’s feminized space to the West” (Chow Woman and

Chinese Modernity 32) and whose own literature and art has, as Chow illustrates,

constructed women as “‘stand-ins’ for China’s traumatized self-consciousness” (170).369

Given the psychoanalytic discourse on which it relies, any representation of female hysteria moves on risky terrain and Law’s approach to it through Hung and Bing has indeed been interpreted as a reproduction of patriarchal discourses. Marchetti notices that psychological imbalance marks most of the female protagonists of Law’s films, and its

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resolution, she argues, is found in a return to the Chinese tradition (From Tian’Anmen to

Times Square 203-07). Although Hung, Bing, as well as her Big Sister, and B.G. are

indeed emotionally wounded and psychologically unstable, their obsessions seem a

commentary on society rather than narrative ploys to advance action. The parodic

excessiveness of Bing, as already noted, turns into a mirroring and distorting surface for

the perceived obsessions of Australian society and media. In The Goddess of 1967, Law accentuates the Brechtian stylization of her characters by practically creating types, as shown in the labels Blind Girl and Japanese Man in the place of proper names. Moreover,

B.G.’s scars are excessive and mimic the wounds usually inflicted in conventional cinematic genres Law parodies, as I will discuss in Chapter Four. Looking at the exaggerated performances of the female characters in terms of their humorous value opens up a reading that emphasizes their double mimicry of the dominant roles assigned to women in narratives of migration and alienation. If in conventional narratives these roles are usually marginal and symbolic, Law makes them central to the story itself and exploits them for a critical look at both Chinese and Western cultures. Hung and Bing, I would contend, are not punished for straying away from Chinese tradition; their work and independent life in the new countries is in fact already subordinated to their marital ties.

Their alienation is as much a result of their discrimination and disorientation in a Western culture, as it is their injunction to endure it all for the sake of the (patriarchal) family.

Conservative, patriarchal discourses, both Chinese and Australian, defining the family, sexuality, gender, and whiteness aggressively invest the bodies of Hung and Bing, turning them into grotesque caricatures of assimilationist ideals. Rather than simply

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functioning as expendable symbols of a nationality in crisis, these female characters work

as Gestencharaktern, where the sentimental and dramatic excess prevents the mimetic

identification of viewers and turns the “doppelte zeigen” (double performance) into a

puzzling piece in a fragmentary text that viewers are asked to re-assemble (Brecht vol. 3:

53-58).

Furthermore, Law seems to be using the male characters in a similar fashion; in

Farewell China, the body of Zhao, the husband, becomes the ultimate symbol of Chinese

nationalism and Western racist capitalism, killed by the psychosis of a seemingly

Americanized Hung at the feet of the Tiananmen goddess of democracy.370 His symbolic

sacrifice follows in Zhao’s own descent in the Inferno of New York City,371 during

which he is transformed into the stereotypical pimp who prostitutes a fifteen year old

Chinese girl to prostitute by appealing to the Western male fantasies of the sexy Chinese

doll. Pathological imbalance is thus not marked as feminine, but it rather invests, in

different forms, both male and female characters and, in Law’s subsequent films, serves

as a source of critical humor. In Floating Life, for instance, Bing’s assimilationist hysteria is juxtaposed to her brother’s, Gar Ming, psychological imbalance over leaving Hong

Kong, at times a metaphor of its imminent hand-over to China. The cultural crisis is here embodied in a questioning of masculinity. Describing Gar Ming, Law comments that

“there’s a modern type of Hong Kong man that inclines more and more to an ambiguous

sexuality: not quite masculine, not quite feminine” (qtd. in Press Kit Floating Life). The

ambiguous construction of this male character can be read as a humorous reflection on

Oriental discourses feminizing the East, as discussed in Chapter One, and on Chinese

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patriarchy. Gar Ming becomes a caricature of the Hong Kong man, in that he is defined

by a single obsession, the meaning of his three-second ejaculations through which he

measures his whole life. Leading a life of flash stock market gains and minutely recorded

sexual encounters and masturbations, Gar Ming humorously emphasizes the masculinist

objectification of women as mere sources of pleasures. Simultaneously, however, he

represents a crisis of such traditional masculinity in that the very heterosexual act, instead

of reaffirming his virile performance, becomes a constant source of self-doubt.

Furthermore, I would contend that his ejaculations are not only a commentary on Hong

Kong’s “re-absorption in the maternal body of China” (Marchetti “The Gender of

GenerAsian X” 78), but possibly also on the excesses of Hong Kong’s capitalism. When

Ming’s sexual reflections take a tragic turn due to Apple’s abortion, he stages a burial for

the fetus and wonders how “three second of pleasure produces three inches of flesh. It

throbs only once in its entire life. Its whole life is only one second. In one second, it

experiences birth, aging, illness and death … too short … or too long? … It’s not a piece

of flesh. It’s my child.” There is certainly a direct relation to the threatened loss of Hong

Kong’s independence in these lines, but it should not be forgotten that Gar Ming is mainly associated with the extreme capitalism of Hong Kong’s economy, with the concept of quick gain, which Law has extensively criticized in interviews and in her other films, Autumn Moon and The Goddess of 1967 in particular. The problematic displacement of the trauma of abortion onto the male body could thus be read as an encouragement to reflect critically on masculinity and capitalism, as they are predicated on accumulation of pleasures/commodities, rather than as a mourning of patriarchy.

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A similar reading seems warranted when we look at two other male characters in

Law’s filmography that present various commonalities with Gar Ming, Tokyo in Autumn

Moon, and J.M in The Goddess of 1967. Both characters are Japanese as the two etiquette-names suggest; Law seems to employ Japanese characters as a means to explore the changing definitions of masculinity in a postmodern and globalized world. Japan becomes an interesting choice given its many contradictory dichotomies, as a highly

traditional yet technological society and as a patriarchal culture associated with mythical

virile fighters yet undercut by the feminized stereotypes of the more docile and passive

Asian male. Tokyo goes to Hong Kong shopping for authentic Chinese girls and food; his

misogynistic gaze is mediated through his video camera, which peruses the bodies of

attractive Chinese women on the street, dispensing such evaluations as “a pair of good

legs don’t promise full breasts.” Like Gar Ming, Tokyo continuously laments the

extremely brief pleasures of sex, which nonetheless seem to define his life. Most

importantly, this questioning of masculinity by the same characters that reproduce it is

not triggered by a demonized female threat; the male body becomes invested with the

crisis of nationhood and cultural identity in the face of globalization.

If such reflections remain ambiguous in Law’s first films because of her

conflicted relationship between Chinese tradition and transnationalism, her reliance on at

times formulaic characters as a means to parody the symbolic construction of femininity

and masculinity in national discourses becomes more explicit and perhaps effective in

The Goddess of 1967. Moving beyond the space of the Chinese diaspora, Law displaces

the same reflections in the Australian national imaginary and its construction through

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cinema. The male body is once again used as symbolic of a Westernizing consumerism, of globalization, and commodification, as they are actively reproduced by her male character, J.M. With her choice of one of Japan’s most popular male models for the role of J.M., Law perhaps points to a new form of objectified masculinity, emphasized in the first images of the film, where we see him work out, comically parade in a bathing suit and snorkeling gear in his apartment, and have occasional sex with a girl curious to admire his pet snakes. Everything in J.M.’s life seems indeed about collecting: the perfect car, the most peculiar reptiles, and the record for bowls of noodles eaten. Defined by his obsession with commodity fetishes, parodied in the gaze at the sinuous Déesse, J.M. seeks to attain the same fetishistic status. His obsession with the Goddess is actually mediated by his desire to identify with the screen image of Alain Delon. Having once seen a film where the French leading man was a detective driving in a Citroën D.S., J.M. aspires to the same idealized masculinity. His male identity becomes ironically defined in terms of his body, inscribed with the signs of successful masculinity, as when B.G. compliments his smell, to which he proudly answers, “I use Armani.” The irony is heightened by the fact that he defines his masculinity in purely Western terms, mimicking

Delon, wearing European fashions, and perfume, while simultaneously standing in for the

“Japanese Man.” Moreover, he defines himself as an “honest man, a Japanese man,” but his invocation of an ideal, traditional masculinity is undermined by the ensuing flashback, where we learn how he got the money to purchase the Goddess, namely through an online fraud that actually puts him on the run in Australia. His body is thus inscribed with the contradictions of both Western and Japanese masculinity, which are reinforced in his

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relationship with B.G. that eschews traditional gender roles, as my earlier analysis of the sex scenes illustrated. Conventional heterosexual relations and norms are also parodied, when J.M. walks out on B.G., affirming his proud Japanese masculinity, just to come back defeated by the harsh Australian land. Waiting for him in the car, B.G. simply exclaims, “you’re late,” which leads into a parodic displacement of the typical domestic scene with J.M.’s answering “it’s evening, time to come home.” Here Law emphasizes the parody with a traditional Chinese tune and a medium shot of the lonely car and couple in the middle of the desert. Stylization and gestic performances in Law’s films are thus exploited for humorous means, going beyond a play on formal conventions, to evoke and decompose dominant discursive practices as they are reproduced in commercial cinema.

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4. CREOLIZING GENRES, RELATIVIZING HIERARCHIES, AND A TOUCH OF

HUMOROUS BLASPHEMY

4.1 Theorizing the Creolization of Genres and Humorous Blasphemy

Bakhtin’s oxymoronic carnival aesthetic, in which everything is pregnant with its opposite, implies an alternative logic of nonexclusive opposites and permanent contradiction that transgresses the monologic true-or-false thinking typical of Western rationalism. (Stam Subversive Pleasures 22)

In the previous Chapter, I argued for the usefulness of looking at the accented, women’s cinema of Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law through the framework of a mode of filmmaking infused with Pirandellian humor. The Italian author’s theorization of

umorismo as a narrative strategy avoids prescriptive definitions of what forms humor can

take and taps into multiple and, at times, contradictory humor, laughter, and comic

theories, developing a hybrid definition that helps navigate the interstitial aesthetics of

these accented women filmmakers. Furthermore, Pirandello’s identification of the principles at work in humor allows us to focus on those cinematic codes that have long been the object of feminist and Third cinema theories. Decomposition of the illusionary wholeness of the film text, a refracting game with the mirror that multiplies the points of view, and a penchant for doubling the mimetic play with masks are attributes of

Pirandellian humor that, like counter-cinemas, aim at debunking dominant film

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conventions. As shown in the previous analysis, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law have found

different ways to perform these humoristic interventions, but they have all, through

varied, contradictory, and experimental techniques, internally dialogized the film text,

multiplied the points of view, and doubled the voices constructed in the relationships

between characters, spectators, and image-makers. In so doing, each filmmaker has

challenged the othering discourses of dominant cinema, from Moffatt’s parody of anthropological discourses, to Pellizzari’s satire of ethnic stereotypes, and Law’s ironic perspective on the processes of migration and assimilation. These deconstructive projects have also all foregrounded the bodies, voices, and perspectives of women, responding to

their marginalization. While already pointing to the critical potential of these texts

through humorous fragmentation and displacement, the analysis has so far privileged

textual analysis over a discursive analysis of the social constructs that come into play in the films. Having plunged into the textual contradictions and film conventions manipulated by the filmmakers, I propose in this Chapter to move from a focus on the authors’ manipulation of cinematic codes, of the syntax of cinema, to the level of discourse, where the filmmakers take satirical aim at the specifically Australian cinematic conventions sketched in Chapter Two.

In so doing, I will stress the potential of humor as a counter-hegemonic tool able to challenge national(ist) discourses. As already noted though, Pirandello’s theorization of humor, albeit always pointing beyond the text, stops short of engaging in forms of social and political criticism with which the author was not comfortable (Gieri 63).

Pirandello, however, has allowed us to open up these film texts to a more searching

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discursive analysis, as his techniques of humorous decomposition constitutes a means to

dialogize the film text, opening it up to the “rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia”

(Bakhtin “Discourse in the Novel” 263). In this sense, I pointed out that Pirandello’s

umorismo bears affinities with the “jolly relativity” emphasized by Bakhtin, which is

indeed, as Stam explains above, predicated on an enjoyment of contradictions, in

Pirandello’s words, a feeling of the opposite. This Bakhtinian carnivalesque is far from

the excesses of the folk carnival that the Russian author so thoroughly studied and it often

only triggers a “muted” laughter; yet, its “footprints” endure

in the structure of the image of the central hero (Socrates) and in the methods of developing the dialog, and – most importantly – in the genuine (not rhetorical) dialogicality itself, the dialogicality that engulfs thought in the jolly relativity of evolving existence and does not allow it to grow stiff and cold in dogmatic (monological) ossification. (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 137)

This latent but carnivalizing, hence relativizing, laughter resists absolute claims over

authority and rationality. Drawing on Barthes, I would argue that this form of

carnivalization struggles against the mythologizing of languages and discourses, where

myth, far from its classical Greek meaning, is instead an accepted, socially convenient

lie, “a type of speech” that ossifies meaning (Mythologies 109).372 When turned into myth, “the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains” (117). The dialogues and conflicts that make up history are turned into an “absent cause” in myth, which instead centralizes and universalizes meaning. For Bakhtin, the “comic style” should expose such centripetal forces and continuously undermine what Barthes terms mythic language, letting loose the centrifugal forces of dialogized and heteroglossic utterances. Such a goal

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“demands of the author a lively to-and-fro movement in his relation to language, it

demands a continual shifting of the distance between author and language, so that first

some, then other aspects of language are thrown into relief” (“Discourse in the Novel”

302). The focus on different strategies of humorous decomposition has shown so far how

Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law do indeed distance themselves and their spectators from the

cinematic worlds they create, in order to create a third space of critical reflection. In this

Chapter, I will illustrate how such a movement also pertains to their relation with

Australian national cinema and discourses which they reproduce and challenge at the

same time. Thereby, the three authors achieve a humorous carnivalization and

relativization of authoritative and authoritarian language, displacing their filmic

vocabularies from a center that is invoked only to be continuously questioned.

If myth ossifies language, critical humor first decomposes this skeletal construct and leaves it to the reader/spectator to patch back together a dialogized body. While myth freezes the image of a language, humor comes to trouble this iced surface and draw attention to the deformed reflection it projects. It destroys the apparent harmony of monoglossia to unveil the flowing stream of other voices and knowledges that lie underneath. By weaving together Pirandello’s and Bakhtin’s theories, I wish to illustrate a process whereby aesthetic norms and their embedded ideologies are unveiled and carnivalized, in a manner that challenges Eurocentric definitions of art. Indeed, according to Stam, who in Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film explores the possible applications to cinema of Bakhtin’s work, the theorist’s “subversive linguistics,” can help “de-provincialize a film-critical discourse too often tied to nineteenth-century

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European conventions of verisimilitude” (10). Fragmenting authoritarian codes, critical

humor, like Bakhtin’s carnivalization, stresses the history that has led to the ideological

hold of such discursive borders (Bakhtin “Discourse in the Novel” 323-24). With this in mind, we can further explore the key topics I have already introduced: how the three directors at hand help historicize the conventions of Australian national cinema, connecting them back to the social and geo-political context of their production, and how the textual fragmentation performed through humor has constantly rejected a linear narrative and constructed a dialogue, whereby past subjugated knowledges can re-emerge to interrupt the performance of the present.

After focusing on the multiple voices the filmmakers have introduced and made to clash in their texts through humor, here I am particularly interested in this instance in the larger units of discourse, namely in generic conventions and their carnivalization. As

Rick Altman has shown, there is a certain parallelism between genres and nations as institutions that need to construct a unity out of a heterogeneous array of forms/subjects.

A monologic generic and national construct is achieved by presenting certain traits as the defining characteristic of a specific genre/nation and consequently by excluding others from that definition.373 As Stam points out, Bakhtin offers an important optic for historicizing the generic construct with his theorization of the “chronotope,” whereby he

“shows how concrete spatiotemporal structures in literature limit narrative possibility,

shape characterization, and mold a discursive simulacrum of life and the world”

(Subversive Pleasures 11). Bakhtin used the chronotope as a unit of analysis for novels,

which defines “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships,” a

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“formally constitutive category” genre (“Forms of Time” 84). Given the manipulation of

time and space by the technologies of cinema, which relies on a timed game of light, the

chronotope takes even stronger significance in film analysis. Mise-en-scène, editing,

camera angles, depth of fields, all contribute to define the spatiotemporal structure of a

certain genre, so that film noir becomes associated with lonely bars and deserted streets

where time seems suspended, while the road movie with long, adventurous roads to be

conquered seems set in a time that is endless and forever young. A genre, though, is also

defined by the absence of certain chronotopes, like the domestic spaces of everyday

routine or the work environments of 9 to 5 schedules in the above-mentioned genres. Set

design, camera work, and editing can be teased apart to understand the discourses which

have been ossified in a genre, and to retrace the historical context that contributed to

harden such conventions. Genres can be disassembled in terms of their histories, “since

the chronotope provides fictional environments implying historically specific

constellations of power” (Stam Subversive Pleasures 41).374

The usefulness of the chronotope for historicizing genre is demonstrated by

Bakhtin himself when he traces the gradual sharpening of high and low dichotomies in the definition of generic conventions during the Middle Ages. He maintains that “a gradual differentiation of ideological spheres [set] in” with the development of a class system (“Forms of Time” 211), whereby “laughter with sexuality, food, drink, and death

… [became] the petty and humdrum ‘coarse’ realities of life” (212-13), a coarseness that was, according to Bakhtin, mostly expurgated from the art forms of the high classes.375

The body, its pleasures and pains “is almost completely driven out of the official genres

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and out of official discourse of the ruling social groups,” to be “sublimated in the

religious cult, and partially in the high genres of literature and other ideologies” (213).

Following Bakhtin, we can see how in the Western tradition the expurgation of bodily

coarseness went hand in hand with the devaluation of the comic as well as of the female

body that was associated with the threatening lack of borders of the female grotesque

discussed in the previous Chapter. Against such devaluation, Bakhtin argues for the

comic as the heteroglossic discourse par exellence because it ultimately carnivalizes all

genres and defies any attempt at unitary discourse.376 Where carnival constitutes the

ritualistic celebration of a folk humor that subverts all standards and norms, offering a

temporary and authorized respite for the masses, critical humor, like the carnivalization

of a Dostoyevsky in Bakhtin’s framework, refrains from transient somersaults and opts

for an interstitial movement that continuously blurs the lines between high and low

genres, standard language and dialects, abstract imagery and bodily concreteness.

Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law with their haptic aesthetics rejoicing in contradictions

and carnivalization show a tendency to mingle chronotopes and creolize the Australian

popular genres with which they play (be it the documentarist, melodramatic, or thriller

mode), by re-inserting chronotopes of re-imagined domesticity and abjected time-spaces

of female experience. I refrain from arguing that the three filmmakers tap into a specific

female folk humor on the lines of Bakhtin’s carnival tradition, because, as illustrated so far, each director draws on multiple artistic and cultural traditions. Certainly, moving

within Australian genres, all filmmakers, to different degrees, come to terms with

Australian “national humor” as well, but even here there is no consensus that such a style

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exists. As Jessica Milner Davis reports in her overview of “Aussie Humor,” most studies agree that there is no such identifiable national tradition; comparative studies of jokes and the comic have long shown cross-linguistic and cultural affinities (Davies Ethnic

Humour). Interestingly, given the previous discussion of high and low genres, which will prove significant in the analysis of the authors’ carnivalization, a trait scholars seem to recognize as distinctly Australian, is a certain penchant for “poor taste” (Adams and

Newell 8) and dirty jokes, with a whole sub-genre of “chunder humor” (Davies The Mirth of Nations 92-100). Yet, even this Australian trait should be reconsidered against the history of colonization of Australia; indeed, Dorothy Jones and Barry Andrews argue that

Australian “humour is deeply rooted in the disjunctions of colonial life” (61), whereby, as mentioned in Chapter One, the British colony of convicts defined itself against the authority of the motherland. It seems that the devalued folk traditions of the English and

Irish working-classes – a humor that might perhaps be traced back to the bawdy, vernacular humor of Chaucer – thrive in the Australian antipodes. Davies seems to suggest something of the sort when he points out that “when the British laugh about the

Australians, they are laughing about themselves (“The Progress of Australian Humor in

Britain” 97). If Australian humor cannot really be defined in terms of specific national themes, targets, or styles, some scholars still seems to agree that there are instead identifiably typical Australian uses of humor, which once again recall the history of colonization, being mainly its anti-authoritarianism, irreverence, subversion, and its ubiquitousness (Davis “Aussie Humor” 3). This very brief overview of Australian national humor, assuming that such a category exists, already suggests that Moffatt,

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Pellizzari, and Law’s at times irreverent laughter, especially in Pellizzari’s case, bears the traces of vernacular Australian traditions, as well as feminist Medusan humor, among other humorous traditions and ironies carved out of the juxtaposition of opposing cultural and discursive conventions.377

As the analysis has shown, the three filmmakers vary considerably in terms of the accents that they bring to the filmic texts and employ for humorous dissociations.

Therefore, rather than arguing for a distinct female “canon” of humor that needs to be re- traced, as Bakhtin did for folk humor, I maintain that the thread uniting the three filmmakers’ humorous and aesthetic approaches is rather a strategy of systematic creolization of canons, discourses, and cultures. In Chapter Three, I have traced the filmmakers’ reliance on their hybrid upbringing marked by cultural and geographical disjunctions that shape their varied creolization of the Western film canon in which they all have been schooled; they attack the canon with multiple subjugated knowledges. In this Chapter, I will instead address how creolization invests the dominant chronotopes of

Australian national cinema, which the filmmakers reinvent in their work. As already mentioned in Chapter One, the utility of Glissant’s concept of creolization consists in its emphasis on social, geo-political, and economic processes on the one hand, and cultural and aesthetic practices on the other. The framework of creolization (as of course those of polyglossia, hybridity, and mongrelization discussed in Chapter Two) demands a continuous historicizing of aesthetic practices and a questioning of the ideological effects of formal conventions, while foregrounding a departure from Eurocentric theories and practices. Moreover, creolization insists on unpredictability, whereby “les elements

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culturels les plus eloignes et le plus hétérogènes s’il se trouve puissent être mis en

relation” (Glissant Introduction 22).378 Thus, we can make sense of Moffatt’s mingling of

Aboriginal aesthetic and narrative conventions with blaxploitation signifiers, feminist

Mexican signs, and the overtones of Hollywood commercial cinema; or of Pellizzari’s

gothic aesthetics encountering Italian cinema, surrealism, and feminist grotesques; or

finally, Law’s oscillation between Japanese and Hong Kong cinematic conventions,

Russian formalism, and Australian national genres. The métissage of forms performed by

the filmmakers has been shown to vary with each film project and with their own

successive cultural and physical disjunctions, which have introduced them to other ways

of thinking, seeing, and knowing, as well as to other traditions from the margins.

Constant, however, has been the humorous structuring principle, which understands aesthetic and discursive creolization as a means to emphasize contradictions and conflicts, so as to foster the viewers’ critical reflection and participation in meaning production. Opening up third, inventional spaces, (humorous) creolization, to paraphrase

Mignolo’s description of transculturation, “infects the locus of enunciation,” denying the dichotomy “pure” and “impure” (220). This is where creolization connects back to the generic carnivalization described by Bakhtin; as filmmakers schooled in the Western canon, while coming from disjunctive experiences that placed them on the margin of dominant cultural practices and industrial imperatives, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law exploit their different accents to defy the generic, monologic borders of Australian national cinema. Humorous creolization necessarily entails an attack against the

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hierarchies of value and power reproduced in dominant film conventions by mingling

Western and non-Western subjugated knowledges and aesthetic practices.

Interestingly, the humorous creolization of national genres performed by the three filmmakers necessarily comes face to face with discourses of the sacred and of religion, which are often subsumed in the “pure” and “impure” dichotomies that creolization blurs.

It should not be forgotten that colonial histories are always enmeshed in religious conflicts through which the clash over territories, resources, and power has often been defined. Theorists of postcoloniality, from Taussig, to Bhabha, and Mirzoeff – to name just a few theorists who have guided my journey so far – have long pointed to the creolization of sacred objects, like the different indigenized bibles emerging in all the colonized corners of the globe. Resisting the Christian conversion enforced by European colonizers, colonized peoples have found different ways to appropriate Christian signifiers and turn them into hybrid signs, a testament to the cultural resilience of subjugated cultures. Bhabha goes so far as to claim that “hybridity is heresy” (The

Location of Culture 322), drawing on the famous case of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic

Verses; what was deemed blasphemous and condemned in Rushdie’s satire, Bhabha maintains, was his sin of “misnaming,” his formal manipulation of sacred signs and names. Drawing on this example, Bhabha theorizes “blasphemy” as a hybrid practice that

“goes beyond the severance of tradition and replaces its claim to a purity of origins with a poetics of relocation and reinscription” (323). To an extent, blasphemy constitutes a form of generic creolization and carnivalization, whereby subjugated knowledges are re- inscribed into the chronotopes and forms of dominant genres and conventions. In this

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sense, blasphemy does not necessarily only transform religious discourse, but also more

extended notions of the sacred. As Bhabha expands the notion, “into the asserted

authenticity or continuity of tradition, ‘secular’ blasphemy releases a temporality that

reveals the contingencies, even the incommensurabilities, involved in the process of

social transformation” (323). Such a notion is particularly significant when looking at

Australian national cinema, which is founded on Western film conventions often

enmeshed in Christian discourse, as I will further discuss in this Chapter, by addressing

the purgatorial narratives of white Australia. Moreover, as I pointed out in Chapter Two,

scholars have long documented the appropriation of the “Aboriginal sacred” as a sign of

Australianness divested of its Aboriginal meanings and transformed into an empty signifier. Australian national cinema in its mainstream manifestations thus already presents the strong creolization and religious syncretism that mark any practice emerging from a colonial context. What I will investigate in this chapter is the act of turning this colonial appropriation into a means to re-inscribe, blasphemously, the subjugated knowledges already flowing under the surface of Australian national cinema. Certainly, given their different backgrounds, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law do not play with the same notions of the sacred and the religious; they tap into traditions as different as Aboriginal dreamtime, Catholicism, Paganism and traditional Chinese Buddhist and Confucian spirituality. All, however, mold their own accented cinema out of an Australian filmic tradition that is necessarily marked by Western, Christian myths and narratives. For this

reason, all three filmmakers, foregrounding hybridity and creolizing Australian cinema,

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engage in blasphemous practices of “reinscription or redescription; an iteration that is not

belated, but ironic and insurgent” (Bhabha The Location of Culture 324).

4.2 Tracey Moffatt: “Scary, Funny and Terribly Arty”

4.2.1 Bedeviling Generic Chronotopes and Conventions

Moffatt frequently and keenly engages in a game of citation and displacement,

which invests texts as varied as colonial diaries, classic Australian films like Jedda,

Hollywood staples parodied in her video work Love and Doomed, and even painting with references to Kahlo’s and Namatjira’s iconography. Moffatt’s citations invariably act as critical parodies; however, they can differ in tone, from the satiric displacements of colonial discourse to the celebration and resignification on interstitial modes of representation. As already mentioned, what marks these parodic references is the act of trans-contextualization, which often implies a generic displacement. Indeed, in Nice

Coloured Girls Watkins’ and Tench’s colonial account is not only challenged by the ironic juxtaposition with the girls’ perspective, but also through its very disorienting repetition in the generic chronotope of the urban “heist-movie,” as Jennings describes it

(Jennings Sites of Difference 70). The displacement seems here mainly motivated as an appeal to a popular genre, so as to negotiate a difficult balance between a critically political tone and experimental style with the need to entertain. The playful genre choice takes on a greater significance when considering the reversal of the genre’s chronotopes perpetrated by Moffatt. The heist movie like film noir became very popular during the

1940s and 50s and usually boasted a male cast and the pleasures of carefully planning the steal against some powerful institution or business; it was filled with urban, smoky

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locales of male socialization and vented against the increasing sense of alienation in the

developing of corporate America. While maintaining the big city chronotope, Moffatt

reverses the generic formula with an all female cast and a resignification of the “sleazy

bar” environment, which is transformed from the place of planning and male bonding

into the heist scene, where a game of sexual and gender roles ensues. The “nasty girls” come out unpunished and victorious, whereas the heist genre is mongrelized through

ironic subversions, fragmentation and the insertion of inconsistent chronotopes like the ancient beach and the sounds of early colonial Australia. As Jennings maintains, these

“anti-realist” elements are “intended to open up spaces for the viewing audience, and

demand an active, analytic engagement” (70); I would add that, beyond the textual

dissociation analyzed in Chapter One, the play of genre is also a means to reach out to

viewers beyond the Australian context. Indeed, the carnivalization and creolization of the

heist genre introduces gender and power dynamics familiar to most audiences; hence,

Moffatt’s inversions and parody do not need to rely exclusively on a specific knowledge of Australian colonialism.379

Moffatt has pursued a similar strategy of genre creolization in her feature film,

beDevil, which she advertised by sending out “postcards that say, ‘Bedevil [sic] - scary,

funny and terribly arty’,” so as to stress its accessibility to a wide audience (Moffatt qtd.

in Conomos and Caputo 32). Despite Moffatt’s claims, however, the film was widely

deemed too “arty;” Laseur points out that jurors at the Toronto Film Festival walked out

of the screening and that generally the film was attacked for being too obscure and

incoherent. Australian film critic John Wojdylo, for instance, attacks Moffatt for her

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excessive formalism and painterly approach to cinema, arguing that her characters are not

well-developed and that the whole film in the end “is a simplistic record of typical feelings of the Australian outback, and is an extremely intricate, but not complex, way of saying ‘Don’t worry, be happy’” (47). Wojdylo recognizes Moffatt’s exploitation of typical Australian tropes, such as the outback landscape and figures like the Aboriginal hunter and convict; however, he deems the overall atmosphere and character development as “mundane,” almost as an acritical and uninventional collection of

Australian national cinema staples. What Wojdylo seems to disregard completely is the humor of the film, which turns such an array of national signifiers not into a superficial play on the image, but into a satire of cinematic Australiana.

Even if Moffatt’s hope that “people [would] walk away with a smile” definitely seems to have been too optimistic (The Bulletin “Riders of the Post New Wave), other critics have recognized the centrality of humor to the film’s meaning and structure. Glen

Mimura recognizes that like her early filmmaking, her feature film, although largely

“neglected,” is distinguished by its “playful experimentation, rich intermingling of high and low culture, and complex articulations of sexuality, gender, and race in the context of

Australian history” (111). Conomos and Caputo point out that “there is a lot of humor in

the film” (32), and Summerhayes, as mentioned in Chapter Three, argues that humor

functions in the film as a motivation for alternative “ways of looking” (15). What can be

gleaned from the mixed reception of Moffatt’s feature film is how much humor impacts

the interpretation of the text, in that positive reviews understand it as a direct response to

the accusations of formulaic and superficial style. Generic formulas are indeed

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exaggeratingly central to beDevil, but it is exactly this excess that turns the film into a satirical look at Australian national discourses and history through a manipulation of popular film conventions. The main genres Moffatt blends in beDevil are documentary and Horror, alongside the more folk literary tradition of ghost stories, particularly the oral storytelling she inherited both from her Aboriginal and Irish families (Summerhayes 16).

These generic themes run throughout the three stories and in each they are mongrelized through additional formulae like the tourist video and melodrama, among others. As in her use of the heist movie in Nice Coloured Girls, the insertion of typical horror and mystery chronotopes like haunted houses and infested swamps seeks to appeal directly to a wider audience, by working with the expectations triggered by this popular genre. As a testament to her knowledge of popular culture and her desire to connect to its global visual archive of fears and dreams, Moffatt claims to have been inspired by what she deems “the greatest horror film ever made,” that is, the 1970s cult movie, The Exorcist

(1973, William Friedkin) and its fear-inducing soundtrack (qtd. in Conomos and Caputo

31). When speaking of her artistic influences, Moffatt rejects high and low aesthetic hierarchies, reclaiming the historic and artistic significance of the often denigrated Horror genre, while also acknowledging more conventional high-art sources like 1960s Japanese cinema. Particularly, the “misty, ghost-like locations,” through which Moffatt’s camera moves in the film, recall the studio-shot outdoor scenes privileged by directors like Ozu, and Masaki Kobayashi, whose Kwaidan (1965), built on four ghost stories, was a key intertext for Moffatt’s own ghost trilogy.

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In the often critically contrasted strands of commercial cinema and horror movies

on the one hand, and auteur cinema on the other, Moffatt finds a common emphasis,

although differently carried out, on sound and mise-en-scéne as triggers of fear and

suspense. Fusing the “arty” ghosts of Japanese cinema and the horror spectacle of

Hollywood, beDevil relies on eerily reconstructed landscapes, which Moffatt recounts discussing at length with her production designer Stephen Curtis, who fashioned the film’s environment out of paintings, old pictures of Australia, and his own travels to national parks and wildlife reserves (Conomos and Caputo 31). To reinforce such painterly décor, spiked by a “Linda Blair puke green,” Moffatt exploited the full potential

of shrill, unexpected, evil-foreboding, sounds that so enthralled her in Regan’s scary

room (Australian National Cinema 31). These references testify to the mass popularity of

the ghost theme, from film to storytelling and literature; yet, this generic choice is

exploited by Moffatt to creolize the entertaining, commercial chronotope of the horror

film and bring out another dimension of the ghost figure. As mentioned in Chapter Two,

from Morrison’s renowned Beloved and its ever-present, past ghost of slavery, to Julie

Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, where it is the ghost of the future in the form of an

“unborn child” that retells the Gullah’s histories, the figure of the ghost has long served

to break apart the abridged linearity of official history and open up its cracks to give

space to subaltern voices. Gelder and Jacobs illustrate that this tradition is well developed

in Australia as well, where the ghost “becomes a figure of displacement” that speaks of

“(dis)possession” (32). In their hunt for the ghosts of Australian cinema in Uncanny

Australia, Gelder and Jacobs include Moffatt’s beDevil, but critically maintain that she

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shows “little interest in how the ghosts came to be where they are,” concentrating instead on “the effects they have on those nearby” (38). Nonetheless, as I have argued in Chapter

Two, Moffatt does exploit her ghosts to establish “an affective connection back to colonialism and colonial trauma,” more than in transitory and fleeting moments as Gelder and Jacobs would have it (39). The continuous shifts in temporalities and places as well as the undermining of white authority through humor, all confront viewers with the haunting past of colonialism and its atrocities, forcing them to re-live the same displacement. With an eye to entertainment and critical reflection simultaneously,

Moffatt skillfully engages with the play on absences allowed by cinematic ghosts, who more often than not inhabit a third space beyond the film frame, which they might only infiltrate fleetingly and translucently to further reinforce the existence of something beyond the seen, known, and understood.

Beyond the many references to colonial traumas like the Stolen Generation and the fight for Aboriginal Land Rights, discussed in Chapter Two, Moffatt clearly translates the entertainment value of ghost stories and effects into a critical reflection by mongrelizing horror chronotopes through humorous juxtaposition and generic creolization. From the very beginning, the film plays with what Eisenstein would term tonal and overtonal montage, eliciting jarring emotions. The film starts out as a thriller – camera moving slowly into an inhospitable space, suspense music reinforcing the danger, close-ups of boiling mud seemingly hiding some sort of mysterious and violent creature.

After Rick falls into the swamp, Moffatt abruptly transplants us into the present with the adult Rick’s laughter from a prison cell; laughing and a merry soundscore humorously

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displace the haunting ghosts of the swamp, making space for aerial tracking shots of

beautiful white beaches and happy bathing tourists. Within three cuts and only a few

minutes, Moffatt moves us from the Horror to the documentary format, finally to plunge

us into what feels like a tourist ad with cruise-like music. All three genres are

mongrelized by the juxtaposition of generic chronotopes, but also of social spaces and

histories. Indeed, Moffatt’s humorous transition from a past Aboriginal outback and its

incumbent appropriation by white business, to the space of an Australian national prison,

and the commercially transformed Australian landscape goes beyond a fleeting, stylistic

play, to encourage instead critical reflection. In his thoughtful analysis of beDevil,

Mimura recognizes in this juxtaposition of spaces the core of the film’s meaning.380 He argues that Moffatt “ironically displays capitalism’s unceasing drive to transform the environment, punctuating its three stories with mock-documentary and tourist brochures images … mimicking the routine flow of television commercials, accompanied by appropriately vacuous elevator music” (115). Moffatt’s abrasive satire of corporate globalization’s cannibalism of Australian land goes hand in hand with her humorous attack on the multicultural policies mentioned above; as Mimura points out, multiculturalism is often used to sell exactly the Australian construct Moffatt parodies.

Against the mythical, “flattened” pictures of “cultural difference” used for advertising and commercial cinema, Moffatt insists on actual differences, on the “unequal relations of power” structuring Australia and its spaces since colonization (115-17). Indeed, if the horror chronotope is abruptly interrupted by a happy-go-lucky soundtrack and a satire of advertisement imagery, these commercialized images are themselves carnivalized at other

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times with the insertion of music that is “sharp and shrill” and hardly decipherable sounds

of chains and shouts like “Get up” (Ken and Jacobs 39). As in her shorts, especially Night

Cries that also comments on the Australian advertising industry, Moffatt uses the

soundtrack here to introduce “secondary signs” that disrupt the myth of Australia as a

perfect tourist paradise, reminding us of the bloody history leading to the construction of

such sunny resorts.

Whereas the first segment in bedevil, “Mr. Chuck” exploits humorous

dissociations between horror and commercial ads, the second segment performs a similar

decomposition by juxtaposing the thriller genre with the video-like footage of outback

Aboriginal women, the uncanny documentary-style interviews, and a cooking-segment.

The effect is similar, in that Moffatt establishes a connection between past disinheritance

of Aboriginal families, symbolized by the ghost train of white modernization, and the present of abandoned tin houses and marginalization. Furthermore, both stories insist on

certain documentary chronotopes and proceed to carnivalize them by leaving unclear who

is filming the reportage, for what kind of program and project it is filmed, and by refusing

to offer an answer to the many questions it raises. The mysteries are not solved, the fear is not satisfied by any violent resolution, and the film suggests that the very authority of

both witnesses and filmmaker is undermined by their mutual contradiction and inability

to recount the whole story. Carnivalizing the documentary genre is crucial to Moffatt’s

film and her more general accented perspective onto Australian national cinema, because

it directly attacks the authority of the many white documentary filmmakers who have

defined Aboriginal cultures without granting them any voice. Moffatt continuously

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confronts viewers with the evidence of difference, with the need to listen to the others’

voices and to bear testimony to their marginalization and silencing. Moffatt’s creolization

of the horror genre, thus, seeks to appropriate ironically its selling potential as

entertainment, while it works to deconstruct its chronotopes. By choosing to decompose

the very cinematic format that feeds on passive, engrossed looking, with representations of actual cultural difference and inequality, Moffatt reminds us that the traumas and ghosts of colonial Australia are still haunting the land and they are not ready to be contained and mythologized in thrilling stories; she insists on the continuous need to bear witness, reflect critically, and act.

4.2.2 Fragmenting and Syncretizing Christian Missionary Discourse

As Summerhayes argues and the previous analyses have shown, Moffatt entertains a “joking relationship with tragedy, based on irony, parody, mockery, and the unholy glee that often accompanies these former strategies within the parameters of

Australian humor” (15). Laughing back at ethnographic discourse, humorously piercing through the masculinist gender and sexual politics of both Australian colonialism and mainstream cinema, pulling the leg of homogenizing multicultural politics with abrasive masquerades, and taking issue with the cannibalist globalization of Aboriginal lands and signs with a biting, creolizing humor, Moffatt seems so far to have spared only one significant colonizing tool, that is, Christian missionary discourse. Despite her “unholy glee” and in looking afresh at sexual taboos and innuendos, Moffatt’s humor has left the religious iconography, which she targeted early on in the already mentioned masquerade of the nativity scene, largely unscathed, a loud absence from her all-comprehensive look

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and parody of Australian history, cinema, and discourse. As in all colonizing enterprises

throughout history, religion did play a significant role in Australia, although, as a penal

colony, arguably less than in the Pilgrims’ messianic sweep of the Americas.

Nonetheless, Christian missions were central in contributing to break ethnic ties and with

them cultural and linguistic Aboriginal knowledges; Aboriginal writers from the seminal

poet Noonuccal, to the renowned playwright Davis, and novelist Mudrooroo have

recounted their experiences in Christian missions (Chesson, Larbalestier). Similarly,

Labumore in her autobiography An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New seeks

to translate her Aboriginal beliefs and rituals into a Christian discourse understandable to

a Western audience. She navigates the two worlds, negotiating the opposing religious

belief systems she grew up with, coming to a syncretization where Aboriginal healers and

Jesus Christ are mapped onto a sacred kinship system (76-77). Although they acknowlede

the weight of missionary discourse in their upbringing, most Indigenous writers and

filmmakers prefer to tap into the “Aboriginal sacred,” into the Aboriginal belief system of

the Dreamtime (Mudrooroo Writing from the Fringe, Shoemaker Black Word, White

Page).381 Moffatt seems to be doing neither in the films analyzed so far; certainly, the

“Aboriginal sacred” can be read into Moffatt’s concern with the representation of the

Aboriginal land, as mentioned in Chapter Two, and fleetingly into beDevil’s second

segment “Choo, Choo, Choo,” drawn from ancient oral stories retold by her Brisbane family. Even in these cases, however, her sacred kinships need to be re-read into the text and remain marginal to her direct confrontation with power relationships in the colonial context and their negotiation along gender and sexual conflicts.

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Given this visible non-presence, it becomes even more intriguing to analyze

Moffatt’s Night Cries, which stands out not only for its inclusion of Christian discourse,

but also for exploiting it as a means to fragment and carnivalize the otherwise bleak

short.382 Night Cries is arguably the most critically acclaimed, reviewed, cited, analyzed, and taught film by Moffatt as attested by Kaplan in Trauma Culture, Jayamanne in

Toward Cinema and its Double, and Mellencamp in “Haunted History.” The short’s

reinvention of Chauvel’s Jedda has proven compelling for Australian audiences and

critics of Australian national cinema, while its stunning cinematography, set design, and

intensity have mesmerized critics internationally. I have already discussed how Moffatt’s

painterly approach to the Australian landscape resignifies upon Australian national

cinema and relies on Namatjira’s work to mediate between black and white Australia.

Along with Namatjira, Moffatt calls on another Aboriginal “cultural mediator,” as Morris

defines Namatjira and Little (“Beyond Assimilation”), namely the Aboriginal musician

Jimmy Little, who in the 1960s conquered Australian audiences with his Nat King Cole

style of singing and Christian lyrics. Little topped the national charts between 1963 and

1964 with his song “Royal telephone,” featured in Night Cries, and in 1964, three years

before Aborigines were even granted citizenship rights, he was named Australian pop star

of the year. He then continued his career as a singer and actor on television and in plays,

while tenuously working for Aborigines’ rights and education.383 As Murray points out,

Little’s “very presence reminds one of the era of the mission school, where black

Australians were re-educated and re-clothed in an attempt to whiten them” (19). His

appearances, in a shiny country-blue dress against a black background, frame the short

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and interrupt its narrative. Outside of the diegetic space of the narrative and apparently

incongruously interjected in this restaging of a familial and racial melodrama, Little’s

performance of his Christian song has intrigued many critics. Michael Snelling calls it an

“inescapably ironic presence … that undermines the already fragile cliché of the story

line” (9). Peter Kemp connects the “the blessed-out, almost crazy, ever-grinning fervour

of real-life Aboriginal pop singer, Jimmy Little” to the role of religion in colonialism,

pointing out that his song speaks of the “hegemonically imposed, monolithic Euro-God

whom Indigenous Australians, just like African-American slaves, can hook into, call on,

anytime when they might ‘get in trouble’.”

As the critics points out, the soothing lyrics of “Royal telephone” where “you may

talk to Jesus” and “hear from heaven almost any time” take on a bitter and ironic meaning

in their juxtaposition with the short’s narrative and tone. Little first appears on screen

after the title credits and the quote from the popular American melodrama Picnic (Joshua

Lohan, 1955) that leads into Night Cries: “Look at the sunset Howard: It’s like the

daytime didn’t want to end; the day is putting up a big scrap to keep the nighttime from

creeping on.” Superimposed to Rosalind Russell’s words are creepy sounds and screams,

which Moffatt describes as “sounds like crazy monkeys” and revealed to be in fact the

last gasps of “a woman choking” “recorded in Haiti in the 1930s during a voodoo

ceremony” (Moffatt qtd. in Murray 22).384 Adding to the ambiguity of the initial quote,

Moffatt cuts from this aural omen of death to the gentle voice of Little, singing about

Jesus, which infiltrates the darkness of the initial shots, opening up a space for the

appearance of a smiling and shining Little himself. The tonal swings of Moffatt’s editing,

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however, do not end here, but continue with another abrupt cut to the frustrated face of

Jedda eating an apple in the devastating silence of the Australian outback. Breaking the tensed stillness of this glossy homestead is a steady metallic sound, which in the next shot we discover is coming from the prosthetic hand of Jedda’s white mother as she attempts to eat dinner. A melodramatic love declaration, an optimistic and evangelizing song leading into a space of frustration, tensed racial relations, and endless waiting; how are we to read this jarring, dissociated, and ironic beginning? Each piece seems to contradict the next, whereas, assembled together, the patched representation starts to make more sense. In fact, the Picnic quote can be re-read as anticipating the short’s themes in that the setting will glow with the redness of a sky at dusk, which so often stands for the

Australian landscape. If redness evokes romance in the 1950s quote, however, in the short Moffatt reworks it with her painterly décor, suggesting that the mythical redness of

Australia “is putting up a big scrap” to hide the many untold stories of colonial Australia.

The black frame introducing Little and repeatedly obscuring the glossy surface of the

Australian scenery seems thus to challenge the myths of Australian wilderness, and open up space for an alternative reading of Chauvel’s Jedda and with it a multitude of untold colonial histories. As Jayamanne points out, the black screen framing Little’s appearances introduces a time-lag, in Bhabha’s sense, that functions as a metaphor for all the voices, stories, and bodies suppressed in the past that are today emerging and contaminating the dominant narrative of the present.385 Finally, as Langton argues, the

film “play[s] out the worst fantasies of those who took Aboriginal children from their

natural parents to assimilate and ‘civilise’ them,” that is, to end up alone in the hands of

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their adopted “brown children” (47). In other words, Moffatt plays against the romantic

redness of mythical Australia a nightmare that can creep in at “nighttime,” pointing again

to the conflicted power relations inscribed into the multi-racial make-up of Australia.

Little’s sunny, Christian performance thus serves as an alienating device to undermine

the viewers’ exclusive identification with the “universal” theme of mother-daughter

relationship emphasized by Moffatt, and insert a space of critical reflection that localizes

the story in the context of colonial relations in Australia.

The irony of the juxtaposition works in two directions though, in that Little’s

Christian message highlights the not so filial feelings of Jedda, while the intertextual

references to Chauvel’s text and Australian colonial, racist policies confer a bitter note to

the assimilationalist, success story of the evangelized Little. As Jayamanne observes,

Little’s performance draws our attention to “both the violent and the fluent aspects of

cultural assimilation and taps into an Aboriginal cultural history which is neither

pristinely Indigenous nor completely other, a kind of mimetic zone” (Toward Cinema 6).

Like Moffatt’s own lifestory, this new Jedda narrative acknowledges the mingling of different traditions and the contradictions and ambiguities buried in the Australian

colonialist history. Moffatt pays homage to Little’s role as cultural mediator and to his

artistic talent, while also countering his assimilationalist lyrics, by fragmenting his body,

so that the “dismembering close-ups create a sense of unease” (11-2). Indeed, Little’s

second appearance is introduced by the sound of a whip Jedda brandishes in frustration;

juxtaposed with this tensed scene, Little is shown putting on his guitar, flashing his smile,

and mimicking the lyrics of “love me tender,” while no sound is heard. The ironic

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superimposition of the suggested love song against Jedda’s burst of anger turns against

Little himself. Deprived of his voice, fragmented in close-ups emphasizing his mimetic

performance in clothes and gestures of the iconic American singer, Little’s charisma is

subdued, whereas the power relations inscribed onto his disciplined body are emphasized.

Little’s last appearance works more ambiguously; in the final shot, against the sound of a

newborn baby crying, Jedda lies next to her dead mother in a fetal position. Moffatt

dwells on this discomforting shot at length, making viewers feel the pain of a daughter,

intensified by the conflicts and tension pervading the relationship throughout the short.

Gradually slipping into a black space, the cries make way for Little’s gentle voice once

more, with his message of Christian faith and solace, which could not be more at odds

with Jedda’s final anguish. Commenting on this ambiguous finale, Moffatt maintains that

she

wanted to end the film like that, leaving the Daughter in an emotional state, and then bring in Jimmy Little with his boppy song so that it would grate even more. He offers his Christian healing, which can be so unwelcome and inappropriate at times. At the same time, I don’t want to make fun of Jimmy or his Christianity. I present him as he is in real life … but, in fact, he’s not really soothing at all, but grating. (qtd. in Murray 22)

It is this scraping juxtaposition that works blasphemously in Night Cries; Moffatt turns

Little’s Christian song into a signifier of colonialism and abuse; she makes his evangelizing message feel “inappropriate” and, more significantly, by establishing parallels between his “Love me tender” and “Royal telephone” performance, she clearly divests Christian discourse of any religious authority, emphasizing instead its instrumental assimilationalist function. In other words, Moffatt turns the Christian message upside down to unveil its secular, devastating impact on Aboriginal cultures.

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4.3 Monica Pellizzari’s Humorous Excesses

4.3.1 A Feminist Look at the “Freakishness” of Australian Cinema

Throughout this study, I have emphasized the extent to which Pellizzari’s cinema speaks both to the Australian and Italian national cinemas; here I return to such artistic kinship to show how Pellizzari’s humor intersects chronotopes from both cinemas, accenting the two in the process. In particular, I will illustrate how such an encounter is inscribed onto the female body, through which Pellizzari reinvents the Italian, masculinist, seriocomic tradition, as well as the Australian trope of the “scrubber,” constructed in the early days of colonial Australia and reproduced in Australian cinema ever since. Regarding Pellizzari and Italian cinema, in Chapter Two I highlighted some resonances with individual Italian directors like Fellini, Wertmueller, and the Tavianis.

However, the “certain realism” I emphasized in Pellizzari’s aesthetics, between its neorealist tones and oneiric drives, goes beyond auteurist influences to establish a certain kinship with the humorous tradition that Gieri proves to characterize Italian postwar cinema at large. It is a tradition that she indeed defines as a “certain Italian cinema” and positions as transcending the generic and auteur cinema; it is an aesthetics characterized by “the free contamination between tragedy and comedy,” tapping into the

“countertradition[s] of Baudelaire’s grotesque or absolute comic, of Bakhtin’s seriocomic, and of Pirandello’s umorismo” (165). Genre carnivalization and “lowering,” according to Gieri, are the defining features of this “certain Italian cinema” and they are felt already in Pellizzari’s first short, Rabbit on the Moon, written in Italy and, as already pointed out, heavily indebted to Neorealism as well as Italian folktales and humor.

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Dell’Oso describes the Italian/Australian’s successful debut as “a charming, cruel, and

funny, fairytale-like child’s view of growing up” (17); in her choice of adjectives, some

of the peculiarities of Pellizzari’s Italian-informed hybrid style clearly stand out: grittiness countered by oneiric fantasy, as well as realist social tableaus contaminated by

a skewed point of view of a young girl. Interestingly, Gieri argues that this generic

carnivalization in Italian cinema has been “carried out by melodrama, which in the Italian context has become … almost a hypergenre” (87). Gieri pursues such a theorization within the history of Italian cinema and literature, where for historical and socio-political reasons different strands of the comic mode, as Commedia dell’Arte and vernacular humor at large, and of the serious, like Italian verismo and naturalismo, merged in the seriocomic attitude of much of postwar Italian cinema. Certainly these aspects have influenced Pellizzari, who in her very upbringing must have felt the influence of all these aesthetic Italian traditions thanks to her exposure to both Italian familial rituals and tales and Italian “high culture.”

For a discussion of Pellizzari’s accenting of Australian national cinema and her reinvention of Italian male cinema, Gieri’s suggestion that melodrama constitutes a mode of discourse, predicated on stylistic excess beyond generic categories and favoring humorous carnivalization, is particularly significant.386 Indeed, if Pellizzari makes her

references to Italian cinema and its seriocomic tradition explicit, she also undermines the

male auteurist tradition that popularized such aesthetics internationally; she cites Fellini

and reminds us of the brothers Taviani, but she simultaneously foregrounds a feminist,

Medusan humor that does away with the male sexual fantasies of the former, and

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challenges the patriarchal formations (both social and familial) the Tavianis so poetically represented, but did not tear apart. In contaminating the certain Italian realism mentioned above, Pellizzari seems to draw from another tradition of melodrama, which has also been theorized as a mode of discourse but made relevant in relation to women’s representation and feminist aesthetics. Film critic Christine Gledhill understands melodrama as a form of “stylistic excess” that eludes generic categorization and actually

“constitute[s] a founding tradition of Hollywood as a whole” (12). Gledhill retraces the melodramatic base of cinema back to the development of popular forms of entertainment in the eighteenth century thanks to the gradual gain of power by the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy, which caused a shift between the high and low categorizations of art and favored a relegitimation of art forms tied to popular spectacle (14-28). In this context,

Gledhill shows how “melodrama [arouse] to exploit these new conditions of production, becoming itself a site of generic transmutation and ‘intertextuality” (18). The new “cross- class and cross-cultural … melodramatic aesthetic” tapped into folk traditions like

“pantomime, harlequinade, tumbling” and so on (17), partially rediscovering that very same carnivalesque tradition illuminated by Bakhtin. From this broader understanding of melodrama as a transmutation of generic forms, reinscribing spectacle and folk traditions within the “serious canon,” Gledhill illustrates how melodrama was gradually redefined in film studies as a specific, “low” genre, against what was increasingly argued to be the realist canon of cinema. This redrawing of critical boundaries was carried out along gender lines as well, with the “classic genres” defined in terms of “masculine cultural values” and melodrama “acknowledged only in those denigrated reaches of the juvenile

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and the popular, the feminised spheres of the woman’s weepie, the romance or family melodrama” (34). According to Williams, who also embraces a view of melodrama as

“stylistic and/or emotional excess” (“Film Bodies” 3), the lowering and devaluation of this mode of discourse is attributable to its being defined by a “bodily excess” (4), harkening back, one could say, to the banning of the nude body from conceptualizations of high art in the middle ages, as discussed by Bakhtin.387 More to the point, the bodies that are most at the center of the spectacle in melodramatic modes of representation are those of women and not accidentally, the devaluation of melodrama also implied an association with abjected feminine discourse, a generic and gender devaluation that also marks the discourse on comedy.

With her first feature film, Fistful of Flies, Pellizzari seems to take on both these processes of generic transmutation and carnivalization as well as their discursive lowering, in order to fashion an unruly feminine text. Generally described as a “black comedy,” Fistful fits into the melodramatic framework because, narratively, it represents a familial drama, dealing with issues of conjugal betrayal, domestic abuse, and parental conflicts. Scenes of family fights around the table, of beatings and punishments directed towards the daughter and of a wife’s recriminations are prominently featured in Fistful and are common staples in the woman’s film and in family melodrama, as is the emotional excess that pervades Pellizzari’s entire text. However, Pellizzari carnivalizes this framework by augmenting the stylistic excess to the extent where the formal play overtakes the emotional excess of melodrama. Moreover, the familial drama is often interrupted by sequences that fall beyond the boundaries of melodrama, like the comedic

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sketches of mother and daughter chasing each other around the table, in a parody of the

corrida, or the absurd stealing stunts that focus the attention on the seven dwarfs as

witnesses of the unraveling of familial drama. Finally, much of the generic

carnivalization and satire is entrusted to the unruliness of the young protagonist discussed

above; in her provocative Medusan humor, Pellizzari transforms the melodramatic female

body, the moved and moving figure of the film, from the masochistic, suffering body,

into the carnivalesque body, reclaiming its unboundedness and its earthly pleasures.

Pellizzari’s skillful interweaving of melodramatic and carnivalesque themes,

stylemas, and figures is particularly significant in relation to Australian national cinema

and its own generic and chronotopic conventions. As noted in Chapter Two, Australian

national cinema has gained recognition internationally with “masculinist” genres and film

texts, where women have long served as symbolic props for nationalist discourses, from

the many wives and daughters since Lottie Lyell who were called on to lure the brave,

wild men into settling the vast empty lands, to the innocent Victorian girls mysteriously

captured by an unknown land in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the film that started the New

Wave in the 1970s, and, finally, to the slain wife triggering off the Mad Max trilogy (see

Morris “White Panic”). As this short exemplary list illustrates, women’s suffering has served as a symbolic representation of the settling enterprise; simultaneously, however,

Australian cinema has also actively reproduced the sexual history of Australia. As Terrie

Waddell argues in the “Scrubbers: The ‘Great Unwashed’ of Australian Cinema,”

Australian national(ist) discourses have long associated women and the new land to be tamed with a “macho bush idea of having to ‘break in’ unruly things” (185). Emblematic

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of such narratives is the trope of the scrubber, which Waddel points out is characterized by an association with filth, the animalesque, an uncontrollable sexuality, and a tendency towards madness and dependence from the male. Scrubbers in Australian mythological speech date back to the early women arriving with the First Fleet who were represented as “national whores” (Hughes).

With the rising visibility of women filmmakers in Australia, however, these sexist myths reproduced in mainstream, masculinist Australian cinema have undergone increasing scrutiny and resignification. Analyzing films like Glenda Hamby’s Fran

(1985), Campion’s Sweetie (1989), and Perkins’s Radiance (1997), Waddell illustrates

how these contemporary women filmmakers have, to an extent, reclaimed the

independence of the scrubber, her unruly pleasures and her control over her own body

(183-84). Collins, in “Brazen Brides, Grotesque Daughters, Treacherous Mothers:

Women’s Funny Business in Australian Cinema from Sweetie to Holy Smoke” documents

further examples of similar reappropriations within the comedic tradition in Australian

national cinema, which Australian women filmmakers like Campion, Barrett, Emma-Kate

Croghan, and I would add Pellizzari and Law (with The Goddess of 1967), are

(re)inventing. In these comedic and melodramatic resignifications on the female grotesque, Australian women filmmakers are participating in a rethinking of the suffering female body, which rejects the binarist definitions of passive and active, victim and aggressor.388 More significantly in terms of the generic conventions of Australian

national cinema, these women filmmakers seem to be working within, what O’Regan

describes as, “Australian cinema’s penchant for producing ‘freaks’” (Australian National

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Cinema 93 ).389 As feminist filmmakers, however, Campion, Barrett, Croghan, Hamby,

Perkins, and Pellizzari among others are interweaving this national penchant for female monsters with feminist approaches to the female grotesque, reinventing the masculinist cinematic canon of Australian cinema.

Pellizzari participates in this reinvention of the “scrubber” myth and other

masculinist and sexist cinematic representations, as has been noted by various Australian film critics. Martin singles out, for instance, the “gothic and grotesque” elements in her films, acknowledging that “Australian cinema has a strong subterranean tradition” of this

kind, although he seems to dislikes Pellizzari’s “grotesquerie” (“Self-Loathing” B4). Hall

also remarks on the “boldness with which she deals with sexuality and with the nastiness

of parental abuse,” which ultimately fashion “a bizarre world … but a robust and funny one as well,” so much so that she declares Fistful of Flies “an Australian original”

(“Small Town Obsessions” 14). Furthermore, her films have often been compared to

Campion’s work, both in terms of the visual style, helped by their collaboration with the same cinematographer Jane Castles, but also because of their gothic imprint and mutual

focus on grotesque women who defy any boundary and norm of behavior. Differently

from Campion, who offers a nuanced and at times ambiguous rethinking of heterosexual

relations and masochism, Pellizzari’s jujitsu of the female grotesque and redefinition of

both the melodramatic and comedic tradition of Australian cinema unambiguously

celebrates the woman’s body and subjectivity. Yet the melodramatic dark themes are still

there; indeed, Pellizzari remembers “pitching between Once Were Warriors and Muriel’s

Wedding” (Colbert “Flying in Face of Film Form” 6), a New Zealand melodrama of

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domestic violence and abuse and an Australian suburban grotesque comedy. Moreover, describing the “grotesque daughters” of contemporary Australian national cinema,

Collins points out that in these films the focus is usually on the father-daughter relationship, which is often portrayed as “incestuous …and maintained by the compliant mother;” yet, Collins also claims that these grotesque comedies’ “assault on the father’s power” also implies a “rebirth of the mother” (“Brazen Brides” 176). Fistful of Flies, while presenting the figure of the father as abusive, focuses from the very start on the figure of the mother, but the narrative arc also concludes with the “rebirth” of the complicit mother. Moving in and out of melodrama, grotesque comedy, neorealist aesthetics and Italian folk humor, Pellizzari effectively creolizes Australian national cinema with an Italian accent and a tradition of humor, while carnivalizing Italian patriarchy and male gaze with an irreverent, feminist laughter unequivocally arising from the “freakish” tradition down under.

4.3.2 Laughing back at Patriarchal Italian Catholicism

Part and parcel of Pellizzari’s creolization of Australian generic conventions is her reliance on a long Italian tradition of blasphemous humor. As Bakhtin also noticed, parodie sacre were long a favorite genre in the Latin and vernacular ancient Italian texts, a heritage that has continued to resurface in the work of Italian writers and filmmakers, including auteurs like Fellini and Pasolini who strongly influenced Pellizzari. In the

analysis so far of Pellizzari’s work, I have already noted her mixture of high and low

Italian cultural references, which includes a blend of Catholic and pagan beliefs, from the

insistent religious iconography to the appearances of witches. This play on the

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contradictions and syncretism that define Italian Catholicism (Verdicchio) is accompanied by a sacrilegious laughter that the women in her films direct against religious rituals and beliefs. Such a motif appears early in Pellizzari’s filmography, whose first film outside of the AFTRS school, Best Wishes, focuses on the young

Angelica’s confirmation and juxtaposes it with her sexual abuse at the hands of her soon- to-be godfather. Shot from a child’s perspective like Rabbit on the Moon, Best Wishes foregrounds the alienation of Angelica from a religious ritual she does not completely comprehend; when after confession, she is told to recite the rosary, we see her kneeling in the church chanting “come on now, shout,” while curiously admiring the overbearing religious icons. Her playful curiosity over such Catholic display is well rendered through point of view shots of the young Angelica looking at the Christ on the Cross upside down, then with an eye covered, a perspective that seems to establish a playful relationship between the young girl and the Christ she grew up with. By the end of the story, the wounded and abused Angelica has learned to be much more distrustful of both male and Catholic authority; her initial playful irreverence towards Christian icons turns into a full-fledged sacrilegious attack during the confirmation ceremony. Rejecting her initial confirmation name of Maria for Margie, Angelica confounds the bishop who finally resigns, assuming that there must well be a saint by the name of Margaret.

Attempts to contain the initial resistant act, however, will soon prove futile, when in the very last frame, Angelica, instead of the ceremonial kissing of the Episcopal ring, vigorously bites his finger under the photographic flash of the onlooking godfather.

Pellizzari augments the blasphemous humor of this child’s irreverent act by filming the

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scene from the low-angle perspective of Angelica’s kneeling, so that the bishop in his

mitre exaggeratedly towers over her; his expression of shocked pain is augmented by the

deforming perspective and the muted slow-motion that finally freezes onto the not-so-

piously looking Angelica squarely looking into the camera. The two fresh and “evil” girls of Best Wishes and Just Desserts represent the new generation of hyphenated Italian women who are not afraid of facing up to the patriarchy of the Italian family and church

that long marginalized their mothers. Indeed, beyond the many juxtapositions already

noted in Chapter Three, in Just Desserts Pellizzari also relishes in making portraits of

Christ and the Madonna become the appalled witnesses of Maria’s sexual

experimentations. Maria’s search for her clitoris is continuously cross-cut with images of

Christ looking down on her, and her climax is signaled by the glorious outburst on the

soundtrack of religious hymns and the Latin Catholic formula in nomine patris, which

itself is undermined by the insertion of devilish sound bites of electronic guitars and rock

notes.

With these piously named and young looking girls who are not afraid to laugh,

bite, and look back in pursuit of their own sexuality and identity, Pellizzari directly

comments on a motif that pervades Italian and Italian/American cinema alike, the

tendency to represent women as either whores or Madonnas.390 In interviews, Pellizzari

has indeed blasphemously noticed, that “unfortunately, we [Italians] have the bloody

Virgin Mary out there to be constantly pitted against. Yet, it’s not like everyone wants

Jesus Christ as a husband” (qtd. in “Bi-Cultural Visions 25). Her attack on the patriarchy

of Italian culture and Catholicism resonates with the films of hyphenated Italian directors

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across the oceans; indeed, I have already noticed her artistic kinship with filmmakers like

De Michiel and Savoca. Interestingly, Savoca seems to pick up on the same sacrilegious

thinking and in her Household Saints presents us with the young Teresa, who falls into

the hands of a young man, after associating him with Christ. Savoca’s film is a familial

epic spanning three generations of Italian/American women, Carmela, Catherine, and

Teresa (appropriately surnamed Santagelo or Saint angel), and recounting the legend of

how the Santangelo sausages have come to possess miraculous powers. The process of

assimilation in the new country is conveyed through a narrative movement from the pagan Catholicism of the newly immigrated Carmela, to the American consumerist creed appropriated by the second-generation Catherine, and finally to young Teresa’s rediscovery of both her ethnicity and her Catholicity. Denied the wish to become a nun,

Teresa decides to serve God as Santa Teresa of Lisieux who transformed daily tasks into holy services; her religious fervor finally thrusts her into the hands of a young university student, Leonard, who knows how to exploit her beliefs. When he starts giving orders to her, she feels “a sense of freedom” similar to the feeling of “floating out of your body” described by the saint hagiographies she so eagerly devours. She thus subjects herself to

Leonard’s will, certain that it is also God’s plan for her. Savoca clearly establishes a connection here between the patriarchal family and the Catholic Church, two institutions where the Law of the Fathers controls women. Thereby, Savoca opens a space for a satirical look onto the complicity of Italian Catholicism and patriarchy, clearly establishing a connection between being taught to serve Jesus in heaven and men on earth. Parodying the notion that a woman’s role is to cook, iron, and clean for her men,

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Savoca literally translates these domestic chores into miracles, when Jesus lovingly

multiplies, not the bread and fish, but the shirts that the young Teresa needs to iron for

her guileful boyfriend. Teresa’s romance with the patri of Italian Catholicism, and

patriarchal family at large, comes to a humorous if bitter end, when, on her deathbed (her

condition brought on by her uncontrolled religious fervor) she has one last vision. Playing

pinnacle with God, Jesus, and St. Anne, Teresa dreams that God is a cheater and

discovers herself different from St Anne, who submissively plays to lose and please God;

Teresa instead recognizes her desire to win her match against the Fathers of her beliefs.

With this quirky and blasphemous comedy, Savoca, like Pellizzari, stands up to the

fathers of Italian/American cinema, reframing both Catholicism and the patriarchy

reproduced in their texts. Both directors celebrate instead the pagan beliefs on which the

authority of Italian and Italian/American women has relied for centuries, while

simultaneously insisting that they need to be reinvented and detached from the patriarchal

traditions they have been part of.

From down under, Pellizzari seems to echo Savoca’s sacrilegious laughter with a similar frontal attack on Italian patriarchy and Catholicism, which reinvents a cinematic

heritage derived from numerous Italies across the oceans. Speaking from her (un)situated

Australian perspective, however, Pellizzari veers more towards the grotesque, as

mentioned above, with religious and cultural confrontation played out on the sexualized

body of women. Her blasphemous humor takes on an accented perspective as Australian

and Italian early in Fistful of Flies, when the self-renamed Mars, from Maria, decides to

skip the religious ceremony organized to welcome a new Madonna in the suburban city’s

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cemetery, in order to stay home and explore her body and its hidden sexual pleasures.391

Studying in the mirror her breast and figure, Mars is oblivious to what happens outside, but Pellizzari makes us privy, instead, to what takes place during the religious ceremony, juxtaposing a naked Mars with an eerily floating Madonna outside of the window. Cross- cutting images of Mars’s continued naked dancing with exterior shots of the religious ceremony, Pellizzari launches into a Fellinian citation. The flying Christ that introduces

La Dolce Vita (1960) and tracks over the ruins of Ancient Rome, the construction sites of the poor Roman suburbs and the rooftops of the rich and aristocratic Rome adorned of its sun-bathing beauties, on its way to the commanding Vatican site, is here parodied, in the sense of “repeated with a critical distance,” with a flying Madonna. The sequence is rich in aerial shots that show the gaping mouths of the Italian/Australian community eagerly awaiting the flying Madonna, while showing visible signs of concern for the immaculate statue that hangs with an oxbow and is swept vigorously on all sides by heavy winds. The final minutes of the lowering of the Madonna on the pedestal are shot in a breathless slow-motion that emphasizes the communal sighs, when, after some failed attempts, the

Madonna reaches safety. The wait, already made ironic in its exaggerated gestures and grand camera movements, takes on heavy satiric tones, when the safe landing is abruptly cross-cut with aerial shots showing Mars masturbating on her bedroom floor while listening to the Australian hit song “Leaving in the 70s” (already featured in Just

Desserts). Oneirically floating on water, Mars’s bliss is interrupted by the return of the mother accompanied by the stereotypical Italian widow in black. Pellizzari focuses on the legs of the two impending women and amplifies the sounds of their approaching heels,

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which seems to anticipate the disciplining and punishment to come. Opening the door,

the two women’s “immaculate conception” wishes freeze in the air when they encounter

the lying Mars, who is obliviously reaching her sexual climax. The sequence displays the

grotesquerie from down under, recognized and lamented by Martin (“Self-Loathing”), as well as an unrepentant “scrubber;” furthermore, it simultaneously celebrates and

displaces the patrilineal relation to Italian cinema, by foregrounding the figure of the

Madonna and introducing the female gazes and relationships that will structure the entire narrative and camera perspective.

The accented Italian blasphemy was clearly recognized by spectators at the

Venice Film Festival, who, Colbert reports, “responded enthusiastically to Fistful’s

irreverence, particularly to the satirical religious touches” (Colbert “Flying in Face of

Film Form” 6). However, given the harsh criticism meted out by Australian critics, it

could be speculated that the humorous blasphemy that counter-balances the Australian

suburban grotesque was too ethnically marked for Australian audiences outside of the

Italian/Australian milieu. The film consistently plays on the theme of the Madonna and

repeatedly interjects humorous episodes against the most abrasive episodes of unruliness.

The confrontation with the tampon hearings, for instance, is framed by another

association between Mars and the holy Mary; visiting for an arranged engagement

between Mars and Eno, the neighbors offer Mars a sort of pledge in the guise of a mirror

representing the Virgin Mother. Displaying the gift to the guests, Mars is framed against

a mosquito lamp, whose neon seems to satirically adorn her face with an aureole while

reinforcing Mars’s association with the abjected mosquitoes. Brushing away any

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suggestion of piousness evoked by the aureole, Mars pulls her stunt with the tampon

earrings and then rushes to the chicken den to chant her promise never to marry. At this point, Pellizzari almost re-stages the initial sequence, having the little brother carry the mirror outside, stumble, and thus launch into the air the religious icon. Once again, in slow motion and with a glorious Ave Maria soundtrack, Pellizzari satirizes the older

Italian/Australian generation and the parents as upholders of the patriarchal Catholic institution, by exaggerating their panicked attempts to save the Madonna, a rescue effort that feels in fact more like a duel between the two women locked in a sinful sexual triangle. The anachronism of a patriarchal Italian Catholicism that long kept Mars’s mother and grandmother under the yoke of the authority of Italian masculinity is reinforced, when, rushed to confession to expurgate her carnal sins, Mars first contemplates the new Madonna installed at the beginning of the movie.392 Instead of the

initial helicopter oxbow hanging around the Virgin Mary’s neck, the statue boasts now a

sign declaring “under new management,” to which Mars replies “hope this one is in the

twentieth century.” Apart from the satiric line, it is interesting to note that the Holy

Virgin’s icons are systematically portrayed in the act of either being crushed to pieces, or invariably constrained or damaged. Indeed, by the end of the film, the icon of holy virginity will receive a lasting blow from the hands of a wounded and desperate Mars.

Resolving, after the last abusive genital cleansing from the hands of her mother, to kill herself, Mars puts on her mother’s wedding dress and, after a starkly visual slow motion run immersed in a fuzzy green garden, she collapses at the feet of the Madonna statue and takes a shot with her father’s rifle. The film reaches here its melodramatic peak, as the

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daughter’s desperate escape is visually replicated by the mother’s frantic tractor run

through the trees to intercept her daughter at the feet of the Holy Virgin. The epic and

tragic tone of the sequence are suddenly dismantled when the mother realizes that Mars is still alive, but, as she turns her eyes to Heaven, she finds the pious face of the Madonna completely deformed, shot through by the father’s rifle. Pellizzari’s loud and striking

blasphemous humor proves a powerful means in the creolization of Australian national

discourses by further deconstructing the myth of the scrubber in its Christian and

masculinist inscriptions. Simultaneously, she contributes to and reinvents the

longstanding Italian blasphemous, humorous tradition by re-directing it towards the

Madonna figure and the symbolic mother authority; not accidentally, the grotesque mother’s re-birth can take place once the holy mother of patriarchal discourse has been irremediably blemished and contaminated. By drawing on Italian Catholic iconography and rituals, Pellizzari accents Australian cinema while making a larger statement on the construction of femininity and the disciplining of the female body. Pellizzari literally

takes a shot at the patriarchal definitions of feminine beauty and propriety in terms of purity, sexual containment, and whiteness, affirming instead an irreverent, feminist and

Medusan counter-tradition.

4.4 Law’s Journey through Australian Cinema and Society

4.4.1 Becoming Familiar with Australian Cinematic Chronotopes

As a relatively new immigrant to Australia and an already accomplished filmmaker in Hong Kong, Law’s cinema strongly bears the footprints of her many personal and artistic journeys. In her films since her immigration to Australia in 1994,

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from Floating Life through The Goddess of 1967 to finally Letters to Ali, Law has charted

a stunning cinematic trajectory. Departing from a thoughtful study of diaspora and

alienation, she has continued to explore the same themes while displaying an increasing

acculturation to Australian national cinema and ultimately taking on the ethic

responsibility of critical, accented citizenship. With Floating Life in Chapter Three, I

have illustrated how Law manipulated the landscape to create humorous juxtapositions which reflect on the psychological space of a diasporic consciousness. In retrospect, I would argue that when Law reshaped the space of Australian suburbia in Floating Life, turning it into a sign of Hong Kong diaspora and migration in general, she was already contaminating Australian cinematic chronotopes. However, Floating Life’s creolization of Australian spaces and discourses was purposefully carried out from the outside-in, mainly focusing on the psychological alienation and negotiation experienced by Hong

Kong subjects on the move. Here, I would like to focus on The Goddess of 1967, which presents a similar concern with notions of marginalization and alienation, as well as the interaction between experiential spaces and the cinematic landscapes of our visual memories. Differently from Law’s first Australian film, however, The Goddess carries its investigation from the inside of Australian generic conventions. This black comedy directly parodies Australian national myths with a relentless generic creolization, finally fashioning an accented text which reinvents the staples of Australian national cinema and challenges both its reproduction of normative whiteness and masculinity.393 Critics are in

agreement that Law and Fong have, at least cinematically, fully integrated with

Australian national cinema and its fantasies, stylemas, and motifs. Hall stresses that

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despite their recent migration, Law and Fong have “firmly plugged into our national

obsession with outlaws, outsiders, the orphaned, and the dispossessed. On the face of it,

they’ve made a road movie … [i]n reality, we never move out of the familiar Australian

state of Dysfunction” (“The Goddess of 1967” 17). Emphasizing the same grasp of

Australian dystopian fantasies, Banks on The West Australian claims that Law with The

Goddess of 1967 completed “an epic journey into the heart of darkness of the Australian

psyche” (6). Further noticing Law’s manipulation of Australian signs and genres, Peter

Crayford notes that J.M “in a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of Australian

film-making, … takes off with a complete stranger on a journey into the outback where

the gruesome scene in Sydney will find its explanation” (10); whereas Peter Thompson

observes that “Law has embraced perhaps the most compelling Australian symbol – the

vast and dry interior – with a mixture of fear and wonder.” Not all critics are appreciative of Law’s take on Australian generic conventions; Chris Bartlett, for instance, laments the fact that apparently “all Australian directors must make at least one road movie” (58) and views the Hong Kong filmmaker’s effort as too cliché. Others also find the narrative structure of the film too conventional; Martin deplores the “contradiction between the radical aspects of its construction and a more conservative impulse” (“Ground Breaker”

3) and Tom Ryan also argues that the film is at its weakest when it strives towards narrative resolution and thus falls into “melodramatic clichés” (1). Both critics, however, extol the film’s innovative style and complex approach to landscapes and relationships, with Martin going so far as to compare Law’s aesthetics to Stanley Kubrick’s and

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s, ravishing the film’s “vivid cascade of sensations, devoted to the

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postmodern sense of all-pervasive oddness” (“Ground Breaker” 3). Similarly, Colbert

maintains, that “with a fresh eye, ear and psyche, Law injects the journey with a

postmodernist, hip and haunting rhythm. Its visual and audio landscape marries

Australian, contemporary oriental and futuristic sensibilities” (“Screen Goddesses 7).

Yet, the stunning, postmodernist visual style of the film has also raised criticism with

Roach pointedly comparing the undoubtedly skillful style to a “commercial or design

catalogue” (“Star Vehicle with Style,” “The Goddess of 1967”).

Similar comments by leading critics of Australian cinema already hint at which

genres Law puts in play in her journey into antipodean imaginaries; first, continuing her

concern with landscape, Law clearly taps into the “landscape tradition” that first made

Australian cinema visible on the international stage. Secondly, translating the motif of

migration into one of journeying, Law moves here in the steps of the popular road movie.

Finally, the exploration of alienation leads Law to look into the dystopic, grotesque, and

purgatorial narratives that thrived in the inhospitable and vast expanses of the Australian

land. More interestingly, however, the reviews raise some problematic aspects of the

film, which I argue directly relate to Law’s use of humor and her creolization of all the

above-mentioned genres. Indeed, the complaints over a too conservative narrative can be

not only answered with Schembri’s argument that the resolution makes it easier to take

the disorientation of the film’s style (“Star Power”), but also by pointing out that, in

Law’s hands, a happy ending can actually turn out to be counter-discursive. As illustrated

in Floating Life, Law carries out a humorous dissociation of both narrative and stylistic

generic conventions by structuring The Goddess of 1967 as a non-linear narrative; this

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allows her to move in and out of different genres, motifs, and discourses. Indeed, Law has observed that she and Fong constructed the film as a montage of independent pieces that together could then “create a certain chemistry” (Press Kit: Goddess of 1967), and

Hall also remarks that the film feels like a “series of vignettes” (“The Goddess of 1967”

17). The overall effect, as Demetrius points out, is a film that does not “really conform to the conventions of any one genre” and feels “often disturbing, sometimes comical and occasionally erotic” (105).

Going over Law’s accenting of different genres and her humorous carnivalization,

I hope to illustrate how her narrative structure and her formal manipulation of film language open a space for critical reflection through systematic dissociation. As the reviews consistently point out, Law taps into what O’Regan has termed the freakiness of

Australian cinema, but she reinvents it through a female perspective. Unlike Pellizzari,

Law does not completely push to the margin the male “freaks” that have long populated

Australian national cinema; if B.G. certainly represents the pivot of the grotesque world created by Law, she is accompanied on her journey by many male freaks. Not accidentally, I would suggest, Law cast Nicholas Hope, the protagonist of the quirky and outrageous Bad Boy Bubby (1993) by Rolf de Heer, to play the incestuous father/grandfather, having him almost satirically mimic his former role in gestural performance and overall masquerade. de Heer’s film scandalized audiences for its experimental portrayal of a disturbed child, imprisoned by his mother with whom he entertains an incestuous relationship until he kills off his parents and goes on a redemptive journey that surprisingly turns grotesquely comic and ends on a happy note.

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At first sight, The Goddess of 1967 seems to follow a very similar trajectory,

investigating domestic abuse and trauma from the woman’s perspective. Yet, Law’s film

does not follow a dichotomous journey from hell to heaven. The vignettes are purposefully out of order, moving us through space as well as through time; similarly, the serious and the humorous are never far from each other and they never completely

descend into the tragic or the comic. Most importantly, however, in Law’s film there are

no black and white characters, no female monsters (like Bad Boy’s mother) who get

punished or male monsters (like Bad Boy) who find redemption. All of the characters are

portrayed as journeying, never static; this does not mean that Law seems to excuse male

abuse and violence by humanizing the father figure or in not demonizing the circus boxer

who tries to rape B.G. Avoiding the glamorization of the anti-hero, the psychotic bad

guy, Law conveys the sense that both male “monsters” are rather products of their

environments, of the alienated world they are part of, and even more of the cinematic

fantasies they emerge from and satirize. Hope’s excessive gestural performance does not

only parodically repeat his iconic bad role, but also feels like an exaggerated

condensation of the evil, psychotic men glamorized in commercial, traditionally male

genres like the thriller, the crime action movie and so on.

Contrary to these genres’ conventions, Law refuses to offer titillating sequences

of male violence or psychotic derangement; instead she portrays the gradual

transformation of the father through almost poetic and tender scenes of emotional loss

and failure. There is nothing exceptional about this deranged man, only the sense that

circumstance, environment, and cultural uprooting ultimately brought out the “darker side

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of human nature,” which Law set out to explore in the film (Banks 6). Simultaneously, however, there is a sense that the gradual descent into darkness has been driven by male fantasies of omnipotence. In a flashback recounting the beginning of the incestuous relationship between B.G.’s grandfather/father and mother, Law shows the loving father come to the side of his sleeping daughter, both still traumatized by the mother’s violent death at the hands of another man. Reassuringly comforting the daughter, he invites her into her bed, tenderly carrying her over to his room under the moonlight; the quiet, subdued, and even tone of the scene contrasts with the conventional depictions of such a dramatic climax. If the film is mainly structured by gestural and stylistic excess, at this dramatic transition Law instead deliberately negates the spectacle of violence and the ensuing feelings of outrage, disgust, or voyeuristic fascination triggered in viewers.

While leaving no space to identify or sympathize with the father, for at this stage viewers have already seen the full force of his abuse and oppression and are aware that this is the moment when it all started, Law also refuses to create another icon of deranged male power as generic conventions would dictate. Viewers are left with an overwhelming feeling of sadness and a perhaps more disturbing impression that the scene comes much closer to the horror of daily alienation and abuse. The disorienting emotional register of the scene is heightened by the abrupt cut to a black screen, featuring the moon and slowly introducing a space shuttle with the subtitle: “From 1959 to 1973, when man began to explore the universe and successfully landed on the moon, the Goddess won all major rallies on earth.” With a further puzzling cut, we are thrown back into the present, watching through the Goddess’s eyes what looks like a terrestrial moonscape, the

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ultimate destination of B.G.’s voyage back to her traumatic childhood. The contrast

between the foreboding sadness of the scene between father, soon to be abuser, and daughter and the detached, informative digression into the Citroën’s history certainly inserts a humorous space of critical reflection, leaving viewers to figure out what the association might possibly mean. There certainly seems to be an ironic note in marking the beginning of the father’s omnipotent, abusive fantasies by association with the space race, and its indirect connotation of a power struggle between two patriarchal systems of power. Both drives and fantasies are then seemingly undermined by the offhand mention that, on earth, it was the Goddess that reaped major success, and is it a coincidence that her success comes in the burgeoning years and victories of the feminist movement? It certainly seems a far-fetched association, and interpretation perhaps, but it is worth noticing that the Goddess itself, from the fetish commodity of male fantasies introduced at the beginning has also undergone a transformation during the journey.394 Through the

two protagonists’ interaction and the many flashbacks, the car has indeed been resignified

as the space of a power negotiation among the sexes; it has turned into the stage for both

B.G.’s and her female ancestors’ assertion of independence against the repetitive attempts

to contain and subject them through male violence. Through resilience and female

solidarity, the Goddess has consistently remained in women’s hands and is here

introduced as the one really venturing into the moonscape of the mythological Australian

outback, anticipating its ultimate contamination as the discursive space of national(ist),

male, cinematic fantasies.

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The humorous dissociation through disorienting associative montage and jarring overtonal editing, I would argue, serves to carnivalize the male genres inscribed into the

Australian landscape, from the road movie to the purgatorial narratives like Mad Max that

I will discuss in the next section. Instead of an individual journey that tests the protagonist’s masculinity, Law fashions a text where the woman is the survivor and redemption comes not through violence, but rather interpersonal and intercultural negotiation and understanding. The effectiveness of such reversal, I would argue, consists in Law’s ability to foster the generic expectations of the male genres, so that when they are thwarted by humorous dissociation, viewers must consider their own complicit pleasure in fantasies of abuse and power. At times the play is ambiguous and subtle as in the case of the father-daughter relationship, but often it takes a more explicit joking tone, like during the encounter between B.G. and the oversized, baby faced boxer for the itinerant “Fred Brophy’s Boxer troupe.” On the run in her pink Citroën, trying to find someone to drive her to Sydney, B.G. encounters this grotesque big boy, caught in clearly failed fantasies of virile success as a boxer. Not surprisingly, a test drive together turns into a melodramatic nightmare of sexual abuse, with the “freakish” big boy trying to take advantage of B.G.’s disability and vulnerability. Yet, the expected voyeuristic scene of male violence turns into a humorous joke on male power, when B.G. flaunts a chastity belt of medieval legendary allure, and the big boy is left looking grotesquely animalesque in his impotent nakedness.395 In an even more comic sequence, Law continues the satire of the male genre, this time more specifically the action-packed road movie, and of the glamorization of male violence. Test-driving the car, J.M. is entranced in his fetishistic

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fantasy conveyed through a sensation of floating in the pink car;396 yet, the harmonious

dream is suddenly interrupted when a black car with mysterious, blond pursuers engages

in an aggressive car chase, which ends just as abruptly with the blind girl shooting

through the window and thus scaring away the chasers. After the first few minutes of

puzzlement floating in the pink car against a heavenly blue background, B.G. drives the

irony further, flatly stating “I hate violence” and narrating that Mr. Hughes, the cousin

who in a killing spree shot himself and his wife, “loved guns.” The whole sequence is

really constructed as a vignette, a rehearsing of the typical car chase scene, where the

suspense and excitement are parodied by the surreal and unmotivated staging.

To an extent, Law is making a clear statement that, as she repeatedly affirmed in

interviews, her film is not a “road movie,” but rather a journey; at the same time, she is

familiarizing herself with the Australian landscape and cinema, which was her second

goal in making this film (Banks 6), and directly challenging viewers, who she

acknowledges will think of the film as a road movie (qtd. in Millard), to critically reflect

on the discursive and aesthetic conventions of the genre. As Catherine Simpson observes,

“the (masculine) road movie” is often characterized by “epic transformations or the

apocalyptic visions” (“Volatile Vehicles” 198), which Law likes to play with, but

ultimately casts by the side with humor.397 Beyond the masculinity inscribed in the fabric of the genre, however, Harris reminds us that the road movie in Australia, and arguably beyond, has served to negotiate discourses of whiteness, by fashioning “a ‘non-white’ landscape traversed by refugees from hegemonic white society” (99). In particular, Harris argues that the genre is marked by “two periods, with the 1980s featuring films structured

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by the ‘cleavage’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and the 1990s and beyond producing films organised around the ‘challenge’ posed by the immigrant to

Australian society”(101). The Goddess of 1967 clearly falls into the second period in that it features the intercultural negotiation between the Japanese man and the white

Australian blind girl; however, Law veers away from the conventional representation of ethnicity in the road movie. Harris points specifically to the contrast between Lahiff’s

Heaven’s Burning and The Goddess of 1967, since Lahiff’s film first featured an Asian-

Australian leading couple, with a white man (Russell Crowe) and a Japanese woman

(Youki Kudoh). Whereas Lahiff’s film conventionally plays on the violent spectacle that ultimately dooms the lovers, as is common in the road genre (106), Law’s film reverses the gendered couple unequivocally and also alters the generic dynamics, making violence and suspense take a marginal position in favor of intercultural familiarization and humorous dissection of film conventions. For this reason, Harris maintains that Law

“stage[s] … a journey to a space of ‘somewhere else’ along the Australian road” (107), where the dichotomy “modernity/tradition” is undermined. Indeed, if Lahiff’s film, lacking any Aboriginal character and sign, posits the Australian white man in the

“‘indigenous’ position within modernity” (105), Law’s film does not offer any nostalgic and romantic tradition to fall back on. According to Harris, with B.G. as the white

Australian, “there is only the traumatic history of white modernity from which she comes and that she carries indelibly inscribed within her,” and the “desert is no longer merely the road's patented landscape of otherness, whether dangerously threatening or benignly exotic; rather it is an integral site of white psychology and ideology within modernity”

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(109). More importantly, I would add, it is a space inscribed by male violence, which the

pink Goddess traverses and finally creolizes. In this sense, the happy ending is counter-

discursive, because it first denies the violent relief of the genre, and secondly, it

introduces an intercultural couple, where neither male nor female are pitted as the savior.

More importantly, however, Harris's analysis of the modernity/tradition dichotomy played out in the desert landscape of Australia leads the discussion into the final genre that Law creolizes and deconstructs, that is the “landscape film,” which made

Australian cinema famous. This is where the final humorous dissection of Australian cinema and discourses takes place, I would contend, banking on Law’s skillful manipulation of the landscape that she had already displayed in Floating Life. As seen in the quoted reviews, The Goddess of 1967 struck audiences mainly for its stunning cinematographic style, which constructs, again with the collaboration of Beebe, a “surreal landscape” by relying on “a technique called bleach by-pass, which removes the intensity of colour to give a monochrome look” (Banks 6). Staging a cross-country trip in

Australia, Law not only removes the most commodified national sign, the desert’s redness, but also parodies its romantic construction as an exotic, feminized space to be conquered and settled.398 As mentioned in Chapter Two, the Australian cinematic

landscape tradition of the New Wave arguably dates back to Walkabout by Roeg, which introduced audiences to the beauty of the Australian wilderness. There are many scenes in the British film that dwell on the singular autochthonous fauna, functioning as a sign of danger as well as fascination. It is hard not to be reminded of these sequences, when during the trip we repeatedly see J.M. as the “curiouser” eyeing the unique Australian

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lizards. At one point, following the first flashback when B.G. narrowly, and comically,

escapes the male violence of the boxer, J.M. actually brakes the car sharply to hunt a

lizard as a prize to bring home. The extreme close-ups of the reptile recall Roeg’s, but

gone is the vividness of color and suspense; bleached out and under attack, the Australian

lizard bites back, and triggers a comic scene, where the couple has to sit and wait for

hours until the reptile decides to loosen the hold and free the foreign intruder. Law denies

here the association between the Australian landscape and a fossilized primitiveness,

through which viewers have been accustomed to see the Australian land; its isolation and

remoteness is also challenged in comic sketches of J.M. displaying the full power of his

Japanese technology with a satellite phone that challenges the construction of the desert

as impenetrable to modernity. In fact, the ultimate stage for resolution, and the site of the

most intense power struggle, is the mine of the father/grandfather, a man-made desert

rather than a natural wilderness. It should be pointed out that this humorous

decomposition of the Australian sign par exellence does not explicate or compensate the

visible absence of Aboriginal characters and signs throughout the film. Indeed, even if

the film enters the Australian psyche and visual archive, Law marginalizes the original conflict inscribed in the land and in its cinematic construction; at the same time, the film

does not reproduce whiteness as indigenous like Heaven’s Burning, but rather challenges any notion of tradition and cultural wholesomeness.399 The white blind girl is as uprooted

in the landscape as the Japanese man, and both find in the space of the pink Goddess a

means to traverse and cross the boundaries of the chronotopes of white, male Australian

cinema.

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4.4.2 An Irreverent Look at Australian Purgatorial Narratives

Throughout the analysis of Law’s film, I have pointed out her keen concern for

Chinese culture and tradition; in Floating Life, the final resolution pointedly comes when

the mother decides to pray on the altar of her ancestors and ask for guidance. There is

thus a sense that spirituality is very significant to Law’s ties to China and her cultural

heritage; however, in interviews and in her films, Law always remains vague on such a tradition. She does not offer any concrete portrayal of religious conflicts or tensions in the assimilation process and always prefers to speak of an abstract spirituality and respect for Chinese ancient culture, rather than in terms of specific rituals or creeds. In this sense, her cinema would seem to offer little space for any humorous blasphemy; for this reason,

I find it significant that in her relentless generic creolization in The Goddess of 1967, Law chooses to directly aim at Christian discourses. This seems the only instance in which

Law actually addresses religion up front in her films and, I would contend, it directly stems from her negotiation of Australian national discourses, narratives, and genres.

Indeed, the road movie genre and the Australian grotesque that Law creolizes are inevitably tied to one of the country’s founding myths, that is the “purgatorial” narrative, as Gibson describes it. Reviewing the early diaries of colonization and the discourses circulating about the South Land before and after its British appropriation, Gibson argues that the Australian land has never been constructed according to the messianic discourse of American colonization. On the contrary, the Australian land was soon associated with the “myths of suffering and paradox” (11); in fact, it was literally transformed into a purgatorial space where British convicts were sent to work and redeem themselves with

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the hope of starting a new life. Given the historical circumstances of Australian

colonization and the antipodean myths inevitably associated with a fear of a world

hellishly reversed, Australia presented the perfect setting for purgatorial myths and

legends, which have been long popularized by “the canon of the ‘Australian sublime,’ a

collection of tales about mysteries that defeat yet ennoble the reader” (17). As already

mentioned, the sublime of the mysterious and threatening Australian outback is a popular

trope in Australian national cinema as well, best exemplified by the Mad Max trilogy as

theorized by Morris in “White Panic or Mad Max and the Australian Sublime.”400 Law takes on the Australian sublime of Australian cinema, typically involving a “male protagonist [who] merely survives … a pitiless natural landscape” (Collins and Davis

77), and stages a journey of rebirth away from any notion of Christian redemption, in fact against the common trope of religious redemptive violence.

The fact that this generic subversion at times directly takes aim at Christian

discourses embedded in the Australian land and cinematic conventions should come as no

surprise given the choice of title itself. If, in its ambiguity and pagan genderedness, the

title left any doubts regarding the humorous blasphemy of the film, they are soon cleared

up by the first words of the film. Reinforcing the visuality of the medium and of Law’s conception of cinema, the first words of the narrative are not spoken, but written across the screen, also a comment on modern technology and Japanese postmodernity. As he rides in Tokyo’s elevated train traversing seemingly fluid bluish surfaces, close-ups of a

bored J.M. holding a computer and mysterious blue box are intercut with images of a

computer screen where the writing “I want to buy god” appears. After a further cut away

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to J.M, we see the writing being partially erased and retyped as “a Goddess.” Law is here

clearly satirizing the god of consumerism, provocatively denying the authority of the

capitalized letter to confer it on the Goddess of his fantasies. The religious blasphemy

seems to continue, when J.M., at the sound of electric disco music, is portrayed in a sort

of sacrificial offering of freshly dead mice to his loving snakes. Introducing J.M. to audiences, Law defines his character through a fascination with the symbol of evil temptation and a crush on a pagan Goddess, “perfect. Totally Original. Red squirrel.

French.” The divine qualities of his object of desire are then illustrated in a dreamy

sequence where Law’s camera lavishly caresses the pink Citroën DS floating in the

clouds, flaunting its perfect shape, roundness, and elegance, from the bottom of the tires

to the Citroën trademark pointing skywards. Interrupting such a perfect fantasy, however,

a surtitle appears dryly stating “number produced 1,455,746.” The fetish of commodity is thus stripped down by the pitiless reference to mass production, leaving however a space

to reflect on the religious iconography and tones exploited by consumerism to sell

products, which Law’s mock ad satirizes. Continuing in a layered, humorous desecration,

in the next voyeuristic sequence of the fetish Goddess, Law brings in a voice from the

sky in a surtitle from none other than prominent French intellectual Roland Barthes,

arguing in his Mythologies about the Déesse that “it is obvious that the new Citroën has

fallen from the sky.” Law seems here to be taking humorous aim at the fathers of French

post-structuralism, irreverently attacking another male institution. In these first

sequences, Law sets the stage for the soon to be road movie, with a conventional

massacre scene, which, however, is completely marginal to the story and left unexplained

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throughout. The journey is hence not triggered by a thirst for revenge, or by disillusion.

On the contrary, B.G. can humorously point J.M. to the blood spread all over the house

that she cannot see and can conduct the business transaction for the D.S. in absolute

calmness. It is the consumerist thirst of J.M. that drives him to undertake the redemptive

journey, while it is a past of abuses (yet to discover) that motivates B.G. In other words,

the whole beginning seems a play on the word of god and its emptiness in an age of

extreme capitalism, where adoration is directed towards a pink French Déesse produced

in series.

If Law is here engaging in humorous blasphemy by transferring God-like

attributes and religious iconography to a commercial product, during the rest of the film

she also directly addresses Christian fundamentalism. Law’s play seems in a way to

function as a confirmation of her cinematic play with Australian purgatorial narratives;

indeed, the first real evocation of the religious iconography typical of Australian dystopic narratives is presented in the second flashback, where we meet the mother/sister and father/grandfather. After the young girl tells her mother that she does not want to remain alone with the father because he touched her, we see the three have dinner and the mother leave for her only night out; the mother turns on religious radio as she heads out, seemingly hoping that her daughter’s chanting to Lord Jesus will protect her from the violence the mother herself endured. The flashback is itself fragmented, moving between

various successive episodes of abuse and intercut with images of the mother finding an

abandoned church, where she explains her Christian faith to B.G. and teaches her to be

wary of her body, a source of continuous temptation and germs. Her religious fervor and

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panic is repeatedly interrupted to depict other confessions of abuse by the daughter, until

her mother finds her running in her underwear and hugging a tree, finally yelling “he hurt

me … he crushed me open.” At this very moment, Law cuts to a long shot of the

father/grandfather emerging from underground, an eerie vision that clearly evokes images

of hell and evil. The last abuse finally drives the mother to escape in the pink Goddess

and reach the abandoned church, where she stages a last purification ritual, setting fire to

the building. Yet, B.G. does not give in either to the mother, calling her to come back, or

religious rhetoric and runs away to the desert landscape with her fire red hair. Whereas

these sequences are certainly not humorous, it is significant to note how Law constructs the mother’s character as subject to the double patriarchal institution of the family and of

Christianity. Yet, if she decides to sacrifice herself in the name of the higher Father, the rebellious daughter, her body freed from the bonds of Christian abjection, will become able to withstand both patriarchal discourses. Moreover, there is a certain blasphemous irony in Law’s construction of the father figure, in that he is the one asking the young girl to chant the Jesus song, at a point where viewers have already been prepared to expect the violence to come. Moreover, the father’s abusive power is portrayed as a fantasy of omnipotence, not only because he claims that no one is to tell him what he can and cannot do in the alienated space of the Australian desert, but also because even before his

“descent into darkness” he is portrayed as desperately seeking to produce the perfect wine out of chemicals, in the middle of the vast dry land. The wine folly serves to

reinforce the father’s alienation from reality, to anticipate his complete break with nature

and tradition, but also human interaction, which will drive him to the act of parental

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abuse and subsequently lead him to his final descent into the darkness of the cave, where

B.G. will find him at the end of the film. This whole past sequence finds resolution in the cave that can be read as the inferno of B.G.’s past; here she feels the grotesque, debased existence of her father/grandfather when, accompanied by the lyrical sound of Verdi’s

Lacrymosa, she touches a festive banquet of cadavers that her father seemingly set for his fictitious dinners with the absent daughters. Faced with the opportunity to shoot, B.G. drops the gun and finds her way back to J.M. with whom she stands in the Goddess at the end, facing an unending road and simply asking "what are you gonna do with your

Goddess?”

Critics have lamented this narrative resolution, maintaining that it is too cliché, contradicting the formal experimentation structuring the film; besides, B.G.’s last question could be read as a subjection to a new patriarchal order, from father to heterosexual lover. Yet, the previous analysis of Law’s formal and humorous dissection of generic conventions, where the excessive formalism can be read as a criticism of landscape narratives predicated on whiteness and masculinity, calls into question whether the narrative resolution is in fact as straight-forward as it seems. My previous description of the Christian motif emerging in the past segment hopefully conveys the formulaic nature of such a representation: from the infernal symbolism, to the sacrificial rights, and religious folly. The already mentioned Brechtian quality of the characters is in this segment reinforced by their symbolic definition, which ultimately works to detach the viewer from the performance and violence. Once again the excitement, outrage, and expectation tied to the purgatorial genre are negated; moving beyond the notion of a

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clichéd representation to speculate on the function of such a generic masquerade, we can

perhaps establish a connection between the parody of the god of consumerism and the

mimicry of purgatorial, Christian myths. If the latter is unveiled in its hypocrisy and

complicity with the masculinist discourses inscribed in the alienated space of the

Australian land and cinematic dystopia, the former is ultimately also humorously

dissected. The fetish Déesse of the iconic Delon leaves the way for the lived and

practiced space of the Goddess and his feminine ancestry culminating in the Blind Girl,

whom the Japanese Man asks to lead him to their new destination. As she counters,

however, she is “as blind as him;” there is no one guide or savior in the constructed

Australian national landscape, but Law has certainly patched together a different direction across the borders of accepted generic and discursive paths. Although the road ahead is singular and straight, J.M. and B.G. have shown that the pink Goddess can veer off in space and time, creolizing generic chronotopes along the way and opening a space of intersubjectivity that is neither white, nor male, but humorously negotiated.

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CONCLUSION

La traduction, art de l’effleurement et de l’approche, est une pratique de la trace. Contre l’absolue limitation de l’être, l’art de la traduction concourt à amasser l’étendue de tous les étants et de tous les existants du monde. Tracer dans les langues, c’est tracer dans l’imprévisible de notre désormais commune condition.401 (Glissant 46)

I started out on this journey in the cinematic down under with the aim of looking

at how humor complicates cinema’s role in negotiating national constructs, diasporic

subjectivities, and gender discourses. The purpose of this study was first to offer a

discussion of the means for inserting and decoding humor in a film text, focusing on the manipulation of cinematic language and elucidating the dissociating mechanisms enacted through Pirandello’s understanding of umorismo. Secondly, I set out to support this study’s contention that humor constitutes a critical component of the accented, feminist aesthetics of women diasporic filmmakers and a valuable reading lens for a criticism that wishes to heighten the counter-hegemonic potential of cinematic texts, in challenging dominant constructs such as monological patriarchy, nation, and whiteness. Approaching the end of the journey, I would argue that Pirandello’s humorous mode has indeed proven a powerful instrument to deconstruct film texts and multiply their many ironic, parodic,

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and satiric accents. Pirandello’s framework allows one to juggle the multiple planes

intersecting in cinematic space, without privileging verbal over visual humor, and, more importantly, offers a tool to instead consider cinematic language as the raw skeleton with

which the filmmakers play to fashion humorous reflections, frames, memories, and

sensations. Singling out the processes of dissociation and hence conversely montage,

reflection and thereby (distorted) looking, and masking as a tool to multiply refractions

and points of view, Pirandello’s framework chimes in well with film theory and

highlights the humorous potential of the cinematic structure. Additionally, Pirandellian

humor grants a valuable entry point into a cinematic criticism that actively participates in

the production of critically humorous challenges. As I have pointed out in the analyses,

the three structuring principles of the Pirandellian humorous text and its encoding –

dissociation, distorted reflections, and masks – demand an active viewing/reading, which

can be synthesized in the three “mirroring” processes of meaning assembling, critical

questioning, and further multiplying of accepted masks and frames. This can facilitate a

gestic criticism that, picking up on the humorous, contradictory openings of the text,

widens them through a parallel dissociating process. While foregrounding hybridity, such

a criticism eschews easy generalizations in favor of a reading that always balances the

local, which is historically situated and discursively negotiated, against the global and the

relations of power that always transcend hierarchically imposed borders.

Such a historicizing and contextualized criticism demands a reading that

constantly interweaves textual and discursive analysis and that is as careful in the

discussion of semiotic, linguistic, and aesthetic principles, structures, and values, as in the

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acknowledgement of the social, political, and economic pressures that co-produce the meaning of the text, both at its encoding and decoding end. For this reason, before moving into a Pirandellian dissociating analysis of Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s humor, this study has first inserted their individual works and perspectives into the historical and discursive movements they have participated in and whose contradictions constitute the source of their humorous dissociations. Albeit arguing for humor’s counter- hegemonic potential in accented and feminist cinema, this study has indeed chosen to situate the film analysis in the discursively marked space of Australia in order to uncover the situated knowledges through which the filmmakers’ humor actually acquires a critical potential. The first two chapters have thus made the case for choosing Australia as the locus of analysis, illustrating that its late colonial history, its marginal and at the same time crucial geo-political position, as well as its peculiar cinematic industry, caught inbetween its paradoxical nationalist and masculinist history and an increasing experimentation thanks to women and accented voices, provide for a starting point that from the antipodes resonates in northern and western hemispheres. Moreover, Chapters

One and Two reinforce the interdependence of accented and national cinema studies, showing that a combination of the two approaches can greatly illuminate the fuzziness and messiness of borders typical of national cinema studies, as well as contain the ahistoricizing tendencies of studies focused on an aesthetic and cultural hybridity always at risk of being uprooted and depoliticized. In particular, the first two chapters have shown the usefulness of championing a film analysis based on the situated knowledges of individual filmmakers, so as to better capture the interstitial position of directors who

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have learned to navigate through the demands of state financing and commercial cinema,

while retaining their artistic independence and critical perspective as hyphenated women

artists. Indeed, the advantage of a situated, gestic criticism drawing from accented,

national, and feminist film studies lies in its structural emphasis on the entanglement of

ethnic, racial, class, and gender identities as they are negotiated in the national arena. By

making displacement and women the cornerstones of films where social and cultural

accents are numerous but always negotiated down under, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law refrain from addressing the spectator as “woman” as did early feminist films, but still

remind audiences that subjects are always already gendered.

Starting out from the filmmakers’ texts – their subject matters and their

intertextual references, Chapter One has explored the migration histories that have shaped

the Australian nation, bringing attention to the many dialogues embedded in such a dynamic and fragmented make-up. With her short and feature films, Moffatt has taken up

the camera to remind viewers of the sexist history of displacement and abuse on which

white Australia was founded, contextualizing it into contemporary multicultural

Australia. Retracing such histories, Moffatt has also opened up her texts to transoceanic

encounters with African/American music, film, as well as indigenous icons like Mexican

Kahlo, thus evoking the global fight for feminist and civic rights in the situated and

negotiated space of her homeland. Moffatt’s multiple associations and echoes address the

contradictions in the power relations among the different groups that have come into

contact in the geo-political space of Australia, pointing to the creolization of any

(neo)colonial space across histories with different accents but common discursive

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structures. Pellizzari, on the other hand, has poignantly challenged the erasure of migrant

and ethnic voices from Australian media production, by creating quintessentially

Australian quirky tales from a hyphenated Italian/Australian perspective. Additionally,

Pellizzari has illuminated a fruitful dimension in migration and cinematic studies,

showing the lateral relationships between diasporic communities whose histories vary

considerably, but find correspondences through the creative reinvention of an ethnic accent and identity in literature and film. Pellizzari’s filmmaking, in its subject matters, intertextual references, and style is strongly rooted in the urban space of dominantly white and masculinist Australia, but it simultaneously reclaims Italian stories and aesthetics, from the “old land” and its prestigious masters as well as from the dialectal varieties disseminated across regions and oceans, as part and parcel of an Australian nation that has never really been white. Law, for her part, has inscribed migration into the connective tissue of contemporary Australia and its suburbia; her films constitute a testament to a migrant cinematic acculturation and their production and realization provide for many insights into the contradictory discourses that have shaped a Western

(neo)colonial nation right at the crossgate of Asia. Addressing a new professional and individual diaspora, Law’s films and their reception also highlight the socio-cultural diversity within diasporic communities and hence offer an interesting case of both auteurist and ethnic cinema. Similarly, her universal explorations of migration as a state of being for modern subjects always also point to the situated histories of individuals inevitably pulled in multiple directions, which always localize the global and globalize the local.

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The situated exploration of Australia’s migration histories illuminates the

disqualified subaltern knowledges of innumerable marginal subjects, whose

objectification in dominant discourses always already contained the potential of turning

back and asserting their subjectiveness. This study’s historicizing contextualization puts

emphasis on the relations of power that overlay social and cultural accents, rejecting a

commodification of multicultural and hybrid signs, while interrogating the filmmakers’

own commitment to critical, rather than glamourized, accenting. Even if pursuing very

different strategies, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law have been shown to consistently address

their hyphenated identities not to add ethnic color to their films, but to lay bare the

contradictions constitutive of a mestiza consciousness, which systematically performs a

jujitsu of what has been discarded, rejected, and devalued in the process of constructing a homogenized national identity. The filmmakers’ different histories and interests have pointed to the need for addressing the hierarchies of oppression embedded in what can be termed accented or intercultural cinema. Fourth cinema, ethnic, immigrant, and exiled cinema can all indeed fit into such a categorization, although they can at times be in direct conflict; moreover, on closer inspection, each proves to be further fragmented into

social, economic, and political accents, which at times blur the boundaries between forms

of marginalization.

For this reason, I proceeded to situate my discussion of accented aesthetics within

the context of national cinema in Chapter Two, in order to investigate both the

fragmentation of the Australian film industry – in its constitutive relation with other

cinemas and a plethora of viewing audiences marked by ethnic, class, and gender

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affiliations – and the constant transformation of accents resulting from intercultural negotiation and conflict. Indeed, the migration histories traced in Chapter One have proven to intersect with the trajectories and routes followed to develop an Australian film industry reliant on the import of visual technologies. These were first exploited for capturing the exotic land and its inhabitants and then re-tooled so as to re-inscribe the territory with colonial signs and ideologies, supporting an ever-expanding national imaginary in which ethnic diversity and gender conflicts could be contained. Yet, just as the “Smoothing the Pillow of a Dying Race” policy and the White Australia Policy could never completely control and ensure the construction of a white, masculinist nation, the development of a dominant national film industry could never contain the spill-over of marginal and excessive signs of difference and dissent that finally found expression in the films of hyphenated Australian women and accented filmmakers.

Moffatt has been shown to re-inscribe the Aboriginal history of forced displacement into the texture of Australian cinema by uncovering the intersections between early ethnographic discourse and the spectacle of the other around which

Australian film classics like Jedda were built. Taking the cues from Moffatt’s trans- contextualization of the objectifying practices of colonial ethnography and expanding her insight through a situated and historicizing criticism, I was able to re-trace the prolific history of ethnographic film in Australia and point out its crucial role in supporting the cinematic industry in its infancy. The intersection between ethnographic and feature film in Australia is unfortunately often neglected in national cinema studies; yet, as this study has shown through Moffatt’s critical eye on Australian cinema, it constitutes a fertile

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ground of inquiry, to further understand the role that cinema played in the construction of a national ideology. Moffatt’s work indeed calls for studies along the lines of the seminal work carried out by Rony on the intersections between Hollywood and ethnographic film and Oksiloff on the constitutive role of ethnographic filmmaking for German cinema.

Comparative considerations between Australian national cinema and Hollywood as well as other national “festival cinemas” have also been fostered by Pellizzari’s filmmaking, which has proven to reflect on the significance of women and ethnic films within and beyond Australia. In particular, Pellizzari’s filmmaking has exposed the significance of lateral exchange between multiple disjunctive Italian communities.

Although Italian migration cannot be really described as a diaspora given the heterogeneity of the groups involved and of the reasons and time frames leading to migration, artists like Pellizzari are today proving that a diasporic Italian consciousness has been shaping nonetheless among later generations of hyphenated Italians. Pellizzari’s interaction with Italian/American cinema, for instance, calls for further studies in Italian hyphenated cultures globally that would shed some light on the ever evolving meaning of ethnicity, from the creolization of multiple descent relations to their re-signification through specific consent relations. Moreover, Pellizzari’s interaction with Hollywood constitutes a powerful lens for understanding its defining role in shaping an Australian film industry via economic, cultural, and political pressure and exchanges. The necessity of competing against Hollywood also intersects with the funding of “ethnic cinemas” within minor national cinemas, so as to appeal both to an arthouse and diasporic viewing

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public, and with the proliferation of dialogues between national festival cinemas thanks to the creolization carried out by hyphenated filmmakers.

Like Pellizzari’s, Law’s cinema reinforces the necessity to consider a director’s accented aesthetics within the national space of its production, where industrial constraints, audience’s expectations, and opposing national generic conventions necessarily impact the play with accents performed by a filmmaker. In her casting, production, as well as in her very decision to migrate, Law has asserted her ability to market her hybrid style, subject matters, and characters so as to be able to work at the margins of the commercial movie industry, without having to compromise her auteurist and critical view. Her experience calls for more study on the significance of co- productions within accented cinema for those directors who have moved beyond artisanal production, but are still holding an interstitial position within the industry by exploiting state financing and the increasing multicultural policies being developed, as well as multiple sources of commercial funding, whose demands ultimately level each other out.

Law’s success and controversial place as both a Hong Kong and an Australian filmmaker also points to a renewed interest in Asian-Australian relations, which, beyond contributing to a new cinema and field of research, has also led to a more nuanced understanding of the construct of whiteness, which seeks to navigate the paradoxes between xenophobic and racist discourses plaguing Australia’s past and present and the country’s simultaneous attraction, in cultural, political, and economic terms, towards its non-Western neighbors.

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“Decomposing” the three filmmakers’ relation to Australian national cinema

through the diasporic histories they participated in, this study was able to identify many

sites of tension in the construction of an Australian national film industry and identity.

Beyond the fruitful avenues of further research highlighted above, the three filmmakers’

cases also provided for significant insights into the development of women’s cinema and the importance of the short film as a tool for filmmakers experimenting with the

boundaries of the cinematic medium, so as to challenge its “ideological effects.” In terms

of women’s cinema, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law are a testament to the increasing

presence of women filmmakers in Australia, which calls for further research into the

effects of state programs and training aimed at fostering women’s access to the industry.

In particular, the presence of numerous early women filmmakers in Australia, like the

sisters McDonough, and their disappearance after the 30s and relative absence up until

the late 70s presents many resemblances to the Hollywood case, which seems to

encourage further comparative study of early women directors’ histories across national

borders and industries. The literature on women’s filmmaking in Australia and beyond

also uncovered the crucial role played by short films for the affirmation of women

filmmakers, which seems to be coupled with the form’s popularity within accented

cinema as well. Given such insights and the lack of theorization of the short, more

research is needed in order to investigate not only the production advantages that make

the short such a useful tool for women and marginal filmmakers alike, but also the structural features of the form that seem conducive to experimentation, fragmentation,

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and perhaps even humorous contradictions, given the lesser focus on narrative and

cohesion.

While not directly relating to humor, the identification of significant future lines

of inquiry through the intersection of accented and national cinema studies in the geo-

political space of Australia testifies to the many tensions and “excessive” meanings,

practices, and voices that a situated and transdisciplinary criticism can open up.

Moreover, these lines of inquiry actually relate to the same contradictions and paradoxes

that feed the filmmakers’ humor; lateral exchanges between cultural diasporas, accented,

and national cinemas have revealed a fruitful source of parodic musings in the films; even

the tensed relationship between minor film industries and commercial cinema, mainly

from Hollywood and Hong Kong, has often been satirized by Moffatt, Pellizzari, and

Law in their humorous decomposition of commercial cinematic conventions through

generic creolization. Women’s cinema has also been subjected to distorting humorous

reflection through the filmmakers’ direct play on both masculinist cinematic conventions and feminist film theory’s tenets. Finally, the experimentation with the short film form can be related to the directors’ continuous interrogation of film language through humor, so much so that their feature films engage in humorous plays that effectively fragment and segment the feature format. In fact, Chapter One and two already introduce the creolizing principle of Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s cinemas that goes beyond the use of humor itself and connects back to the work of postcolonial feminist film theorist and filmmakers who have long advocated the necessity to speak, write, and look back at

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the entangled hold of masculinist and (neo)colonial discourses reproduced in dominant

cinema.

Aesthetic and discursive creolization needs certainly not be humorous, as Minh- ha’s films can readily testify; similarly, a situated, transdisciplinary criticism can deconstruct dominant discourses through cinematic analyses without necessarily focusing on humorous dissociations. What this study has shown, however, is that humorous dissociation, as a filming and reading practice, can deepen the creolizing jujitsu of

dominant discourses and, more importantly, encourage spectators to participate in the questioning of the meaning production process. Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law have all, to different degrees, stressed their desire to reach a wide audience, beyond the arthouse where avant-garde and experimental cinema often risks being confined. Though their commercial success is debatable, their films have all been distributed in theaters and publicized for a general public; yet, the directors have not renounced their

experimentation with cinematic language and their critical accented perspective. Humor

has often served them to negotiate between different modes of discourse, so as to fashion texts that, albeit still auteurist and at times obscure, also offer openings for a wider public. Beyond inserting comic elements for relief, the authors also employ humor to repeat, and to an extent, express appreciation and enjoyment for the cinematic genres and conventions they grew up with. Through parodic transcontextualization, the three directors can boast their knowledge of commercial classics and pop culture, while scrutinizing them through a humorous dissociation that encourages a critical reflection upon one’s own contradictory pleasures and beliefs. Theorizing the transition from the

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comic to humor, Pirandello detailed just such a process whereby in the third, interrupted

space of reflection, one comes to recognize his/her complicity in the upholding of

discursive frames and, instead of enforcing them through derisive laughter, pauses to

question them. The three filmmakers might play with the comic stereotypes of black

mamas, ugly befane, and obsessive hysterical Asian women, but their trans- contextualization of such racist and sexist discourses turns into a criticism of the very

masks they repeat and an invitation to instead re-direct the humor towards the

objectifying discourses reproduced in such demeaning tropes.

Pirandello’s humorous mode can thus contribute to understand how individual

filmmakers fashion humorous contradictions, by playing with cinematic linguistic codes,

while also offering a mode of reading which can multiply and refract the humorous

cracks wrinkling the text’s surface. Unprescriptive regarding the forms that humor can

take, Pirandello is, however, unequivocal on humor’s distinction from irony as a

rhetorical device, because humor thrives in exposing contradictions that are discursive

and experiential, not purely formal or linguistic. Therefore, the decomposition of the

linguistic code performed by humor always entails an irreverent questioning of the social

codes first put under the spotlight by the comic. Applied to cinema specifically,

Pirandellian humor has shown to upset, through dissociation, reflection, and the

multiplication of masks, those very structural mechanisms long criticized by feminist and

Third cinema, namely narrative suture, the male gaze, and a mythologizing of colonial

and masculinist tropes.

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Through humorous dissociation, for instance, the narrative coherence that sutures

ideological reproduction into the text is disrupted. Moffatt proves to be the most radical

humorist in this regard, in that she drives her dissociation to the very core of cinematic

language, making its basic signifying units contradict each other, rather than neatly align

to construct polished statements. Pellizzari, on the other hand, focuses on the connecting devices of cinematic language, forgoing casual and temporal relationships for a free- wheeling and irreverent game of associations and antinomies. Finally, Law has found in the sensory manipulation of lighting, colors, and landscape imagery a means to confound our spatial and discursive coordinates. Thereby, she interrupts the narrative flow and resolution, inscribing alterity in the quintessentially cinematic spaces of Australia.

Pirandello’s emphasis on reflection as a distorting mirroring and a critical interruption of the comic goes instead to the heart of most film theories and feminist and

Third cinema’s criticism of the objectifying and othering power of the gaze. Like

Pirandello who drew attention to the complicit looking relationship developed in the

transition to humor, Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law play with the cinematic gaze, so as to

reshape the relations between characters and spectators, turning the latter into participants

and accomplices of humorous irreverence. Breaking the fourth wall and upstaging the

perceived conventionality of the interview format so as to alert to its hidden power

relations, Moffatt continuously once more humors her own pleasure in voyeurism, while

inviting reflection on the ethics of witnessing. Pellizzari, instead, aims at aggressively

shocking viewers, not just by humorously looking back, but by foregrounding female

ways of looking and irreverently forcing the camera and her spectators’ eyes to see and

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feel, and ultimately to relate across the distance and with a smile to the abjected

pleasures, pains, and openings of our bodily existence. Law also pushes her audiences to

question their looking habits, tearing down any realist pretense in favor of a distorted

perspective that alerts viewers, in exhilarating and caricatural intercultural encounters, of

the cultural filters through which they (mis)read reality and the other.

Finally, Pirandello’s biting humor against stifling social masks and its

multiplication of acceptable disguises well serves to understand the mimetic plays staged

in the game of shadows of the silver screen. Moffatt’s penchant for masquerading her

own persona and her characters serves to open up her markedly Australian texts to

humorous assonances across oceans, time-frames, and cultures. Exploiting the blatant

artifice of the mask in ethnic and gender performances, Moffatt further disrupts the

already fragmented narrative space of her films and forces viewers to stand back and

decipher the signs and relations established. Similarly to her impertinent gaze, Pellizzari

uses the mask to break taboos and perform a jujitsu of those grotesque masks boys and

girls are taught to fear and distrust from their very first ninne nanne. Conventional

constructions of femininity and masculinity are driven to a caricatural extreme, so as to

be, in Doane’s words, “flaunted” and “kept at a distance” for critical questioning. Law also displays a predilection for excessive characters who are turned into masks of their

obsessions, be they Tokyo’s collecting frenzy for food and girls, Bing’s fat and germ-free manic world, or J.M.’s obsessive attempts to fashion his image in the mold of glamorized

French male beauty. The excessive gestural performance of Law’s characters prevents the spectators’ identification and stimulates reflections on the obsessive disguises and

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masquerading of modern life, as if upholding a distorting mirror to the limited, repetitive, and stiffening masks of dominant cinema.

Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law thus reveal the wealth of humorous means capable of deconstructing cinematic language and of questioning its constitutive relation between image-maker, text, and spectator. Despite the many differences, the three directors share a joking relation with the visual, mimetic technology of cinema, in that their humor differs from the more common verbal musings of clever dialogues or the popular visual stumbles of slapstick. The three directors’ humor arises, instead, directly from the play with the language of cinematic technology and ultimately chips away at its perceived objectivity and visuality. The mimetic plays staged through dissociation, distorting reflections, and masks humorously target our looking habits, alerting us again to our bodies and their cultural inscriptions. In this sense, their humor incites our senses to pierce through the two-dimensional and framed space of the screen and glimpse its third dimension behind the frozen contemporary masks. The accumulated and muted historical sediments trapped in the celluloid are re-animated by being displaced and re-invented in the disruption of linear temporality and narrative cohesiveness. The oblique move historicizing the constructed timelessness of cinematic images is also accompanied by a movement outward into the experiential world of the spectator. Disrupting the performance of the present with humorous and at times incongruous associations, montages, and perspectives, the filmmakers force viewers to turn their eyes toward their own situated knowledges so as to complete the task of meaning production. In this sense, they encourage a re-reading, a re-invention of the text, which, following Pirandello’s

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humorous mode, can entail the production and multiplication of sites of humorous

dissent. The reading and interpretation process becomes a game of tracing the allusions,

shadows, and scents constituting the situated knowledges of the filmmakers; yet, the

game of identifying the parodic, satiric, and ironic references still falls short of providing

a resolutory meaning to the texts. Too numerous and contradicting are the meanings

evoked and put in play, leaving the spectator with the freedom of constructing his/her

own way towards a critical reception, which, thanks to the formal play with cinematic

language, will inevitably involve a reflection on the cinematic medium itself.

If Pirandello is instrumental in understanding the combinatorial rules with which

cinematic humor plays and thereby breaks apart cinematic language, Bakhtin guides the

way into understanding how such decomposition can translate into a questioning of the

discursive structures embedded in cinema and its codes. By intersecting Pirandello and

Bakhtin’s frameworks, the analysis could pay homage to the auteurs’ unique style and humorous idiosyncrasies in their manipulation of cinematic language, while also accounting for the sedimented accents and heteroglossia that necessarily overlay their voices. All three filmmakers move within the generic framework of Australian national cinema; in different fashions and degrees, their films all engage with the grotesque comedy, the landscape film, the epic melodrama, and the dystopic narratives that have shaped cinematic Australia domestically and internationally. Working down under, the three directors are to an extent forced to speak through the generic structures and discourses of the Australian canon. Yet, their dissociating humor allows them to

decompose these frames and unveil the fragility of their borders, by bringing out the

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silenced heteroglossia through a generic creolization that draws on the multiple generic

and cultural traditions they grew up with.

Re-reading Moffatt’s humorous juxtaposition of the multiple film tracks, for

instance, one recognizes how each is exploited to parodically repeat, and therefore

displace, a generic convention. Scenography becomes a means to signify upon the

Australian landscape film and denounce its construction on the backs of Aboriginal

mythology and land, by re-appropriating them through the conventions of Aboriginal

painting. Sound evokes frightening antipodal dystopias, but in Moffatt’s beautifully

crafted spaces, it is not the inhospitable land that threatens and traumatizes, but rather the

ghosts of colonialism, so that the voyeuristic and cannibalist horror genre leaves the way

for the sensual world of postcolonial haunted storytelling. Finally, the soundtrack reminds us of the Australian penchant for comedies, which is, however, displaced by the

irreverent resilience of black humor across the oceans.

Pellizzari’s grotesque and monstrous women, on the other hand, recalls the

freakish tradition of Australian cinema and specifically of its grotesque comedies; yet, the

sexist and derisive laughter of the genre is here transformed into a complicit smile with her unruly women, by being re-read through the eyes of feminist melodrama, Italian folk

humor, and Neorealism. The creolization of forms and traditions accomplishes here no easy task, in that Pellizzari successfully challenges both Italian and Australian patriarchy by playing one against the other.

Law also taps into the tradition of the Australian grotesque, intersecting it with antipodal purgatorial narratives, landscape films, and road movies; what distinguishes her

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play with Australian generic staples is her outside perspective as a Hong Kong filmmaker familiarizing herself with the alleged canon of Australian national cinema. Her decomposition is thus performed, to an extent, by challenging the very Australianness of the signs; her humorous distortion of the landscape and parody of the male gaze, typical of most of the above-mentioned genres, systematically blur the lines between Australian and Hollywood cinematic conventions, ultimately targeting the commercialization and homologation of visual imaginaries.

Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law thus all juggle with Australian cinematic chronotopes, and often with the same ones, but they all come to a different blend because their humorous fragmentation and creolization is informed by different diasporic accents.

What remains constant in their mongrel texts is the systematic blurring of boundaries and negation of pure and impure discourses and categories; in fact, each genre and discourse is proven always already contaminated and hybrid. For this reason, I have also argued that the three directors’ creolizing humor can be understood as a form of blasphemy, where any sacred notion of purity is constantly contaminated by the intrusion of abjected voices, memories, and accents. As in the case of generic creolization, each director’s blasphemous humor is heavily influenced by the cultural and geographical disjunctions experienced by the author and hence the different religious and sacred discourses they have encountered. Moffatt speaks to the history of colonialism and the evangelizing

Christianity that accompanied it; Pellizzari, on the other hand, targets the Roman

Catholicism of her Italian ancestry, and Law seems to remain more vague in championing spirituality, but mainly satirizing the God of capitalism that she sees sweeping across

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religious traditions, while being rooted in the Christian creed she satirizes in The Goddess of 1967. Apart for the literally blasphemous jabs peppered throughout the filmmakers’

texts, my reliance on Bhabha’s insights into blasphemy wishes to emphasize that

Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s humor mainly constitutes a form of creolization that rejects the “sacred” authority of white, masculine discourse, reminding us that white is actually the sum of all the colors of the light spectrum, as Richard White appropriately pointed out, and masculinity should be understood as a masquerade rather than a physical attribute.

The analysis performed in Chapter Three and Four has thus illustrated that critical humor constitutes a systematic biting away at accepted conventions and discourses, performed through the manipulation of cinematic language by dissociation, refraction, and masquerade. These three principles, however, do not translate into unitary and limited humorous forms, but rather into critical practices that will vary depending on the signs and accents upon which the authors draw. What unites the humorous practices of the three filmmakers is their use of humor to crack the unitary surface of conventional

cinematic language, pointing to the visual technology’s complicity in nationalist,

(neo)colonialist, and masculinist ideologies. Additionally, their deconstructive humor

does not pretend to offer one alternative model or resolution; the paradoxes and

contradictions put under the cinematic spotlight through humor are not resolved and the

three directors’ cinematic approaches do not neatly fall into any one model of counter-

cinema. At the end of Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s films, feelings will inevitably be

mixed, comprehension partial, and viewing pleasure perhaps even in doubt; attributes

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such as feminist, counter-hegemonic, or resistant will be contrasted by accusations of elitism, depoliticization, and stylistic posturing. Yet, questions are certain to revolve around gender, race, and class, because the directors’ humor arises precisely from the contradictions in the discourses that invest our gendered and socially and culturally inscribed bodies. Having cracked the iced surface of dominant discourses and denied to suture it back together with comic laughter, the filmmakers leave to the spectator and critic the task of translating the humor into a counter-hegemonic practice of critical reflecting and meaning production. The third spaces of interrupted humorous reflection the filmmakers offer are invitations towards the viewer to engage in a re-reading that can disrupt dominant discourses, by historicizing the contradictions and bring visibility to the subaltern knowledges trapped in the bursts of blackness in-between the projected frames.

Focusing on the structural impact of critical humor on cinematic language and the discourses it reproduces, I have refrained from arguing for a specific female or accented humor, preferring to stress the authors’ acknowledgment that identities are necessarily nested, entangled in gender, racial, class, and sexual bodily and cultural inscriptions.

Certainly, the analysis of the films has identified a common penchant to construct humorous dissociations, by addressing food and sexual habits with a particular attention to their gendered meanings. This tendency has been understood as part of the filmmakers’ challenge to the visuality of the medium, or rather its dominant theorization in terms of the gaze and the objectifying power relations it involves. The filmmakers’ emphasis on the sensuousness of cinema, their focus on the gendered, ethnically marked, and abjected body as a source of humor, and their play with feminist film theories could justify a

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theorization of female humor, which argues for its roots in the female grotesque tradition already analyzed by Russo and Rowe among others. While recognizing this as an important facet of the three filmmakers’ humor, I have purposefully not prioritized this aspect, showing how it translates into different humorous practices for each author depending on the other accents interacting with their gendered bodies and laughter.

Indeed, although the emphasis on food can be interpreted as a commentary on dominant constructions of femininity and domesticity, it also represents a common feature of accented cinema, where food serves to evoke sensuous memories of long gone homes and countries. Moreover, for each filmmaker the reference to food serves different purposes beyond a challenge of gender stereotypes; in the case of Moffatt, it satirizes racist constructions of the Aborigines as savages ignorant of the most primitive tools of civilization; for Pellizzari, it connects to an Italian hyphenated identity that is strongly marked by food imagery across diasporic experiences; for Law, finally, food imagery and humor directly connect to feelings of uprootedness and an ethnic identity that is forever contaminated but still longed for like the noodle taste, smell, and sound of J.M.’s Tokyo.

Food and its imaginary can indeed signify upon multiple and intersecting dimensions like national identity, multicultural heritage, class status, privilege, and gender as well as serve as a political tool or an aesthetic metaphor. Certainly, food has often been a source and/or prop for comic and humorous purposes, thus its overdetermination with gender and accented discourses, as also illustrated in Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s texts, constitutes a fertile avenue for further research, which can also shed some light on the

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relations of power negotiated in the exchange, mixing, and discarding of differently

accented ingredients.

The filmmakers’ relation and humorous connotation of food imagery thus

intersects with the cultural accents with which the authors spice up their texts; indeed,

while focusing on humorous formal devices and their discursive functions, I have

repeatedly emphasized how each filmmaker’s approach is strongly influenced by

different comedic and aesthetic traditions. Although, as I pointed out, the notion of a definable “Australian,” or “Aboriginal,” “Italian,” and “Chinese” humor is disputable, it is undeniable that the humor of accented filmmakers is influenced by the comedic

traditions, rituals, and jokes that have common currency in the cultures with which they

identify. Thus, to better understand the sources, functions, and meanings of humor in

accented cinema, further study should focus on specific inflections, so as to investigate in

detail how humorous traditions intersect and creolize. What relation can be discerned, for

instance, between Moffatt’s masquerades and the humorous mimetic plays emphasized in

Aboriginal writing, performances, and criticism? How does Pellizzari’s reliance on the

Australian grotesque transform through the encounter with maschere of Italian

Commedia dell’Arte? What elements of Chinese humor can be detected in Law’s

distortions? These are questions that I have only partially addressed here, but that warrant further study, including comparative analyses of hyphenated Italian and Chinese humor across diasporic communities. Indeed, in discussing Pellizzari, I underlined the extent to which her representation of Italian/Australian identity has been influenced by

Italian/American cinema; in such lateral exchanges, one can also hear echoes of common

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comic routines as well as humorous practices of jujitsu due to similar histories of

discrimination and stereotyping. The study of such lateral exchanges would certainly also

benefit from further research into the reception of humorous texts across accented and

diasporic communities; besides, reception studies of humorous cinematic texts would

offer more indications of the extent to which its critical potential is actually translated

into critical reading habits and practices.

As this brief overview of further work needed in the field of cinematic, critical humor and its significance for women and accented filmmakers illustrates, this study

concludes with possibly more questions than when it started, pointing to other disciplines

in order to deepen the understanding of humorous mechanisms and functions. At the

outset, I stressed that I believe in a transdisciplinary approach that considers the

translatability of theoretical approaches, languages, codes, and cultures as the starting

point both for the filmmakers’ cinematic humor and for its critical interpretation. One

single study’s approach cannot exhaust the multitude of perspectives and insights that can

be gained by drawing on different disciplinary knowledges and their mutual illumination;

what I hope this study has shown, however, is the extent to which translatability among

systems of knowledge, ways of seeing, perceiving, and feeling actually defines the critical humor analyzed in this study. In this sense and relying on Bhabha, I described the filmmakers’ texts as “borderline work[s] of culture” that open an oblique space in the

“continuum of past and present,” allowing for “a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (10). The notion of translation that I only obliquely touched upon during my analysis could in fact sum up and connect the dots of the journey sketched so

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far, in that it subtends much of the authors’ cultural interventions on cinema and

constitutes the main strategy for a critical organization of their humorous texts and for the

practice of critical interpretation of such humor proposed here.

Translation, understood as a pratique de la trace, in Glissant’s theorization of

creolization, literally constitutes a movement of meaning, which often, but not necessarily, involves multiple languages and always stresses the heteroglossia of any given utterance, establishing connections between parallel concepts, experiences, senses, and feelings. Glissant’s emphasis on translation as a cultural practice highlights the unpredictability of the “métissage culturel” that characterizes the process of creolization

(45), because it puts at its center a process that is necessarily situated and individualized, while being at the same time collectively mediated in its reception and intent.

Foregrounding the process of translation across systems of knowledge, discourses, and languages draws attention to that space where signs are negotiated and meaning is constructed in the interval between enunciation and proposition. Indeed, theorizing the

third space, Bhabha also points out that such interval “ensure[s] that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.” In this always-ready potential for recontextualization and recodification, signs “are caught in the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation” (The Location of Culture 55).

Moffatt’s, Pellizzari’s, and Law’s humor has been described and theorized as a practice that carries out just such a negotiation, by displacing, trans-contextualizing, and reading anew contradictory signs and discourses. Through humor, the three filmmakers

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literally carry over, trans-late, the accented and subaltern perspectives they share into the dominant signifiers and forms of a national cinematic language at pains to put up a mask of monologic unity. The notion of translation and humor also warrants further research and presents its own humorous paradoxes, in that humor theory has long debated whether the comic is translatable in different languages and cultures. Eco has interestingly attacked the notion that tragedy is universal, whereas comedy is provincial and untranslatable, maintaining that the difficulties in carrying over comic and humorous meanings lie in the humorous mode’s play with hidden rules. Whereas the tragic spells out its conventions and norms, the comic pivots around the breaking of rules that need to remain implicit, in order not to spoil the punchline. In this sense, getting the joke has been argued to imply an acknowledgment and acceptance of the rule being violated in the first place. Yet, Pirandello’s humor has been shown to nurture a different relationship with the norm, in that it arises from the blatant contradiction and unmasking of the norm; critical humor could be understood as an act of blasphemous translation, in the sense that it repeats and reproduces certain dominant signs, but, by displacing them through contradictory discursive and aesthetic conventions, satirically resignifies upon them. To give a concrete example, Moffatt does not satirize the trope of the oversexed, savage

Aboriginal woman assuming the viewers’ knowledge of its cultural and historical meanings; on the contrary, she first unmasks its origin, spells out its meanings, and then resignifies upon it, by displacing it in a different chronotope and translating it into Aretha

Franklin’s irreverent and laughing “evil gals.” Such a translation establishes a

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correspondence not just between colonial signs, but between different forms of marginalization as well as dissent.

The humorous creolization of discourses, forms, and cultural traditions performed by Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law always relies on a similar explicitation of the rules of the game and humorous resignification through their unpredictable trans-lation via differently accented cultural paradigms. Critical humor in the accented cinema of these women filmmakers constitutes yet another dimension of the translation and negotiation performed between the national, monologic constraints of film production and cinematic language, the heteroglossia of the global imaginaries that have traveled since the beginning with film technology, and the local and diasporic accents informing a filmmaker’s unique style and perspective. As Abe Nornes calls for a cinematic translation

“ready and willing to experiment, to tamper with tradition, language, and expectations in order to inventively put spectators into contact with the foreign – a translation that is, in a word, abusive” (230), this study hopes to have made the case for a form of gestic criticism that multiplies the humorous dissociations, reflections, and masks of accented filmmakers like Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law, performing an additional act of abusive translation by passing them through the sieve of the critic’s own situated knowledge, with its own accents and sense of humor.

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ENDNOTES

1 Usually translated as “the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.” Gramsci actually attributed this aphorism to French writer Romain Rolland, but the Italian writer seems to be the one who popularized it. It should be noted that all translations in this study unless otherwise specified are my own. 2In this dissertation, I will employ the term “histories” in the plural, as a means to challenge the concept of a unitary history, and point to the necessary existence of multiple conflicting histories, an aspect that emphasizes the narrative dimension in history, as discussed by scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Hayden White, and Fredric Jameson, which will be discussed later in the dissertation. In the English language, it is common to bracket the initial (his) of the term, so as to foreground the term “story” and, as some feminist scholars have done, substitute it with the prefix (her) to point out the erasure of women’s voices from historical accounts. However, such semiotic intervention on the sign /history/ are not translatable in other languages and do not reflect the etymology of the term from the Latin “historia.” Indeed, in many romantic languages, the same distinction is made by pointing to the capitalizing of a certain History versus erased histories. For this reason, I prefer using the plural and employing the singular, only when I specifically refer to the official construction of History. 3 As Salvatore Attardo points out in his review of the Linguistic Theories of Humor, humor has also become the privileged umbrella term in linguistic theories that seek to investigate disparate phenomena such as jokes, puns, satire, etc. The term has known an increasing popularization as evidenced by the formal establishment of the International Society for Humor Studies in 1989, which brings together scholars from the Humanities, Social Sciences, Biology, Psychology, and Education. The society also publishes the quarterly journal Humor and organizes annual international conferences dedicated to all the matters broadly falling within the semantic field of humor. Given the common usage of humor as an umbrella term for humorous phenomena that do not necessarily entail a social criticism, in this dissertation I employ the adjective “critical” to clarify my reference to those humorous phenomena that serve to promote a critical attitude towards social norms, conventions, behaviors, and dominant discourses. Moreover, in a different tradition pointed out by Jan Hokenson in her The Idea of Comedy, the term “humor” was popularized “by the early eighteenth century … [when it] came to comprise a sort of popular umbrella for all non-satiric, or ‘other’ comic modes” (68), the most notable example in this tradition would probably be Stuart Tave’s “amiable humor.” To avoid confusion and to mark the distinction from the British tradition of non-satiric humor, I emphasize the function of cultural criticism that the humor analyzed in this study performs. Finally, as last terminological caveat, I privilege “humor” over “the comic” because one of the theories informing this study’s dialogical understanding of humor is Luigi Pirandello’s Umorismo, where the Italian literary critic and author details the differences in his approach between humor and the comic. Such a distinction, although vague as Umberto Eco also points out and as it will be discussed in chapter three, is instrumental to this study, in that it allows to distinguish between a critical and self-reflexive humor and the comic in general. 4 I am relying here on Hokenson’s distinction between “satiric theories” of humor that emphasize the butt of the comic versus “populist theories” of humor that champion the comic hero, where “populist” is understood as the OED definition of “intended to appeal to or represent the interests of ordinary people” and does not carry the negative implications associated with the term as demagogy or political propaganda. I will return on this distinction among humor theories in chapter three. 5 An emphasis on the commonalities and needs to intersect subaltern points of view and discourses relies on Gramsci’s introduction of the term “subalterno” to refer to the mix of different groups in terms of race, ethnicity, and religion that are excluded from the dominant classes (QD 25: 25 XXIII). The notion of subaltern acknowledges the centrality of class conflict in the relationships of power, but it allows 374

eschewing a prioritization of class over other constructs that are exploited for oppression and exclusion. It is a term that connects to revisions of Marxist materialism in light of the history of slavery (DuBois) and racism (Fanon) and it is also “linked … to gender” because discourses of revolution, independence, resistance have been constructed, as Roediger points out, on a “powerful masculine personal ideal” (13). In fact, Gramsci excludes women from the subaltern groups, because he maintains that women’s position cannot be understood in terms of a class domination over the other and hence their stories belong to a folkloric rather than political and social history (QD: 25 XXIII). I will show the extent to which discourses of gender and race are in fact intertwined and will hence rely on the postcolonial and feminist critic Gayatri Spivak’s revision and expansion of the notion of subaltern to include all those forced at the margins of a given society and system, including women. 6 “Must be broad, political, and liberal in aesthetics, sovereign against conventions.” 7 Although “the death of the author” was already proclaimed some forty years ago by Roland Barthes, poststructuralist theorists also recognized the desire of viewers to ascribe intentionality (Barthes Le Plaisir 39); in other words, the illusion of the author determining the meaning of a text is indeed dead, but not the awareness that the discourses constituting that author do find their way into the text as well as our own (re)construction of the originator. I will thus look at biographical accounts of and interviews with the authors through Michel Foucault’s argument for an “author function” in his essay “What is an author?” There, Foucault argues that “the subject is “dead,” because, rather than being the source of meaning, it is produced by discourses, institutions and relations of power” (116), which are indeed constitutive of the text. Any claim of true, essential or original meaning is thus dismissed, but not the necessity to still historicize the conditions and loci of production and enunciation of the text. 8 In film jargon, Jean-Louis Baudry would refer here to the “cinematographic apparatus,” meaning a technological, ideological, and institutional machine that creates subject effects, as he theorized in his “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (1970). Baudry is here relying on Louis Althusser’s interpellation theory, explaining how individuals are made subjects, reproducing the existing power relations. Althusser famously revised the Marxist relationship between superstructure and base, accounting for the role of what he defined as “Ideological State Apparatuses,” including church, family, schools, trade unions, but also literature, art, etc, ensuring the “ideological subjection” through the exercise of hegemony within these realities (98). The apparatus theory of cinema thus offers a means to understand its role in the relations of power. Christian Metz has later famously theorized in The Imaginary Signifier, through the application of psychoanalysis and semiotics to film theory, the mechanisms and relationships constituting the cinematographic apparatus, involving spectators, texts, and the technology of cinema. 9 Dialogization is a process, whereby the authority of unitary, monologic discourses is undermined, by pointing to the dialogism of every single utterance, which necessarily reproduces, contains, and echoes a multiplicity of meanings, previous utterances, and usages of language. In chapter three and four, I will discuss more in depth the Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism, which are at the basis of his theory of laughter and humor. 10 In chapter one, I will expand on the concept of créolisation and relate it to other paradigms that resonate with Glissant’s argument from different geopolitical and theoretical fields, such as mongrel(ization), transculturación, hybridity, métissage, and syncretization. All these frameworks and terms will be discussed and contextualized in their field of emergence, emphasizing that this work does not privilege one term or approach over the other, but argues for the mutual illumination that intersecting the histories and insights inscribed in these terms and theories can bring. 11 In their monumental Unthinking Eurocentrism, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point out the many discourses and figures of cultural mixing discussed in postcolonial theory; thus they point to different labels used to qualify the mixing: “religious (syncretism); biological (hybridity); human-genetic (mestizaje); and linguistic (creolization).” They prefer to employ the term syncretism, because, they argue, it bears the traces of the power differentials that shaped the cultural mixing; more so than the term “hybridity” that has too often led to a celebration that hides the deadly histories leading to it (41-43). They point out that syncretism is simultaneously cultural, linguistic, culinary, musical, etc. Although heavily relying on Shohat and Stam’s invaluable contribution to the study of cinema and its Eurocentricity, I prefer to use Glissant’s term Créolisation, because it has inscribed in its name the colonial past of its emergence. Indeed, the use of 375

the term “creole” spread during the 16th century at the time of the most invasive colonizations of the Americas and Africa. The etymology of the term brings with it both an acknowledgement of the violent histories that saw the spreading of the term – at first an instrument to hierarchically distinguish between “pure” and “creole” languages – and a celebration of the survival and resilience of colonized and oppressed peoples and languages around the world. Creole languages’ unpredictable structure and development are a testament to the optimism of the will in the face of the pessimism of the intellect. This is the reason why in this study I will privilege the term créolisation, as I will explain further in chapter one, contextualizing this choice in the broader field of postcolonial studies across different colonial histories. . In this introduction, I will always refer to créolisation in its French spelling to purposefully trans-late this term emerged within the context of French colonization to that of British colonization. Indeed, as mentioned previously, there are many affinities and echoes between (post)colonial voices emerging from the different forms of colonialism – Spanish (mestizaje, transculturatión), French (créolisation) and British (hybridity, mongrelization). However, for the rest of the dissertation, I will mainly use the now common anglicized form, creolization. 12 It should be noted that Pirandello’s approach to humor is predominantly literary and metaphysical in that it constitutes a reflection on the condition of human beings and their relationship with the world and reality; on the contrary Gramsci’s theories are rooted in Marxist materialism and aimed at a reflection and awareness of the need of political action. The usefulness of considering Pirandello in a study that looks at humor as a counter-hegemonic force derives first from his insights into humor as a narrative strategy and secondly from the subtle relation that Pirandello discerns in humor versus the comic. These aspects will be further explained and developed in the third chapter of the dissertation; here it suffices to point out that Pirandellian humor refers to an ontological condition of human beings, but also points to social norms, inviting a critical reflection and questioning of them. For this reason, Pirandellian humor as a narrative strategy can constitute a significant step towards critical thought, in that it contributes to de-naturalize the dominant ideology and unveil its fissures. Moreover, the films analyzed in this project are not politically militant projects in the mold of Brecht’s theatre or filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard. They are not as rooted in Marxist thought; the filmmakers under analysis are rather auteurs whose individualist projects offer a critical look onto dominant discourses and an alternative to commercial cinemas. Their works, like all art, participate in social and political discourses, while reclaiming their right as unique, individual voices. In this perspective, Pirandellian humor well suits a narrative strategy that, drawing critical attention to social norms and dominant discourses, also serves to articulate a unique, individual sensibility. A Gramscian framework serves to translate these critical, auteurist film projects into political film texts that can contribute to a gradual counter-hegemonic process, which necessarily involves challenging dominant systems of representation, in order to think anew the relations of power in which each individual participates. 13 In the analysis of their work, I will retrace the “historical hegemonies” buried in the construction of the Australian nation, acknowledging, in Shohat and Stam’s words, “the existential realities of pain, anger, and resentment” that have informed each artist’s vision” (358-59) and that confer a bitter taste to their humorous créolisation. Indeed, when calling for a multicultural aesthetic or celebrating the syncretism of an artist’s work, it is always necessary to question whether this créolisation of the form also acknowledges the power relations embedded in such transculturation processes, i.e. whether the celebration ultimately works to hide the histories of exploitation, oppression, and discrimination that brought the different cultures into contact in the first place. Moreover, the analysis of their creolizing humor needs to be inserted into the geo-political and historical space and time of its production, in order to refrain from universalizing discourses, which over the centuries have repeatedly proven deadly and oppressive as Glissant points out. The global créolisation thus needs to be read against the local histories informing the texts and authors under analysis. 14 When referring to national, social and political conditions within a formerly colonized country, I will bracket the prefix (post) in the term postcolonial, in order to signal the ambiguities and contradictions in such a definition, which often hides the fact that colonial – and/or neo-colonial - relations still hover over these societies (for this reason, I will also often write (neo)colonial to point to the continuities). In terms of

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postcolonial studies, however, I will not use the brackets, but employ the common term that is more or less accepted in the discipline. 15 For a discussion of the First Australians and their colonization of the land see Ronald M. and Catherine H. Berndt and Adolphus P. Elkin. Although these two early accounts traced the arrival of the First Australians to 60,000 years ago, more recent studies seem to indicate that they actually arrived 120,000 years ago; see Josephine Flood, John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga, and Noel G. Butlin. The data is not yet complete and there are hypotheses that actually push further back the first arrival on Australian land by Homo Sapiens; see here Jennifer Sabbioni, Kay Schaffer, and Sidonie Smith. Whatever the exact date, it seems certain that the First Australians were also the first “ocean voyagers” because “at no time in the last 3 million years has there been a complete land bridge between Asian and Australian continents” (Flood 31- 32). The Indigenous peoples of Australia had already long disputed the claims that they arrived only 30,000 years ago and viewed Western scientific claims with a certain irony as Aboriginal writer Gerry Bostock comments in his review of “Black Theatre:” “You know Aborigines have been living here for over 100000 years, I would say. (We only have the anthropological view that we’ve been here less, but then they’ve only been here for five minutes in the day of time we go by)” (63-73). 16 See Mulvaney and Kamminga, and Sabbioni, Schaffer and Smith. 17 See Hughes for an account of early beliefs of the genetic transmission of crime and the reports of the low crime rate among the first generation of native-born white Australians. Hughes argues that “the truly durable legacy of the convict system was not ‘criminality’ but the revulsion from it” (356). Interestingly, Hughes also notes that the desire to erase the convict past for a present and future of ‘respectability’ also led to a “historical amnesia” (356), which one could argue helped the perpetration of scientific racist discourses against other groups. 18 John Hallows and his Dreamtime Society, written in 1970, is just one of the many accounts that comfortably describe Australian Aborigines as “closer to Neanderthal” (15). 19 See Anthony J. Tamburri To Hyphenate Or Not To Hyphenate. The Italian/American Writer: An Other American, where he challenges the neutrality of the hyphen, arguing that it is “not a mere linguistic element but indeed an ideological construct” (17) that “sets up a contrast between the ethnic and the dominant groups from the perspective of the latter” (46). Tamburri thus suggests replacing the hyphen (-) with the slash (/), a tilt that “should aid in closing the ideological gap” (47). His suggestions refer to the field of Italian/American studies, but the principle relates to all ethnic minorities and will be applied here. 20 In Chapter Two, I will discuss the relation between Pellizzari’s filmmaking and Italian/American cinema, whose global influence and significance has already been amply analyzed by Peter Bondanella in his Hollywood Italians. 21 Shohat and Stam define Eurocentrism as “the procrustean forcing of cultural heterogeneity into a single paradigmatic perspective in which Europe is seen as the unique source of meaning, as the world’s center of gravity, as ontological ‘reality’ to the rest of the world’s shadow” (1-2). 22 Foucault regards discourse as a language that is inextricably associated with an institution and that produces its objects of knowledge. We are produced by and through the discourses that circulate in the society we live in, as they are (re)produced, to use Althusser’s terms, through the Ideological State Apparatuses. Such an understanding of discourse stems from Foucault’s conception of the “disciplinary power” that characterizes our (post)industrial world. In Discipline and Punish, he defines disciplinary power as “a set of forces which establishes positions and ways of behaving that influence people in their everyday lives” (48). Power is disciplinary because it domesticates our bodies into normalized conducts, but also because it flows from the power of disciplines of knowledge. Indeed, Foucault’ legacy is mainly recognized in his theorization of the power-knowledge couplet, whereby we understand that in modern societies, knowledge produced by disciplines and institutions is the necessary condition for the exercise of power. Foucault’s relation to Marxist theory is the object of ample conflicting studies and claims; his theory is, however, definitely indebted to Althusser’s revision of the Marxist dichotomy of base and superstructure, which revaluates the role of culture in the (re)production of dominant ideologies, drawing on Gramsci’s previous theorizations of hegemony and the role of organic intellectuals. Gramsci’s theories, and their re-elaboration by Althusser, are instrumental for an understanding of how disciplinary power subjects individuals and reproduces the relations of production. However, to echo Althusser’s wording 377

(115), Foucault shifts away from Althusser and Marxist theory, as shown by the disappearance, continuation, and emergence in his thought of certain notions/terms: Disappeared: the terms state, ideology class struggle. Survive: the terms subject, practice, apparatus. Appear: the terms discourse formation, disciplinary power, struggle between discourses. The object of this study is not to assess or make a claim for Foucault’s place within Marxist theory; it will thus draw on Foucault’s theoretical paradigm at times pointing to the bridges it seems to open towards other theories informed by Marxism, while always acknowledging the contradictory and problematic relations between the two. 23 “Contamination, which does away with borders and hierarchies between knowledges and transforms them, by forcing them to influence each other.” 24 The concept of translatability also connects to postcolonial studies and theorists like Bhabha who have emphasized the centrality of (un)translatability in the cultural conflicts and encounters that characterize colonial histories and the notion of hybridity that emerges from it. On the other hand, Gramsci uses the concept of translatability specifically to call for a trans-methodology that relies both on science and philosophy. Indeed, transdisciplinarity is today mainly known within the sciences thanks to the Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET) which adopted the Charter of Transdisciplinarity in 1994 at the First World Congress of Transdisciplinarity in Portugal. One of the first promoters of the Center and the author of the Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity is Basarab Nicolescu, a quantum physicist who seeks to apply the insights from quantum mechanics to our understanding of the world, bridging the gap between science, and philosophy. While this dissertation is admittedly limited to the field of the humanities, it is intended as a transdisciplinary work in that I understand it as part of a larger investigation that needs to be completed through the dialogical interaction with other works, authors, institutions, arts, and sciences. In my analysis, I will thus always try to point to questions that remain unanswered, or to the partiality of this work’s responses, which need to be tested, contradicted, and expanded upon through the lenses of other approaches and eyes. 25 Solanas and Gettino distinguish between First, Second, and Third Cinema. As first cinema, they intend Hollywood cinema, which is defined by its economic and imperial interests and where films constitute consumers goods and the viewer is conceived as passive. Second cinema, instead, consists of the work of auteurs that go beyond the narrative and formal conventions of First cinema, sometimes also overtly addressing political subjects; but it is still distributed within the same commercial network. Solanas and Gettino call for a Third cinema that will be produced collectively, distributed independently, and viewed actively. As Guneratne observes in his introduction to Rethinking Third Cinema, Third cinema as a theory has always been too easily overlooked; it is rarely included in film theory anthologies and seriously discussed in film theory classes, despite the visibility that Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in the Third World” brought to Third cinema theory for “many EuroAmerican scholars” (Guneratne “Introduction” 11). 26 For detailed discussions of Third Cinema’s legacy and evolution see Mike Wayne’s Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, Michael Chanan’s “The Changing Geography of Third Cinema,” and the already cited Guneratne and Dissanayake’s Rethinkng Third Cinema. 27 While the manifestoes called for collective filmmaking practices, it should be noted that many of the early theorizers and practitioners of Third cinemas have long been considered auteurs. As Marvin D’Lugo argues in his contribution to Rethinking Third Cinema, Third Cinema filmmakers were often forced into exile from their lands and continued filmmaking thanks to international co-production, producing auteurist films that could in fact be considered as early examples of accented cinema. Solana’s Tangos: El Exilio de Gardel (1985) about Argentinean exiles in France, for instance, would certainly fit into Naficy’s framework for an accented cinema. Interestingly, the film also presents many instances of what I am tempted to call “accented humor,” a potential extension of this study’s discussion of critical humor as a creolizing force. 28 It should be noted that since the theorization of Third Cinema, video technology has increasingly taken hold across the globe. There seems to be some evidence that collective projects in the spirit of Third Cinema manifestoes are today carried out in video communities. In the specific Australian case, for instance, Lydia Buchtmann documents an early experiment carried out in 1975 at Yuendumu with the introduction of video technology through the Whitlam Government funds. In 1980, then, the Central Australia Media Association (CAAMA) was founded with the aim to reach more remote Aboriginal 378

communities. Since then various studies into Aboriginal policy and broadcasting have been commissioned by the Australian state and remote communities now own the technology to broadcast their own programs, as is the case with the Warlpiri Media Association and Imparja TV in which it participates. Some programs have enjoyed considerable success and visibility such as Bush Mechanics, set in the outback and documenting the inventional practices of Aborigines to repair white mechanics. This seems to be a humorous response to the many stereotypes of Aborigines as technologically inept and frozen in a primitive past with no change since colonization. Other programs teach traditional cooking and hunting techniques; interestingly, these videos mix ethnographic-like documentation of indigenous rituals, with music clips editing styles and inscriptions. Further work should be carried out to investigate the use of humor as a creolizing and counter-hegemonic force in these projects. See Buchtmann, Faye Ginsburg, Eric Michael, Phillip Dutchak, and Michael Meadows for a discussion of the use of video and media technologies by Aboriginal communities. As these examples, show, video technology has been particularly effective for indigenous communities and, according to Shohat and Stam, “the three most active centers of indigenous media production are Native North American (Inuit, Yup’ik), Indians of the Amazon Basin (Nambiquara, Kayapo), and Aboriginal Australians (Warlpiri, Pitjanjajari)” (34). 29 In this framework, identity, following Hall, is understood “as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 51). Furthermore, in “The Spectacle of the Other,” Hall, drawing on Bakhtin, defines identity as a dialogic process, where we construct a representation of ourselves in constant dialogue with the other and the discourses that surround us (235). 30 Bhabha’s emphasis on the “third space” addresses the problematic conceptualization of the “sign” in the Saussurean linguistic system. Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistics and its emphasis on the arbitrary nature of linguistic signs and their organization by difference in a linguistic system (langue) separated from actual language use (parole) has arguably been one of the most fruitful theories of the last century, spurring structuralist and post-structuralist approaches in practically all the humanities (anthropology, psychology, literature, cinema, etc.). The increasing criticism and rethinking of Saussurean linguistics is mainly linked to its emphasis on the synchronicity of a system that works independently of its referents. Such an approach has facilitated the common universalizing abstractions of Eurocentric thought. De Lauretis has also famously called for a rethinking of the Saussurean legacies that are discernable in the works of Foucault (Technologies of Gender) (who, as many scholars have pointed out, largely ignores gender and racial issues). She calls for a re-evaluation of Peircean semiotics, which accounts for a greater role of the object, the real, and the interpretant. See her lucid discussion in Technologies of Gender (38-42). This is not the place to pursue such a rethinking, which, however, I view as promising for new theoretical paradigms that put the body, necessarily gendered, colored, aged, and sexed, at the center of the debate. Here, it suffices to note that Bhabha’s insistence on the third space, the break, between the locus of enunciation and the proposition allows writing history and the body back into the “system of representation.” Such a tactic allows acknowledging the systematic erasure of the historicized body in discursive systems, while disrupting them from within. 31 Certainly, each theory, definition, and author should be contextualized in the local histories that led to each approach’s emergence, as I briefly do above and will consistently do in the course of this study; however, many terms are already used as partial synonyms and it is crucial to foster a dialogue and confrontation between the parallel work carried out in French, Spanish, and English postcolonial studies. 32 Davis used the term to disparagingly referring to “children of inter-racial partnerships,” even making explicit the association between Australian Aborigines and dogs implied by the term (Shannon), which in Oxford English Dictionary, is defined as “the offspring or result of cross-breeding, miscegenation, mixed marriage” but is a word commonly used for mixed-breed dogs and disparagingly for subjects of “mixed race.” 33 Borders mark accented films also in their more usual references to geographical demarcations that frequently appear and are thematicized in accented films. As Naficy argues, the attention on borders is central today when “the globalization of capital, labor, culture, and media is threatening to make borders obsolete and national sovereignty irrelevant” (31), without challenging the asymmetries of power that borders signal. 379

34 Such marginalization echoes with the experiences of Black/American writers and activists during the Civil Rights movements as documented by Pratibha Parmar in her documentary A Place of Rage (1991) where she interviews June Jordan, Alice Walker and Angela Davis, among others. 35 Shohat introduces the term “post-Third-Worldist” to define a “perspective [that] assumes the fundamental validity of the anti-colonial movement, but also interrogates the fissures that rend the Third- World nation” (75). The term avoids the traps of adjectives like “postcolonial” that imply a “movement beyond anti-colonial nationalist ideology” (75). 36 Chakravarty, drawing on George Bataille’s approach to the erotic, shows “the entangling of the erotic with social dynamics” in non-Western films directed by men who “present the oppression of women and the tensions arising out of transgressive sexual desires as allegories of social or national history” (77). Her discussion of the female body and the erotics of history will be instrumental in discussing Moffatt’s depiction of the erotic policies of colonialism. 37 Women’s bodies have generally served the purpose of symbolically representing nationhood and supporting the claims for its defense and protection; as Tania Modleski, in her essay “Do We Get to Lose This Time? Revising the Vietnam War Film,” has argued, women’s bodies are a powerful signifier in the war genre generally, where they never feature as real characters, but are prominent as symbols of nationhood and homeland. 38 As Shohat and Stam observes, “as many as 3,000 native nations, representing some 250 million people, according to some estimates, function within the 200 states that assert sovereignty over them” (32). 39 For discussions of the hyphen see Aaron and Tamburri. 40 Cohen distinguishes between labors/service diasporas, in the case of Indians, and trade/business diasporas, relative to the Chinese and Lebanese. While the distinction might help to consider how issues of class and status at the outset influence the life of diasporic individuals in their new countries, it seems to be too specific in ascribing one group to one or the other. Italian diaspora, for instance, has known different waves and source factors, from trade to miseria and thus search for labor. Moreover, once in a new country, the different migrations are often lumped together and the differences are partially erased. A more generic notion of “economic diaspora” would perhaps more simply distinguish it from forced diasporas – of expelled (Jews, Greeks, Armenians) or abducted peoples (African Americans). 41 As I will explicate in the fourth section of this chapter, Law emigrated from Hong Kong during the 1990s; there was at the time an increasing migratory flow of professionals away from Hong Kong towards Western counties in anticipation of the territory’s handover to the People’s Republic of China. However, the numbers did not correspond to the massive economic diasporas that forced many to emigrate earlier in the nineteenth and twentieth century. 42 There is no exact estimate of the number of Indigenous peoples in Australia before colonization; however, most anthropological accounts seem to agree with Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s estimate of 300.000 (Mulvaney and Kamminga 69). Mulvaney and Kamminga, however, acknowledge that there are more recent hypotheses that argue for a much higher number of Indigenous peoples with a maximum of ¾ of a million. Noel G. Butlin, on the other hand, experimenting a new system and focusing on Victoria and New South Wales argues for a total of 1,25 million peoples including Tasmania (9,000) (120-122). Moreover, there is also a continuous debate on how to account for the different groups among Aborigines before colonization. Many have contested the use of the term “tribe” (Sabbioni et.al., Berndt), which however has now become of common use (Mudrooroo). A privileged alternative is to refer to “linguistic units” given the fact that in Australia 200/260 languages were spoken before colonization. These were then further distinguished in 600 “dialects” (A National Language Policy, 80). As a result of colonization, of the 260 Indigenous languages, 50 have died out, 100 are in danger of extinction and only 28 seem destined to survive (80). 43 The acclaimed Aboriginal writer and activist Jack Davis recreated this encounter in his drama, Kullark, entrusting the Aboriginal woman Moyarahn with the task of warning her people against the curious and funny white invaders (13-15). It should be noted that the Indigenous peoples of Australia had seen other ships and met with traders, but this fleet with its heavy contingent was different; they did not seem to be transiting, but showed rather the intention of staying. Australian Aborigines had contacts with peoples from Indonesia and Malaysia; in the cultural exchanges with these other peoples they had learned of agricultural 380

techniques, as well as about metal production. Yet, they selected which practices to import and which to discard (see Mudrooroo X and Flood. 224). 44 Only recently scholars have started documenting the stories of Aboriginal resistance that are associated with names like Pigeon who fought for 3 years in the Kimberleys, Walyer, a woman in the north-west of Tasmania who fought an individual battle until 1830, Yagan in the South west of Australia who led his people against the white colonizers, and finally Pemulwuy who fought until death in 1802 in the territories of New South Wales (see Sabbioni et.al. XXII and Stanner 45-46. Hughes also briefly discusses Aboriginal resistance 276-79). Yagan’s story was also the inspiration for Davis’s Kullark. 45 For Indigenous Australians the concept of land property has no meaning, since the Dreaming assigns and distributes groups over the land they are supposed to nurture following the ancestors’ teachings. Indeed, there were no territorial wars in Indigenous Australia because a group could not abandon the place they belonged to spiritually (Mudrooroo, Elkin, Maddock). As Mudrooroo explains: “Dreaming is a continuous process of creation which began in the long ago period called the ‘Dreamtime’, when the physical features of the land were formed by creative beings that were neither humans or [sic] animal, but had the attributes of both. It was through the actions of these primordial ancestors that flora and fauna, including humanity, evolved” (Aboriginal Mythology VII). These ancestors either sank in the depth of the earth, and assumed the shapes of rocks and trees, or ascended to the sky and transformed into stars (Berndt and Berndt 138). Their existence is outside time, which in Australian Indigenous cultures is not linear; past, present, and future mingle and intersect in the Dreamtime (Berndt and Berndt 230). The survival of the ancestors is guaranteed by the descendants’ performance of songs, rituals and myth inherited from the Dreamtime. In this sense, Indigenous cultures claim to sing the world back into existence with their rituals and thus nurture the land. For this very same reason, they cannot abandon the land they have been instructed to keep alive with their rituals (see Berndt and Berndt, Mudrooroo, Stanner, Muecke for detailed accounts of the Dreamtime). The Dreaming, with the songs, rituals, stories and kinship system that constitute it (Mudrooroo vii), remains today the strongest anchor for the marginalized and abused Aboriginal populations to reclaim an identity, a past, and a right to the land (Benterrak, Muecke, and Roe). 46 The emergency increased after the American colonies gained independence and the “export” of British convicts as laborers to the colonies was no longer possible (56). See also Alan G.L. Shaw that addresses transportation to America before the revolution (21-37) and the necessity of settling convict colonies in Australia afterwards (38-57). 47 As mentioned above, biological determinist discourses sustained a belief in a “criminal class” (165), where criminality was understood as almost a genetic trait. To protect property, however, it was “all too easy to assign criminal propensities to the marginal, the outcast, the rag-and-boner – in short, to those who might be seen as English sans-culottes” (166). It should be noted that this is also the period shortly preceding the phase on which Foucault concentrated in his Discipline and Punish, the time when the attitudes toward crime and, especially, “the criminal” started to change. If, in this period, the belief in unredeemable criminality dominated the debate on the criminal class, many voices were emerging and pushing, instead, for prisons that would reform the convicts. Jeremy Bentham developed his model for the Panopticon in 1785-87, which was rejected in favor of the deportation of convicts to Australia. Yet, these alternative discourses continued to grow and contributed to the termination of the transport of convicts in the mid nineteenth century. For a further discussion of the “defence of property” that pushed England to establish penal colonies in Australia, see also Sherington’s first chapter in Australian Immigrants 1788- 1978 (3-20). 48 The transportation can be divided in four phases, based also on the numbers of convicts deported. First, between 1787 and 1810, “relatively few convicts, about 9,300 men and 2,500 women,” secondly between 1811-1830, with a “sharp rise … after 1815” for a total of “50,200 people;” thirdly, the peak of the system was reached between 1831-1840 with “43,500 male and 7,700 female convicts. At the end of this period, a growing resistance developed with the new Australian-born settlers fighting “the stigma of convictry;” their calls for a stop to the transportation contribution to a constant decrease in the fourth phase between 1840, when transport to New South Wales stopped, and 1868, the last trip to Van Diemen’s Land (Hughes 161- 62).

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49 See Oxley for a detailed discussion and re-assessment of the literature on convict women and their status in England (3-15, 34-62). 50 See also the caricature by a Georgian satirist, Farewell to Black-Eyed Sue and Sweet Poll of Plymouth reproduced in Hughes. 51 The “depravity” of convict women relied on a well established eugenist discourse that argued the identification of criminal women “from their physical characteristics … receding foreheads, asymmetrical faces, projecting cheekbones and masculine faces” (Oxley 39). Interestingly, criminality was soon coded as non feminine, given its defiance of the construction of the passive and subservient woman. 52 Hughes quotes here Lord Sydney who in 1786 called for “enslaving women” so as to avoid the risk of a colony where the lack of the female sex would “foster” homosexuality (245). As Hughes illustrates later in his book, fears and repression of “convict homosexuality” was indeed a major concern in the first years of the colony, when sodomy laws were particularly strict (264-65). Although many records document how common homosexual relationships were and actually constitute the subtext of the “mateship” ideal and images of Australian men, Australian official records and institutions applied all their repressive powers to control and discipline sexuality in the colony (320). Interestingly, in one chapter entitled “Bunters, Mollies and Sable Brethren,” Hughes casually addresses what in his accounts were the three minorities in the new colonies: women, homosexuals, and Aborigines (244-81). Gender, sexuality, and race were the borders to be protected and reinforced, in order to ensure the establishment of a successful English colony; a fact that points to the intersections between racism, sexism, and patriarchy in the process of (neo)colonization. 53 See Kay Daniels and Mary Murnane for letters and official reports regarding the women working at the Female Factory at Parramatta (8-25). 54 See Oxley for a discussion of the policies promoting the immigration of free women; in her book, there are also copies of some of the early pamphlets calling for “Female Emigration to Australia” (170-97). 55 See Ina Bertrand for more details regarding this early film, its production and remakes. In relation to convicts’ escapes, it is interesting to note that, according to Hughes’ reports, many were the attempts to flee to China, dreamt as a destination for escaped prisoners. Among the Australian national stories of escape features also the story of Mary Briant who led her whole family in a mythical and long escape to finally earn a pardon and a way back to Cornwall (205-09). 56 Early Australian films well illustrate the endearing, humorous, and provocative celebration of Australian anti-authoritarianism and unruliness, while gradually arguing for the need to settle down and plant roots once again. Many are the examples among the early mute classics: the lovable larrikin in Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke (1919) who manages to forgo of regular stints in prison, loosing bets, and drunken nights for his “ideal tart” Doreen; or Longford’s other classic, On Our Selection (1920), where the adventures of the Rudds are dedicated to those “who strove through the silences of the Bush-lands and made them ours,” by marrying, settling down, and farming the land; or, finally, the irreverent Kid Stakes (1927), where gender stereotypes are humorously reproduced in the young gang of Fatty Finn, who manages to help an eloping couple divided by class to wed, wins a goat race with “manly pride” and thereby conquers the heart of the girl of the gang, while still refusing her too frivolous and feminine kisses.

57 For a discussion of Arcadian tropes in colonial narratives and their sudden alteration see Stephane Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions that investigates a similar history and evolution in the American context. 58 In Orientalism, Edward Said shows how, generally, the colonial projects of the late 18th and early 19th century relied on a more scientific approach to colonization that, like Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Egypt cited by Said, sought to turn colonized territories “from a land of obscurity” to mapped countries to be studied by Western learning institutions (83). The colonial enterprise flourished and was organized textually; anthropologists, ethnographers became weapons to spread colonization, by objectifying and controlling the bodies of the others, constructing them as inferior, and, more to the point, as in need to be educated. Objectification was and still is the means to subject individuals through a “set of material elements and techniques […] that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge” (Foucault 28). Expanding on Foucault’s theorization of disciplinary power, Said has shown that the mechanisms used to create the Other in colonial society resemble those that in Western society 382

have created “the criminal”, “the mentally ill”, and “the deviant.” This process of construction of the other implies ascribing fix identities and properties to them, as if Western men were the only capable of evolution; it is a process of “museizzazione” (Camaiti-Hostert Metix 171), where the other is defined as primitive and the norm, the West, is defined by negation as modernity. Such claims proved very resilient in the imaginary of white Australia; John Hallows, for instance, in the 1970s was still claiming that “the truth is that pure blood Aborigines … are probably closer to Neanderthal than to modern Europeans” (15). Frederick Macartney echoes him, claiming that Aborigines “retained some instincts which man lost in his evolution to civilization, and which seem to be an element … of their power to follow tracks, in which are surpassed only by the lower animals” (113-14). 59 I refer here specifically to the case of Congo because of Adam Hochschild’s detailed account in King Leopold’s Ghost of Belgian colonization of Congo and its atrocities in the name of knowledge and science. 60 See also Sabbioni et.al. (xx). 61 As Kevin Gilbert, an Aboriginal writer, puts it, “the white men wouldn’t declare war and make treaties because that would’ve meant having to deal with us as a people, having to care about our rights. It was much easier to steal our land and ignore their own guilt by calling us vermin” (Because a White Man 301). 62 Horton refers specifically to the Moore River Settlement established in Western Australia in 1917; yet, all settlements responded to the same systematic policies of separation, disciplining, and abuse. 63 The white burocrats had almost absolute power over the Aboriginal children, including the power of naming; as Keith Chesson explains in his biography of the Aboriginal dramatist Jack Davis who was removed to the Moore River Settlement: “Moore River authorities bestowed upon the children names such as Dalgety and Cross, derived from the properties and districts of their origin. They were left neither maternal Aboriginal names, nor paternal ones.” The Aboriginal poet Noonuccal, who in her adult life rejected the name bestowed upon her by the white authorities, claiming and Aboriginal identity with her new name, satirizes on the naming policies, making fun of the authorities who “could not spell the Aboriginal names so they gave us English ones” (“Poet Changes Name, Returns MBE in Bicentennial Protest”). To fully grasp the extent of racism in (colonial) Australia, and the consequent practical, if not official, enslavement and diaspora of Aborigines, it suffices to recall that similar naming policies marked the system of slavery in the United States and the rejection of white owners’ name became one of the first signs of resistance on the part of African/American activists. Moreover, the state of segregation in reserves and settlements is compared by many Aborigines, including Davis, to the apartheid laws of South Africa. Davis argues that: “the laws which exist in South Africa today were in use in Australia twenty years before they were ever thought of. … But it’s not generally known that in the thirties there was lots of laws specifically for Aboriginal people which were the counterpart of what’s happening in South Africa today. … And some of those laws were that Aboriginal people were not allowed to assemble, were not allowed to march – they could be given a sentence of three months” (“The Day after the Moore River” 165). 64 Stanner considers these four factors the main explications for what many define the “passivity” of Australian Aborigines. Contesting its depiction as a racial trait, Stanner shows how these factors concretely impair Aborigines to have agency in white Australian society. 65 It is interesting to note that this constitutes the exact reverse of the “one drop rule” in the USA where one drop of black blood was deemed enough for exclusion from white American society. 66It should be noted that the uncovering of such atrocities was largely a success of Aboriginal women’s activism (Sykes); it is thus a case in point that the movie that has brought the scandal of the Stolen Generation to international audiences, Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (2003), focuses on the story of three girls and their mothers. Towards the end of the movie, we are made aware of the agency exerted by Aboriginal women, when Molly’s mother and grandmother are told that their children have escaped and are walking their way back. The two women leave the station where they live and take refuge in the forest to wait for their girls. The forest is also symbolic, in that the white men cannot exert any control here; their vulnerability is exposed. Indeed, when the regional “protector of Aborigines” goes into the forest to see the kids arrive and thus be able to apprehend them once more, he becomes the target of the women; his power evanesces once his sight is impaired by darkness and the intricacies of the forest, so that the two women can successfully chase him away.

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67See http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/rsjproject/sorry/ for details on the Sorry Ribbon Campaign. As for the official apology, the previous Conservative Prime Minister John Howard repeatedly opposed the idea of an official apology, going so far as not to attend the official ceremony in 2008, see Tony Wright and his article “Power of occasion best expressed by the names of those who were not there” on The Age, February 13 (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/02/12/1202760300951.html). It should be noted that the apology comes with no right to compensation for Aboriginal families that have been destroyed by the policies of white Australia, see the Australian Associated Press’s article “Leaders push for 'sorry' compensation” on The Age, February 13, for some comments on the issues by leaders of various Australian Indigenous communities and institutions (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/02/13/1202760380240.html). 68 Hughes argues that in the early days of colonization Aboriginal women “provoked mild longings but “their relative immunity to rape, was nonetheless secured by their dirtiness” (93). Although white accounts do emphasize the primitiveness of Australian Aborigines, this certainly did not serve as a protective shield for Aboriginal women, who were systematically raped (Sykes). Moreover, Hughes himself refers to the common rape of Aboriginal women by bushrangers who then used them to learn how to survive in the bush; yet again, his description of this practice de-emphasizes rape as just a violent start that is soon forgotten as in the next example: “the escapee Michael Howe and his aboriginal “wife,” Black Mary. (Such liaisons, which usually began with abduction and rape, were of course invaluable to all bushrangers, as they could learn a host of survival tricks from a friendly black”) (230). 69 According to the estimates reported in Horton’s The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, the lowest number of Aboriginal peoples was reached in 1933 with 73,800. Since then the numbers have grown steadily reaching 238,600 in 1991 (1299). 70 In her later series, Moffatt has returned on the theme of dispossession in Scarred for Life (1994) with photographs in Life-magazine style that satirically comment on marginalization. She has also addressed issues like deaths in custody for Aborigines in the ambiguous Some Lads (1986), where young beautiful Aboriginal dancers pose in positions that remind of the tragic hangings of many Aboriginal prisoners. In Up in the Sky (1998), she speaks to a history of children removal and patronizing Christianity and in Something More (1989) mentioned above, she tackles violence against women, sexual desire and orientation, as well as ethnic discrimination. In all these works, Moffatt is able to maintain a humorous note in the depiction of some of the most dramatic social issues plaguing Australian society. 71 This is the title chosen by Moffatt and Catherine Summerhayes who published in 2007 the first monographic book on the Australian artist, namely The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt. Moreover, most critics and commentators of the work of Moffatt have addressed the cinematographic quality of her photographs, and, conversely, the photographic quality of her films. The blurring of the boundaries between the two artistic expressions is a line of research that goes beyond the present work, but that has already been pursued by many; see Snelling, Durand, and Summerhayes. 72 In Something More, the ambiguities mainly relate to sexual and ethnic identities and are conveyed through details and close-ups that unexpectedly play with the viewers’ expectations. 73 In the sort of photographic biography Moffatt puts together at the end of Moving Images, we clearly see this dual perspective in her life in the 1980s, with pictures at many Aboriginal demonstrations and activist marches alternated with pictures of Moffatt in the hyper-white spaces of art galleries and schools. 74 The stills in Moving Images of these two shorts stand out for the vividness of the colors, the artificiality of the landscape, which is definitely a trademark of Moffatt’s work, and the role-playing she enjoyed as an adolescent. In Spread the Word, for instance, she has an Aboriginal man stand in the kitchen with a nicely feminine apron drawn over him and a manly football in his hand. As in her later works, she also contrasts spaces, moving from the traditional Aboriginal outback, to the urban slum, and the white beaches of Sydney. Despite the experimentalism of the short, Spread the Word, was effectively circulated as a health video to raise awareness and it was even picked up by the World Health Organisation, to be distributed in Africa, because, as Moffatt provocatively claimed, “Africans” could finally “see brown people instead of pink people talking about AIDS” (qtd. in Howell 34). In Moodeitj Yorgas, she humorously and poetically alternates psychedelic backgrounds with dancing silhouetted women and medium shots of prominent Aboriginal women. Moffatt had also participated, in 1983, in another collective “political film,” as she 384

describes it, which documented the struggle of Australian Aborigines for land rights (qtd. in Matt 67); however, disagreements within the collective led to the film being actually “destroyed” and never shown, an experience that further convinced Moffatt to pursue a solo career (Murray “Tracey Moffatt” 79). For further details and analysis of Moodeitj Yorgas, see Cathy Payne’s “Visible Spaces, Electronic Records: John Conomos and Tracey Moffatt.” 75 Pellizzari similarly recalls being “slotted into being a ‘multicultural’ filmmaker” or asked to make “films that espoused the philosophy of multiculturalism” (Conomos 33), and hence encountering difficulties with her non-celebratory films. 76 In an interview with Higson, Moffatt argued that she had just made a new film for women, probably referring to Heaven, but that being labeled as a feminist “bored” her (14). Moffatt’s provocative rejection of labels has left many dismayed, so much so that even the iconic American, experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer remembers listening with concern to Moffatt’s downplaying the “political and feminist implications” of her Night Cries, which to Rainer meant “reduc[ing] the specifically ethnic and gendered anguish of that work to the universality of baby up-chuck” (224). I would contend that Moffatt’s provocative statement should be read “simply” as a rejection of any label, which, however, does not diminish her feminist and accented criticism. 77 Although refraining from making “political films,” as she calls them, Moffatt still welcomes political readings of her works and does not deny the political relevance of her stories, but she feels that her role as artist, her aesthetics need to be foregrounded to escape easy pigeonholing (qtd. in Matt 67). 78 See Sherington for the heterogeneity of the emigrants that left England from 1815 onwards. While before 1900, many were soldiers or laborers, the beginning of the new century saw a “vast exodus from Europe” and mainly from England due to the growing “numbers of an alienated working class.” For this reason, England established schemes for “’shoveling out paupers’”, first to Canada in the 1820s and then to Australia in 1832 (36). At this stage, “the Australian colonies” were much in need of “skilled labour and single women” (37) who were selected for emigration by “charitable institutions and a group known as the London Emigration Committee” (37). In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, most free immigrants to Australia were thus still coming from British territories and mainly belonged to the lower classes in search of a job and a future. 79 Known as Kanakas, Pacific Islanders were transported to Australia “against their will for the purpose of developing the sugar plantations” (London 9). Their treatment amounted to slave labor and triggered resistance and “public sentiment,” which however were mainly directed to demand the stop “of any non- white labor” (10). See Willard for “the Kanaka System of Labour” (135-77). 80 See Price (38-52, 146); Walsh (22-26); Tavan (10-11, 26); London (9-12). 81 Regulations against non-white immigration were introduced roughly around the same time in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and United States; London and Price sketchily address similarities and differences in these restriction policies across the Oceans. 82 Kate Walsh in 2001 published an interesting photographic history of The Changing Face of Australia: A Century of Immigration 1901-2000, where 1901 is emphasized as the beginning of the history of immigration to Australia given the birth of the Federation and simultaneously of the White Australia Policy. The photographs documenting the celebration of the Federation attest to the already visible Chinese presence in Australia (22), to the exclusion of Aborigines who used to hold voting rights in the states but were denied the status of citizen in the new Federation (18-19), as well as to the presence of “Afghans” (actually including people from “the Indian subcontinent, and also from Iran , Egypt and Turkey”) in the outback (23), “Indians … in the sugar and banana industries” and “Pacific Islanders … in the Queensland sugar industry” (23-24). Many of these were indentured laborers and worked in harsh conditions that resembled slavery. Japanese laborers were also recruited for the pearl shell industry in Broome (25) together with “Malays and Filipinos” (25) 83 During these 72 years, the policy went through various revisions and was actually “replaced by the Migration Act [in] 1958, which left the policy unchanged” (Hawkins 15). 84 In The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Tavan argues that the ongoing hold of the White Australia Policy is due to the “the nature of [its] abolition,” which she explores in detail, in order to show that the

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cancellation actually “removed racial discrimination and fear of the foreigner from the statutes but not from the hearts and minds of everyday people” (5). 85 See London, Willard, Pugliese. 86 Pugliese is here directly criticizing Richard Dyer and his famous study White, because of its “disregard of the historical specificity of whiteness when examined in spatio-temporal context” (150). Pugliese shows that abstracting a general category of whiteness, irrespective of its connections to the construction of ethnicity, is actually detrimental to a critical questioning of the construct itself, because abstraction makes whiteness too vague and uprooted to be effectively challenged. The analysis of whiteness within the historical specificities of its construction in determined spatio-temporal relations can instead contribute to bring out the contradictions in its definitions, as well as the purchasable, contaminated nature of the category (151-153). 87 It should be noted that the chromatic ambiguities marking the status of Italians, especially those coming from the South, migrating to predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries have known a renewed interest with the publication, for instance, of Are Italians White? edited by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salerno and Salvatore Salerno and the proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Foundation edited in the volume Shades of Black and White. Conflict and Collaboration between Two Cultures – Africa, Italy, USA. Both texts mainly concentrate on the North-American context, however, as Pugliese shows, there are numerous resonances, as well as some interesting differences, in the chromatic variations and evolutions experienced by Italian migrants. 88 Such observations were reinforced by scientific racist arguments like those of J. Lyng Harbison- Higginbotham, “scholar at the University of Melbourne” who sustained that ‘the once pure Mediterranean blood has been impoverished by an infusion of inferior African and Asian blood’” (qtd. in Pugliese 159). As mentioned before, the racism against Italians in Australia was also nourished by the racism of Northern Italians again Southern Italians that Pugliese discusses in Australia and that in the United States has been discussed by Richard Gambino in his early work Blood of My Blood in the 1970s and documented by Salvatore LaGumina in his reproduction of pamphlets and caricatures in Wop. For other historical and critical accounts of the Italian migration to the Americas and the Northern-Southern question, see the monumental saga by Jerre Mangione La Storia; in terms of Italian secondary literature, Piero Bevilacqua addresses the question of migration away from the South in his Breve Storia dell’Italia Meridionale, finally Verdicchio, as already mentioned, discusses how the Northern-Southern conflict has played out for Italian Americana in general. 89 In the invasive and disciplinary practices of racialization of bodies in Australia, Pugliese discerns a link between the immigration procedures and the policies to distinguish “fair-skin children” among Australian Aborigines to be removed from their families (164). While recognizing “the significant differences in the development of racial policies and practices, and … underscore[ing] the enormity of the genocidal effects that the regime of colonial assimilation produced in Aboriginal communities,” Pugliese wants to stress the “global reach of the apartheid screening practices that the Australian government deployed to keep Australia white” (165). 90 Pugliese points out that such practices could be described as an “outing of race, an act simultaneously inflected by questions of sexuality and gender” (161); it is an examination where the homosocial and debasing relation of “scopic vigilance” can be subversively re-read as “a brown eye that stares back at the white eye in a gesture of cyclopic defiance” (162-63). 91 See Robert Pascoe Buongiorno Australia: Our Italian Heritage for further information on the destinations of Italian workers once they were accepted to Australia. The book provides some information of the regional differences among Italians who emigrated and how these influenced their chosen destination in Australia; through individuals life stories, Pascoe narrates of Friulans (33-38), of the fishermen leaving their coastal town of Molfetta in Apulia behind (43-47, 52-54) and many more. Moreover, the book also spans across the different contributions of Italian workers in Australia, from the “cane cutters,” to the “agricultural labourers,” the “roadmakers,” the “miners” (101-23), the farmers (131-46), and the builders (154-78). Interestingly, the chapter dedicated to the miners, cane cutters, etc. is entitled “Noi kanakas,” drawing on a poem written by the Italian/Australian poet Lino Conchas. However, Pascoe does not contextualize the reference to the Pacific workers forced to work in Australia and dismisses the Indigenous 386

populations, by stating that they were “not needed.” As mentioned before, although it is necessary to put the racism suffered by immigrants to Australia in relation to the racist structure of white Australia in general, the hierarchies of oppression should always be acknowledged. 92 Baldassar and Pesman relate of early Italian sailors who ventured to Australia in its first stages of colonization (14) and O’Brien well documents the presence of a few Italian immigrants in the sugar industry in Queensland at the end of the nineteenth century, in the “fishing community of Fremantle, WA, and in the outback as miners (19-25). Rando recalls the early “missionaries …, political exiles, …, singers and musicians, … artists, … and professionals …, and businesspeople that arrived in Australia between 1840 and 1880 (“Italians in Australia” 51 – see 52-56 for a discussion of Italian in Australia prior to WWII, their occupation and discrimination). However, “in 1947 the Italian-born component of the Australian population numbered little more than 33,000;” it was only after WWII that the percentage of Australians of Italian birth or descent grew; so that in “in 1971, it was just under 290,000” (Baldassar e Pesman 14). Francesco Cavallaro, in a review of the data on Italian immigration to Australia published in 2003, observes that most studies categorize and report data according to “different time spans.” In synthesizing the collected data, he finally chooses the categories: “from the beginning to 1946,” “from World War Two to the mid sixties” and “from 1966 to 1975,” and finally “from 1976 to the present.” His categorizations reflect the major waves of Italian immigrants highlighted so far, with the majority arriving after 1946. Yet, although the highest numbers of Italian migrants to Australia were reached after WWII, it should be noted that compared to the end of the nineteenth century, in the first 20 years of the twentieth century, the numbers of Italians in Australia increased from 5,700 in 1901 to 8,100 in 1921 and “from 1921 to 1930, there was a net gain of 23,928 Italians in Australia” due to the “Immigration Restriction Acts of 1920 and 1924” in the United States. As noted above, a similar act was enforced in Australia in 1901, thus also screening the Italian migrants that started to try alternative routes to the American migration (Sherington 115; see 114-17 for further data on Italian migration during the interwar period and 141 for the post-WWII years). It should be noted that the 1% that had emigrated to Australia prior to the onset of WWII suffered increasing discrimination once their status was defined as “enemy aliens.” See Richard Bosworth’s and Romano Ugolini’s War, Internment and Mass Migration: The Italo-Australian Experience 1940–1990 for more information on this history. This story of racism and abuse has strong echoes with the histories of Italian – and for that matter, Japanese, German, etc. – enemy aliens in the United States; for more on this topic see Lawrence Di Stasi’s edited Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment During World War II. 93 Uneducated Italians in particular saw the world beyond the seas as one undifferentiated place – la Merica. … One woman who migrated to Melbourne before World War I even insisted, “I migrated to America. It did not occur to me that Australia was not in fact America” (Gabaccia “Immigrant Women” 70). 94 The Berlusconi government granted voting rights to Italians residing abroad (among whom are included second-, third, and fourth-generation hyphenated Italians), according to a political calculus that Italians abroad would facilitate the re-election of the right-wing party coalition. The clear victory of the left-wing coalition among these new voters testified to the still incomplete knowledge of hyphenated Italian cultures by the “motherland.” In terms of cultural visibility of the histories of Italian migration, just in the twenty- first century, I would mention the release of Melania Mazzuco’s novel, Vita (2003) that was awarded the prestigious Italian literary prize Strega and enjoyed both critical and commercial success. In 2006, Italian director Emanuele Crialese shot Nuovo Mondo, an epic rendition of the journey to the New Continent from Italian dispossession to humiliation and racist discrimination in Ellis Island. On the same subject, in 2002, acclaimed Italian composer and cellist, Giovanni Sollima, completed his first lyrical opera, Ellis Island commissioned by Il Teatro Massimo di Palermo. Finally, in 2007 the Italian state television, RAI 3 broadcasted, and produced the documentary Pane Amaro, directed by Italian/American documentarist and filmmaker Gianfranco Norelli. The film recounts the story of Italian migrants from the end of the eighteenth century until World War II and their internment in camps as enemy aliens. In two parts, the documentary has received critical acclaim and put the history of Italian migration on primetime TV. These are just few examples that attest to the increasing interest in the Italian communities abroad, an interest

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arising from economic interests, but also political, social and cultural factors that include the transformation of Italy from a land of emigrants to one of immigrants (Verdicchio). 95 See also Gill Bottomley regarding the genderedness of migration and the need to reconsider the history of migration and Australian feminism from women’s perspective (59-69). 96 While these arguments were particularly strong in reference to Mediterranean men and the need to control their “wild nature” as mentioned above, generally speaking, the Australian government sought to control the masses of immigrants arriving between 1947-80, by regulating the proportion of men and women. Women were considered necessary, in order to populate Australia, as it will be discussed later on, and to “create nuclear family unites that provide an appropriate market for the goods produced by industry” (Martin “Non-English Speaking” 234). 97 Alternatively, the marriage could be celebrated upon arrival in Australia (Vasta). 98 In English-speaking countries, the film was distributed as A Girl in Australia, but it is interesting to literally translate the title, which is already a parodic comment on proxy marriages “Handsome, Honest, Emigrant Man in Australia seeks Virgin Country-Woman.” 99 Among the Italian immigrants who came to Australia before WWII, Italian women, for instance, were forced into the labor market once the Australian Government interned most of the Italian men as enemy aliens during the war. As documented in Growing Up Italian in Australia, in Queensland many women went to work in the fields so as to sustain their families; in a picture taken during the war years, we see, for instance, Delia and Inez Raiteri busy laying down the “portable railway tracks to that the cane could be hauled out” (57). 100 Caroline Alcorso observes that “NESB migrant women, an in particular married and recently arrived migrant women, have been over-represented in the paid work force compared to their Anglo-Australian counterparts” (19). 101 As discussed by Mirjana Morokvasic, the systematic underestimate of working, migrant women is common to most migratory studies largely because of the lack of recognition of the types of jobs performed by women (887). See Morokvasic for further references on the matter and Evans for an analysis of available statistics on immigrant women in Australia in relation to various factors like occupational status, education, entrepreneurship, income, etc. Data on Italian women are here grouped under the arguable label of “Mediterranean women.” Morokvasic’s and Evans’s contribution are part of a Special issue of the International Migration Review specifically dedicated to “Women in Migration.” See Tirabassi for a discussion of the parallels between Italian women in Italy and in Australia and their invisibility in terms of the literature on work; see also Vasta for further data on Italian immigrant women and their work in Australia. Tirabassi’s and Vasta’s contributions are part of Vol. 9 of Altreitalie that was dedicated to the comparative analysis of Italian women in migration, considering the numerous destinations from North (United States and Canada) to South America and across the Ocean to Australia. 102 Although, as Jennifer Curtin reports, “labourist tradition in Australia has embodied an ethos of mateship,” women started forming their own unions early on; in 1882 the Victorian Tailoresses Union was formed, and more flourished after 1890 (41-42). In the nineteenth century then, most women’s unions were dismantled with the new union subsuming both men and women; the latter made their voice heard demanding equal pay in the 1920s and in 1946 the Union of Australian Women was established. With the women’s movement, the 1970s saw a flourishing of women unionists with the forming of “groups such as the Women’s Action Commission, the Women’s Trade Union Commission and the various Working Women’s Centres” (42). Moreover, in 1977, the Australian Confederation of Trade Unions finally adopted the Working Women’s Charter (42-43). See Curtin for more data on the numbers of women working and their condition (37-65). 103Alcorso briefly reviews the literature emerged in the 1970s regarding NESB women and their work conditions (22-25). As discussed above, these studies were groundbreaking, in that they often unveiled the scandalous working conditions of NESB women; however, they were later criticized from an “ethnic perspective” because of their generalizations and simplifications in representing the cultures of different ethnic groups. See Alcorso also for statistics on working women by occupation (41) and by country of origin (43).

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104 In fact, immigrant women had been fighting for their recognition and dignity since the late nineteenth century, when most of them were sheltered in country depot during their time as “domestic servants.” They fought against the initial controversy over the sheltering of immigrant women temporarily out of a job and against their living conditions in the depot. For an account of the policies and conditions of immigrant women workers and controversies over the demands of servants see Daniel and Murnane (210-21). The discussion mainly relates to Irish women, since this was the largest group of migrating women at the turn of the nineteenth century (208-36). Interestingly, the letters, contracts, and complaints mainly relate to the treatment of “immigrant” women; yet, this group of white immigrants will eventually be naturalized in Australia and largely ignore the demands of NESB women some 50 years later. 105For a discussion of feminist movements and the different phases of the women’s movement and of feminist (film) theory (mainly in relation to the United States and Britain) see Kaplan (Feminism and Film), Rich, and Mayne. Specifically in reference to black feminism and its criticism of the 1970s (American) feminist movement see hooks Ain’t I a Woman and Hull et.al. See instead Bottomley and Martin (“Non- English Speaking”) for references regarding Australian NESB women’s criticism and responses to dominant Australian feminism. 106 Although focusing here on the Italian/Australian case, it should be stressed that the strongest criticism against Australian feminism has certainly been wedged by Aboriginal women who have denounced the complicity of white women with the racist and patriarchal colonial system. In this regard, see Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism and Karen Jenning’s Sites of Difference, which obliquely addresses the issue in her discussion of the representation of Aboriginal women in cinema, bringing up the ambiguous and contradictory role of white women filmmakers. It should also be noted that black women were the pioneers against white feminism and their calls for a re-assessment is inextricably linked with the abusive history of colonialism. 107The depictions of Italian patriarchy and Italian society were also too easily dismissive of the significant roles of women in Italian society in general; moreover, as Pesman argues, the portrayals of Italian women before emigration as passive, oppressed and locked in the domus, hardly paid justice to the many women who were working and owning land already in Italy overall and especially in the South, for instance Calabria, were many men had been forced to emigrate and left the care of the house, field, and children to the women back in the homeland (396). 108 It should be noted that “western Oriental gentleman” is a folk etymology which has spread after the use of the term, similarly to the folk etymology of wop in the U.S. as “without official papers.” There is still no agreement on the definitive etymology for the term wog, which is sometimes believed to have originated from “Golliwog,” the name of a black face minstrel character and doll. The ethnic slur is not exclusively addressed against Italians, but most Southern or Eastern immigrants to Australia. In later years, the slur wog has undergone a significant re-signification, becoming popular among “ethnic” comedians, with groups like “Wogs out of Work” that were popular in the 1990s, or the following Wog-A-Rama (Davis “Aussie Humor” 11). 109 In her deliberately and provocatively humorous account of her childhood and her Italian ancestry, Pellizzari seems at times to reinforce many stereotypes. Her resentment and angry humor can sound stereotypical, when she describes her Sicilian neighbor and friend Nella. Although declaring their friendship, and her envy, Pellizzari revels in describing her embarrassment at Nella’s overweight and excessive moustache and legs hair (141). Moreover, when in Italy she describes the Piedmontese dialect she could not master with a certain contempt as “a cross between Chaucerian English, Pidgin French and baby talk” (139). 110 She remembers the conservative nuns at her school “forcing [the pupils] to sing God Save the Queen when our national anthem had long been changed to Advance Australia Fair” (143). 111 Pellizzari herself acknowledges that she has troubles with “Anglo-Celtic characters” because she “can’t make them round enough;” she points out that her art is fueled by her own familial stories (Conomos 35), which might explain her difficulty in translating to the screen the experiences, feelings and thoughts of characters and a community from which she felt so alienated. 112 Werner Levi in his Australia’s Outlook on Asia claims somewhat differently that in the nineteenth century Australia showed “a complete unreceptiveness to any ideas coming from Asia” (7). Levi’s account 389

seems to consistently belittle the racism of Australian early colonies and ensuing institutions; he argues that the concept of “race” is “used loosely” in Australia and that “racists may never have existed in Australia in large numbers” (6). Being published in 1958, Levi’s perspective voices the continuing racism in the country that was still enforcing the White Australia Policy. 113 See Walker for a detailed discussion of Australian relationships with India in the late nineteenth century (13-25). 114 Pearson’s book employs a eugenic discourse, speaking of “higher” and “lower” races and arguing that the “higher races” were on the brink of extermination, while the “lower races” would gradually take over. In this context, parallels were drawn to the Aboriginal populations, in that the failure to fully populate Australia in the first decades of the twentieth century was seen as a sign of weakness and a threat to white Australians’ claims to the land. Given the demographic emergencies in Asia, the vast, still empty land of Australia was seen as doomed to serve as a solution to the problem, unless white Australia was able to lay claim to the land, by populating and harvesting it. Yet, the discovery of the dryness of the interior land and a failure to overcome put white Australians in a position similar to the one they argued against the Aborigines (Walker 7-10; see also 154-67 for a discussion of the Australian land and its potentialities and delusions). An illustration on the Bulletin on July 18, 1907 seems to be an acknowledgment of the Asian threat that could “aboriginalise” white Australians. In the picture, an aggressive, towering Chinese man with long Dracula nails and two pointed carnivorous teeth looks ready to grab the vast expanse of Australia shown as almost completely empty in the desertic outback. On his way, there are only few stones, a running and scared Aborigine, another naked Aborigine stunned in seeming fear, and a third Aborigine lying down with a club. Against these seemingly helpless and doomed Aborigines, on the bottom of Australia stands a white man, facing the Chinese man on firm feet and pointing to him, while scolding a young boy to pay attention and beware of the threat (Walter Plate 16). 115 Indeed, in 1904, Japan won the “Russo-Japanese war” and this victory, as W.E.B. DuBois famously argued, “marked an epoch. The magic of the word “white” is already broken and the Color Line in civilization has been crossed … The awakening of the yellow races is certain. That the awakening of the brown and black races will follow in time, no unprejudiced student of history can doubt” (34). DuBois’s famous views on Asia and the Color Line clearly exemplify the fear that dominated at the time in the white centers of power that saw their dominance more and more challenged. It should be noted that the expression “the yellow peril” was coined by German Kaiser Wilhelm II in reaction of Japan’s rise over Russia (Wyndham 358, Walker (3). 116 The theme of “people or perish” was widely common at the time and famously argued for by the Commonwealth Minister of Health, Bill Hughes, who in 1937 stated that “Australia mush advance or populate, or perish” (Wyndham 20). Illustrations and pamphlets with such warning spread over the country and Wyndham reproduces a “fund-raising appeal in the Charities’ Gazette and General Intelligences, Official organ of the Benevolent Society of New South Wales” distributed on September, 25, 1919 (vii), which asks contribution for the Renwick Hospital of Infants. The frame of the ad depicts angelic faces of white children staring at the reader and embodying the call contained in the written message at the center of the flyer: “Encourage the Best Type of Immigration” (20). 117 See also Werner Levi 13-14. 118 Exceptions were made in cases where the industry could have not survived with a regular influx of Chinese workers; this was the case of the pearl industry in North Western Australia for instance (Tavan 11); for a thorough discussion of the policies of exemption see Yarwood (104-23). 119 The literature points out the numerous differences among Chinese migrants based on their origin within the vast territory of China, which implied great varieties in languages, traditions, class, etc. (see Price 10-11 on this difficulty). See Choi for more details on the conditions that led to emigration and the main provinces affected in China (1-16). 120 In reference to similarities in the histories of Chinese and Italian migrants, Gabaccia argues that “either white or black, Italians were ‘the Chinese of Europe’ in all three countries,” i.e. USA, Canada and Australia (Italy’s Many Diasporas 181). On the one hand, the statement acknowledges the strong racist discourses against Chinese constructed as the lowest of immigrants, and by analogy Gabaccia argues, (Southern) Italians were the lowest of Europe. However, her claim partially ignores that Italian migrants were part of 390

migratory waves in which Chinese constituted a high percentage and discrimination against Asians in Australia has arguably been stronger than against any European migrant, however ambiguous its whiteness might have been. Gabaccia also problematically establishes a relation between the Greeks migrants of more ancient times and the Italian migrants (6-7), who were escaping misery and starvation rather than driven by entrepreneurial spirit. Moreover, she problematically claims that Australian multiculturalism displays a, positive in her accounts, lower degree of hyphenated identities (185). 121 The relations between the ‘Coloureds” in Australia, like in all multiracial societies, were thus conflicted. Early in the twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois famously addressed the relations among “the coloured races” and called for them to unite, in order to fight humiliation and weakness and stake a claim for equal standing with the European races (65-67). His speeches and writings about Asia interestingly emerged after Japan won the war against Russia in 1904 and directly commented on Wilhelm Kaiser II’s fears of a yellow peril (65). He contested the discourse predominant in the United States at the time that black and Asian people should not unite in a resistance against whites in America (65). DuBois’s calls were not for a “tyranny of black folk or yellow folk or white folk,” but an acknowledgment that the common humiliation and marginalization of “coloured peoples” required them to unite, in order to fight against the “hegemony of the white race” (67). DuBois also addresses the conflicts between Japan and China that he sees fomented by Western wars and domination (88-98). 122 One of the first artists to directly speak to his experiences as a Chinese-Aboriginal man was writer and musician Jimmy Chi who in 1979 wrote the play Bran Nue Dae with his band the Knuckcles. The play is broadly based on his own life experiences and represents the multiple marginalities in multicultural Australia; it is written in Aboriginal English with intrusions of Kriol (a creole languages resulting from the encounter of Chinese, Malay and Aboriginal; see Edwards and Yuanfang 8), and it aims at humorously deconstructing dominant stereotypes. 123 As mentioned before in reference to Hurst, there were early voices dissenting these views on Chinese and Asian immigrants, but they were mainly silent and publicly decried. Diana Wyndham in her book Eugenics in Australia: Striving for National Fitness, for instance, refers to the professional geographer, Taylor Griffith, who argued that the dry lands of Australia were “no asset,” but on the contrary a “burden,” because they were not usable. He favored in this regard the arguments for leaving the Northern Territory to Asian migrants, who might better cope with the tropical climate (39); interestingly, the tropical climate in the North was a source of heated discussion and arguments for keeping white men and women away from the Northern Territory, because it was believed that tropical climate would corrupt white children and turn them into degenerate (36). Griffith was also a supporter of “Chinese-European marriages;” this simple suggestion drew much criticism and was promptly ridiculed on the Daily Telegraph, June 25, 1923, with an illustration representing a “Mongolian men” – overweight, short, with long nails and what seems like a fan in his hand – next to a beautiful, white woman dressed in Oriental clothes. Behind them a white men dressed in a judge gown points to the difference in height, reminding of the superiority of the white races symbolized by their height. In the rhetorical question underneath the picture, the Telegraph writes: “Professor Taylor Griffith (Sydney University) asks: why are we horror-stricken at any suggestion of marriage with Mongolian? [and in bold] Will Somebody Tell Him?” (41). 124 As Yu points out, the stereotyping and marginalization of the Chinese in Australia was helped along by the spreading of narratives and fictions that constructed a common imagined other marked as deviant and foreign; Yu with his analyses illustrates that “the Chinese in Australian fiction have been subject to racism, ethnocentrism and Orientalism” (65). Walker also re-traces the many narratives that framed the global anxieties over the Asian nations and in his chapter “The Invasion Narrative,” he draws attention to the proliferation, at the turn of nineteenth century, of fiction depicting a threatening Asia. He argues that “the invasion narrative was commonly a discourse upon vulnerability at a time of growing anxiety about the decline of British power.” He spans British, American, and Australian fiction, highlighting some commonalities in a generalized Western fear over the Oriental others (98-112). Indeed, many of the common discourses circulating regarding the Chinese in Australia resonate with representations that Hollywood has spread as part of a global imaginary: the hordes of undifferentiated Chinese – or “oriental” – men threatening the white hero, the serpentine mischievousness of Chinese men of power, and the exotic and threatening beauty of “oriental women.” These are some of the popular Hollywood images of “Asians” 391

that Christine Choy and Renne Tajima assemble in their documentary Yellow Tale Blues: Two American Families (1990), intercutting them with scenes of daily life for the Choys, a Chinese, working-class family, and the Tajima, a Japanese, middle-class family. The striking contrast between the racist and Orientalist Hollywood depiction and the actual struggle for Chinese and Japanese families to fit in within a Western world resonates with Australian histories as well and constitutes a visual reminder of the many narratives that have shaped the Western imagination of “Orientals.” 125 His anecdotic narrative recalls his experiences in an opium den and the corruption that, he argues, opium brought to white women and men. 126 See Tucker’s “Your Worst Nightmare: Hybridised Demonology in Asian-Australian Women’s Writing” for an analysis of how Asian-Australian women writers are today reappropriating and resignifying on these stereotypes. 127 It should be noted that the association between the Oriental threat and anti-feminist sentiment was also grounded in the gendered and masculinist discourse that defined Asia in the first place. As Walker illustrates with his reviews of both fictional and historical accounts of “Asia,” “the awakening East drew heavily on … metaphors of fluidity and tidal change. Asia was … seen as both oceanic and threatening. … in this subtle, infinitely flexible and feminized world, a white man might easily become bewildered” (132). In particular, “China was described as a great dam, soon to burst, sending inundating rivers and flows of migrants into neighboring countries” ( 37). As these accounts show, Orientals were systematically feminized in a narrative that constructed them as able to infiltrate borders, to insinuate doubt, and vice, just like the feminine body, which, as Kristeva has theorized, in his association with bodily fluids, has long been abjected, for its defiance of borders between interior and exterior. 128 It should be noted that contrary to Japanese and Indian migrants, Chinese men were not allowed to “bring out wives and minor children” to Australia; the lack of agreements between Australia and China and of political pressure on the part of China to protect its migrants often put Chinese migrants in much harsher conditions than other groups (81). Yarwood also documents how little, however, the presence of a Chinese Consul General in Australia could actually contribute to change the regulations. In 1918, for instance, the consular representative led a delegation to demand that the regulations against the immigration of wives and children of Chinese men working in Australia be revised “on the lines of regulations in the United States and Canada.” However, at the time 17,000 Chinese men were reported to live in Australia against a mere 900 Chinese women. Given the disproportionate gender gap, the Minister further refused the demands of the Chinese community (121-22). 129 According to Li, Law had already experimented successfully with directing for the stage during her high school years, when her direction of a play “adaptation of the Joan of Arc story, which swept all of the awards in the school-wide competition.” Moreover, during her years at the Radio Television of Hong Kong, she tested her talents in most areas of television production – directing, scriptwriting, and producing, being credited for twelve acclaimed television dramas (Li). 130 In interviews, Law actually compares the condition of Hong Kong Chinese and their global diaspora to the Jewish diaspora. 131 Mar refers specifically to the migration to Australia; however the term and Law’s film refer more generally to wealthy, professional Hong Kong migrants to Western countries. Mar also observes that the term usually refers to men and evokes the picture of the married women as instead grounded in the home. In Law’s film, however, the astronaut syndrome affects both men and women emigrating and leaving behind their loved ones. See Ong’s Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality for further information on the “astronaut” trope (127-28). 132 It should be noted that Law seems to cannily navigate the difficulties of finding finances to support her projects. Law has repeatedly voiced her desire to make auteurist and non-commercial movies, although she admits that early on she only timidly refused Golden Harvest, one of the biggest production studios in Hong Kong, “to make her their queen of the B-picture remake” (Hanos “A Different Life in Australia” 4). Since then she has not regretted her artistic decision and has always been able to work with decent budgets on her non-conventional projects. It seems that Law’s strategy to maintain a certain creative independence involved favoring co-productions, where no one major producer had definitive pressure on the project; for Autumn Moon she found funding both in Japan and Hong Kong, relying on her scripting a Japanese lead 392

role and casting Japanese actor, Masatoshi Nagase, who was already known thanks to his role in Jim Jarmush’s Mystery Train (1989); similarly for the Goddess of 1967, Law managed to have the film co- produced in Australia and Japan, by offering popular Japanese fashion model, Rikiya Kurokaxa, his cinematic debut. Just arrived in Australia, Law also managed to have Floating Life produced by the Australian Film Finance Corporation (according to Hanos there was also “Taiwanese finance ... involved” 4), despite its being predominantly in a foreign language and featuring practically no Australian characters. It seems that her casting Annette Shun Wah in the role of the “big sister” might have helped her receive funding, given the popularity of Shun Wah as presenter “of innovative music and art programmes” (Press Kit Floating Life), which guaranteed more media coverage (Englund, Chisholm, Cochrane). As this brief sketch hints, Law’s script and casting choices seem to be cannily evaluated, in order to navigate the film industry so as to remain artistically independent, but still commercially viable. Further study should be carried out on the production of accented cinemas within national contexts generally, to better understand how accented filmmakers have learned to carve an interstitial position between artisanal and commercial cinemas. 133 In this context, O’Regan also points out that the label post-colonial is particularly problematic in reference to Australia and its artistic productions, be it literary or cinematic, because, beyond the debated and criticized suggestion of an easy post-phase of colonization, postcolonial in Australia could also refer to the decolonization from Britain (which however has never been complete), and to the decolonization of Australia’s Indigenous populations (hardly ever started). Adding to these problematic dimension, the label postcolonial would “associate Australia with the African and Asian States gaining their independence,” which would hide the fact that Australia has been a settler and not a colonized society – given the early genocide of its Indigenous populations (Australian National Cinema 306). 134 Over the decades, stories have varied from bush-rangers’ “epic” lives, to mythological frontier stories in the outback – where the indigenous populations were either erased and displaced in the depth of a landscape, or pitted as “noble savages,” a doomed race, etc. – to the later emergence of multicultural suburban comedies. In his brief reference to Australian national cinema, Elsaesser mainly focuses on the New Australian Cinema of the 1980s and cites: Gallipoli (1981), Peter Weir’s epic tale of Australia’s role in WWII, which partially criticizes and ridicules the nation’s marginality and futile, but deadly, attempt to gain a seat among the Western powers; Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1981), a denunciation of British imperial wars, specifically the Boer war in South Africa, fought with the help of Australian soldiers, often sacrificed as easy scapegoats for imperial violence. Finally, We of the Never Never (1982), where Igor Auzins’s adaptation of Jeannie Gunn’s novel reinforced the so-called “landscape tradition” in Australian cinema with its mythologizing of the outback, settlers’ life and the exotic “primitivism” of Australian Indigenous populations (293). 135 Obviously, many more are the studies dedicated to the Australian National Cinema; my emphasis on these two texts is due to their seminal contribution to both the theorization and historical analysis of Australian national cinema, which grounds most other studies. Other key texts that should be mentioned are: Graeme Turner’s National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative first published in 1986 and revised in 1993, which provides a useful framework to understand “the ways in which the Australian culture creates meaning in its narratives in order to suggest not only what an Australian narrative is, but also what it does” (2); Scott Murray’s books The New Australian Cinema and Australian Film 1978-1992; Briand McFarlane’s study of Australian Cinema; Glen Lewis’s Australian Movies and the American Dream on the relationship between Hollywood and Australian cinema; Gelder and Jacobs’s Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, which reviews, instead, the literature on the centrality of the landscape in Australian cinema and culture and connects it to the idea of an “Aboriginal sacred” that they read through the Freudian concept of the unheimlich, in order to assess and explain the impact of the groundbreaking Mabo decision in 1992 that overturned the doctrine of terra nullius; Felicity Collins and Therese Davis’ Australian Cinema After Mabo, which further details the consequences of the establishment of the Native Title Act in 1993 and the role that cinema played in this (re)negotiation of national identity; cultural theorist Meaghan Morris’s recent Identity Anecdotes:Translation and Media Culture, where she reflects on the position of Australian cinema and national identity in the processes of globalization and transnationalism, posing questions on how to build 393

solidarity through narrative today; finally, the latest anthology The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand by Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie released in 2007, where once again the authors reflect on the usefulness of retaining the category of national cinema in the face of globalization and the peculiar history of the Australian cinematic industry. 136 As Shohat and Stam observe, Anderson did not consider the intersections between a national and an imperial sense of identity; they emphasize that in relation to colonizing nations, the imagined community often expanded across oceans, in order to support “the imperial project as a whole.” Australian national identity was indeed at pains to create a sense of belonging that would resist and counter the already established imaginary relationship to Australia as a part of the British Empire. 137 What is central in Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power is the fact that subjected individuals are active participants in the relations of power, resisting and simultaneously reproducing and reinforcing them. Resistance is an inherent part of the system and it is possible because power results out of the discursive practices, which “are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation …, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles” (27). These are the cracks where contradictions emerge. 138 See chapter three for a more detailed discussion of spaces of dissention in a Foucaultian framework of discursive power (216). 139 One can hear in this passage once again echoes of Marxist thought where class conflict is the moving force of history; yet, Foucault carefully and repeatedly avoids identifying the history of struggle with class conflict exclusively, which is part of his strongest criticism of Marxism. 140 Foucault draws on Nietzsche to define genealogy and never actually names Walter Benjamin as a practitioner of this system – which can be understood in terms of his purposeful distantiation from Marxist scholarship; yet, his description of genealogy as requiring “patience and a knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material” cannot but resonate with Benjamin’s (genealogical) attempt to read the 19th century through its Passagen, the arcades where consumer capitalism and its development were on display (140). Moreover, as Hokenson points out, Benjamin with his “distinction between history (the winners’ flattering account of themselves) and tradition (the losers’ memories)” enormously contributed to the rethinking of history thus challenging the objectiveness claimed by most historical accounts (125). Benjamin’s observations on history show awareness that every historical account is indeed a reconstruction, a story where the chronicler has picked and chosen the pieces of the puzzle, as historian and literary critic Hayden White argued. White called for a “metahistory,” a kaleidoscopic reconstruction that denies any single correct view, and instead brings to surface different perspectives. Similarly, Marxist literary critic Jameson reminds us that, although history is non-textual, in that class struggle is the force that produces it, it is an absent cause that we can only access through texts, making the task of the critic one of reconstructing and retracing the “political unconscious” in texts (The Political Unconscious 20). To a certain extent, the critical humor that I will be describing in the next paragraphs and chapters serves to unbury this political unconscious; it forces us to see, feel, and think through the contradictions in our histories, paradoxes that we often embrace or at least fail to question in our daily routines. 141 Genealogical and rhizomatic understandings of history work through contextualization; in these frameworks, as cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg explains, “analyzing an event … involves (re)constructing or, in Foucault’s terms, fabricating the network of relationships into which and within which it is articulated, as well as the possibilities for different articulations” (54). In rhizomatic expansion and genealogical investigations, there are still connections and relations, but these are hardly linear, predictable, and retraceable in vertical lines; causes and effects need to be assessed by a greater inclusion of contextualizing factors, by an attention to the multiplicity of histories that have nourished the rhizome. I refer to Grossberg for a detailed discussion of the concept of articulation that, stemming from Gramsci, has found much application into the field of cultural studies. 142 “Then you waste the worthless, the denials, the disregards, the ugliness. Retain the judgment, deep and rooted, of the ancient peoples.” In her prose and poetry, Anzaldua constantly code-switches between English and Spanish, practicing a mestiza language to voice her mestiza consciousness. 143 Various film scholars cite the short as an exemplary example of oppositional gaze that parodies early ethnographic discourse (see Shohat and Stam 326, 337; French “An Analysis of Nice Coloured Girls,” 394

Jennings Sites of Difference, Mellencamp “Haunted History,” Morris “Beyond Assimilation,” and Kaplan Trauma Culture). 144 While all three of the authors mentioned have produced scholarly as well as filmic deconstructive criticism of anthropological discourse – although Rony’s films are arguably less known as well as more recent than Minh-ha’s and Jayamanne’s – there are also other filmmakers who have contributed important documentaries, like Ngozi Onwurah, who made And Still I Rise in 1993, and scholars like Assinka Oksiloff, who, in her Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography and Early German Cinema has significantly contributed to the understanding of the role played by cinema in constructing a spectacularized, objectified, and popularized notion of the “exotic other.” 145 In her book, Women, Native, Other, Minh-ha ironically denies them the “fathers” of Western anthropology an authorial voice; yet, in contrast to Western appropriations of indigenous narratives and stories, Minh-ha does use quotation marks and offers all the references in her footnotes; however reading her book effectively forces us to understand the ideological meanings that a discourse around the “author” carries, namely who is granted the rights of authorship. 146 As studies in national cinema have shown, the pressure towards a feature film industry is part of the development of a successful national cinema that needs to compete internationally (see Elsaesser and O’Regan Australian National Cinema). For this reason, most studies of national cinemas ignore the national histories of ethnographic filmmaking, which are instead documented in separated studies on the ethnographic film generally. However, scholars like Rony and Oksiloff have effectively proven the many intersections between national commercial and narrative cinema on the one hand and ethnographic filmmaking on the other – Rony predominantly in reference to Hollywood and Oksiloff to German cinema. The brief overview of ethnographic cinema in Australia offered in this study wishes to point to its centrality in the development of Australian national discourses and the Australian feature film industry, as I will further highlight in the next section. Early seminal studies of Australian national cinema like Andrew Pike’s and Ross Cooper’s Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production and John Tulloch’s Legends on the Screen: The Australian Narrative Cinema 1919-1929, as their title already suggest, do not address ethnographic film and do not even mention the significance it had in spreading film technology in Australia. This factor is instead taken into account by Graham Shirley and Brian Adams in Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, which mentions Baldwin Spencer and the 1960s success of Ian Dunlop’s Desert People only in passing, but offers some reflections regarding the Australian film industry’s interest in banking on the spectacle of the other, as I will discuss in the next section. More recent studies of Australian national cinema tend to concentrate on the period since the New Wave of the 1970s onwards, like Dermody and Jacka and O’Regan, and therefore do not mention the early development of ethnographic film. O’Regan, however, does discuss the significance of the documentary tradition in Australia, under which he includes ethnographic filmmaking (Australian National Cinema 170). 147 Alfred Cort Haddon had actually already experimented with the kinematograph in his field research in Australia in 1898; however, Spencer’s first footage is considerably longer and hence commonly taken to be the first ethnographic “film” made in Australia. Interestingly, it was upon Haddon’s suggestion that Spencer also took the kinematograph with him on the field (128); these first ethnographic experimentations with film technology often had a commercial sponsoring and Haddon had actually suggested to Spencer to “defray” the expenses of taking a kinematograph with him on the field, by letting “the trade” copy and exploit the footage he was to produce, where “the trade” “was the third great producer of cinema on Aborigines” (Leigh 80-81). 148 Michael Leigh has worked as a film archivist at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra and has been part of the organization of Back of Beyond: Discovering Australian Film and Television, a program presented at the University of California in Los Angeles that saw the collaboration of the Australian Film Commission, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Australian Bicentennial Authority. The program was presented in 1988 as an international initiative celebrating the bicentennial of Australia; given the ideological underpinnings of such nationalist celebrations and the need to diffuse the virulent criticism leveled against them, the program was careful in offering four strands that tried to be representative of the many faces of Australia: “Women of the Wave,” “Nurturing the New Wave,” “Mixing Fact and Fiction,” “Formative Landscapes,” “Curiouser and Curiouser,” “Cross-over and Collaboration: 395

Kennedy Miller.” Leigh wrote the essay to introduce the section “Curiouser and Curiouser,” which focuses on the representations of Aborigines in cinema. His brief overview clearly puts the ethnographic film history of Australia in relation with the dominant Australian film industry; despite the briefness and introductory tone of the essay, the overall approach helps to emphasize how these two strands of filmmaking in Australia have always been in dialogue. 149 Cunningham and Jacka trace the genealogy of the Commonwealth Film Unit, today known as Film Australia back to 1911. First, it was a “production unit within the federal government” that eventually grew under the supervision of Stanley Hawes into a “government-owned production company … known as Commonwealth Film Unit. Thus, in 1976, this was incorporated under the Australian Film Commission “and took on its present name, Film Australia” (111). 150 Griffith pointedly observes that the popularity of Spencer’s touring ethnographic films could also be understood within the context of “turn-of-the-century … Victorian standards of taste and decency,” which his films allowed to forgo under the mask of their “scholarly credentials” (165-66). 151 Hawes’s success in promoting Australian ethnographic filmmaking and turning it into a profitable marketing asset for national cinema is evidenced by the well attended and advertised eighth edition of the Festival dei Popoli, an internationally renowned film festival held in Florence and dedicated to film of social documentation. In 1966, the festival dedicated a whole section to a retrospective on Australian ethnographic filmmaking, which was presented by Hawes, who also prepared the brief historic overview I have cited in these pages. 152 The renaissance of Australian national cinema thanks to state financing and nationalist policies directed to counter Hollywood domination of the market heavily relied on the “AFC genre” or landscape film. Trying to compete with Hollywood, Australian national cinema, as O’Regan observes, needed to “carve a space locally and internationally” and often did so by “indigeniz[ing] genres, artistic movements and influences” (Australian National Cinema 1). Thus, as Gibson observes, under the encouragements of funding entities such as the Australian Film Commission, “during the 1970s and early 1980s, filmmakers … were attempting to create a cohesive view of national character through the rendition of Australian landscape as if it were the one thing that all factions of the society held in common” (68), a strategy also indebted to the success of Roeg’s Walkabout (1971). The leading films that popularized the AFC genre are certainly Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the most popular Australian movie of the triennium 1975- 7, and The Last New Wave (1977) (Lewis 45, O’Regan Australian National Cinema 12, Collins and Davis 76-78 ). The flourishing of the landscape tradition should be further explored not only against the global pressures of Hollywood, but also against the socio-political changes that affected Australian society specifically, notably the referendum that in 1967 finally granted citizenship rights to the Indigenous populations of Australia. 153 O’Regan cites many reasons, which can account for “the documentary in the fiction and the fiction in the documentary in Australian film-making;” firstly, he points to the centrality of “remythologizing of Australian history” and to the documentarist “storehouse of types, stereotypes … to be drawn upon for fiction film-making;” secondly, he refers to the concrete conditions of production that for many years offered Australian filmmakers only the option of making documentaries; thirdly, the documentaries’ stories center on “ordinary people” and thus “fit a fictional tradition which combines the tall story and ‘the blatter’;” fourthly, smaller national cinemas cannot aspire to compete with Hollywood’s “standards of imaging” and thus the cheaper documentary aesthetics “turn[s] a minus into a plus;” finally, state funding for cinema and TV need to “educate, entertain and inform” and the blending of the informative documentary style with the entertaining fictional perspective helps satisfy “the film policy’s dualist emphases” (241-43). I would add that to better understand such blurring of fact and fiction, we need to consider the links between the documentary and ethnographic tradition in Australia, as well as the instrumental appropriation of Indigenous meanings for the Australian national project. Further work is needed to document the many dialogues between Australian ethnographic and fiction film, from a focus on individual directors’ dual contribution in both fields, to the documentation of ethnographic-like scenes in many a popular national feature film. Additionally, another aspect worth further research would be the impact that filmmaking techniques developed in the ethnographic field have had on fictional filmmaking. Indeed, most critics of ethnographic film point out that early ethnographers like Spencer and subsequently 396

the anthropologists working for the University of Adelaide and Mountford experimented with the new technology to make their footage more entertaining. Spencer complained about the difficulties of shooting in the field, where no notice is given about the beginning or end of a ceremony, or where subjects move suddenly to a different spot. To ease such difficulties, Spencer eventually mounted “a panning head on his tripod so he could follow his subjects as they moved about” (Dunlop 12). Spencer, and his close collaborator Frank Gillen, were also conscious of the monotony of the single camera angle, so they started to employ two cameras and to take shots at different distances from the ceremony that they would then edit together to confer more pace and rhythm to the overall footage (Griffiths 156). It would be worth investigating to what extent the knowledge and techniques developed in the field contributed to the development of film conventions employed in early Australian fiction film. 154 I am borrowing the expression “intertextual invention” from Shohat and Stam, who employ it in reference to Christopher Columbus’s America, which was “formed by readings from the scriptures, Herodotus, Marco Polo, King Arthur, chivalric romances, and fifteenth century chronicles of African expeditions.” These “multiple intertexts” in the New World “encountered an indigenous culture that tried to account for the invaders through its own preexisting mythic system” (67). In a similar approach, in South of the West: Postcoloniality and the Narrative Construction of Australia, Gibson documents the intertextual invention of Australia that “from the times of Ptolemy through Saint Augustine” was fantasized as the “Great South Land” (10). 155 I am using the general term other to emphasize the commonalities in the violence of Western discourse when approaching different cultures and defining them in similar terms – according to the general dichotomy us vs. them. However, to better understand the workings of such imperial ideologies, the specific histories should always be taken into consideration and emphasized, so as to avoid a further universalizing practice. The turning of the gaze in ethnographic cinema has also been theorized in relation to commercial cinema by African/American film theorist bell hooks and the subjecting power of vision is painfully discussed by theorists like the Mariniquais Frantz Fanon and the British/Jamaican Stuart Hall. Moreover, their experiences and the calls for a countering discourse are paralleled by the writing back of (post)colonial writers, a practice emphasized in the anthology The Empire Writes Back and by writers like the Nigerian Chinua Achebe reacting to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 156 Beyond the artistic resignification carried out by filmmakers, writers, and artists of Aboriginal descent, there are also more prosaic and concrete applications of such a process; the exemplary case being the role played by Haddon’s early ethnographic footage shot in 1898 “in the landmark Murray Island Land Case (1992), commonly known as the Mabo land rights.” Mabo’s victory in the case led to the dismantling of the terra nullius doctrine in Australia and the establishment of “native title rights.” Mabo won his case by “proving continuity of tradition,” and hence ownership of Mer Island with Haddon’s footage of “Mer (Murray) Islanders performing dances in 1898 that are still in use today” (92). This is a paradigmatic example where the subjugated knowledges of the Indigenous peoples’ of Australia, inscribed but silenced in the texture of dominant Australian narratives, have emerged to re-write the history of Australia in the twentieth century. 157 The representation of Marbuk is still much contested within Aboriginal studies as well. While Mudrooroo argues that Marbuk is still today “to Chauvel’s credit, or perhaps in spite of Chauvel, … the only dignified Aboriginal male lead” (“Chauvel and the centring of the Aboriginal male in Australian film”), Aboriginal anthropologist Marcia Langton harshly criticizes the film. Indeed, Marbuk dies at the end of the film, but not at the hands of white society, but rather because he has transgressed Aboriginal law. According to Langton, the film, thus, “rewrites Australian history so that the black rebel against white colonial rule is a rebel against the laws of his own society” (45). I refer to the two authors for a more detailed discussion of the matter and to Barbara Creed for a discussion of the film that inserts it into its local and global socio-historical context (“Breeding Out the Black”). 158 Although the film was produced and conceived by the five brothers Tait, Charles, Edward, Frank, Nevin, and John (Graham and Shirley 16), Charles Tait is commonly credited as the director (Bertrand 15). Today, only seventeen minutes survive of the original film and the estimates of its length are mainly based on the advertisement materials of the time boasting a 4,000-6,000 feet long film, which critics estimate

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would take sixty-four to ninety-six minutes to screen on a hand-cranked projector used at the time (Bertrand 15). 159 Just as missions were heavily involved in producing ethnographic films in Australia to advertise their missionary work with Aborigines, other religious bodies in Australia like the Salvation Army were among the first to engage with the power of cinema to educate. The Limelight Department of the Salvation Army based in Melbourne is commonly credited with the first “film studio” in Australia which gained success with the early screen presentation of Soldiers of the Cross, projected “on 13 September 1900” and described as “a lecture on the Christian martyrs.” The Salvation of the Army then continued with more “secular projects” like the “35-minute long The Inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth” produced “on behalf of the New South Wales Government” (Mayer and Beattie 1). The early productions of the Salvation Army were mainly an idea of Major Joseph Perry who after witnessing “Carl Hertz’s first cinematograph screening in Melbourne … sensed that, if used in conjunction with magic lantern slides, it could be unrivalled in its power to attract large congregations” (11). Combining his early insights into the future of the cinematograph with the growing concerns of the time on “the morals of society,” Perry, together with General Herbert Booth, established the first film studio in 1897 and they went on to produce various Christian-inspired “story films,” which they believed “could best convey their message” (Graham and Shirley 10-11).This early religious component in Australian cinema seems still largely understudied and certainly constitutes a promising area of future research that would shed further light on the role of religious discourse and practices in the colonization of Australia. 160 There are many similarities between the Australian national cinema’s emphasis on the outback as a sign of nationhood and early American cinema’s construction of the frontier; further research into the differences between the two national cinemas and their relationship to the land and its reproduction could shed new light on the role of cinema in the processes of nation formation. See John Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique for an early discussion of the monumental landscape of Westerns. 161 In 1919, Longford was sponsored by the “Sydney company, The Vita Film Corporation” to go to New Zealand to film A Maori Maid’s Love, where Lottie Lyell, the most famous Australian star of the time and regular collaborator with Longford, starred as the Maori girl. The film did not have much success and did not “take full advantage … of the Maori life, and customs” (Pike and Ross 76), indirectly confirming Longford’s keener interest in settlers’ stories, rather than in colonial encounters. 162 Mudrooroo defines “walkabout” as “the pilgrimages that Aboriginal people must take to their sacred places to conduct ceremonies” (Aboriginal Mythology 174). The coinage of the term is unclear, although it is documented that it was first used by European colonizers “in derogatory fashion,” reinforcing the idea that Australian Aborigines were “aimless” wanderers; today, it is recognized as the English term to describe their sacred journeys through the land. 163 Interestingly, the Chauvels recognize the abuses perpetrated by early settlers and the fact that many survived only thanks to the Aborigines, but simultaneously, they argue that “these are the things worth remembering – the courage of the men who deliberately went to the lands which had been condemned” (62), going on to celebrate the courage of early white adventures. 164 Chauvel had already exploited his “explorations” in Aboriginal cultures for his previous film Uncivilised (1936), a sort of Tarzan story in which he combined the star capital of British star Dennis Hoey and the spectacle of “Palm Island blacks” (Carlsson 92). He included many “scenes of Aboriginal warfare and ritualistic corroboree,” which despite being partially censored because too violent, greatly contributed to the success of the film (93). To advertise the film, he had the Aboriginal man playing “Big Belt” go “for a joy-flight over Sydney in a light plane” (94), fully exploiting him for his “entertainment freak show.” The film had a “tremendous success in America” (94), probably a reason for the later advice to continue making pictures with some Aboriginal color. 165 Beyond the stylistic influence of American westerns mentioned above in relation to the interiors of Jedda, Chauvel’s reliance on American production models stems from his extensive travels to the United States, where he learned and greatly appreciated “American production methods” (Lewis 11), realizing that “Hollywood had an unassailable lead in resources and talent in the making of spectacular costume drams” (Tulloch 271). However, observing the United States film market, he also “saw that among the biggest box office successes of 1923 were Nanook of the North and Hottentot” (271). This was the territory in which 398

Australian pictures could carve a space internationally and infiltrate the American market, by exploiting the exotic spectacle of indigenous cultures, which was a strategy facilitated by the great supply of ethnographic footage discussed in the previous section. 166 Tunnicliffe observes a similar use of the landscape in Moffatt’s photography, which “is engaged in a serious game with the fiction of location constructed through image associations already familiar from film, television and photography;” such a game aims at unveiling “the construction of nation through a rhetoric of cultural dispossession” and ultimately illustrate “that landscape is as intensely inscribed through the psychosocial and psychosexual life of the communities that inhabit it” (24). Moreover, Gen Mimura observes a similar criticism of the appropriation of Aboriginal signs for commercialization in beDevil, which also comments on the tourist selling of Australia as “natural paradise” (112-113). 167 Moffatt’s artificial landscapes recall the colonial paintings she inserts in the re-enactments in Nice Coloured Girls. There, they stand for a colonial history that cannot be easily forgotten or erased; indeed, we see a hand repeatedly blacken the painting of colonial Sydney cove and shatter the glass, to always find the intact picture beneath. Finally, with repeated blows the hand successfully tears down the whole wall where the paining hangs, seemingly suggesting that to resignify and alter colonial imaginaries, it does not suffice to address them in isolation, but it is necessary to re-contextualize them, to break apart the frame that holds them. 168 See also Julie Marcus on the “Appropriation of Ayers Rock” and her comments on how Australian rural folk-songs are indebted to Aboriginal culture. It should be noted that indigenous cultures have never received any acknowledgment – and even less economic compensation – for their stories, songs, and legends that were freely appropriated for economically successful Australian books, and films. Copyright laws indeed are not designed to recognize the collective ownership of an indigenous culture that can thus be fully exploited to create a white well profiting industry, which will instead assign intellectual property rights to the individual – or better corporations – that will successfully market and package such indigenous myths (see Miller et. al. chapter four for a discussion of copyright laws and history). It should be noted that in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, Aboriginal art has become an increasing prestigious commodity sold at the best auction houses for very high prices; this constitutes a shift in the public perception of Aboriginal art, which is starting to recognize Indigenous authors as well. For further information on this market, see Michael Reid, Carmel Dwyer. 169 In this context, Gelder and Jacob in Uncanny Australia employ the Freudian concept of the “uncanny,” unheimlich, whereby “one’s home is rendered, somehow and in some sense, unfamiliar” (23), a strategy Moffatt uses to voice the repressed traumas in the Australian home. I prefer not to rely on such a concept here because I see a risk of the psychoanalytic reading obscuring the highly marked political issue of the land in Australia. 170 Since beDevil, Moffatt has realized other independent video projects. In 1997, she made Heaven, an ironic look at male surfer culture and specifically male bodies; in the experimental video Lip (1999), she assembles images from famous Hollywood movies, specifically addressing representations of African/American women; following the same concept, in 2000, she made Artist; in 2003, Love, a feminist and ironic experimental video juxtaposing cinematic kisses and punches; in 2007, finally, she made Doomed, on the representation of natural catastrophes in cinema. Moreover, between 1993 and 1995, she also directed various music videos, specifically for the Australian band INXS, for the Australian Aboriginal singer Ruby Hunter, and for the pop singer of Torres Strait Islander descent, Christine Anu. 171 Arguably, the most well-known post-colonial ghost story is Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where the ghost stands for slavery and all its abuses; while her story does not concern the Australian continent, it is important to note that Aboriginal writers and artists have turned their attention to the work of African/American authors early on and have drawn inspiration from their fights, realizing that they needed to connect their voice with other diasporic and marginalized peoples in the world. Thus, in the late 1960s, even before acquiring full Australian citizenship in 1967, they started to make their voices heard through literature and theatre. To do so, they looked at the works of Black/American and Caribbean writers and artists (see Noonuccal). Such a tactic allowed Aborigines to insert their voice in a global movement that demanded agency and recognition; it reinforced their local voices, echoing resistances with longer traditions. As for ghosts within the Australian landscape, Gelder and Jacobs in Uncanny Australia also 399

focus on this trope for the post-colonial condition of the Australian nation; their approach draws on Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves and “her strategy to internalize and individuate the ambivalence as a means of coping with it” (27), where the “ambivalence” can take the figure of the ghost, with whom we need to familiarize (see 30-42). 172 The Australian Film Finance Corporation is one of the institutional entities establishes in 1969 during the launch of the first major public financing of the Australian film industry. At the time, the state funds were allocated to two major institutions: one responsible for financing mainstream films that would encourage the development of an Australian entertainment industry, and another to subsidize experimental and local film projects. Such an organization responded to the multiple demands weighing on national cinemas discussed above, i.e. the need to be commercially competitive on the global market and to simultaneously promote films with an educational and cultural mission. As O’Regan argues, the “creative branches” did function as the “moral barometer” needed to justify the massive intervention of the state into the entertainment industry, balancing out the commercial projects with less marketable, but more cultural texts (Australian National Cinema 142). Over the years, the names of these entities have changed from the initial Australian Film Development Corporation and the Experimental Film Fund in the 1970s, to the 1980s Industry Branch and the Creative Development Branch of the Australian Film Commission, and finally, since 1988, to the Australian Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and the Australian Film Commission (AFC). In the same years, other state and non-state agencies emerged that were specifically addressed to Aboriginal peoples such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Ethnic Affairs Commission. It is interesting to note that the more “commercial” Finance Corporation was the major sponsor of Moffatt’s formalist feature film; this fact is proof of the success of her previous short and the recognition that Indigenous stories had become increasingly marketable locally and internationally. For more details on awards and production, see the web page dedicated to beDevil managed by Prabhjyot K. Bal - and the page under CreativeSpirits.de -. 173 The Multicultural Agenda should also be contextualized within a global historical conjuncture. In this regard, O’Regan observes that “in the 1990s, cultural value clustered around a revived ‘Third’ and ‘multicultural cinema’ option. This was based on two developments: a strategic convergence of festival and Other cinemas in the 1990s which opened out the festival cinema to move beyond the first world prestige cinemas of Europe and selected Japanese … and Indian … auteurs to embrace more of the world” (Australian National Cinema 128-29). 174 The following are just few of the representatives of this new wave of filmmakers, whose differently accented proper names suggest the kaleidoscopic make-up of the new generation: Monica Pellizzari (A Fistful of Flies 1993), Pauline Chan (Traps 1994), Clara Law (Floating Life 1996, Letters to Ali 2004), Ana Kokkinos (Head On 1998), and Manuela Aliberti (The Missing 1999). This new wave of alternative narratives that are critically (re)visiting Australian history contradictorily clashes with the latest political climate in Australia. Indeed, this renaissance started in 1998, ten years after the official launch of the Multicultural Agenda and just one year after the institution of the nationalist One Nation party by Pauline Hanson. These films successfully voiced the dissenting voices who spoke out against the nationalist and conservative politics carried out by the Howard government. In particular, they forced issues of Australianness, whiteness, multiculturalism, assimilation, and immigration into the public debate at a time when Australia seemed to be reverting to policies that recall colonial times and “white policy laws.” 175 There are, however, substantial differences to be considered between the “brands” of multiculturalism promoted in Canada, the U.S., and Australia; see Stratton and Ang, and Sneja Gunew for a discussion of Australian multiculturalism. Stratton and Ang’s essay was published in the eight volume and second issue of Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture published in 1994 and fully dedicated to the issue of “Critical Multiculturalism.” The volume also includes O’Regan’s introductory essay, Miller’s review of Graeme Turner’s National Fictions, plus Meadows’s comparative analysis of indigenous media production in Australia and Canada. The essays together offer an invaluable introduction to multiculturalism in Australia and to its theorizations across borders.

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176 Hidden Pictures’ overview of cinematic representations of Aborigines in films written and directed by whites addressed the racism of early representations and the negative impact of those films on Aboriginal- white relationships. Beyond promoting positive images of Australian Indigenous populations, such a project, however, also attributed to cinema – and its state funded projects – the merit of reconciliating the tensions between settlers and Indigenous cultures. 177 It should be noted that despite these ideological biases, the Multicultural Agenda did partially contribute to the emergence of more militant projects carried out by Aboriginal communities and filmmakers such as Moffatt, Rachel Perkins, and Ivan Sen among others, who are now using cinema to write themselves back into history. In 2002, Philippa Hawker even hypothesized that “Aboriginal films are moving into the mainstream,” but she was soon contested by “Sally Riley, head of the Australian Film Commission’s Indigenous Unit [who] has her doubts. Australian films are still a small percentage of the local box office, she points out.” (Hawker “Black Magic”). It should be noted, however, that the Indigenous populations of Australia started to experiment with visual media, from photography, to film, and video early on. The Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) organization, for instance, which was recognized officially and supported financially by the Office of Aboriginal Affairs (Horton 612-14), used the photographic medium to document violence and abuses against Aboriginal peoples. Later, while Australian cinema was emerging on the world stage and was fashioning a dominant national identity, Aborigines in remote Australia were fighting to gain access to visual technologies. In 1975, for instance, at Yuendumu an early experiment was carried out with the introduction of video technology through the Whitlam Government funds (Buchtmann). Then, in 1980 the Central Australia Media Association (CAAMA) was founded with the aim to reach more remote Aboriginal communities. Since then various studies into Aboriginal policy and broadcasting have been commissioned by the Australian state and remote communities now own the technology to broadcast their own programs, as is the case with the Warlpiri Media Association and Imparja TV in which it participates. See Buchtmann, Ginsburg, Michaels and Meadows for a discussion of the use of video and media technologies by Aboriginal communities. 178 In this sense, Moffatt fashions what Langton describes as a dialogic representation of Aboriginality, whereby “Aboriginality is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, imagination, representation and interpretation” (81). 179 The lawsuit Mabo and Others v. the State of Queensland was first brought in 1982 by Eddie Mabo who was the first Aborigine to reclaim the land of his tribe through judicial process. In 1992, he finally won the lawsuit, which put an end to the legal doctrine of terra nullius on which the Australian nation was constructed (Loos and Mabo XXV). As Tim Rowse explains, “Mabo’s legal argument raised the point that ‘Australia’ is morally illegitimate to the extent that it is founded on European denial of the continent’s prior ownership by Indigenous people such as himself and Hobbles Danayauri” (2). Thanks to the Mabo victory, in 1993 the Native Title Act was passed, according to which Australian Aborigines can claim back the lands over which they can demonstrate to still hold spiritual and sacred bonds. See Noel Loos and Koiki Mabo and Cedric Wyatt for a better explanation of the constraints and limits imposed on this act and the negative consequences that they had and still have for Mabo and many other Aborigines. 180 The authors read in this new cinema a form of “backtracking” that “reprises and at the same time retracts some of the seemingly intractable figures of Australian national identity” (3). There is thus a revisitation of the “Black Tracker figure” in Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002) and the less known short by Perkins One Night The Moon (2001); of the landscape film in recent releases such as The Missing (Manuela Alberti 1999), Serenades (Mojgan Khadem 2001), Yolngu Boy (Stephen Johnson 2002); and of white – Indigenous relations in general in Black and White (Craig Lahiff 2002) and Australian Rules (Paul Goldman 2002) (Collins and Davis). These titles testify the growing interest and popularity of Australian Aboriginal stories, which culminated in the 2006 release of Ten Canoes directed by de Heer and focusing on David Gulpilil’s people, their stories, customs and duck hunting traditions. This last film follows in the come-back of this renowned Aboriginal actor - who first debuted at 16 years of age in Walkabout and then fell into a morass of addiction. After his two successful roles in Rabbit Proof Fence and The Tracker, Darlene Johnson dedicated a documentary to his life Gulpilil: One Red Blood (2002). Ten Canoes sees Gulpilil in the role of external narrator and his son Jamie Gulpilil in his first film role. 401

181 Collins and Davis observe such a shift in all three genres typical of Australian cinema: first, the landscape tradition launched by the AFC sponsored films in the 1970s I discussed previously; secondly, the male purgatorial narratives like Mad Max (George Miller 1979 – plus the sequels), Sunday too far away (Ken Hannam 1975), Gallipoli, Heaven’s Burning (Lahiff 1997), and more recently Yolngu Boy, and finally the suburban grotesque comedy so frequent in Australian cinema as evidenced by the commercial domestic and international successes of Muriel’s Wedding (Paul J. Hogan 1994), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephen Elliot 1994) and Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrman 1992) (76-78). 182 For a discussion of Hollywood’s expansion see Miller et.al. and their detailed account of state policies, economic strategies, and trade policies that allowed the U.S. film industry to dominate the international market (60-73) and squeeze the many national cinemas that had thrived up to the 1920s, like the Indian cinema (69-71), among others. 183 British investors were already active in the distribution and exhibition business before Williams and they also joined him later on to found the Australian Films Ltd, which Longford accused of actively damaging the local production of film in favor of foreign imports (Tulloch 154-56). Australian Films resulted from the “centralizing” of the four main exhibitors and distributors of the time, Johnson and Gibson, Tait, Spencer, and Williams (Graham and Shirley 32-33). 184 Pike and Ross discuss how Hollywood moved to establish “studio branches” in Australia; in response, more Australian nationalist films were encouraged like Longford’s Australia Calls (1923) and the government sponsored production of “fifty short films … under the general titles of Know Your Country.” 185 For further information on the debates concerning the Royal Commission see Graham and Shirley (74- 80); see also Tulloch, who reports the complaints of Australian exhibitors that “15 to 20 per cent of American films were useless,” to an extent hence supporting the complaints and demands of Australian producers (149). 186 See Adams’s “The Australian Film Industry: Homegrown or Foreign-owned?” for a discussion of the process and struggle behind the launch of state funding for the Australian cinematic industry and the establishment of the AFC. Adams was one of the strongest proponents of a national film industry and was appointed by the Gorton government as the first chairman of the Commission. In his historical overview, Adams explains how “Australian content” was defined and recounts anecdotes that document Hollywood’s will to import its already constructed nationalist narratives of a settler society into the space of the Australian land, as when he met with Kirk Douglas and refused his proposal to make a film where he would organize a rebellion of Aborigines. Adams recalls that Douglas was fantasizing about a Western in Australia without any concern or knowledge of the differences between Native Americans and Australian Aborigines (12-13). For another detailed account of the role of the state in the development of an Australian film industry, see Molloy’s and Burgan’s The Economics of Film and Television in Australia. Their review also addresses the “oligopoly” of the distribution market in Australia that is dominated mainly by U.S. distributors working in partnership with the Australian majors, Hoyts and Village Roadshow (45- 48). Australian independent distributors are few: Capricorn Pictures, Dendy Films, The Other Films, Palace Entertainment, Premium Films, Ronin Films, Newvision, Sharmil Films, Australian Film Institute Distribution, Urban Eye Film Releasing. Finally, it is important to point out that despite the task of promoting culturally significant projects that were commercially viable, the AFC and its more commercial branches like the FFC “in no year [have] generated revenue from film projects in excess of [the] expenditures” (96) – a further proof that national cinemas cannot survive Hollywood’s pressures without any government financing. 187 For a review and discussion of Italian/American stereotypes, see Marcuson on drama (288), and on cinema see Lourdeaux (69), D’Acierno (592), Coletta (10). For valuable studies of Italian/American cinema see also Serra’s Immagini di un Immaginario, one of the few studies of Italian representations in early American silent movies, Bondanella’s Hollywood Italians, and Camaiti-Hostert’s and Tamburri’s Screening Ethnicity. 188 The diversification of roles was also due to the contribution of soldiers of Italian descent during the war. The image on screen became more positive because America needed to stress unity instead of otherness in order to call the immigrants to defend their new home country (Coletta 20). Marcuson notices the same tendency in American drama (161). During the war, however, the representation of Italians was ambivalent 402

because of Italy’s allegiance with nazi Germany and the many defeats that provoked the stereotypes of Italians as cowards (Cortes 96). See also Christie Davies’s Ethnic Humor around the World for a sociological explanation in relation to jokes on coward Italians (170-233). 189 See Cortes for a more detailed discussion of the plethora of Italian/American representations in this period (93-98). 190 The Lords of Flatbush (1974), The Wanderers (1979), True Love (1989), Baby, It’s you (1983) and My Cousin Vinny (1992). As many scholars have pointed out, the public identity of this ethnic group from the famous Rudolph Valentino onwards seems to be largely defined in terms of masculinity, with common tropes like the Italian/American exotic lover and/or ruthless macho gangster (Baker and Vitullo, Gardaphé “A Class Act: Understanding the Italian/American Gangster,” D’Acierno). At the same time, the Italian/American masculinist image is traversed by many contradictions, since Valentino was already marked as the exotic lover par exellence and the most effeminate manly icon of the silent era. Interestingly, Valentino never actually played an Italian/American on screen; his olive-skin and southern look enabled him to play any ethnicity from the Mediterranean and his icon is a reminder that Italian Americans have always held an unstable position when it came to issues of whiteness, a trait that accompanied them to Australia as well, as discussed in chapter one. The ambiguities of Valentino’s screen masculinity as well as ethnicity also highlight a commonality in the representations of ethnic immigrants observed, among others, by Vito Russo in the Celluloid Closet, where he argues that the virile representations of ethnic immigrants functioned as a rejection of weakness, a symbol of the ethnic group’s will and rationale to thrive in the new land (4). Furthermore, hypermasculine representations of US immigrant populations seem to be connected to the discourse of the American Dream and its association with “discourses of nations and gender” (Adam 266). The intersections between national myths and ethnic constructions along gender lines deserves further research both in the American and Australian context. 191 These traits also constitute the basis of ethnic jokes at the expense of Italians and hyphenated Italians; see Davies for a discussion of the most common jokes and scripts targeting Italians (63); he also briefly addresses some differences between Italian and Italian/American jokes (201-02). 192 Various studies have investigated the trope of the gangster and explained its unabated relevance for many Italian/American filmmakers. Most Italian/American films explore the gap and contradictions between their ethnic heritage and their middle-class ambition. Crime seems to constitute the link between the two and the gangster serves as a way to reach the desired wealth without whitening up and submitting to the superimposed hierarchy of the American society. Gardaphé interprets the gangster as “a mode of being a man, a roadmap of moving from poverty or working class to middle or upper class. … a trope for signifying the gain of cultural power that comes through class mobility” (“A Class Act: Understanding the Italian/American Gangster” 52). 193 For a discussion of the new generation of Italian/American directors emerging mainly in the 1990s, see the recent collection Quei Bravi Ragazzi: Il Cinema Italoamericano Contemporaneo edited by Giuliana Muscio and Giovanni Spagnoletti. 194 More research should be carried out on the filmic representations of Italian Australians in Australian national cinema and television at large; some productions, apart from They’re a Weird Mob, seem to confirm the tendency to represent Italian Australians in working-class stories, refraining from the reproduction of the stereotypes diffused by Hollywood. Moving Out directed by Michael Pattison (but written by the Italian/Australian Jan Sardi and arguably based on Giuseppe Abiuso’s short story, see Rando “Migrant Images”), for instance, explores the dilemmas of emigration, assimilation, and tradition. Moreover, ABC in 1985 produced the series The Italians that narrated the histories of Italian migration in “six and half hour episodes,” once again with the input of an Italian/Australian writer Gianfranco Cresciani. Rando summarizes the stereotypes of cinematic Italian Australians as “working-class, anarchical, unreliable, easily excitable, speak broken English and the older women (especially mothers in law) are fat, petulant and usually dress in black” (“Migrant Images”). While some stereotypes resonate with their American counterpart – machismo, incontrollable passions, low status, and inarticulateness for instance, the lack of the gangster and overtly violent stereotypes seems to mark the main distinctions between Hollywood Italians and Celluloid Italian/Australians.

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195 When speaking of ethnicity and hyphenation, much debate concerns the theorization of the passing down of ethnic heritage and the different phases of ethnic identification according to the subsequent generations. American sociologist Herbert Gans famously maintained that, with later generations of hyphenated Americans, ethnicity became symbolic, invested in exterior signs and icons, but devoid of everyday significance and attachments. Sollors has theorized the pull between descent relations tying one back to the ethnic group and consent relations to the homeland one chooses to pledge allegiance to. In terms of Italian/American studies various categories and theorizations have been developed to understand and position the work of Italian/American writers: from the earliest critical works on Italian/American literature by Olga Peragallo and by Rose Basile Green – the two precursors of the Italian/American studies, to Aaron’s theorization of the hyphenated writer, comparing Italian/American and Jewish/American authors, and the subsequent revisions by Gardaphé on a Vichian model (Italian Signs, American Streets), and Tamburri on a Peircean model (A Semiotic of Ethnicity). Yet, less literature is available on the matter regarding Italian/Australian authors. Rando provides thorough overviews and analysis of Italian/Australian literature; however, further research could venture into a comparative and theoretical analysis of ethnicity within the Italian diaspora. Indeed, many insights would be gained in terms of the cognitive development of ethnicity, the aspect Tamburri foregrounds in his classification, and its intersection with issues of class, age, and gender. A brief comparison between Italian Americana and Italian Australiana, for instance, shows a significant difference in how ethnic identification developed among Italian/Australian artists. If typically, in a very rough approximation of the numerous ethnic classifications mentioned above, Italian/American directors and authors rediscover their ethnic roots and reflect on their hyphenation from the third generation onwards, Italian/Australian artists seem to foreground issues of ethnic identification and hyphenation much earlier on. The difference can certainly be attributed to the fact that most Italian Australians are the result of a late emigration, which means migrants arriving on Australian shores did think of themselves as Italians, rather than as Sicilians, Venetian, Calabrians as most of those who left for the Americas before the unification of Italy did. Secondly, the late emigration also allowed migrants to maintain a greater contact with the relatives and friends left behind and with their home country in general. See Cavallaro for data on the numbers of the second generation of Italian Australians and dimensions like age, gender, and qualifications. 196 See Silvana Tuccio, Rando “Liminality, temporality and marginalization in Giorgio Mangiamele's migrant movies,” and Lampugnani for an analysis of Mangiamele’s filmography and position within Australian national cinema. Lampugnani also provides an interesting reading that argues for Mangiamele’s Pirandellian humor in representing the troubled adjustments of Italian migrants in Australia. Arguably, the most visible, and commercially successful, Italian/Australian director is Fred Shepisi, who, however, has never focused on Italian/Australian stories in his films. 197 Other directors of Italian descent have been active in the Australian film industry, many in the documentary field, like Rosa Colosimo, who has produced, written and at times directed “documentaries on migrant and aboriginal themes” (Rando) and Fabio Cavadini, famous for his documentary work on and with Australian Aborigines. 198 An exception is the recent Looking for Alibrandi (2000) directed by Kate Woods and based on the novel of Italian/Australian writer Melina Marchetta; the film was a commercial success in Australia and starred Australian actors of international fame like Greta Scacchi and Anthony LaPaglia. The film focuses on the coming of age of a young Italian/Australian girl, addressing the machismo of three generations of Italian Australians through the stories of her mother and grandmother; simultaneously, it pokes fun at stereotypes of passive, black-dressed hyphenated Italian women transforming them into spy agents. Some of the exchanges between the three generations of Italian women distantly recall Italian/American director Helen De Michiel’s Tarantella (1996). See Nichols’s “Gen. Italia: Class, Sexuality and the Melodrama of Migration: in Italian Italian-Australian Cinema” and Lesley Speed’s “‘No matter how far you run:’ Looking for Alibrandi and coming of age in Italo-Australian cinema and girlhood” for a discussion of the film inserted within the history of Italian/Australian cinematic representations. For a discussion of the emergence of Italian/American women filmmakers in the Italian/American cinema of the 1990s, see Giunta “The Quest for True Love,” Camaiti “Identitá di Genere,” Serra “Forme e Deformitá della Famiglia nel Cinema Italoamericano,” Senzani “La Carne e L’Anima: Cibo e Religione nel Cinema Italoamericano.” 404

199 For a discussion of women filmmakers in Australia see Blonski et.al.’s Don’t Shoot Darling, Robson and Zalcock’s Girl’s Own Stories, French’s Womenvision, but also O’Regan Australian National Cinema 291-95. 200 Early feminist film studies were keen in challenging “his story” (Acker xix, Mayne 95, Kaplan Feminism and Film 20) and recover the experiences of women filmmakers that up until the 1920s had been active in the film industry, in fact more so than for many years to come. Interestingly, both Hollywood and Australia boast many women filmmakers in the early years of cinema and there are some resemblances in themes and tone between the work of Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, and Germaine Dulac – arguably the most researched early women filmmakers – and the McDonagh sisters. See Mayne for further references on studies of early women filmmakers; certainly, the pioneering work in this area was Johnston’s first book on Dorothy Arzner, the only successful woman directors in Hollywood during the early sound era. Further work is needed to investigate whether such participation was common throughout different national film industries, because most studies of early women filmmakers focus on Hollywood. Many are the reasons for the disappearance of women filmmakers from the 30s onwards; in the U.S. much is connected to the establishment of a studio system and the advent of sound with the production changes it triggered (see Acker xvii-xxvi). In Australia, beyond the advent of sound, the presence of women filmmakers in the early years of the film industry is often attributed to the “liberating effects of what has become known as ‘the Roarin 20s’” (Speed “Voices from the Silent Era” 34). However, by the late 1920s, more conservative discourses on family and nation dominated in Australia; as already mentioned, the impact of American films caused calls for protecting British and Australian values. The Royal Commission heard the testimonies of many women, not the filmmakers and workers though, but rather middle-class housewives concerned with the negative influence of American films on their children. The conservative push guaranteed that by the end of the 1920s, “the entry of women into the workforce [had] … been contained” (34). 201 The festival was mainly organized by the Sydney Women’s Film Group who enjoyed the support and cooperation of the Sydney Film-makers Co-op, which was instituted in 1970 to promote independent movie production and widen the access "to means of production for directors” (Stott 6-9). Other groups active at the time were also “Reel Women” and the “Feminist Film Workers;” see Blonski et.al. for further information on these parallel groups. 202 Pressured by women activists, the state had allocated $100,000 for the production of a “documentary TV series on human reproduction” proposed by Germaine Greer, who had surged on the international stage after the publication of The Female Eunuch in 1970. Conflicts over the decision and appropriateness of such massive funding for a documentary caused the project to stall. The Sydney Women Film Group later demanded the allocation of that money for the establishment of a Women’s Film Fund, a proposal finally carried out in 1976 (Grieve 72). For more on the history of the Australian Film Commission, as well as the numerous funds that this administers, among which the Women Film Fund, see the special issues of Filmnews vol. 12 (11-12). 203 It should be noted that the AFC still “administer[s] a ‘Women’s Programme;’” however, Robson and Zalcock emphasize that “there are now no specific affirmative funding policy in Australia” for women (3). 204 The continuous presence of women filmmakers in Australia since the 1970s seems to be strictly connected to the active efforts towards promoting training for women in every position of the film industry. Although women activists’ demands for the development of training programs for women filmmakers have always been denied (Grieve 80-81), the AFTRS since its first year has enrolled an increasing number of women and also provided workshops specifically designed for women filmmakers. In “Women in Training,” Philippa Hawker points out that in a survey conducted in 1983 by the Women’s Film Fund and the AFTS, Women in Australian Film Production, 51% of the women who reported some “film qualifications ... had done an AFTS programme of some kind;” indeed, the school was responsible for “eighteen specific courses for women since 1977” (“Women in Training” 139). Despite these successes, French reports that in a survey conducted by the AFC in 1992, women filmmakers were still lamented the persistence of access “barriers” to the film industry” (“On Their Own Merits” 26).

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205 Dzenis has identified some of the forms of the short: “1) post-modern pastiche; 2) personal, subjective, diaristic and autobiographical 3) representations and analysis of experiences 4) stylized narratives which experimentally tackle pressing contemporary issues 5) the ‘gag’ film” (449). 206 For this reason, exhibitors have not always been as supportive of the screening of short films prior to the feature as it was common until the late sixties (Tamburri Italian/American Short Films 4). In Australia, for instance, the 80s knew a period of slow production that incited exhibitors to campaign against shorts because of their unprofitability. Yet, “since 1999,” some have started “screening shorts with features as an ongoing element of their programming,” although not on such a regular basis as before (French “Short Circuits”114). It should be noted that, like many newspaper accounts report, Moffatt is one of the few filmmaker who has been able to have her shorts, particularly Night Cries, screened commercially in movie theaters (The Age “Cries in the Night,” Turner “Expect the Unexpected”). 207 Further work is needed on theorizing the short film; much has been written on the early transition from short to feature film, but little, instead, has been written on the short film within a film industry already dominated by the feature. Dominique Bluher and Francois Thomas have compiled an important collection on the French short film between 1945 and 1968. The time frame selected wishes to stress the proliferation of short films as art form in this period of French cinema’s prominence; the authors emphasize that during this time, the short did not constitute a transition and preparation towards the feature, but rather “une voie parallele,” a parallel and separate path towards film experimentalism and innovation (12). They identify different types of short films: commercial and “amateur,” which often include experimental shorts that engender their own festival (11). Bluher and Thomas’s localized study of the French short offers important insights into the role that short films have come to assume in the film industry post World War II. However, more work is needed both in terms of the aesthetics of the short film, going beyond the numerous manuals targeted to beginning filmmakers like Clifford Turlow’s Making Short Films or Levy’s Making a Winning Short. These studies do offer some insights into the structure and conventions of the short and into the world of short festivals and awards that have launched the career of many filmmakers. However, many of these studies do support the notion that the short is a preparation ground for the big feature breakthrough. Yet, established filmmakers’ continued interest in making shorts, after their success in the feature business, testifies to another dimension of the short that needs further theorization. 208 In his brief review of the Italian/American Short, he engages in detailed semiotic readings of six shorts by Italian/American filmmakers, offering some insights into the structure of the short. These should be further investigated in relation to the significance of short films from an accented perspective. 209 Themes of loneliness, alienation and the conscious effort to create an emotional distance from the story and the characters characterize the work of all three filmmakers. See Elzbieta Ostrowska for a discussion of Holland’s style and filmography and Barbara Halpern Martineau on Meszaros. 210 Discussions of realism in cinema have started arguably with the invention of the medium and the myth of its capacity to capture the “truth,” the world objectively, as Bazin has argued in his “The Myth of Total Cinema;” but so have also challenges to realism’s pretense of objectiveness. Feminist and third cinema critics have been particularly effective in deconstructing the realist aesthetics and discussing the problematic connections between realism and a discourse revolving around stereotyping. I refer to the in- depth discussion of the matter in Shohat and Stam’s chapter “Stereotype, Realism and the Struggle over Representation” (178-219). Although the authors mainly focus on ethnic and racial stereotypes, they do present reflections on gender as well. 211 As “messy” constructs, national cinemas need to be analyzed from multiple perspectives, considering economic and political pressures and demands, cultural and national values, as well as, at times, their transnationality. In this perspective, O’Regan reminds us that Australian national cinema is a “festival cinema,” circulating “in the space of the ‘foreign film’ in world cinema markets” (Australian National Cinema 61); it is thus defined at once with other national festival cinemas for their common opposition to Hollywood, and against them, especially for its being an “English-language cinema” (61-106). 212 See Millicent Marcus and her Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Bondanella’s Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, and Laura Ruberto and Christi Wilson’s Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema for a discussion of Neorealism within Italian and global cinema. See also Wayne for a very brief discussion of the influence of Neorealism on Third Cinema. 406

213 Viscusi argues that this ambivalent heritage is still colonizing Italian Americana today, because Italian migrants to the U.S. have never shared the grandiosity of the “Italian signifier” in the first place; the men and women fleeting Italy were mainly coming from the South of Italy, which suffered a quasi-colonial relation to the North of the country, as Gramsci explained in The Southern Question. As soon as they arrived on American shores, these migrants were closely connected with the Italian signified, while the grandiose Italian signifier served only to further underline their alienation from Italian high culture and society, a feeling voiced in many an Italian/American novel from Fante, to Barolini, and DeLillo. The Italian Australian case certainly presents many differences given that migration to Australia started much later as mentioned above; despite the differences, however, the contradictoriness of the Italian sign continues to define Italy abroad and by extension the many Italian diasporas across the globe, not least because of the continued state of political, economic, and social upheavals plaguing Italy. 214 It should be noted that, although Antonioni and Fellini could not be further apart from the neorealist tradition in many ways, they are still somewhat related to it. For Fellini, the connection was partially due to the fact that he acquired his mestiere under the aegis of many neorealist directors, while for Antonioni the relation was established in the conscious break with the neorealist aesthetic, through which he had come to the realization of a “irreparable fracture between reality and its artistic representation” (Gieri 122-123). 215 A “certain realism” could arguably be regarded as an intrinsic tendency in cinema. Such tension is at the heart of cinematic production since its inception, as well as of cinematic theory. From Rudolph Arnheim to Bazin, all would agree that both realism – with its naturalistic representation – and formalism – with its emphasis on conventionality – are necessary to make a picture. Indeed, as Yuri Lotman observes, the contradiction of artistic communication is that “the text must be regular and irregular, predictable and unpredictable at the same time” (49). 216 “The naturalist element coexists with expressionist overtones.” 217 Pellizzari recalls having seen the Taviani brothers at work in the editing room (“Il Cinema in Ottica Italo-Australiana” 25); given that she stayed in Italy from 1985 to 1987, it is possible that the Taviani were working on Good Morning, Babilonia (1987), the film they shot after Kaos and that appropriately tells of two brothers emigrating to Hollywood and working to build the cinematic artifice of Griffith’s scenographies (Brunetta 235). Moreover, Peter Bondanella reports that the Taviani “have declared [irony] is a constant presence in their films” (Italian Cinema 177), which might be a further influence on Pellizzari’s own reliance on irony in her films. 218 Pellizzari claims that she refrained to use the black and white in Fistful of Flies, because it would have been “too difficult to tackle on a first feature;” so she “opt[ed] to go for much monochrome in choosing bright blues and greens” (24). 219 Moreover as Bondanella remarks in Italian Cinema, Fellini’s cinema is typified by his blending “illusion as reality, as well as by his focus on “the … clash of mask and face” (125), which is central to Pirandellian humor and to Pellizzari’s own masquerades. The relationships between Fellini and Pirandello is however problematic for differences in theoretical approaches and provocative statements by the Italian director as well, see Bondanella Italian Cinema 116 and Gieri 82-89. 220 “Ignores half-notes, nuances and chiaroscuri … it is an aggressive and loud cinema.” 221 As already mentioned in chapter one, Pellizzari attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome from 1985 to 87; she recalls the excitement at the thought that “a lot of [her] idols had gone there” and she “figured that if [she] could walk the corridors then [she]’d be inspired” (qtd. in Colbert 24). During that time she managed to work in different positions with Wertmueller on Notte D’Estate con Profilo Greco, Occhi a Mandorla e Odore di Basilico (1986), with Fellini for L’Intervista (1987), and with Bertolucci on L’Ultimo Imperatore (1987). Although her role was minimal, she had the opportunity to meet two of her cinematic mentors and see them at work. During this time she also wrote the script for Rabbit on the Moon, where the stories of old Italian villages powerfully resonate. Italian interest in Australian cinema at the time should also be read in the context of Italian national cinema’s steady losses at the box-office since the late 1970s; indeed, while the 80s brought major successes to Italy like the three Academy Award nominated films L’Ultimo Imperatore, Mediterraneo (1988), and Cinema Paradiso (1989), the status of the Italian film industry was generally in decline, partially because of “the deregulation of television … [that] operated a seismic shift in the Italian cultural terrain” (Marcus After Fellini 6). See Marcus for a more 407

detailed discussion of Italian cinema during the 1980s; although, it should be pointed out that Pellizzari’s relationship with Italian national cinema mainly refers back to the films she grew up with and the Italian auteurs from Neorealism until Bertolucci. 222 Abbas in Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance explores the territory’s “floating identity,” by theorizing a condition of “disappearance,” which attempts to understand the continuous cultural reinvention of Hong Kong from a colonial to a global sign/site; see Abbas for a reading of Hong Kong through cinema and its aesthetics and culture of disappearance. 223 The development of Hong Kong cinema should be further analyzed in light of Appadurai’s analysis of the “mediascapes of deterritorialized groups”, which have transformed the histories of deterritorialization in profitable opportunities to establish new markets (37-41). 224 Chu points out that Hong Kong cinema has been theorized as “either part of Zhonghua minzu (Chinese national and/or ethnic Chinese) cinema or as haiwai Huaren (overseas Chinese) cinema” (xi), but also a “bentu dianying (indigenous cinema)” (xix) since the 1970s, which stresses Hong Kong film production uniqueness. From 1913 to 1956, for instance, Hong Kong cinema is commonly defined as a Chinese national cinema because “China was the source and resource for Hong Kong cinema in terms of film market, film talent and financial investment” (1). Indeed, in 1932 as a consequence of the conflict with Japan, Chinese movie companies moved to Hong Kong (Fu and Desser 1). Yet, the relation is complicated by the fact that Hong Kong was still a British colony and thus in many ways, culturally, politically, socially, etc. distinct from the Chinese nation; a fact that was further emphasized by the absence of Hong Kong films from the Chinese market since the 1950s (Chu 1). Indeed, it is during this period that the “triangular relationship between Britain, China and Hong Kong” drastically changed and with it the status of its film industry. After the Chinese revolution, the hiatus between the British colony and the Chinese motherland deepened and Hong Kong became the destination for a massive exodus from China (22). Loosing the support of the Chinese film industry, Hong Kong “function[ed] as Chinese diasporic cinema,” despite the fact that its Chinese population and culture was actually indigenous to Hong Kong (22). As a Chinese diasporic cinema, Hong Kong cinema produced films for the Chinese living abroad, hence in Mandarin and mainly with narratives relating to Chinese history and culture. However, since the 1970s, the new Malaysian government favored indigenous production and restricted the number of Chinese and Hong Kong imports; in Singapore after independence, the major Hong Kong studio, Saw Brothers, was forced to close and the import of Hong Kong films was hurdled by increasing censorship laws; Indonesia also instituted quota to favor the domestic market, and for the same reason, Thailand “increased the importation tax.” Moreover, following the Vietnam War, Hong Kong also lost its Vietnamese market. During this same period, Taiwan also became a stronger competitor, specializing in a diasporic cinema in Mandarin; therefore, Cantonese films started to dominate again in Hong Kong by the late 1970s (Chu 40-41). For a more detailed discussion of these phases and the development of Hong Kong cinema, see Chu’s Hong Kong Cinema, Fu’s and Desser’s The Cinema of Hong Kong, Fofi et.al. (340-348), and Fu (50-92), the latter particularly for Hong Kong cinema development in the 30s, 40s and up to WWII. 225 Thanks to the overwhelming, international success of Lee’s films, Golden Harvest was able to out- compete the other major production companies that had dominated the market in Hong Kong that far, the Saw Brothers. 226 See Chu 51-58 for more details on the production and distribution of Hong Kong cinema after the 1970s. Chu also briefly discusses the key role played by the government in supporting the domestic film industry, although it did not directly fund production like the state did in Australia (57-58). 227 See Teo “The 1970s: Movement and Transition” for a more detailed analysis of the kung fu emergence and the development of the Hong Kong industry, which takes into account the shift from a Mandarin- language cinema to a predominantly Cantonese-language cinema. For a specific analysis of the kung fu genre, see Desser “The Kung Fu Craze: Hong Kong Cinema’s First American Reception.” 228 “The Western technical and formal virtuosity.” 229 Tsui Hark is arguably the director that has most reinvented and elevated the tradition of Hong Kong kung fu and wuxia films to international prestige and aesthetic recognition, culminated with his Seven Swords (2005). See Stephen Chan Ching-Kiu for a brief discussion of the wuxia genre and Hong Kong

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nationalist discourses. The role of Hark is also attributed to his work as producer and writer, which has boosted the Hong Kong production of quality action films (Jingua). 230 According to some scholars and Law herself, this aesthetically innovative and socially committed perspective was also soon confronted with the pressures of a commercial film industry, leading Law to argue that the Hong Kong New Wave, first and second, “became more and more formulaic, and less and less auteurist.” Law laments that the Hong Kong film industry neglects the arthouse market in favor of local, commercial production (qtd. in Berry 11), a tendency that is stressed by Teo as well, when he observes that “starting from around 1993” Hong Kong cinema experienced a “commercial decline,” which “persisted into the post-1997 present” (“Autumn Moon”). While the commercial pressures of Hong Kong film industry might certainly have increased after its New Wave, it should be noted that directors like Tsui Hark and Wong Kar-Wai continued to work in Hong Kong, often thanks to co-productions, winning considerable critical appreciation with films like Seven Swords (2007) for the former, and In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) for the latter. 231 Lau, however, shows that throughout the first and second New Wave, international exposure to Hong Kong cinema was still mainly dominated by kung fu films of the likes of Chan and the cult-director John Woo (160-62). Lau also criticizes the predominant reading of Hong Kong’s 1990s cinema through the lenses of the “annexation to China;” acknowledging the centrality of the transition and the historical break in 1997, Lau points out that Hong Kong cinema has always retained a strong relation to the Chinese mainland and cinema in general and invites critics not to ignore some traits of Hong Kong cinema that are not necessarily attributable to the tensions of the transition years (162-63). 232 A further line of inquiry is the specific commonalities among the women of the First and Second wave, which according to Marchetti are distinguished by their focus on women’s stories and “themes of exile, nomadism, migration, split/multiple/uncertain identities, and intergenerational conflicts” (“The Gender of GenerAsian X” 73), thus appealing to a new generation of hyphenated Chinese women, whose subjectivities have shifted with the social and economic changes occurring within the Chinese diaspora itself. The focus on home and alienation seems to run through the cinematography of Hui and Law despite many differences; as Chua points out in the analysis of Hui’s Song of Exile (1990), “the film speaks of the pain women encounter as ‘exiles’ in spaces relegated to them in domestic homes” (“Song of the Exile”). Although Hui looks more in depth at the patriarchal constraints in the Chinese home and marriage and the marginality of women, the two filmmakers seem to share an interest in the woman’s perspective on migration and alienation. Interestingly, Hui also explores the differences and similarities between Hong Kong and Japanese culture, focusing on the story of Hueying, the daughter of a Hong Kong man and a Japanese woman, Aiko. In Autumn Moon, Law has also explored the sense of alienation and uprootedness that Hong Kong citizens share with sections of the Japanese upper and middle class, as a result of increasing globalizing technology and consumerism in the two societies. 233 Gina Marchetti defines this generation as “GenerAsian X,” in the attempt to synthesize its “postcolonial and postmodern” character that “recognizes a separation based on racism and the legacy of colonialism, while embracing the hybridity the condensation implies” (“The Gender of GenerAsian X” 72). It should be noted that the international success of Hong Kong films parallels a growing interest in Chinese cinemas generally as Sid Adilman already noticed on the Toronto Star in 1993, reviewing the many entries of Chinese films winning and conquering audiences at film festivals from Toronto to Cannes. Interestingly, Adilman also reports an interview with Clara Law who had just presented her heritage film, Temptation of a Monk (1993) at the Venice Film Festival. Law explains the success of Chinese films on the world stage, maintaining that “the artist has to be repressed politically an in other ways to be able to say more” (C4). In this view, Hong Kong filmmakers’ artistry emerges against the “commercial pressures” of the Hong Kong industry, while the Chinese filmmaker’s against the “political pressures” of the Chinese government. Such a thinking, however, seems to echo Andrew Sarris’s long criticized appropriation of auteurist theories, where he claimed that Hollywood filmmakers made for better auteurs because artistry emerged from the conflict between the individual artistic genius and the pressures of the industry. Moreover, Law’s argument seems to conflate too easily the economic and political constraints, not considering the influence of the Western training of most new Chinese filmmakers. On the other hand, if Western schooling partially accounts for these filmmakers’ success, not least because of their ability to fashion texts that more easily 409

cross cultural divides, the role of the longstanding tradition of Chinese cinema, with its own auteurs and conventions should not be downplayed. 234 It should be noted that Pettman’s, and Law’s, emphasis on what Wenche Ommundsen describes as “the very seductiveness of diaspora/migration and other ‘travelling’ metaphors for modern-life-in-general” risks encouraging ahistorical approaches to the process of migration, thus “blind[ing] us to the cultural and historical specificities of real migrants and real diasporas” (102). It is the task of the critic to contextualize these narratives into historicized, situated, and conflicted national spaces. 235 See Ien Ang for a critical perspective on “the transnationalism of the Chinese diaspora … [as] actually nationalist in its outlook” (77), in that it ultimately returns to an essentialist category of Chineseness. Such a trajectory is partially to be explained by the pressures of Anglo Australia onto the Chinese immigrants, regardless of their exact origin. According to Chinese/Australian writer Yu, Chinese in Australia arrive wishing “to be as English as possible … [but they] are ‘pushed back’, and eventually … become more Chinese than [they] ever were” (qtd. in Barrowclough 46). In terms of positioning Australia within the Hong Kong diaspora, it is interesting to note that at the time of the 1990s exodus from Hong Kong, according to Lynden Barber, Australia was indeed “floated as a possible base for a Hong Kong film industry” (“No Foreigner” 15). 236 According to O’Regan, the circulation of foreign film in the 50s and 60s mainly involved European and Japanese auteur cinema. Imports from China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan were fewer, the ethnic Chinese being less “valued” as a target audience. O’Regan points out that Asian cinemas – “Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Japan” –started to be regularly screened in Australia in the 1990s (Australian National Cinema 80). It seems that the Chinese community, thanks to its sheer numbers and increasing class mobility, finally gained a public voice and agency in the 1990s, so much so that in 1994 “Chinese-language pay-TV services” started to be broadcast. Interestingly, during the same period, Italian pay-TV began its services as well, reflecting the demographical weight of both these two ethnic groups (O’Regan 80). Yet, it should be noted that “Greeks made up the second largest NES community” in Australia and many are indeed the successful Greek/Australian filmmakers. 237 In this framework, Moffatt and Law differ from Pellizzari in that they explore the multicultural make-up of Australia and its tensions, rather than focusing in only on one ethnic community. Although Law’s Floating Life actually only conveys the perspective of one Hong Kong family migrating to Australia, her later films and her approach to migration narratives in general tend to address displacement as a modern condition. Certainly, Pellizzari’s films are more grounded into the ethnic space of the Italian/Australian community; however, in the previous section I hope to have explained why her narratives and style can also unsettle Australian national cinema and discourses. Her filmmaking is directly in dialogue with a global Italian diaspora and with a foreign national cinema, specifically the Italian, which in her texts is entangled and creolized with the Australian national cinema. 238 I would add that Moffatt performs the same decomposition for the Australian outback, negating its ahistoricity and immobility which has usually been foregrounded in the Australian landscape film. 239 See Chua (“Reel Neighbourly”) for a discussion of Asian representations in Australian cinema that addresses issues of masculinity and femininity as well; the article was published in 1993, thus pre-dates the emergence of most Asian/Australians films and directors mentioned above. 240 However, both Chan and Tan have not won much critical attention beyond their first films. Chan made another feature, a thriller Little White Lies in 1996. Tan, instead, returned to native Malaysia to produce his second feature, Spinning Gasing (2000). 241 Ayres is a Chinese/Australian filmmaker, born in Macau like Law, who was first recognized internationally for Walking on Water (2002), a sensitive drama on sexuality and familial tensions; however, Ayres first addressed Chinese representations in his second film The Home Song Stories (2007) which was nominated for various Australian awards and won, among others, Best Directing at the Australian Film Institute Awards. The film was also recognized internationally, winning the Torino International Festival of Young Cinema. 242 Although Yue illustrates the presence and development of an Asian/Australian cinema (“Asian- Australian Cinema”), its emergence is a quite recent phenomenon, so much so that Australian film critic Stratton in 1998 argued that excluding Romper Stomper (1992, Geoffrey Wright), “there are still no films 410

that present Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Timorese, and so forth, as participants in Australia’s everyday multiculturalism” (Race Daze 168). As Mitchell points out, his argument ignores the significant works by Chan, Tan, Law, and Ayres, but also Solrun Hoaas, a Swedish/Australian filmmaker who has resided in China and Japan for various years and received critical acclaim for her film Aya (1990), about a Japanese woman and an Australian soldier (“Clara Law’s Floating Life 291). Although Stratton’s argument is particularly surprising, coming after the international success and visibility of Law’s Floating Life, it does point to the fact that there is not a longstanding tradition of Asian/American cinema in Australia. Gary Gillard on the pages of the online journal Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, for instance, puts together a list of “Australian directors and the Asian context,” spanning from the 1920s to contemporary films and including representations of Papua New Guinea, China, Bali, Vietnam, etc. He ends up with a short filmography of five pages. Although the list does certainly not claim to be exhaustive, its shortness provides a sense of how much research in still needed in this field, and the listing of just Law and Chan as Asian/Australian directors illustrates the ongoing struggle to gain more visibility in the industry. 243 As a film text for the Chinese diaspora, Floating Life was indeed noticed in San Francisco, where Bob Graham on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle emphasizes how the film will likely strike the chord “in the Bay area,” as it probably will in most dispersed Chinese communities across the globe. 244 To add to these ironies, the film is not currently “available for rental on video in Australia, or indeed anywhere in the world” and few are the copies for sale (Mitchell “Boxing the ‘roo” 103). The author of this study found a long coveted, over-priced, second-hand copy of the film on the Canadian Amazon website, because the film seems to have circulated in Canada thanks to Universal Studios Home Video Canada. However, copies are now out of print. 245 Being the first Australian film in a language other than English, it is no surprise that it was also the first to be nominated in the Foreign Film category. However, it is important to point out that not many Australian directors and films actually received an Oscar nomination. Australia’s most iconic director, Weir received four nominations for best director, but interestingly all for films that do not present an Australian narrative (Master and Commander, 2003; The Truman Show, 1999; Dead Poets Society, 1990, and Witness, 1986); furthermore, Campion was nominated for Best director, only the second woman in the history of the Academy Awards after Wertmueller for Pasqualino Settebellezze in 1975, for her Australian, New Zealand, and French co-production, The Piano (1993); the animated box-office hit, Babe by Chris Noonan (1995) was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Director; in 1997, another Australian film and director were nominated, Scott Hicks for Shine; then finally, Luhrman’s non-Australian narrative Moulin Rouge! (2001) also received a nomination for Best Picture. This list testifies to the fact that mostly non-Australian narratives succeeded in being considered for an Academy Award – a notable exception is The Piano, which, however, constitutes the return, narratively and thematically, of Campion to her native New Zealand. 246 Beyond further investigating the reception of the film among Australian audiences in general, in order to better explain its box-office failure, further research should also address the reception of the film among Chinese diasporic communities in Australia and beyond. To this author’s knowledge, such an aspect has not been discussed, but it would shed some light on the heterogeneity of the Chinese Australians, both in terms of language spoken, but also of class, since the film focuses on a middle-class Hong Kong family joining the wealthy, professional younger daughter who leads an economically, if not psychologically, comfortable life. In this context, it should be noted that Floating Life, as the product of a newly immigrated Hong Kong New Wave filmmaker, is mainly spoken in Cantonese; indeed, the multiplicity of “Chinese films” and their languages complicates the study of their reception and marketing, requiring a study into the sociological outlooks of the Chinese diaspora, which goes beyond the scope of this study. 247 In terms of production, the films also moved from being an Hong Kong film partially financed by Japan, since Law had already scripted it when she decided to move to Australia, to “a totally Australian-backed production via SBS Independent” (Barber “No Foreigner” 15). 248 In chapter three I will discuss the possibility that such criticism misses the parodic and satiric tone of the film on the one hand, and points to a serious question over Law’s filmmaking ambiguity and ahistoricity on the other. 411

249 “The darkest and most precarious dimension of the phenomenon, which finds tragic correspondences in the immigration years and especially in the migrants’ epic, an epic of lacerating misery, of journeys not chosen but forced.” 250 Interestingly, with this critical documentary, Law is still contributing to the visibility of Australian national cinema, being Letters to Ali “the only Australian movie selected for [the 2004] Venice Film Festival” (Phillips “Australia’s Inhuman Treatment”). 251 See Abbas for a discussion of Hong Kong’s architecture and its representation in cinema, as a sign of a continuous cultural reinvention (63-90). 252 The film places the Chinese in the place of African Americans, but interestingly, it went against commercial expectations, actually failing at the box office, with exhibitors refusing to show it (O’Regan Australian National Cinema 347); this might explain the relative few scholarly analysis and discussions of the film. However, its racist depiction of Chinese in Australia does certainly constitute the departing point for an analysis of the politics of representation against Asia Australians. As Shuang Liu, who conducted “an examination of the social categorization of Chinese ethnic groups” in Australian newspapers, argues, there have not been many studies conducted about the stereotyping of Australian media, especially in comparison to the U.S. There have been various sociological and ethnographic studies of Chinese communities throughout Australia, especially in the Northern Territory, like Tim Jones’s Chinese in the Northern Territory, and Diana Giese’s Beyond Chinatown: Changing Perspectives on the Top End Chinese Experience. Moreover, there exists various institutions, like the Chinese Australian Historical Society and the Chinese Australian Cultural Heritage Project, that are dedicated to the research of Chinese history, culture, and integration in Australian society. Yet, few are the systematic studies of representations of Asian/Australians in cinema. In his thorough review of Australian national cinema, O’Regan generally groups together “South-East Asian” representations and mentions films as varied as Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) – set in Indonesia before the fall of Sukarno’s regime; Noyce’s Echoes of Paradise (1987) – set in Thailand and recounting the love affair of a white Australian woman with a Balinese dancer; Stephane Wallace’s Turtle Beach (1992) – where an Australian journalist discovers love and injustice in Malaysia while reporting on the “boat people” attempting to emigrate; Wright’s Romper Stomper – the provocative movie depicting and humanizing the world of Australian skin-heads, while briefly flashing images of Vietnamese gangs. Certainly, a systematic study of representations is needed; however, given the literature on Asians coming to Australia analyzed in chapter one and the few examples cited here, it seems that the predominant representations fit more or less into the categorizations identified regarding Asian Americans in Hollywood. In Screening Asian Americans, Peter X Feng lists three main constructions of Asian Americans, first in terms of the Yellow Peril, secondly as Madame Butterfly, Lotus Blossom, or Dragon Lady stereotypes, and thirdly as the industrious, inscrutable worker. These representations seem to be over-determining the representations of Asian diasporic subjects across the oceans. When speaking of Asian stereotypes in the Australian context, however, it is interesting to note that Arthur Huck’s study of “Australian attitudes to China and the Chinese,” based on a review of national polls, seems to suggest that the view of the good and reliable Chinese worker was more widespread than the harsh policies against Chinese immigration might lead to believe. He observes that in 1948, “at a time … when White Australia was assumed to be almost universally supported 2.2 per cent of the Melbourne sample approved of allowing Chinese to come in.” Interestingly, Chinese immigration was preferred to Italian, Greek, and German arrivals (158). I refer to Huck for further information on the oscillations in opinion polls regarding the Chinese, which, I would suggest, should always be taken with caution and checked against the actual implementation of policies to obtain a broader picture of the country’s stance on immigration. 253 Arguably, Fraser’s point is more complicated that it first seems, since the calls to populate Australia were in fact responses to the yellow peril threats, in other words calls to stop the Asian neighbors to take over the Australian land. Despite such contradictory connotation, Fraser’s claim in the interview clearly aims at stressing the constitutive role immigration in general has played for the Australian nation. 254 In 2007, Australia elected a labor government and Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister; given Rudd’s knowledge of the Chinese language and long experience of study and work in China, it will be interesting to see how the relationships between the two countries develop. 412

255 See Phillips “A Sincere and Evocative Protest” for a further discussion of the documentary’s omissions, in particular relative to past Labor governments’ complicity in establishing and maintaining restrictive immigration laws. Phillips claims that the documentary never refers to the White Australia Policy; however, MacPhee does bring it up in his statements, reminding that it had just been cancelled before the Fraser government took office. Certainly, for those who are not familiar with Australian history, the remark is too brief and in passing to get noticed. 256 For work on the reception and translation of humor in media texts, see the special issue of Humor and Translation of the International Journal of Humor Research 18(2) edited by Delia Chiaro, who has also published numerous articles and case studies on the subject, among which “‘Investigating the perception of translated Verbally Expressed Humour on Italian TV’" and “Verbally Expressed Humour on Screen: translation, reception and perception.” See also the special issue Translating Humor of the journal The Translator 8(2) edited by Jeroen Vandaele. Numerous are the studies on film comedy, from general treatises, to studies of national comedic traditions, and of specific directors; as a start, see general overviews of the genre like Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies; Andre Horton’s Comedy/Cinema/Theory; and Geoff King’s Film Comedy. 257 Metz’s theorization of cinema and the linguistic analogy underwent considerable changes and revisions over time and the question whether cinema is a language is indeed still debatable. Such a discussion is however beyond the scope of this study, which draws on Metz only to address those cinematic signifying practices that he identified and that the filmmakers skilfully manipulate to insert humor in their texts. 258 As Sanja Roic observes, Pirandello is less interested in the causes than in the effects of the feeling of the contrary that can be felt by the author as well as the reader, spectator (77). 259 Pirandello takes the man who survives the plague, conquers fear and hence acquires that feeling of the contrary as the epitome of the humorist. One could read a certain connection here to existentialist modernist philosophies and theories of the comic, where “comedy was increasingly construed as a paradigm of the absurd human condition” (Hokenson 102). It should be also noted that to describe this feeling, Pirandello takes inspiration from the famous epigraph by Giordano Bruno in Il Candelaio, “In tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis” (Borsellino 4). As Borsellino points out, Bruno’s work constitutes a satire that resembles Rabelais’s humor and thus draws Pirandello’s own approach to humor closer to Bakhtin’s analysis of Menippean Satire, as I will also point out later. For more on Bruno’s work and its relation to Pirandello’s theorization, see Borsellino. 260 Roic maintains that Pirandello’s humor can actually only exist as the contrary of the comic, since the negation of the comic is what triggers the process of decomposition (80). 261 Notably, the medieval “fool” also represents a different approach to humor where the norm is not front and center, as does Patrick O’Neil’s entropic humor. See Hokenson for a more in depth discussion of those theories that do not neatly fit into the satiric-populist distinction. 262 In his reflections, humor maintains its etymological reference to bodily fluids, and specifically to the four classical humors (blood, bile, phlegm, and melancholy) (11), together and besides its current meanings of, as defined by the Merriam- Webster dictionary: “a. that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous. b. the mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous. c. something that is or is designed to be comical or amusing.” 263 For an account of laughter as a corrective of “asocial” behavior see Henri Bergson’s famous essay Le Rire and his vitalist account of the causes and functions of laughter. 264 In light of this nuanced theorization of the difference between the comic and humor, and thus of their relation to the norm, Eco differentiates Pirandellian humor from Bakhtin’s carnival, which has often been criticized as a transitory respite for the masses that ultimately reinforces the status quo (8). As I will discuss later, however, if Pirandellian humor does indeed differ from carnival, it comes close to what Bakhtin theorizes as a “carnival attitude,” typified by the “reduced laughter” and dialogism of Dostoevsky’s poetics (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 137). 265 In Chapter Two, I have already illustrated how Bhabha’s theorization of the “narrativity” of nations relies on Foucault’s discursive framework and re-formulation of the Marxist principle of contradictions. Given the centrality of Foucault’s theorization of dissent also to this study’s understanding of the critical function that humor can potentially carry out, few more words are necessary to explain Foucault’s model. 413

In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault calls contradictions “spaces of dissension” (152), where possibilities of resistance emerge at one and the same time with the new discourses aimed at overcoming and silencing the contradiction. Although the Foucaultian framework of discursive power always stresses the possibility of free spaces for dissent, Foucault’s genealogical and archeological explorations of power have often been criticized for postulating an all-encompassing and invisible discursive power that precludes any possible resistance and freedom (Gordon 4). Said argues that Foucault minimizes resistance (Foucault: A Critical Reader 154), and Jameson criticizes his model of “the total system” because it “would seem slowly and inexorably to eliminate any possibility of the negative as such, and to reintegrate the place of the oppositional or even merely ‘critical’ practice and resistance back into the system as the latter’s mere inversion” (The Political Unconscious 91). Yet, in most of his interviews, Foucault strongly declares his belief in freedom and spaces of resistance and argues that “all [his] analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made” (qtd. in Martin “Truth, Power, Self” 11). Kendall Phillips addresses the problematic understanding of resistance in Foucault’s thought and through a rhetorical reading of his works argues that “the limiting/enabling relations of knowledge/power/subjectivity are counter-pointed by three terms that describe the conditions for invention: dissension, freedom, and thought” (337), through which we can understand how the “spaces of dissention” “are not only the spaces from which resistances emerge, but also the spaces in which resistances are created.” (332). Spaces of dissention – in the relations of knowledge – are thus coextensive with spaces of freedom – in the relations of power – and both lead to the displacement of the subject “from those technologies that have constituted it.” (337). This displacement of the subject is termed by Foucault “thought” (qtd. in Phillips 337), through which the subject is able to distance himself/herself from his/her actions and question them. Dissention, freedom and thought – the three counterpoints to knowledge/power/ subjectivity in Phillips’s argument – do not imply the creation of new discourses or the reversal of power relations; they are rather “reflective/inventional moment” before a reversal or the initiation of “some new way of living” (338). As already mentioned in chapter one, there is a certain congruence between Foucault’s approach to dissent and the Gramscian hegemonic project, whereby “ognuno cambia se stesso, si modifica, nella misura in cui cambia e modifica tutto il complesso dei rapporti di cui egli è il centro di annodamento. In questo senso il filosofo reale è e non può essere altri che il politico, cioè l’uomo attivo che modifica l’ambiente, inteso per ambiente l’insieme dei rapporti di cui ogni singolo entra a far parte” (QD 10, 1345) (“Everyone changes oneself, in as far as he changes the whole network of relationships in which he is the knot. In this sense, the real philosopher is and can only be the politician, that is, the active man that changes the environment, where environment defines the whole of the relationships in which every individual takes part”). As Teodros Kiros explains, such project is carried out through critical questioning “the effects of ideas that have generated those distorted and false religions, political ideas and philosophies” (102). Although Foucault would reject the notion of “distorted and false religions,” he also emphasizes the potential for subjects to question and thus displace the technologies and knowledges invested in their formation. Reflecting on the three conditions of invention, dissent, freedom, and thought, and their relation to Pirandellian humorous reflection, we could argue that by perceiving the comic, a moment when the control over our body/mind, and thus our compliance with disciplinary practices breaks, we can open a space of dissent in the relations of knowledge, by perceiving the contradiction between the dominant frame and the deviant (in)voluntary act. Simultaneously, this opening constitutes a potential site of freedom in the relations of power, in that it creates a third space, a break in the interpretation process that can lead to a challenging of the dominant discourse. 266 Indeed, this site of dissent/freedom remains potential as long as it is not activated, as long as we enact and perform freedom through critical thought. There is a parallel here again between critical humor and the Foucaultian “inventional pause,” since in both propositions it is unclear what happens after. It is only through the critical reception and recognition of critical humor that a resistant practice can start emerging; for this reason, critical humor is always only a potentiality, until it is acknowledged and acted upon by the readers and spectators, who are then responsible to translate their aesthetic perception in social practices. 267Through the situated perspectives of Glissant and de Lauretis, I wish to dialogize Pirandello’s theorization of humor and critically acknowledge its risks of reaffirming a universalist– and thus male and 414

Eurocentric – point of view. As I will point out later, one of the central tenets of Pirandello’s approach to humor, which distinguishes it from irony, is its attention to humorous contradictions that are not contained within the arbitrary space of the sign, but rather in the lived world of the referent, where the body with its ethnic and gender inscriptions is at the center of the humorous reflection. 268 “Decomposed, interrupted, interspersed with continuous digressions.” 269 Indeed, I argue that Pirandellian humor can exploit the potentiality in interstitial perspectives to destabilize dominant discursive formations, by exploiting the incongruencies within the “systems of cultural signification” that are always threatened by the excess of “cultural difference.” The concept of “excess” has received a multitude of theorizations. In film theory, Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger have long theorized excess as a threat to narrative coherence, which they identify as the dominating principle in classical Hollywood cinema. Christine Gledhill theorizes excess in the context of melodrama in terms of the disruptive quality that emotional non-containment provides (12-28). Bill Nichols theorizes excess in the context of the documentary and argues that it refers to “that which stands beyond the reach of both narrative and exposition,” in other words it mainly refers to the historical knowledges and facts that can disrupt official accounts of history (142). Spectatorship theories have long shown how viewers produce meaning always in excess of the text, albeit not always critically or oppositionally (for spectatorship theories see Hall’s seminal essay “Encoding/Decoding,” and theorists who have expanded on his insight like Janet Staiger among others. I want here to draw on all these theorizations and their implications, because they all share the insight that discursive systems – history, genre, apparatuses – are inevitably fissured by the differences that they cannot contain and that force such systems to continuously readjust, in order to appropriate the excesses that threaten their discursive coherence. 270 Humor necessarily connects the aesthetic and discursive dimensions, in that it already defines a relationship, even if just an intended reception. The comic is defined as such for its intention to elicit laughter; hence it is already constituted as a relationship between an encoded intention and an expected decoding response; textual critical humor, while not expecting laughter, is also defined by its winking towards the reader/spectator that he/she recognize the critical space opened for his/her reflection on discursive contradictions. 271 Bakhtin argues that every single utterance is always a “contradiction-ridden, tension filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language,” just like any word is always already “entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents” (272-76). As pointed out earlier in relation to Foucauldian discourses, the Bakhtinian utterance and language have contradiction built-in and hence spaces of dissent and resistance, where “subjugated knowledges” in the Foucauldian framework, and “social accents” for Bakhtin, can emerge and challenge the dominant voices. 272 “In humorous conception, reflection is indeed a mirror, but a mirror of iced water, where the feeling’s flame does not just look at itself, but dives in and blunts.” 273 Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks famously described the experience of being subjected to the gaze of the others: “the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me there in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self” (109). 274 “In our soul lives the soul of the race or of the collectivity of which we are part of; and we suffer unconsciously the pressure of the other’s judgment, of the other’s way of feeling and act: and, like in the social world where simulation and dissimulation dominate, the less perceived the more habitual they become, we simulate and dissimulate with ourselves, becoming double and often even multiple.” 275 “Free us of the masks and social mechanisms that trap us and hold us prisoners.” 276 “Clothes … compose and hide: two actions humor cannot stand.” 277 While Pirandello famously spoke out in favor of theatre over cinema, various theorists have shown the Italian author’s fascination with the advent of film and his early confrontation with its aesthetics. If in his 1914 novel Si Gira! (Shoot), Pirandello criticizes the naturalism of film and laments the age of mechanic art, he simultaneously appropriates qualities of film language (Gieri 17). Indeed, Pirandello also supported the notion that cinema needed to develop “its own grammar and syntax,” the cinematic codes that Metz later spelled out (5). For further information on Pirandello’s conflicted stance towards cinema, see Gieri (1- 81), and also Guido Fink’s “Voce di Macchina e voce del Padre,” who argues that Pirandello, ironically 415

and involuntarily, founded the tradition of Italian sound cinema with a short story titled In Silenzio (Silently) (275). 278 In marked contrast to Pirandello, Eisenstein’s theory of film heavily relies on a Marxist, dialectic conception of art, where art is “conflict,” “because of its social mission,” and its task/goal is to unveil contradictions, “because of its nature,” as a constant tension between reality and the creative shaping of reality/nature; and finally, “because of its methodology” (161-63). For Eisenstein, cinema should thus strive to construct with the shots’ building blocks an aesthetics aimed at raising political consciousness. Although Eisenstein and Pirandello come to focus on conflict and juxtaposition in light of different ideological conceptions of art, they do share a deep interest in the assembling process of a text, which ultimately calls for a decomposition of those knots that mainstream cinema learned to hide in the flow of narrative cinema. 279 Gieri argues that the core of Pirandello’s theory of humor is his “search for aesthetic distance” and Brecht goes so far as to describe humor as “Distanzgefühl” (“the feeling of distance”), which is essential to his conception of theatre (Schriften vol 2: 12). As with Eisenstein, Brecht’s Marxist conception of art dramatically differs from Pirandello’s; yet, the three authors’ understanding of the mechanisms of aesthetic composition present many congruencies, which I would contend contribute to rethink Pirandellian humor in terms of a counter-hegemonic practice, in spite of its author’s exclusive focus on aesthetics vs. political concerns (Gieri 63, 66). As for Brecht’s influence on film theory, see George Lellis’s Cahiers du Cinéma and Contemporary Film Theory. Lellis illustrates the different phases of Brecht’s reception, from an engaged translation of his theatre theories to cinema, to an apolitical appropriation of distantiation techniques. The depoliticization of Brecht’s aesthetics parallels the emptying of the satirical force of parody into pastiche. This reinforces the point that critical humor and Brecht’s serious comedy retain their critical purpose only when their distantiating and estranging techniques direct us outside of the narratives frames to question discursive practices and power relationships. 280 With Verfremdung, Brecht was indicating a technique of aesthetic estrangement, while simultaneously evoking the Marxian concept of Entfremdung, defining the state of alienation experienced by subjects in capitalist societies. 281 “Transform the dialectic in pleasure … the joke of contradictions.” Brecht manifestly advocated a politicization of art and thus often suffered accusations of didacticism, formalism, and elite art. However, it is often forgotten that for Brecht the highest goal of theatre always was and remained to entertain its spectators; theatre should educate, but it should retain something superfluous, because in the end we live for the superfluous (vol. 7: 9-11). By performing its function of entertainment, theatre should continue to offer a respite from the alienating working conditions of capitalist societies, while striving to unmask them and stir action against them. Brecht is searching to maintain emotional empathy, while avoiding the “emotional identification [that] blurs or stultifies the intelligence and reason” (Ewen 481). Brecht is well aware that the affective dimension is what draws spectators to the theatre and what can move them into action; a theatre of absolute detachment would indeed only succeed in alienating its audience, rather than in estranging it. To stir both reflection and a will to action, it is necessary to retain the “affective investment” through which “the specific event is made to matter” (Grossberg 82). Brecht best illustrates the thin line between empathy, identification and estrangement that his epic theatre strives for in his exposition of “eine fröhliche Kritik,” a cheerful critique, where he stages a dialogue between a philosopher, a playwright, and an actor. In this exchange, the philosopher explains that feelings need to be part of criticism and that perhaps the task of a playwright is exactly to exercise criticism through feelings, by drawing on his/her aspirations, dreams, worries, hopes, sympathy, suspicion, but especially the experience of contradiction (Schriften vol 5. 225-26). The task of epic theatre is to combine the lightness of representation with the gravity of its political goal and to represent masks, while exposing the very act of masking by appealing both to our intuition and knowledge, which are inextricably linked to our dealing with the social and its conflicts (230). Art is constituted in the tension between intuition and knowing and sometimes what the playwright and actors can only perceive by intuition, the spectator recognizes and knows (227-31). 282 As Ronald Gray observes, “the essential feature [of Brecht’s theatre] is that there should be some contrast: the spectator’s mind is brought to dwell on the opposite of what is said or performed, or two versions of an event are given simultaneously, or a comparison is implied” (69), almost a by-the-book 416

definition of irony. Returning to Pirandello, however, I would contend that what Brecht employed was humor rather than irony, since Brecht certainly refrained from a purely rhetorical irony, a distinction Pirandello makes, and engaged instead in a humorous form that pointed to material contradictions. 283 Although McKenzie uses the term irony, I would contend that in the case of Moffat we are dealing with humor because it affects the very structure of the film texts Moffatt creates and it points to the “material” contradictions of the personal, socio-political, and historical world she represents. Even her photographs are known for their ironic and parodic play, although Linnel Secomb describes them rather as “postmodern techniques of pastiche and quotation” (51) due to the use of intertextual references like Pasolini and Mad Max. However, Moffatt’s parodic and ironic elements are never only contained within the aesthetic language of photography and film, but always point to social contradictions and conflicts, just like Pirandellian humor does. 284Film scholar Patricia Mellencamp has written with particular admiration of Moffatt’s mastery of film editing, arguing that “Moffatt thinks through montage” (143), and using her film to discuss Eisensteinian montage. In particular, Mellencamp sees in Moffatt’s use of close-ups in Night Cries, an exemplification of the Russian director’s reflections on the close-up, which, contrary to the Hollywood convention of meaning “viewpoint,” was supposed to signify value, creating meaning by juxtaposing separate parts (143). See Mellencamp for a more detailed discussion of Eisenstein’s views, especially in connection to the “emotional unity,” which can arise as a “new quality” from the principles of dissection professed by Eisenstein and applied by Moffatt (142-44). 285 Minh-ha also participated in this deconstruction of film conventions and anthropological discourse; her renowned documentary Reassemblage (1982) makes of dissociation its structuring principle with disorienting disjunctions between sound and image. In the documentary and in the short, Minh-ha has theorized her technique as “speaking nearby,” meaning “a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it” (“Speaking Nearby” 327). As an independent woman filmmaker, originally from Vietnam and now living in the US shooting a documentary in Senegal, such a practice is particularly significant for her, in order not to reproduce the ethnographic and objectifying gaze of the outside observer. Such self-reflexivity is also typical of Moffatt’s works, which are, however, always grounded in her own experiences. Moreover, Minh- ha does not make of humor a structuring principle of her documentaries; the disjunctions in her film text do not function as parodic or ironic statements, in that they do not directly and humorously undermine one another, but rather force the viewer to split his/her attention and reflect on the reasons of the divisions. 286 Apart from the title, Jayamanne seems to repeat and displace Wright’s film by employing similar camera movements and structure. Like in the ethnographic documentary, in her parody, there is a constant alternation between voice-over and music, mainly drum beat, and the camera often pans over landscapes and human figures, highlighting their aesthetic qualities almost as abstract art forms. There is an insistence on gesture and dance, which in Wright’s film often leads to the feminization of the “Asian male” (Vigneswaran), whereas in Jayamanne’s parodic repetition, it displaces the voice-over in a context of performance. 287 Although Hutcheon highlights that parody and satire can and often do intersect, I would contend that her definition complicates the distinction between parody, as a self-reflexive commentary on the form predicated on ironic repetition, and the postmodern pastiche theorized by Jameson. Hutcheon argues that a criterion to distinguish these two forms, is pastiche’s emphasis on similarity versus parody’s insistence on difference (34), which is usually accomplished by dialogizing the text through “ironic trans- contextualization” (12), whereas pastiche would remain within the safe boundaries of the original genre. I see an ambiguous shift in planes of discourse between Hutcheon and Jameson, because she argues the difference from pastiche on pure aesthetic grounds and Jameson, instead, rejects a purely aesthetic definition of pastiche, interpreting it as a form of mythical speech, which masks ideological reproduction and ahistoricity with aesthetic innovation. I would contend that in cinema Quentin Tarantino is indeed a master in trans-contextualizing his repetitions of past genres, plots, themes, and conventions; yet, I would regard, in line with bell hooks’ interesting reading of Pulp Fiction (1994) in Reel to Real, his texts as pastiche, in that they show his ability to draw from high and low genres and different cultural traditions to 417

package an auteur text, which, ultimately, celebrates our knowledge and grasp of visual imaginaries, but does not provide us with the means to criticize them. Indeed, Jameson himself had defined pastiche “like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, … But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse … Pastiche is thus blank parody” (“The Cultural Logic of late Capitalism” 17). In other words, pastiche could be described as commodified parody; it appropriates the innovative, contaminating, refreshing, and entertaining techniques of parody, to construct a fragmented, interrupted and often partially comic text, which however mainly consists in a pure exercise de style. Jameson’s definition of parody, I would contend, raises the question to which extent the “satirical impulse” is indeed a defining trait of parody (16). A question that cannot be further pursued in this study, which in fact sees both parodic and satiric elements as defining Pirandellian, critical, humor. 288 Obeyesekere’s text is an “ethnography of a case of spirit possession in Sri Lanka,” reproducing the “psychoanalytic discourse” on female hysteria; Jayamanne deconstructs the backgrounded text through a film that “functions as a hysterical body … split[ting] body and voice as the soundtrack and visual track are divorced and distinct” (Vigneswaran). The identity of the woman is also split in images of multiple female bodies marked by different ethnic traits and at times by direct imitation of famous fetishized celluloid women, like the Maleine Ester/Judy Barton character of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Trans-contextualizing multiple backgrounded texts and displacing the discourse of hysteria with contradictory images of contemporary performances, Jayamanne suggests that anthropological discourse itself participates in Eurocentric and patriarchal histories of oppression. For a more detailed analysis of Jayamanne’s film see Jayamanne’s “Speaking of ‘Ceylon’” and Priyadarshini Vigneswaran’s “Hysteria and the Hybrid Body in Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon.” 289 Tench’s and Bradley’s descriptions of Aboriginal women also resonate with the descriptions of the Tasmanian Trucanini, discussed in chapter one, whom Western accounts describe as promiscuous and thus welcoming the colonizers’ sexual demands. See Mirzoeff for a further discussion of how colonialism, race, and gender are entangled in the politics of reproduction (173-84). 290 In her photographic work, Moffatt practices a similar play, juxtaposing visuals and written words for humorous purposes; this is particularly evident in her series Scarred for Life inspired by “1960s Time/Life books” and presenting an “ironic twist” on tragic stories (McDonald); in the series, the offensive and outrageous comments are juxtaposed to the images of girls and boys looking back at us, challenging their degradation. 291 Moffatt challenges the borders between the components making up the film text, disorienting the viewers and their knowledge of film language, thus rupturing the “entrenched habits and patterns of behavior” proscribed by Anzaldua’s mestiza consciousness (79). 292 Bakhtin’s discussion of the chronotope connects also to his theorization of genre and of folk humor in Rabelais, in that he emphasizes the French author’s use of a “folkloric chronotope,” where “time is collective, time of labor, of productive growth, maximally tensed toward the future, profoundly spatial and concrete, unified,” where there is a contiguity between “copulation … pregnancy, ripening, old age and death” as well as food, drink and laughter, all those bodily functions and pleasures that are often excluded from the discourse of high art (206-11). Moffatt’s manipulation of time and space as a unified entity that obliquely traverses time periods and geo-political spaces also alludes to a (post)colonial chronotope, if I can use such an expression, in that it makes manifest the impossibility of neatly separating contemporary discourses and power relations from past period; the colonial chronotope necessarily includes ghosts of colonial time, who actively infiltrate and affect the present of monologic discourses. In chapter four, I will return on the Bakhtinian chronotope to discuss its relevance in analyzing genre, because as Stam argues, it can potentially “historicize” the formation of genre (12) and the discourses they reproduce. 293 Historical re-enactments interrupt the short throughout as Brechtian alienating effects, not necessarily employed for humorous purposes. The painting symbolizes the whites’ attempt to define Australia and its Indigenous populations; we see a hand blackening the frame, crushing its glass, and finally tearing down the wall supporting the painting and opening into a black space free of frames. As Kaplan argues, frames and their tearing down are indeed central in this short – the frame of the shot, the picture’s frame, the frames of cinematic genre, etc (Trauma Culture). 418

294 Moffatt was criticized for this portrayal of Aboriginal girls taking advantage of white men, because the “older women” in the “black community” felt that she was reproducing a negative stereotype and thus doing a disservice to Aboriginal peoples. Yet, Moffatt insists on the right to represent her own reality, which necessarily includes positive and negative sides of the community. Interestingly, she invokes as model the Italian/American directors who have often been attacked by their ethnic community for films like The Godfather, where, Moffatt argues, the criticism has not withstood the passing of time given the aesthetic quality of the texts (qtd. in Harris 48). Unfortunately, within Italian/American studies, however, Scorsese and Coppola are still viewed as “sinners” and, as already mentioned, the debate over negative and positive stereotypes is far from settled. 295 It should be noted that beyond using humor for critical reflection, Moffatt does also create spaces for comic relief in the text, from the simple dignified and enjoyable representation of the Aboriginal girls laughing to the parody of common ethnic stereotypes like the ones associated with hyphenated Italians. When the girls lead their captain to the most expensive restaurant in town to have him buy dinner, they enter an Italian restaurant as the popular Italian/American song “That’s Amore” signals to the viewers. Besides the ironic comment of the song lyrics on the captain and girls’ relationship, Moffatt inserts a short humorous digression, when she pans to the kitchen doors and, in the frame of the window, plays a comic hand-shadows show, mimicking the stereotypical Italian animated and expressive gestural language. The scene seems to be mainly played for comic relief, although one could read an indirect commentary on multiculturalism in Australia and the, at times, similar position of “dark ethnics” and black Australians in relation to the objectifying gaze of the white Australian male, as the captain’s attitude towards the Italian waitress might suggest. It should be noted that there is a long documented tradition of Aboriginal humor reclaimed by Indigenous authors like Davis, who argues that ““Aborigines have learnt to keep themselves alive by laughing” (qtd. in Shoemaker “Aboriginal Drama” 123). For further studies into Aboriginal humor in Aboriginal literature, see Shoemaker “Aboriginal Drama,” Bill Perrett “Only When I Laugh.” 296 Interestingly, Moffatt also recalls reading Uncle Arthur and Bedtime Stories because it contained images of black children, but Stretton observes that the series by Arthur S. Maxwell was actually sold by “Seventh Day Adventists in the 1950s and 1960s” as morality tales for white children, only later it also “controversially featured children with dark skin” (284). 297 The trope of the “unruly woman” is strongly connected to carnivalesque humor and notions of the female grotesque that I will discuss in section three. 298 Some critics even define her signature as a “slash-and burn style” (“Pellizzari Projects Rural Life on Mars” 10), which anticipates the criticism leveled at her first feature film Fistful of Flies, as I will discuss in section three. 299 As mentioned above, “intellectual montage” relies on an associative montage of usually abstract concepts and constitutes in Eisenstein’s taxonomy the most didactic and political category of montage (72- 83). Eisenstein himself has used it for humorous, specifically satiric, purposes in October (1928) and in his later films. 300 Marks’s “intercultural cinema” seems to share many features with Naficy’s accented cinema, foregrounding experiences of disjunction and a sensuous visuality. However, Marks theorizes “intercultural cinema” as a movement, which includes experimental films, circulated outside of mainstream distribution channels predominantly between 1985 and 1995. Marks acknowledges the many intersections with other cinemas, differently defined as postcolonial multicultural, etc. and argues that “intercultural cinema” itself “is ceasing to be a movement and becoming a genre” (2), which is what Naficy’s accented cinema actually is in her argument. The filmmakers selected for this study seem to be precisely at the intersections of the two, constituting the more experimental and independent fringe of accented cinema. 301 The sensuousness of Pellizzari’s visuals, if not the food imaginary, also connects her to a tradition of Italian cinema that culminates with the masterful “materialitá delle sensazioni, dei piaceri, delle emozioni tattili, visive, sonore e del gusto” that Fellini brought to screen (“materiality of sensation, of pleasures, of tactile, visual, aural, and taste emotions” Brunetta 270). 302 The ambivalence in the relationship with food and domestic rituals, as well as the (re)claiming of the stories, voices, and experiences of the silenced grandmothers unites Italian/American women directors with writers and filmmakers of other ethnic backgrounds. As Marvalene Hughes observes, for instance, food – 419

and specifically “soul food” – plays a crucial role in the reconstruction of an African/American identity that wants to give visibility to the women forgotten in the kitchen (272- 280). 303 De Michiel’s film tells of Diane’s trip back home after her mother’s death and her journey of rediscovery. Back in her maternal house, Diane meets Pina who will become her comare and will initiate her to the rituals of the Italian cuisine and the struggles of the women in her family. Although De Michiel presents an interesting approach to deconstructing conventional linear narratives with the insertion of estranging elements like Sicilian puppet theatre and re-enactments of past events, her film also constitutes an example where the play with different genres, languages, and codes leads to less than satisfying results. 304 In the third segment, “Cornmeal/Polenta,” Pellizzari further comments on ethnic discrimination and stereotypization of Italian Australians, when Maria and her Anglo/Australian friend Mona stage a symbolic wedding ceremony. In proof of her love, Maria is asked to renounce her “wog” friends, as her girlfriend calls them; yet, Pellizzari counters the ethnic slur by superimposing images of Maria’s own parents, lovingly looking over her. Even in this act of countering ethnic stereotypes, however, Pellizzari does repeat her criticism of Italian/Australian machismo, also inserting an image of the father in authoritative position towering behind the mother. 305 The lyrics transpose the viewers in 70s songs celebratory of hallucinatory drugs and “pill[s] to calm … down,” in other words, to the world of the 70s counter-culture that seems was barred from mention in the Catholic and traditional Italian/Australian community Pellizzari depicts. 306 Pellizzari also inverts the association between the white beach and beautiful female bodies for male pleasure, by foregrounding, instead, the muscular body of the male “stallion” and having Maria complain about him not being sufficiently waxed. 307 Interestingly, she notes that “the film gives us a fascinating and funny view of how we come across from the outside looking in” (77); what strikes me in her description is the a-critical use of “us;” should that be understood as “Australians”? However, given the high percentage of Chinese Australians as well as hyphenated Australians generally, is Eisenhuth actually only referring to Anglo Australians? If that is so, her statement seems, involuntarily, to reinforce nationalist claims, which still construct Australia as a British-descended nation, despite the long history that defies such a notion. 308 Law inserts multiple points of view in the text through the diversification of the authorial voices; all the children of the Chan family at different stages in the course of the text are endowed with voice-overs, through which they directly engage the viewers and tell their perception of Australian and migration. 309 Various critics have commented on the disorienting structure of the film, due to its fragmentariness (Patsch) and, at times, to its clearly scripted dialogue (Hall “The Goddess of 1967”); however, most recognize the voluntary defamiliarization performed by such stylistic choices and finally conclude that it does contribute to “changing our local perception of immigrant culture” (Patch 40) and appropriately “chim[es] in as it does with the script’s preoccupation with disharmony and disconnectedness” (Hall “In a Harsh New Light” 18). 310 The last subtitle without any geographical indication points to the search for an interior home, a sense of belonging and connectedness that goes beyond the actual coordinates of one’s position, but retains the roots, symbolized by the tree, to an ancestral culture, which needs to be preserved and learned, even at the moment of moving away from it. 311 Relying on the Bakhtinian category of chronotope, a “time-space” unit to analyze texts without privileging one dimension over the other, Naficy proceeds to identify the most common chronotopes of accented cinema; he divides them in those relating to the homeland (152-87), to “life in exile” (188-21), and to journeying (222-82). An analysis of such motifs in Law’s film goes beyond the scope of this study; however, it should be noted that Law interestingly plays with chronotopes of homeland in her depiction of Hong Kong, which is fractured by the many ambiguities of Hong Kong transitory political status at the time; certainly, Law’s focus on the “house” as a source of both harmony and disharmony is a theme that traverses much of accented cinema (Naficy 169). 312Law’s focus on the landscape should be further studied in light of this theme’s significance in Chinese art, from painting to literature, and film. As Nick Jose in Chinese Whispers maintains, Chinese art and writing are indeed often centered on reflections on space and landscape, which serve to investigate the subjectivity of characters in search of their bearings. 420

313 Law often cites renowned Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu as a source of inspiration for her work and indeed his cinema, especially Tokyo Story (1953) which particularly influenced this film, is famous for having written masterful “architecture of interiors” (Bruno 36). In Tokyo Story, viewers learn much of the family members’ personalities and stories, through the intimate representation of their houses. With low- angle shots that convey the perspective of the Japanese social environment, Ozu dwells on the effects that the parents’ intrusion in these domestic spaces affects; from their position within the homes, we learn much of the relationships between parents and children. Similarly, Law leaves much of the characters’ definition to the homes they construct, which tell us of their desires and fears. 314 Interestingly, discussing the chronotopes of accented cinema, Naficy observes the recurrence of themes of claustrophobia and agoraphobia for representing the estrangement of those in exile (188-91). Naficy’s explanation for the documented agoraphobia of many women in exile well describes the characterization of Bing in the film; Naficy notes that, “women and exiles may willingly whittle down the space that they occupy in order to fit the normalizing gaze of society about gender, sexuality, and citizenship ideals – a way of ‘behaving themselves’ by overcompensation” (189). Indeed, Bing is always framed in enclosed, white spaces and when she ventures outside, Law stresses her phobias of lurking dangers in the Australian natural landscape. The ending of the film will symbolize Bing’s slow recovery from her depression and Westernizing manias, by her finally leaving her house and walking outside unprotected by umbrellas and glasses. 315 Miller et.al, particularly, point to the case of the Queensland Film Development Office that in the late 1980s capitalized on the successful production, in Australia, of the American television show Mission Impossible, to “[advertise] the state to prospective producers like this: ‘the production company of a recent American primetime television series found a diverse range of ‘international locations,’ from London to the Greek islands in Queensland” (144). Miller et.al. observe an increase in “runaway production in Australia” in the 1990s and a brief look at recent American sagas shot and produced in Australia attests to its continued popularity as a transformable “nowhere” site; Mission Impossible (1996),The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and the last episode of Star Wars (2005) are just few of the American productions that have taken advantage of the excellent, but cheaper, Australian studio infrastructure and professional labor, which, perhaps ironically, also attracted Law in the first place (Schembri “Director Stops Here”, Cawthorne). It should also be noted that the Australian landscape in the history of cinema seems either to have stood for imaginary lands with no cultural specificities attached, or to have been over-invested with symbolic meanings drawn from its Aboriginal cultures in films like Walkabout (British production), Where the Green Ants Dream (1984 German and Australian co-production), Bis ans Ende der Welt (1991 German, French and Australian co-production) and many others. The use of (post)colonial lands as canvas for Western narratives seems to follow in the tradition of viewing these lands as “empty” of meanings and human traces, waiting to be colonized and inscribed by the settlers. Drawing off Anderson, many are the theorization of how writing and printing have been crucial to the processes of colonization and appropriation of “new lands;” see among others Gibson on Australia and Boelhower on the U.S. 316 If kung fu and martial arts in general constitute an abused sign of Chineseness, Feng-shui has become one of the most popular exports of Chinese culture and style. Law inserts also this sign in the film, to comment on the cultural and geographical disjunction suffered by the older sister in Germany. The sign serves for some comical sequences of intercultural miscommunication between the Western husband, who cannot comprehend the significance of Feng-shui, and the Hong Kong transplanted daughter, who is actually rediscovering ancient Chinese teachings, with her own dose of suspicion after years of increasing Westernization. What seems most interesting in Law’s use of this Chinese sign is the possibility it opens to interrogate the consumption of the other in face of national discrimination. As Vicki Englund poignantly observes there is indeed a bitter irony in the fact that Chinese traditions like Feng-shui are now popular in many Western countries, and certainly in Australia, where the “Woman’s Day magazine has a weekly Feng-shui advice column;” yet, “it’s very possible that some of these women might think there should be no more Asians allowed in the country” (17). Although Law does not comment specifically on the issue, her humorous portrayal of a home in disarray, seeking for the right Feng-shui can remind viewers of the increasing commercialization of Chinese traditions, which is, however, emptied of any real connection to Chinese culture. As I mentioned above, homes are the focus of the action in the film and often they define 421

the characters; if “big sister”’s house is in constant shift as she is still battling with her own identity, Bing’s house resembles a hospital room, in its excessive whiteness and depersonalization; the Hong Kong house is less of a focus, although it presents the warm colors of the homeland together with a sense of being deserted, abandoned behind. It is inscribed with a sense of transience, in that it is here that Gar Ming starts his reflections on the transitory pleasures of ejaculations. Finally, the ancestral house in China features only as a photograph, a figment of Mr. Chan’s memory and nostalgia; it roots him in his culture, but is at the same time forever gone. The “big house” of the ending is a space to be constructed, an imagined space through Mr. Chan’s projects and plans, but one that will have to be readjusted and modified with the intervention of the other family members, of time, and of interactions with the new country. 317 Fay, for instance, maintains that the slow-pace of Sydney seemed so boring after coming from Hong Kong (61), especially considering the less crowded neighborhoods of Sydney suburbs. The lack of a social network of friends in the new place also turns the home into the deserted and lonely space where you “idle” before going back to work (Mar), an image that starkly recalls Bing’s flashbacks of her early years in Sydney. See also Lili Ma who, as a mainlander Chinese, relates of her experience of first viewing Floating Life as a diasporic Chinese in Australia, focusing on how the text can speak to different generations and cultural groups of hyphenated Chinese. 318 Kangaroos, for instance, re-appear in the text at the fringes of the first suburban house Bing inhabits; their appearance is once again clearly out of place, but well conveys Bing’s feelings of isolation in a foreign and inhospitable land, where she lacks any human contact and support. 319 The only explicit reference in the film to discrimination is a brief scene representing “big sister’s” encounter with a Nazi skinhead on a supermarket parking in Germany. The scene is played out against a wide, blue sky as a sort of frontier confrontation between the man and the Chinese woman, who first attempts to run away and then turns to face the man, a challenge that he decides to walk away from. As this scene suggests, Law only hints to anti-Asian sentiment and prefers to focus on the process, whereby the hyphenated Chinese learns to come to terms with his/her own cultural disjunctions. 320 It should be noted that the film was scripted and shot before the Hanson’s controversy actually erupted in Australia; yet, with the raging national debate, the film became a symbol of Asian voices countering the xenophobic discourses of the One Nation party (Naglazas 5). In numerous interviews, Law “has resented it in that she does not want it labeled as a film on immigration and racism, but rather alienation and exile” (5). At times, the understandable attack on being labeled as ethnic filmmaker dealing with ethnic themes seem to excessively foreground discourses of “universality,” as in her conversation with Schembri (“Director Stops here”), where she at times seems dismissive of the class and racial dimensions that affect migration. 321 See Yuanfang’s “Confucians Down Under” for a discussion of the significance of Confucian thinking and tradition as a sign of Chineseness and anchor to descent relations; Yuanfang mainly discusses early autobiographies of Australian Chinese, but offers insights into “models for self-construction” for hyphenated Chinese (23). 322 See Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body for a thorough discussion of the female body and the impact of media discourses on women’s relation with their bodies; her analysis of discourses of female beauty and “fatness” as well as of diseases like agoraphobia affecting many women resonates with the construction of Bing’s character, who seems to be a receptacle for such media discourses. Bordo has also written on the “male body” and its construction in the media in The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private. 323“Until contradiction;” “the comic that does not trigger laughter, the irony that does not subject.” Interestingly, Barthes himself reminds us that Brecht is one of the authors who have attempted to imagine an aesthetics of jouissance, which is completely centered around the spectator’s responses : “Imaginer une esthétique … fondée jusqu’au bout … sur le plaisir du consommateur, … les conséquences seraient énormes, peut-être même déchirantes (Brecht a amorce une telle esthétique du plaisir; de toutes ses propositions, c’est celle qu’on oublie le plus souvent) ” (Le Plaisir 80). 324 “A text of bliss (is) that which puts you in a state of loss, that discomforts (perhaps up to the point of ennui), makes the historical, cultural, psychological coordinates of the reader, the texture of his tastes, of his values and memories shake, it sets his relationship with language in crisis.”

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325 According to Lacan, when a child first sees his/her reflection in the mirror, he/she recognizes its finitude, its boundaries, by contemplating its image in the mirror. It is a reflection that elicits both recognition of the self and of the other; it fosters the child narcissism, which misleads it to fashion a more competent and ideal image of itself. Ultimately, it is an initial appraisal of the existence of boundaries, which is then reinforced with the learning of the first words. The acquisition of language signals for Lacan the entry into the Symbolic stage, when the child recognizes that language is synonymous with the Law that is always embodied by the father, by the nom/non du pere. 326 In the words of Cixous’s manifesto The Laugh of the Medusa, écriture feminine brings to the page, “a woman’s body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor … will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language” (885). In Kristeva’s formulation of a feminine approach to writing, there are more resonances with the feminist deaesthetic de Lauretis subsequently theorized. Kristeva indeed foregrounds Barthes’s “notion of writing,” where “language [is] seen as negativity; the desubstantification of linguistic ideals; the operation of inscribing the a-symbolized real into the fabric of writing; the desire of the subject in writing; the impetus of the body and, ultimately, the reckoning of history within the written text” (Desire in Language 93). 327 In Kristeva’s account, it is a laughter that comes after the act of reading, once we come to the realization that “the sign, the name, and the utterance, but also pleasure and jouissance” are “arbitrary” (Desire in Language 181). Similarly, I would argue that Pirandellian humor comes after the act of perceiving the comic; both entail a third space of reflection, where the norm is critically acknowledged and potentially challenged. Kristeva’s emphasis on jouissance should also be understood in light of jouissance’s own oscillation between mastery and loss, which can potentially undermine notions of masculinity predicated on virility, control, and courage. As Barthes argues, “le plaisir du texte (la jouissance du texte) est au contraire comme un effacement brusque de la valeur guerrière, une desquamation passagère des ergots de l’écrivain, un arrêt du ‘cœur’ (du courage) ” (43) (“The pleasure of the text (the bliss of the text) is instead like an abrupt erasure of the warrior’s valor, a peeling off of the writer’s own scales, an arrest of the ‘heart’ (of courage).” It is an understanding that parallels Kristeva’s own reference to Lacanian jouissance as a moment when we reconnect with our imaginary; we abandon the (masculinized) Symbolic realm to connect back to emotions and feelings that characterize the pre-linguistic stage, a phase when the connection to the mother is actually dominant. Such an emphasis on the imaginary stage and the link to the mother wishes to foreground an alternative understanding of subject formation as predicated on relation and connectedness rather than separation as argued by Lacan (see Chodorow). Yet, it should not be forgotten that in its association with sexual pleasure and performance, jouissance is regularly constructed as “figure fixe: forte, violente, crue: quelque chose de nécessairement muscle, tendu, phallique” (Barthes Le Plaisir 37) (“the general rule, which wants to confer to jouissance a fixed image: strong, violent, raw: something necessarily muscular, tensed, phallic.” Similarly, Jane Gallop points out that the jouissance extolled by feminist theorists can also “stiffen into a strong, muscular image … The difference between jouissance and pleasure is generally understood to be one of degree ... The timid, defensive egos, cautious in their bourgeois comfort, prefer plaisir and shun jouissance, but we brave, feminist, revolutionary, avant-garde …” (114). As Gallop notes, feminist movements calling for an écriture feminine and a feminine jouissance have often fallen into the trap of essentializing gender identity and, ultimately, reinforcing unitary language and its binary logic. Their laughter at masculinist discourses simultaneously reinforced other exclusionary practices, in terms of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion. 328 Despite the phallocentricity of the Lacanian framework, Purdie maintains that the “internalisation of the Law which produces subjection … is a necessary condition for any meaningful human being” (146); it is what anchors our identities and makes communication meaningful. The arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is in fact inherent in all significations; however, “human being needs to use language most of the time as if signifiers and signifieds were immovably stuck together” (146). Joking, in Purdie’s framework, actually reinforces such necessity, in that it “creates mastery of the basic ‘one for one’ rule” (22), i.e., the arbitrary and binary relation between signifier and signified. Purdie emphasizes that even if joking breaks the linguistic code by exploiting the play of signifiers and signified, ultimately it reinforces both linguistic and discursive propriety, for, in order to perceive and enjoy joking, we need to acknowledge the rule and hence, in the end, reinstate it (8). For this reason, she attacks 423

vitalist accounts of laughter like Bergson’s, for they systematically underestimate the “potency” of joking, which is mostly directed against women and all those in a subordinate position. In fact, Purdie argues that comedy as a genre is closely connected to the feminine, in that its positioning as a “low genre” “is precisely parallel to that of ‘female’ in gender constructs” (120); comedy’s targets are the (linguistically) incompetents and the “masters” of comedy are instead “masculinised,” because they achieve their status by claiming mastery over discursive propriety, over language (120). Celebrating comedy as the expression of a “primitive vitality” ignores such play for domination and traps us in a discourse that undermines any “political awareness” in view of an ultimate “happy ending” tale of the survival and supple adaptability of the human “race” (164-65). On the contrary, Purdie argues, we need to acknowledge that “joking” presents the “inseparable, simultaneous generation of both pleasure and power” (3). 329 I would contend that such an argument comes actually closer to Kristeva’s own account of laughter than Purdie concedes; in fact, Kristeva argues that “we laugh on account of the limit assumed in the very movement that enroots and uproots finitude within an endlessly centered and yet decentered process. Laughter of language, laughter of sociality itself. Laughter of castration that moves us to name in a process that exceeds naming. Optimism or pessimism? – misplaced milestones that also cause laughter. Everything causes laughter since significance is motion. Oriental laughter: sensible and leading to the void” (182). Kristeva’s laughter, thus, does not negate the boundaries that form our identities within discourse, but continuously points to their “actual” transitory nature, to the constant process of decentering against which the Law needs to be constantly reinforced. It is in this continuous process of decentering, where the heterogeneity of “actuality” intrudes into discourse, that laughter, in Kristeva’ account, and humor in Pirandello’s, can find a site to question the norm, instead of reinstating it. 330 As I pointed out for Pirandello’s humorous gaze above, the oppositional gaze foregrounds a relation between subjects; in this context, it is interesting to note William Boelhower’s suggestion of an “ethnic kinesis,” whereby both parties are decentered onlookers and there is no definable subject or content at the center, but rather a dynamic energy, a relation (23). Moreover, such a theorization of the gaze well translates to the kinetic medium of cinema. 331 Lacan’s own framework was highly influenced by the surge of “primitivist” interests in the first half of the nineteenth century and by Claude Levi-Strauss’s own structural approach to anthropology. See Mariana Torgovnick’s insightful book Gone Primitive for an account of the central place of the primitive, and its association with the feminine, already in Freud’s theories (204-08). For a critical treatment of psychoanalytic theory and its intersection with postcolonial theory and discussions of “colonial discourse,” see Young, who also proposes a rethinking of colonial discourse through Deleuze and Guattari’s own criticism of psychoanalysis in L’Anti-Oedipe. 332 Similar acts of disruptive, parodic re-reading have been common in counter-cinemas as a means to queer, carnivalize, and disrupt canonic, literary, and cinematic texts. Parmar, an accented woman filmmaker with British, Indian, and Kenyan heritages, has shown in an early essay film, Khush (1991), how such re-reading can take the form of re-editing and queering the gaze. Titled with a Sanskrit word meaning both happy and gay, Khush re-invents classic Bollywood films, by re-editing popular excerpts of 1944-45 black-and-white Indian films, in order to contaminate the game of gazes on which they were constructed. The lavish sequences of Indian female dancers performing for the male gaze are cut and re-assembled so as to create a humorous and erotic dialogue between the female dancers and their female viewers, inscribing queer readings into the texts of the Indian canon. Parmar cuts out the patriarchal male gaze of classical Indian cinema and offers to the modern gay and lesbian hyphenated Indians she interviews, a cinematic queer gaze that was lurking inbetween the frames of these classics. Parmar provides just one example of disrupting practices that directly engage with the male gaze of cinema and embody in a fragmented, parodic repetition the oppositional re-readings that can carnivalize dominant discourses and representations. 333 Drawing on the literature on trauma and memory, Kaplan distinguishes “vicarious trauma” from “witnessing,” in that the latter “leads to a broader understanding of the meaning of what has been done to victims, of the politics of trauma being possible” (Trauma Culture123). 334 During these sequences, Moffatt inserts gags that break the tension and offer comic relief, like the workers pausing for lunch and passing apples in the manner of circus jugglers. Moreover, Moffatt inserts numerous subliminal images, which at times act as ironic defamiliarizing devices like the abrupt and 424

extremely brief cut to a silhouetted image of the theatre owner whose mouth and tongue start resembling those of a menacing snake; seen from the young Rick’s perspective, the superimposition could be read as a comment on the cannibalism of white capitalism. 335 At various turns, Moffatt shows us silent and gazing white people, while suggesting abuses and violence against Aborigines. In this particular scene, Moffatt portrays the two “hyper-white” kids of the movie theater owner look into the Aboriginal children’s house. They stand outside of the house and look in through the window; we see a shadow approach and start hearing the sound of heavy beating; at this point, the camera cuts away from the violent scene, and forces us to look at the two white kids silently and eagerly gazing through the window as if in front of a cinema screen. They stand there until they see red water coming out of the house, until the horror/thriller show is over. Denying us the sight of the violent act being committed, Moffatt shifts our attention to the unethical passivity of the witnesses. By masking the violence, Moffatt makes the responsibility of all of the bystanders visible, transforming them into accomplices of the racist system responsible for the killings of Aboriginal men and women. 336 Laseur also points out that “a series of close-up portraitures where sadness, joviality and resilience create an overwhelming presence,” which allows viewers to empathize with the character. 337 The story constantly oscillates in time and space from the young Ruby living in the haunted house, to the older Ruby’s present re-telling; Moffatt plays the young Ruby whose character hardly speaks. According to Laseur, she rather “observes and listens, in touch with the myths of her people and country.” By casting herself in this role, Moffatt seems to reiterate the need to listen and bear witness to the voices of the past, who speak to us in the figure of the ghost that cannot be repressed. 338 Moffatt inserts numerous other incongruities in her text, which viewers might not necessarily notice at first viewing, but which encourage a re-reading. These can function as Barthesian “secondary signs,” that as Tamburri explains, are “something that … instead of being … the cardinal functions/nuclei or catalysers, would be, instead, something in the line of indices or informants: those secondary and tertiary signs that seem to have no constitutive function in the production of meaning yet, when all is said and done, figure significantly” (Italian/American Short Films 37). As such secondary signs function the voodoo-like dolls that suddenly appear in the outback of the reconstructed past. These are disseminated along the path of Ruby’s husband hunting route, haunting his daily routine with the memory of the young blind girl. Moffatt seems to play here with indigenous signs from different colonial histories, as she had done before in Night Cries, where she had used the sound of the last gasps of “a woman choking” that had been “recorded in Haiti in the 1930s during a voodoo ceremony” (Moffatt qtd in Murray 22). These interventions on the text do not affect its first viewing, but at a more informed reading, they do open up new “hyperlinks” for viewers’ critical reflection on the suggested intersections. In beDevil, Moffatt also played with her casting choices, ironically casting for the ghost of the white young girl killed by the train, the “blond Aboriginal Karen Saunders” (Summerhayes “Haunting Secrets” 18). Such a play on representations might be read as a reference to the situation of many Australians with mixed heritage who are dispossessed both of their Aboriginal and European families. 339 See chapter one, page 26 for details on the use of visual media by Australian Aboriginal communities. For Mark Olive, visit his website: http://www.lifestylefood.com.au/shows/show.asp?id=161 340 The famous rhyme similarly goes "Lizzie Borden took an axe/And gave her mother forty whacks/And when she saw what she had done /She gave her father forty-one.” For a discussion of the Borden legend and its place within feminist and gender debates see Charles and Louise Samuels’s The Girl in the House of Hate: Being an Exact and Faithful Account of the Trial of Lizzie Borden and Ann Schofield’s article “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe: History, Feminism and American Culture.” 341 The significance of the grandmother and aunt figure for hyphenated Italian women writers and filmmakers, as well as for hyphenated Italian gay artists has been analyzed within Italian/American studies; see Giunta’s Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors, Bona’s Claiming A Tradition: Italian/American Women Writers, and “Gorgeous Identities: Gay and Lesbian Italian/American Writers;” and Serra’s “Le Streghe Son Tornate: The Reappearance of Streghe in Italian American Queer Writing.” 342 Pellizzari has already experimented with a children’s perspective in her first graduation short Rabbit on the Moon, where the young Giuseppina often looks through her telescope, zooming in on the people she is 425

curious about like her Southern Italian friend, or out of focus on those who deride her, like her freckled and blond schoolmate. With her prosthetic gaze, Giuseppina can also cultivate the fairy tales she has learned from her Italian traditions, like the one about the rabbits, simultaneously her pets and her family’s dinners, who go to live a better life on the moon where they transform in a giant rabbit. Italian proverbs and songs are often humorously peppered throughout the short, thus paying homage to the regional Italian culture she inherited, while criticizing its patriarchy. Many are the scenes that offer comic relief, from the classical chase around the tale between mother and daughter at the beat of popular Italian folk songs, to the singing grandfather skinning the chickens and interjecting unrequested Italian sayings. Interestingly, Pellizzari also plays with the interview/testimony format; at the beginning of the short, Giuseppina introduces us to her family; alone in her room, she flips through family photographs placing them under the camera eye and explaining the kinship relations in the family. Such a scene establishes a direct dialogue between the viewers and Giuseppina, but it leaves open the question, to whom the direct address is directed, possibly her rabbit who is eating away a the photographs, thus humorously making us view through the rabbit eyes. 343 The first time, Pellizzari shows Mars's father beat his daughter for her sexual curiosity; her suffering and wounds are displaced in the depiction of the father’s belt breaking a porcelain doll and erasing its mouth, a vivid commentary on the silencing of women, enacted with the complicity of older generations of Italian/Australian women, but contrasted by Mars’s repeated protestations. Furthermore, it should be noted that the act of covering and hiding often recurs in the film, as with the potato sack and the images of the repeated closing of curtains, from the typically Australian green blinds, to the Italian white crochet curtain doubled by thick, blue drapes. Restricting the act of looking serves both as training in what is acceptable for the rigidly defined gender roles in the Italian/Australian community and as an affirmation of power, offering the invisibility necessary to exercise control through force. 344 The dwarfs will also become the witnesses and prey of the final unruly act, with the daughter menacing to shoot through every single dwarf and then pointing to the rifle against the father, ridiculously protected by a trench of porcelain dwarfs. 345 Mars is the witness of the hypocritical transgression of a Christian nuclear family ideology, when she catches the adulterous caressing between father and “aunt Maddalena,” who has just offered Mars a Virgin Mary mirror, as well as the sexual solicitations of Maddalena’s husband to Maria’s mother. 346 The scene’s humor is heightened by the juxtaposition with the father’s obsessive crushing of the flies, which do not stop infiltrating in the house, a symbol I will further discuss later, and with the mother’s racist, but unconsciously self-disparaging comment, that her skin, “white as mountain snow,” descends from true “polenta eaters, Northerners.” 347 At another point, she dusts talcum powder on her legs to make them look whiter for her meeting with a local Italian/Australian boy. Furthermore, many are the episodes in which she repeats self-disparaging ethnic humor, like defining herself a “freckled wog,” with the Italian boyfriend trying to console her, by naming important people with freckles, and ironically only coming up with the patri of Italian patriarchy, none less than the Pope, Mussolini, and Machiavelli. 348 Mars is often at the mirror, where the frame is centered around Maria’s eyes studying her developing body, checking if she has “perfect breasts” as described in girls’ magazines, and flirting, mediated through the mirror, with the camera. The vexing power of the mirror for women in a culture of normative slimness, youth, and standardized beauty is also satirized by Mars’ unruly grandmother who prefers looking at herself in a used tin foil rather than in a mirror, because with that she can have the young granddaughter flatten out her wrinkles in her displaced, foiled image. 349 During the girl’s tourist tour, the boy had demonstrated his Westernization by not even knowing of the imminent handover of Hong Kong to China and by uttering comments like Hong Kong resembling “a huge fucking Chinatown.” 350 J.M.’s marriage proposal aimed at dissuading B.G. to carry through her plan of killing her abusive father will be rejected, reinforcing the fact that the will to continue, to change one’s direction cannot be offered, but needs to be sought independently. B.G.’s final encounter with her past is portrayed with a lyrical beauty and irony; deep in the opal mine, she finds her father’s hideout and guides viewers to see it through the darkness, by touching and feeling it. At the shimmering light of candles, B.G.’s hands caress through what

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superficially appears to be the sumptuousness and lyricism of a banquet, but feels like the detritus it actually is, dead mice and insects. 351 “That, where what was enters in a flash into a constellation with what is.” Benjamin continues explaining that “Bild ist Dialektik im Stillstand” (the image is arrested dialectics), and that it can be encountered in language. In “Notes on the “Dialectical Image,” Hanselm Havermal takes issue with Buck- Morss’s re-reading of the Passagen-Werk, and puts forward an interesting proposition regarding the dialectical image, as a theory of dialectical reading (4), of extrapolating the dialectics of history in the process of reading. Benjamin’s theorization and its interpretations go beyond the scope of this study, but Havermal’s suggestion is certainly suggestive and worthy of further exploration, in a theorization of humor as a reading strategy to bring out the discursive and historical contradictions making up the image. 352 Benjamin also considered the critical potential of the comedic uses of technological reproduction pointing to Chaplin’s mimetic comedy. By decomposing under the lenses of cinema the details of human experience, Chaplin’s mimetic reproduction points to the automatization that characterizes industrial capitalism (“The Work of Art” 116-17). 353 In this context, Pirandellian humor, as it is predicated on a principle of structural dissociation, could be described as a “solution brusque de continuité” (“an abrupt break in continuity”), which Bergson sees as necessary to perceive the comic. Bergson famously argued that the cause of laughter is “une certaine raideur de mécanique” (8) (the “mechanical encrusted on the living” as Hokenson translates it, 55). Thereby, Bergson also disclaims the long supported “incongruity theory” that sees in surprise and contrast the triggers for laughter. Bergson, instead, argues that many things that are comic in principle, because they display a certain mechanical rigidity, but habit keeps us from perceiving the comic. Therefore, he argues, a break in continuity is necessary to reawake our ability of perceiving the comic. Although Pirandello’s theory of humor resonates with incongruity theories, it also differs from these, in that he insists that the contradiction that triggers humor, rather than the comic, does not pertain to the realm of signs, but rather to the experiential world of enunciating subjects. As a narrative strategy, humor acts as a break in continuity, which forces us to reflect and establish connections outside of habitual thinking. An overview of Bergson’s theory goes beyond the scope of this study, and I, therefore, refer to the French author’s essay itself and to Hokenson’s concise explication of this theory (43-63). 354 The extreme example of the peculiarities of the actor’s positionality within cinema and its alienation “in the face of the apparatus” is probably still best epitomized by Lev Kuleshov’s experiments, which deprived the actor of any humanity in the face of cinematic montage. 355 Spielraum is usually translated with “field of action,” but I retained the German term, because Benjamin purposefully uses the term with an emphasis on spielen, meaning to play. 356 Benjamin focused on the revolutionary potential of film, not delving into its disciplining function instead. Although, after arguing that the audience has the power to control the actor and the action, Benjamin himself acknowledged that "there can be no political advantage derived from this control until film has liberated itself from the fetters of capitalist exploitation” (113). It is important to keep this specification in mind, in order not to overstate the revolutionary tasks performed by film, or by humor and mimicry in film for that matter. Benjamin, for instance, also speaks of the “therapeutic” quality of laughter as triggered by Chaplin’s comedy, or even Disney film, which, in his argument, can help “immuniz[e] against … mass psychoses” caused by alienation (117-20). In spite of the politically critical potential of Chaplin’s mimetic comedy, it is, however, important to remember that film and laughter can also serve as containment strategies of resistance, as momentary relief, to thus reassert the status quo. 357Brecht’s theorization was inspired by Chaplin’s mimetic and plastic comedy (vol. 3: 29-30), as was Benjamin’s thinking on mimetic comedy and the role of actors within cinema (“The Work of Art” 112-16). 358 “The mimic and gestural expression of the social relationships … existing between the people of a specific epoch.” 359 Having started out with a discussion of humor’s role in awaking viewers from habit, the resonances with Bergson’s theory of laughter cannot be underestimated; Brecht’s emphasis on gestures, for instance, echoes again the French philosopher’s own argument that comedy needs to focus its attention not on the action, but on the gestures, because these are automatic and, contrary to acts, unconscious expressions of emotive states that can thus ridicule the “mechanical encrusted on the living.” A focus on gestures contributes to 427

suppress the emotions that are instead the material of tragedy; it is one of the tools in the author’s hands to prevent the reader/spectator’s empathy and emotional identification (108-09). Despite this shared emphasis on distance, Bergson’s assonances with Brecht stop where the latter translates such insights from comedic gestures into a tool of ideological critique 360 The first meaning of masquerade distantly recalls Lacan’s definition of mimicry as “camouflage … [where] it is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare” (qtd. in Bhabha 121). As Bhabha notices, Lacan’s definition of mimicry defines “identity … along the axis of metonymy,” which has dangerously defined the other in colonial discourse; however, Lacan’s own definition also represents a threat because of “the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself’” (128-29). Doubling the mimicry, the authority of metonymic discourse can hence be challenged. 361 The oneiric quality of the background and the melodic soundtrack that underlines her every move could remind of the erotic dance Leslie Caron performs for Gene Kelly in An American in Paris (1951), another intertextual reference that, if activated, parodically displaces the Hollywood icons into the Australian desert, where they loose their aura to be mimetically reproduced and challenged. 362 Although Bakhtin is careful to point out that grotesque realism cannot be contained within a specified and limited number of literary or artistic forms, but is multifarious and unpredictable, he still employs the term canon, to emphasize the necessity to further the research into a tradition that has largely been ignored. Whereas studies have multiplied in theorizing, describing, and documenting the classical, Renaissance, canon, the longstanding tradition of grotesque realism was long forgotten and under-appreciated (26-33). 363 See the discussion in section two of this chapter regarding écriture feminine and the role of Medusan laughter in disrupting the symbolic (216). 364 The broth imagery might possibly also be playing with high and low dichotomies, by evoking the pornographic genre and titles like “Brodo Menstruale;” in chapter four, I will indeed discuss the intersections between aesthetic discourses and the bodily excesses that define them. 365 Interestingly, Russo points out that the very term “grott-esque” was actually coined following the “ex- cavation in fifteenth-century Rome of Nero’s Domus Aurea or Golden Palace across from the coliseum” where “a series of strange and mysterious drawings, combining vegetation and animal and human body parts” was found, leading to the use of “grotesque” in art to initially refer to “marginal decoration” (The Female Grotesque 3). Clearly, since then its connotations and meanings have flourished beyond the fringe, despite resistance. 366 In his play and short stories, Pirandello systematically proceeded to bite away with his humor at the masks of social propriety, constantly reminding of the grotesque substratum where each subject’s degradation and regeneration ultimately leads to. He created characters like Mr. Perazzetti who, in Non é Una Cosa Seria, inhabits the margins of proper society, because he cannot refrain from looking beyond the everyday masks we wear to see the traces of the carnival laughter that contaminates any harmonious picture. Every pompous lawyer, well-dressed dame seen through Perazzetti’s imagination ends performing the same intimate and corporeal necessities. It should be noted, however, that Pirandello’s constant source of humor in the carnal grotesque realism also presents traces of the abjection of the woman that pervades the genre of comedy (Purdie). 367 His name is also a hybrid compromise between the mother and father’s preferred choices of Gino and Lino, inscribing in this non-traditional name his interstitial identity as hyphenated Australian. Pellizzari seems also to be playing with Mars’ last name, Lupi, which Mars argues has a proud heritage in Italy, just to be countered by Eno that she is not in Italy, suggesting that in Australia Lupi might have more negative connotation, possibly “loopey”? This would indeed be an indirect reference to Mars’s own position within the family and community as the unruly woman. 368 Like the aunt of Just Dessert, the nonna of Fistful of Flies has revolted against her own family and community, starting a new life with a female lover. 369 Chow is here mainly addressing Chinese literature and its representation of women, through which she studies the oscillation and negotiation of national discourses; Chow points out that in the ambiguities of

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such representations, where tradition has been inscribed on the body of woman, there is the potential for a new agency (Woman and Chinese Modernity 170). 370 Shen Shiao-Ying discusses at length this last scene in Farewell China, especially in reference to its soundtrack, namely the song “Ssu Hsiang Ch’I” that he describes as “an old Taiwan ballad made popular by Chen Tan,” which function as a sign of “Chineseness” (120). Shiao-Ying well points out the layered meaning of this sequence in its play with multiple signifiers; first, because Law chose a Taiwanese emblematic song in “a film about two Mainlanders,” secondly, because the song evokes a certain patriarchal nostalgia, but is also juxtaposed to the Tiananmen’s Goddess of Liberty; ultimately Shiao-Ying interprets the sequence as a “last glance at China, a love at last sight, a tearful farewell to China” (124). See, Shiao-Ying for a detailed discussion (120-24). 371 Teo describes Law’s New York and the journey of Hung and Zhao there as a “Dantesque descent into an American inferno” (Hong Kong Cinema 216), which certainly takes on grotesque nuances when Zhao, transformed into a pimp, wanders around the mean streets of New York, transformed in a stage for a rave party, where everybody wears a mask. Law seems to enjoy the stylistic freedom that such a masked performance allows her, a pleasure in playing with costume and masquerades that resurfaces in Temptation of a Monk as well, where the fallen princess turned prostitute and her women entourage delight the soldiers turned monks in a ball of masks, food, and sex. 372 Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel” already addresses “language as myth;” see 366-70. 373 Altman illustrates how genres are discursively constructed in the unending exchange among competing users, which include filmmakers, studios, critics, and audiences. He demonstrates that genres have never been as impermeable to one another as they are often constructed to be in classical analysis of Hollywood cinema, but they do constitute a marketable strategy for the studios, a device to allure audiences to the movie theatres, to sort through the difficult allocation of funds for the production and distribution of films based on their chances at the box office. In the definitions of these aesthetic categories, which, reading Altman, prove to be more and more ideological and market products, academic and journalistic criticism play a large role. They help in the definition of the genre’s attributes and in judging its value; they construct the distinctions between high and low genres based on institutionalized discourses of art value, which in the end serve to reinforce class and status distinctions, as well as gender differences. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has argued that “at stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, i.e. the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness” (193). In his sociological survey of aesthetic judgment, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Bourdieu effectively proves that “taste [is] one of the most vital stakes in the struggles fought in the field of the dominant class and the field of cultural production” (164). Combining a rigorous review of the disciplinary discourses on aesthetic value with an empirical survey of tastes among twelve hundred French men and women in Paris and Lille, Bourdieu illustrates which interests and discourses come into play in the construction of aesthetic categories, genres, and aesthetic value. Such reflections on aesthetic definitions need to be taken into account when discussing critical humor, because historically, comedy has always been defined as a low art form and its characters have been constructed as butts in subordinate positions. 374 See Stam for a more detailed discussion of the chronotope in cinema (Subversive Pleasures 4043). 375 Bakhtin retraces how in a “pre-class, agricultural stage,” time was collective, dictated by the collective labor in the fields that followed the seasonal times of “productive growth;” it is a time “profoundly spatial and concrete” and, above all for our present discussion, a unified time. All spheres of life, “food, drink, copulation, birth and death are … a common affair; they are ‘historicized,’ they are indissolubly linked with communal labor” (The Dialogic Imagination 206-09). When this “folkloric time,” however, gave way to a “bifurcated time” of a class society,“ where collective historicized time is separated from individualized, personal time, a similar bifurcation set in between the low spheres of daily, gritty life, and the high spheres of art, which were indissolubly associated with the high classes. As Bakhtin himself observes, his illustration of the “matrix” of “folkloric time” is extremely simplified, described in its “crudest, most basic outlines” (211). Despite this acknowledgment, it should still be stressed that Bakhtin seems to be oversimplifying “agricultural time;” he seems to fall into a romanticization of a “primitive”

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state, where the connection to a natural cycle and rhythm was absolute. There seems to be not much space in this time for superfluous entertainment, for art, which instead can still be and was part of this matrix. 376 He takes as model the medieval rogue who always parodies high language; he distorts it and inverts it; in so doing he forces the detached, sublimated, high language to get “dirty” and concrete again, to mix with the social. 377 It is important to note in this context that a common theme of Australian humor seems to be “mateship” (Davis “Aussie Humor,” Dibble and Evans, Bill Wannan), which, not surprisingly, marks Australian joking rituals as very much male-oriented, as Jones and Andrews emphasize. Furthermore, studies have also pointed out that there is a considerable and long tradition of “derogatory” Australian humor at the expense of marginal groups like the Aborigines, the Chinese, and the “darker” immigrants (Davis “Aussie Humor,” Jones, Jones and Andrews, Adams and Newell, Wannan). Thus, even when tapping into the national humorous repertoire, the three filmmakers take issue with the machismo of Australian humor, by turning the laughter onto the male, as Moffatt does in Nice Coloured Girls and Pellizzari in all of her works. Law, as a recent immigrant to Australia, seems to play less with such traditions, although, as I will show in this chapter, in The Goddess of 1967, she does creolize typical Australian generic conventions, which at times present a distinctive humor. 378 “The most distant and heterogeneous cultural elements are pushed into mutual relationships.” 379 Having taught the film in “women and film” classes in the U.S., I had the chance to witness how students, unfamiliar with experimental and Australian films, were able to capture the irony and criticism of the film, despite their confusion in terms of the narrative and estranging devices, thanks to the reversal of the familiar heist formula. 380 My use of the term “space” relies on Michel De Certeau’s seminal definition of “space” as a “practiced place” inscribed with social, economic, political, and economic practices (117). 381 It seems that the role of religion and missions in Australian colonization features more prominently in movies directed by white filmmakers on Australian racial politics. From the Christianization of Jedda, to Shepisi’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978) and Jimmie’s transformation from the thoroughly evangelized mission boy to angry, black killer, to Dead Heart (1996), where an Aboriginal priest is torn in his allegiances during the investigation of a white woman’s murder. Similarly, the most recent interest in Aboriginal stories shown in The Tracker, and Rabbit Proof Fence displays the complicity of the mission system with the practices of removing Aboriginal children from their families, and training trackers to help white institutions prosecute Aborigines. On the contrary, like Moffatt, Aboriginal filmmakers such as Perkins in Radiance and Sen in Beneath the Clouds ignore religious clashes between Aboriginal cultures and Western Christianity, to focus on the difficulties and marginalization experienced by Aboriginal families and youth. 382 Beyond her early experimentation, Moffatt has returned on the theme of religion in her experimental, social film Moodeitj Yorgas, dedicated to the resilience of Aboriginal women and their fight against the removal of their children to missions and for the right to continue teaching the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Moreover, in her photographic series, Up in the Sky, Moffatt also includes several pictures featuring nuns, either holding an Aboriginal child against the sky, or approaching a young woman, desperately holding onto her baby. Tunnicliffe has already written of the ironic and parodic twists of the Up in the Sky series. The pictures seem to suggest traumatic experiences of children removal, although they remain ambiguous in their measured gestures and unreadable faces. Moffatt plays on such ambiguity and has also speculated on the different readings that can be performed, from a sense of “love and concern” to Australian viewers’ more critical interpretation as a comment on “the Catholic Church and control over indigenous people” (Moffatt “Museum of Contemporary Art”). 383 See Little’s entry into Horton’s The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia (626) and his personal website for more information on Little’s career: http://www.jimmylittle.com.au/welcome.htm. 384 Moffatt explains this foreign intrusion, saying that her collaborator, Deborah Petrovitch, a video artist responsible for the short’s soundtrack, drew on her fascination for voodoo ceremonies in creating the necessary sounds to convey the eerie feeling Moffatt wanted in the beginning (qtd. in Murray 22). However, I would argue that we can also read this intrusion as an indirect attempt to move beyond the Australian borders and point to similar histories of exploitation and colonization. Indeed, I have already 430

pointed out how Moffatt systematically interjects estranging intercultural references in her films, like Aretha Franklin in Nice Coloured Girls, Kahlo in beDevil, where voodoo-dolls also mysteriously appear in the painted desert landscape of the past. These eerie could thus be read as subliminal reminders, secondary signs, of the global marginalization of indigenous populations and of black women specifically. 385 Jayamanne also draws attention to the mimetic performance and layered temporal inscriptions, in that Little is made to mimic, lip-sync his own song (9-10); her analysis of such mimetic play interestingly speculates on a intertextual reference with Marbuk in Jedda, see her discussion of “The Shaman and the Showman” (10-12). 386 It goes instead beyond the scope of this study to debate whether the carnivalization Gieri describes is specific to Italian cinema. 387 Williams refers specifically to three genres she includes under a melodramatic mode of discourse, namely pornography, horror films, and women’s films/weepies. Williams illustrates how in all three genres the spectacle is rooted in a “body in the grip of intense emotion,” either in sexual ecstasy, or in a “body beside itself” because of fear in the horror movies, and “overpowering sadness” in the melodrama. In all these cases, the bodies of women function as the “embodiments of pleasure, fear, pain” (“Film Bodies” 4). 388 As Williams has argued in her analysis of “film bodies,” “even in the most extreme displays of feminine masochistic suffering there is always a component of either power or pleasure for the victim” (8).388 Certainly, such a play on representation is fraught with ambiguities and bound to raise much criticism and questions within feminist film studies, as the work of Campion has indeed done (see bell hooks). For more on the theorization of masochism in feminist film studies see Williams, Studlar, and Clover. 389 O’Regan explains the “Australian freakishness” partially as a result of Australia’s position in the world, which makes it the farthest, and hence “freakiest” to an extent, Western nation, and of its history, from its pre-colonization history and its Indigenous populations who have fascinated anthropologists for centuries, to its colonization by convicts, etc. 390 See D’Acierno, Giunta “The Quest for True Love”, Casillo, Camaiti-Hostert “Identità di Genere” for a discussion of women in Italian/American cinema. Although such a binarist representation characterizes most of Italian/American cinema and its male directors, the dichotomy is particularly on display in Scorsese’s movies right from his very debut Who’s Knocking at My Door, where the fervently religious aspiring boss Charlie explains the difference between broads and marriageable women. 391 The cemetery is desecrated repeatedly in the film, becoming the stage for the narrative climactic points; it serves as the site for Eno and Mars’s first date, where the flirting ritual takes place amid and atop tombstones and is cross-cut with the father’s engagement in adulterous sex with Eno’s mother in the cemetery’s house. As in her previous shorts, Pellizzari revels in making religious icons, paintings, and statues the witnesses of sinful acts and religious hypocrisy. 392 In the confession sequence, Pellizzari also employs humor to satirize against the priesthood institution as is common in Italian popular film and literature. She shoots the confessing ritual from a bird’s eye perspective, that thus splits the screen between the kneed Mars who asks provocative questions to the priest like “whose version of the truth, father?,” and the young priest, who, rather than listening to his repenting souls, eagerly reads a newspaper and answers a phone to place a bet on a horse named “archangel.” Furthermore, like in Best Wishes, Pellizzari satirizes the hypocrisy of the penance, by showing its holy administration through an automatic machine played in fast-forward. 393 In terms of production it is also a “hybrid” because financed by the Australian Film Finance Corporation, New South Wales Film and Television Office as well as Japan’s Nippon Development Finance and Fortissimo sales, which is based in Amsterdam and Hong Kong (“Screen Goddesses” 7) 394 It should be noted that generally speaking, as Stratton maintains in his review of Mad Max, cars in road movie often function as surrogate “locations of the domestic domain” (“What Made Mad Max Popular?” 55). In The Goddess of 1967, the meaning of the car shifts throughout; it starts as a fetish object, a cult antique, to transform in a more classic mobile vector, which becomes more and more “inhabited” through the growing relationship between the protagonists. However, in the flashback, it first serves as a means of escape and independence for the abused women, where domesticity is instead inscribed in the mobile home, the Goddess helps them to leave behind. Throughout, the car certainly functions, as Morris has argued in “Fate and the Family Sedan” regarding road movies, as a “utopian space to escape or 431

‘reconstitute’ sexual and family relations” (124), becoming a tool for “critical thinking about the family and familial space” (“Fate and the Family Sedan.” 116). 395 The generic, parodic displacement continues with a lyrical shot of B.G.’s sleeping under the arms of a sheltering tree, protected by vigilant dingoes. The association between woman and nature seems more stylistic than discursive and is soon interrupted by a humorous cut to a technological promotional video for the goddess, featuring stencil project designs and illustrations of the car’s technological innovations. With the two juxtapositions, Law seems to reject a dichotomy nature-technology along gender lines. 396 As Hawker notices, Law employed here “an old technique – rear projection – so that the landscape we see during several car journeys has a stylized, impressionistic look” (“Law and Disorder” 3). 397 Simpson’s analysis of women’s road movies in Australia argues for a rethinking of the genre, which would include a “more inclusive type of domestic journeying,” that is shorter family trips rather than the necessary cross-country adventure (“Volatile Vehicles” 198). Although there are some similarities between this more domestic approach and Law, in that the car is predominantly marked by familial relationships and negotiations, the Hong Kong/Australian director directly tackles the genre’s staples, using the long trip as a means to explore Australian cinema and landscape.

398 The other space that only briefly appears in the film, but is equally deconstructed is the hypermodern landscape of Tokyo. Law has clearly stated that her choice of a Japanese man as co-protagonist and of Tokyo for the introductory shot was a means to “make a very succinct point about post-modernism. The wealth and materialism, the sense of isolation, the coolness and beauty of surfaces” (Press Kit “Goddess of 1967). Thus the film starts with a “a cool, blue-hued depiction of Tokyo” that resembles the opening of Autumn Moon and throughout the film, the flashing images of Japan focus on, what Yue describes as, its “post-realist spatial aesthetic” (“Migration-as-Transition”). With the bleach-out processing, Law turns the Australian landscape into a sign of modern alienation, rather than tradition; similarly, with the painted quality of Tokyo’s shiny, modern surfaces, Law foregrounds a sense of postmodern uprootedness. In this case as well, she uses humor to, arguably, satirize on her own romanticization of this postmodern landscape, when J.M., asked to describe life in Tokyo, says that "it’s like Mars,” not the “the lonely planet” though, but rather “the chocolate bar.” The humorous line seems a veiled criticism of the extreme consumerism and capitalism; indeed, if there are any feelings of nostalgia in the film, they seem directed toward Japanese tradition, in that all J.M. longs for is “noodles,” for him the “smell” and “sound” of Tokyo alike. 399 Looking at Law’s filmic trajectory in Australia, it seems that the Hong Kong/Australian director uses cinema to get to know her new land and culture, so that the relative distance from Australian culture displayed in Floating Life leaves way to the attentive exploration of Australian landscape and cinema in the Goddess of 1967. If Law’s second Australian film still displays significant lacunae in coming to terms with the key power struggles inscribed both in the country’s land and cinema, Law seems to come a bit closer in Letters to Ali. As already mentioned, Law discovers here the racist history of Australia; she is still only moving within the socio-political and historical context of immigration, not tackling the issue of colonization. At one point during the documentary, she traverses an Aboriginal community, remarking so, but offering no further comment except the mute tracking shots of a marginalized and desolate camp. Certainly, Law has not yet confronted the continuities between Australian patriarchy and a racial history inscribed both in its colonization and settlement through immigration. Given the trajectory of her films, however, it is to hope that more will surface in Law’s next cinematic project and negotiation with her new land. 400 Beyond Mad Max and the sequels, other typical purgatorial films are Sunday Too far Away, Gallipoli, Heaven’s Burning, and more recently Yolngu Boy. 401 “Translation, the art of skimming and approaching, is a practice of tracing. Against the absolute limitation of being, the art of translation contributes to gather the extent of all that is and all that exists in the world. Tracing through languages means tracing through the unpredictable of our common condition.”

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Rocky. Dir. John G. Avildsen. Perfs. Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire. Chartoff-Winkler

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Romper Stomper. Dir. Geoffrey Wright. Perfs. Russell Crowe, Daniel Pollock. Australian

Film Commission, 1992.

Saturday Night Fever. Dir. John Badham. Perfs. John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney.

Robert Stigwood Organization, 1977.

Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. Dir. Howard Hawks. Perfs. Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak.

The Caddo Company, 1932.

497

Sentimental Bloke, The. Dir. Raymond Longford. Perfs. Arthur Tauchert, Lottie Lyell.

Southern Cross Feature Film Company, 1919.

Serenades. Dir. Mojgan Khadem. Perfs. Perfs. Alice Haines, Aden Young. Australian

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Shaft. Dir. Gordon Parks. Perfs. Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn. Metro-Goldwyn-

Mayer, 1971.

Soldiers of the Cross. Dir. Herber Booth, Joseph Perry. Perfs. Beatrice Day, Harold

Graham. Limelight Department of the Salvation Army, 1900.

Somersault. Dir. Cate Shortland. Perfs. Abbie Cornish, Damian de Montemas. Red

Carpet Productions, 2004.

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Song of Ceylon. Dir. Basil Wright. Ceylon Tea Board, 1934.

Song of Exile. (Ke Tu Qiu Hen). Dir. Ann Hui. Perfs. Maggie Cheung, Tan Lang Jachi

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Spaventapasseri. Dir. Luigi Acquisto. Swinburne Film & Television School, 1986.

Spinning Gasing. Dir. Teck Tan. Perfs. Ellie Suriaty Omar, Craig Fong. Niche Film Sdn

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Spread the Word. Dir. Tracey Moffatt. Aboriginal Medical Service, 1987.

Star Wars: Episode III – The Revenge of the Sith. Dir. Georg Lucas. Perfs. Ewan

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498

Story of the Kelly Gang, The. Dir. Charles Tait. Perfs. Elizabeth Tait, Frank Mills. J. and

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Strictly Ballroom. Dir. Baz Luhrman. Perfs. Paul Mercurio, Tara Morice. M&A, 1992.

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Sweetie. Dir. Jane Campion. Perfs. Genevi~eve Lemon, Karen Colston. Arenafilm, 1989.

Sydney’s Darlings. Dir. Thomas Marinato. Perfs. Charles Chapman, Doris Harrison.

Beacon Light Productions, 1926.

Tangos: El Exilio de Gardel. Dir. Fernando E. Solanas. Perfs. Marie Laforêt, Miguel

Ángel Solá. Central National de la Cinématographie, 1985.

Tarantella. Dir.Helen de Michiel. Perfs. Mira Sorvino, Rose Gregorio. Independent

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Golden Harvest, 1993.

Ten Canoes. Dir. Rolf de Heer, Peter Djigirr. Perfs. Crusoe Kurddal, Jamie Gulpilil.

Adelaide Film Festival, 2006.

Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. Perfs. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn.

Hemdale Film, 1984.

They Say the Moon is Fuller Here. Dir. Clara Law. 1985.

They’re a Weird Mob. Dir. Michael Powell. Perfs. Walter Chiari, Clare Dunne.

Williamson/Powell, 1966.

499

Those Who Love. Dir. Paulette McDonagh, P.J. Ramster. Perfs. Marie Lorraine, William

Carter. MCD Productions, 1926.

Tokyo Story. (Tôkyô Monogatari). Dir. Yasujiro Ozu. Perfs. Chishu Ryu, Chieko

Higashiyama. Shochiku Kinema Kenkyû-jo, 1953.

Tracker, The. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Perfs. David Gulpilil, Gary Sweet. Vertigo Productions

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Traps. Dir. Pauline Chan. Perfs. Saskia Reeves, Robert Reynolds. Filmopolis, 1994.

True Love. Dir. Nancy Savoca. Perfs. Annabella Sciorra, Ron Eldard. Forward Films,

1989.

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Turtle Beach. Dir. Stephane Wallace. Perfs. Greta Scacchi, Joan Chen. Regency

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Two Minutes Silence. Dir. Paulette McDonagh. Perfs. Frank Bradley, Vampbell Copelin.

1933.

Uncivilised. Dir. Charles Chauvel. Perfs. Margot Rhys, Dennis Hoey. Expeditionar

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Until the End of the World. (Bis ans Ende der Welt). Dir. Wim Wenders. Perfs. William

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Velo Nero. Dir. Monica Pellizzari. Perfs. Rita Zerbini, Angelo D’Angelo. AFTRS, 1988.

Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perfs. James Stewart, Kim Novak. Alfred J. Hitchcock

Productions, 1958.

500

Walkabout. Dir. Charles Mountford. South Australian Museum, 1940.

Walkabout. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Perfs. Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg. St. Litvinoff Film

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Walking on Water. Dir. Tony Ayres. Perfs. Vince Colosimo, Maria Theodorakis.

Porchlight Films, 2002.

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We of the Never Never. Dir. Igor Auzins. Perfs. Angela Punch McGregor, Arthur

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Where the Green Ants Dream. (Wo die Grünen Ameisen Träumen). Dir. Werner Herzog.

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Who’s That Knocking at My Door. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perfs. Zina Bethune, Harvey

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Witness. Dir. Peter Weir. Perfs. Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis. Paramount Pictures,

1986.

Year of Living Dangerously, The. Dir. Peter Weir. Perfs. Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver.

McElroy & McElroy, 1982.

Yellow Tale Blues: Two American Families. Dir. Christine Choy, Renee Tajima. The

Film News Now Foundation, 1990.

501

Yolngu Boy. Dir. Stephen Johnson. Perfs. Sean Mununggurr, John Sebastian Pilakui.

Australian Children’s Television Foundation, 2002.

502