AURAL AUTEUR: SOUND IN THE FILMS OF .

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Published Papers in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, .

Supervisors:

Ms. Helen Yeates Lecturer, Film and TV, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT.

Dr. Vivienne Muller Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literary Studies, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT.

Associate Professor Geoff Portmann Discipline Leader, Film and TV, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT.

Written and submitted by

David Bruno Starrs

BSc (ANU), PGDipHlthSc (Curtin), BTh (Hons) (JCU), MFTV (Bond), MCA (Melb).

Self-archived publications available at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Starrs,_D._Bruno.html

January 2009. Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

ABSTRACT.

Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

An interpretative methodology for understanding meaning in cinema since the 1950s, auteur analysis is an approach to film studies in which an individual, usually the director, is studied as the author of her or his films. The principal argument of this thesis is that proponents of auteurism have privileged examination of the visual components in a film-maker’s body of work, neglecting the potentially significant role played by sound.

The thesis seeks to address this problematic imbalance by interrogating the creative use of sound in the films written and directed by Rolf de Heer, asking the question, “Does his use of sound make Rolf de Heer an aural auteur?” In so far as the term ‘aural’ encompasses everything in the film that is heard by the audience, the analysis seeks to discover if de Heer has, as Peter Wollen suggests of the auteur and her or his directing of the visual components (1968, 1972 and 1998), unconsciously left a detectable aural signature on his films.

The thesis delivers an innovative outcome by demonstrating that auteur analysis that goes beyond the mise-en-scène (i.e. visuals) is productive and worthwhile as an interpretive response to film. De Heer’s use of the aural point of view and binaural sound recording, his interest in providing a ‘voice’ for marginalised people, his self-penned song lyrics, his close and early collaboration with composer and sound designer Jim Currie, his ‘hands-on’ approach to sound recording and sound editing and his predilection for making films about sound are all shown to be examples of de Heer’s aural auteurism.

As well as the three published (or accepted for publication) interviews with de Heer, Tardif and Currie, the dissertation consists of seven papers refereed and published (or accepted for publication) in journals and international conference proceedings, a literature review and a unifying essay. The papers presented are close textual analyses of de Heer’s films which, when considered as a whole, support the thesis’ overall argument and serve as a comprehensive auteur analysis, the first such sustained study of his work, and the first with an emphasis on the aural.

i Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

KEYWORDS.

Rolf de Heer auteur analysis aural auteur auteurism auteurist authorship textual analysis film sound

Australian film aural point of view binaural sound recording unlikely protagonist non-hyper-masculine protagonist psychoanalytic film theory

Graham Tardif

Jim Currie

ii Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS FORMING PART OF THE THESIS.

1. Starrs, D. Bruno (2007). “The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that weren’t?”, Metro Magazine, (ISSN: 0312-2654), Melbourne, Australian Teachers of Media, no. 153, pp. 166-172.

2. Starrs, D. Bruno (2007). “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, (ISSN: 1749-9771 - online), UK, University of Edinburgh, no. 5.

3. Starrs, D. Bruno (2008). “Enabling the auteurial voice in ”, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, (ISSN: 1441-2616 - online), Brisbane, QUT Creative Industries, vol. 11, no. 3.

4. Starrs, D. Bruno (2009, forthcoming). “Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie aural auteur”, (accepted for refereed publication in the conference proceedings of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 January 2008, Kolkata, India. A revised version is also currently undergoing refereeing by Metro Magazine [ISSN: 0312-2654], Melbourne, Australian Teachers of Media).

5. Starrs, D. Bruno (2010, forthcoming). “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, (accepted for refereed publication in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, (ISSN: 1543-5326 - online, 1050-9208 - hard copy), London and NY, Routledge, vol. 27, no. 5).

6. Starrs, D. Bruno (2008). “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003)”, Metro Magazine, (ISSN: 0312-2654), Melbourne, Australian Teachers of Media, no. 156, pp. 148-153.

7. Starrs, D. Bruno (2009, forthcoming). “Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer”, (accepted for refereed publication in the conference proceedings of the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January 2008, Delhi. A revised version is also currently undergoing refereeing by Cinema Journal [ISSN: 0009-7101], Texas, University of Texas Press).

iii Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY.

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

------Signature - David Bruno Starrs (also known as D. Bruno Starrs)

------Date

iv Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

First and foremost I would like to acknowledge and thank my Primary Supervisor, Ms. Helen Yeates (50%), lecturer, Film and TV, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT. Helen’s keen eye for detail was a decisive factor in helping me get the papers of the thesis to a standard where they were ready for submission for publication and in coalescing the thesis into a unified whole. My Associate Supervisors, Dr. Vivienne Muller (40%), lecturer, Creative Writing and Literary Studies, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT; and Associate Professor Geoff Portmann (10%), discipline leader, Film and TV, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, made my supervisory team complete by offering advice and assistance from very different perspectives. I feel very fortunate to have had this most professional trio guiding me from the start (19 September 2006).

Other staff at QUT who deserve thanks include Professor Terry Flew for his guidance regarding the publishing of papers and Dr. Bronwyn Fredericks for her advice on the choice of language that is respectful to Aboriginal Australians. Professor Brad Haseman and Mr. Peter Fell deserve recognition for their invaluable instruction in the courses “KKP601: Approaches to Enquiry in the Creative Industries” and “IFN001: Advanced Information Retrieval Skills”. Creative Industries Faculty support staff including Ms. Leanne Blazely, Mrs. Jenny Mayes, Ms. Kate Simmonds, Ms. Alice Steiner and Ms. Ellen Thompson also warrant acknowledgement for their eager and helpful assistance.

Panel members at my Confirmation and Final Seminars must be heartily thanked. These QUT academics include my supervisors as well as Professor Terry Flew, Professor Julian Knowles and Dr. Susan Carson. Also on the panels were Griffith University staff Dr. Amanda Howell and Dr. Wendy Keyes, whose contributions were extremely useful. The comments and suggestions from all panellists have been vitally important in preparing and refining this document.

Thanks must go to the conveners of the international conferences I attended and presented at: a very important process involved in preparing several of my papers for later publication. These were the Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series, University of Auckland, New Zealand, 13 August 2007; the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January 2008, Delhi, India; and the Indian Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 January 2008, Kolkata, India. Thanks also to the QUT Research Student’s Centre for their Grant In Aid funding that assisted me with the costs of

v Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

travel to the two conferences in India. In 2008, this doctoral study was supported by a Creative Industries Faculty QUT Postgraduate Research Award for which I am extremely grateful.

Thanks must go to the creators of the films addressed in this thesis, Rolf de Heer, Graham Tardif and Jim Currie, who gave their time so generously for interviews. I am, of course, deeply indebted to these film artists for their creative work and enterprising collaborative practices. Without their inspired output, Australian cinema would be greatly impoverished and this thesis would not exist.

Finally, I would like to thank the editors and anonymous referees of: Cinema Journal; Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts; M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture; Metro Magazine; Quarterly Review of Film and Video; and RealTime+Onscreen for accepting (or submitting for refereeing) for publication the papers and interviews of the thesis.

vi Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

AUTHOR’S NOTE.

The writing style and terminology utilised in the thesis has been deliberately chosen in order to support rather than undermine its general argument. Wherever possible, terms that reinforce the dominance of the screen image are avoided: the word ‘film’ is used in preference to the term ‘motion picture’ or its derivative ‘movie’ and the receivers of a film are referred to as ‘audiences’ or ‘filmgoers’ rather than ‘viewers’ or ‘spectators’. Of course, the term ‘film’ is itself a less than perfect choice, referring as it does to the photographic medium upon which the narrative is recorded, but it is certainly less ocular-centric than other terms. In addition, the term ‘film’ can be understood in this thesis as also referring to works that were actually created with videotape.

Foreign language words and their derivatives are italicised, including the French words ‘auteur’, ‘mise-en-scène’ and ‘genre’ and the German words ‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘Weltanschauung’, although some of these are terms so often used in English now that they are frequently published without italics. Where this has been the case in referenced material, quotations from such publications retain the original absence of italics.

The referencing and citation style of the thesis is QUT Harvard, but the separate published papers of the thesis have been prepared according to the differing writing and referencing styles of the journals to which they were submitted and are reproduced as such within these pages.

Australian English is used in the body of the thesis (with a preference for ‘ise’, rather than ‘ize’, where some dictionaries of Australian English are ambivalent), but not necessarily so in the published papers or in quotations from other sources.

vii Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PART ONE: Introduction.

CHAPTER 1. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM, OBJECTIVE/AIMS, SUBJECT AND METHODOLOGIES ...... 3

1.1 Description of Research Problem Investigated...... 4 1.2 Overall Objective of the Thesis …………………………………………………... 7 1.3 Specific Aim of the Study …………………………………………………….….... 7 1.4 Account of Research Progress Linking the Research Papers ………………….. 7 1.5 The Subject: Why Rolf de Heer? ...... 9 1.6 The Methodology and Research Plan for the Thesis ...... 11

CHAPTER 2. THE LITERATURE AND CONTEXTUAL REVIEW ...... 23

2.1 Preamble to the Literature and Contextual Review ………………..……..…... 24 2.2 The History and Development of Auteurism ...... 26 2.3 Criticisms of Auteurism ...... 38 2.4 Auteur Analyses of Australian Film-makers ...... 46 2.5 Towards an Aural Auteur Analysis of Rolf de Heer ...... 51 2.6 Psychoanalytic Film Sound Theory and the Aural Construction of Subjectivity ...... 53 2.7 Collaborations in Context: The Interviews with Rolf de Heer, Graham Tardif and James Currie ...... 64

PART TWO. The Seven Refereed and Published Papers of the Thesis.

CHAPTER 3. A PAPER UTILISING GENRE ANALYSIS AND SIGNALLING AN INTEREST IN THE AUTEURISM OF ROLF DE HEER ………………...….... 69

“The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that weren’t?”, Metro Magazine, Melbourne, Australian Teachers of Media, no. 153, 2007, pp. 166-172.

CHAPTER 4. THE FIRST OF TWO PAPERS UTILISING STANDARD AUTEUR ANALYSIS …………………………………………….……………………...... 79

“Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts (online), UK, University of Edinburgh, no. 5, 2007.

viii Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

CHAPTER 5. THE SECOND OF TWO PAPERS UTILISING STANDARD AUTEUR ANALYSIS …………………………………………………………………...... 97

“Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song”, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture (online), vol. 11, no. 3, 2008.

CHAPTER 6. A PAPER ARGUING FOR THE METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATION OF THE THESIS: AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS …………...... 109

“Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie aural auteur”, (accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 January 2008, Kolkata, India. A revised version is also currently undergoing refereeing by Metro Magazine).

CHAPTER 7. THE FIRST OF THREE PAPERS UTILISING AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS ...... 129

“The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, (accepted for refereed publication in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, London and NY, Routledge, vol. 27, no. 5, 2010).

CHAPTER 8. THE SECOND OF THREE PAPERS UTILISING AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS ……………………………………………………………………. 153

“An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003)”, Metro Magazine, Melbourne, Australian Teachers Of Media, no. 156, 2008, pp. 148-153.

CHAPTER 9. THE THIRD OF THREE PAPERS UTILISING AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS …………………………………………………………………………………. 162

“Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer”, (accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January 2008, Delhi. A revised version is also currently undergoing refereeing by Cinema Journal).

PART THREE: Conclusion.

CHAPTER 10. THE UNIFYING ESSAY ……..…………………………………….... 189

10.1 Preamble to the Unifying Essay ……………………………………….…..…. 190 10.2 The Journey of the Thesis ...... 191 10.3 The Film Sound Industry in Australia ...... 194 10.4 Overseas Aural Auteur Analyses ...... 197

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10.5 De Heer’s Aural Signature Expressed via Acoustic Binaries? ...... 199 10.6 An Unconscious Weltanschauung? ...... 205 10.7 An Unconscious Preoccupation With Designing Films For and About Sound? ...... 208

11. REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FILMOGRAPHY.

11.1 References/Bibliography ………………………………………...……...…….. 213 11.2 Rolf de Heer’s Filmography ………………………………………...……...... 232

12. APPENDICES.

12.1 Letters of Acceptance for As-yet-unpublished Papers …………………….... 233 12.2 The Published (or accepted for publication) Interviews: 12.2.1 Rolf de Heer …………….…………………………………..………. 237 12.2.2 Graham Tardif ……………..………………………………...…….. 242 12.2.3 Jim Currie ……………………………..…………..……….….……. 246 12.3 Table 1. Protagonists and Antagonists: Their Outcomes in the Films of Rolf de Heer …...………………………………….... 256 12.4 QUT Ethics Application and Approval ………………………….…………... 258

LIST OF FIGURES.

Figure 1. The structure of the thesis ………………………....…………………….... 7 Figure 2. Front cover of Metro Magazine, no. 153, 2007 ………………..……...…. 71 Figure 3. Front cover of the programme from the Indian Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 Jan. 2008 ……….. 111 Figure 4. Front cover of Metro Magazine, no. 156, 2008 …………………………. 155 Figure 5. Front cover of the programme from the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 Jan. 2008 ………...... ……….. 164 Figure 6. Front cover of Metro Magazine, no. 152, 2007 …………………...…….. 237 Figure 7. Front cover of Realtime+Onscreen, no. 85, 2008 ………….……...……. 242

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PART ONE. Introduction. Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. CHAPTER 1. The Research Problem, Objectives/Aims, Subject and Methodologies.

“Audio is the last frontier” (Hollywood sound designer, Tamara Rogers qtd. in Stokes 1995, 77).

“Always a problematic and very special sign, the signature of the author is a mark on the surface of the text signalling its source. The signature embeds within it - as in hypertext - a genuine fourth dimension, the temporal process that brought the text into being in the first place. The signature moors the film image to a submerged reef of values by means drawn by camera or pen” (Dudley Andrew 1993, 83).

3 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

1.1 Description of Research Problem Investigated.

The research problem this thesis addresses is the failure to consider film sound in the process of auteur analysis, a methodology for the close interpretative study of a film- maker’s œuvre (or body of work),1 which is usually undertaken in order to seek out an authorial signature. The film sound to be considered in the thesis includes music, dialogue and its accents, sound effects and diegetic and non-diegetic sound. It should be noted from the outset that the thesis will not be a technical treatise on the various theories of sound or music, the specialised arenas of acoustics and otology or the practicalities of audio engineering.2 Nor will the thesis serve as a technical exploration of the film sound industry and the details of the sound recording business in Australia. Rather, the role of sound as part of a writer/director’s auteurial signature is the particular focus of the study.

The thesis makes the claim that typically, the auteur analyst only interprets the mise-en- scène (or the visual components)3 as she or he studies the film director’s œuvre. Rick Altman noted, “a surprising number of theoreticians blithely draw conclusions about the nature of cinema simply by extrapolating from the apparent properties of the moving image” (1992, 35). Indeed, film sound makes plenty of noise but writing on it is relatively quiet. The hegemony of vision in the academy persists unshakably, because, as Philip Brophy indicated: ... auteurism is forensically cited via the non-sonic discourses of literature, theater, and photography … visuals are directed, while sounds are simply direct. Theorists have long smothered the ontological investigation of so-called direct sound with poor metaphorical assignations of truth and honesty (“Bring the noise”, 2006, 16).

1 The key word here is œuvre. It is important to note from the beginning that an auteur analyst attempts to consider a film-maker’s entire body of work. An analysis of a single film, selected from a number of films made by an individual, is, therefore, not an auteur analysis. The exception may be where that single paper is considered, as is the case with this thesis, to be one in a collection of papers that analyse the work of a particular auteur. 2 Such investigations are the worthy subject of other research studies (see Rick Altman [1992], Royal S. Brown [1994], Michel Chion [1994, 1999] or James Lastra [2000]). 3 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson define mise-en-scène as follows: “… the term [used] to signify the director’s control over what appears in the frame ... : setting, lighting, costume, and the behaviour of the figures. In controlling the mise-en-scene, the director stages the event for the camera” (2008, 112).

4 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

According to Brophy, artistic experimentation with soundtracks has been discouraged in favour of audio that has “truth and honesty”, even while the image is permitted to dance freely. Yet unlike the spluttering, squawking Kinetophone of yesteryear, modern cinematography has the potential to collude and contrast with audiography to create deeply layered audience responses. An audio-fluent film-maker will seek to exploit this potential from the earliest stage, artistically “designing a movie for sound”, as Academy Award winning sound designer Randy Thom recommended (2003, 121). From when the film exists as little more than a germ of an idea in her or his head the aurally attuned auteur will then work with this potential through each and every stage of production, eventually producing “soundtracks [that] psychologically excite the auditory membrane” (Brophy 2004, 3). She or he will need, however, to communicate suggestions for sonicity to all key personnel such that the concept of the film as an AUDIO-visual artwork permeates the cast, crew, editors, distributors and exhibitors like a meme. Film theorists play a role, too, in nurturing this level of audio artistry by acknowledging and congratulating its existence, and by identifying those few film-makers who qualify for status as an “aural auteur” (to use the term coined by Brophy in describing Indian film director Satyajit Ray [“Punk ambient” 2006, 16])4. Such ‘aural auteurs’5 need to be identified as cinematic groundbreakers regarding Tamara Roger’s “last frontier” of film audio (qtd. in Stokes 1995, 77).

Brophy bemoaned the “absent aural in film theory” (2008, 424) and, indeed, only recently has the tentative suggestion been made that there exists an elite few directors whose œuvre demonstrates a propensity to design films for sound, with Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda proposing, as worthy subjects for future academic research, the likes of Russian Aleksandr Sokurov, Mexican Carlos Reygados, Japanese Takeshi Kitano, Taiwanese Tsai Ming-Liang and Brazilian Julio Bressane (2008, 17). Unfortunately, the Beck and Grajeda text includes scholarly work from contributors who address the use of sound in a director’s single work, and not her or his complete œuvre, thus falling short of

4 Brophy wrote that Ray’s work “simultaneously problematises the presumed literary criteria for authorship, and complicates the assumed musicological criteria for composer” (Brophy “Punk ambient” 2006, 16). 5 Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda coined the similar term “acoustic auteur” recently (2008, 13), but because of the additional technical nuances the word “acoustic” suggests (e.g. non-electronic musicianship), Brophy’s original phrase is preferred throughout this thesis.

5 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

a sustained aural auteur analysis of any of their subjects. Even more disconcerting is that their list of “acoustic expressions of cultural identities that still need investigation” (ibid) neglects to include any Australian cine-artist whatsoever.

Regardless, this thesis has anticipated Beck and Grajeda’s proposal (and unfortunate elision of Australian film-makers) with regard to aural auteur analysis. It was decided from the very start that to demonstrate that the hypothesised neglect of the potential for aural auteur analysis exists in Australia too, a likely Antipodean subject needed to be found. An important criterion in the selection of such a subject was that the film-maker in question should not yet have been the focus of adequate academic enquiry. Hence this thesis examines in detail the creative use of sound in the films written, directed and/or produced by South Australian resident Rolf de Heer, who has been labelled an auteur by critics for several years now, and who it is suspected devotes greater attention to sound than most other major Australian film directors, but who has nevertheless received relatively little scholarly attention (as yet no monograph or thesis devoted to his work exists). This thesis attempts to answer the following key question: ‘Does his use of sound make Rolf de Heer an ‘aural auteur’?’ As this question surfaces, others eddy into being in its wake: ‘What is an auteur?’; ‘How is an auteur analysis best conducted?’; and, finally, ‘What does de Heer attempt to say via his auteurial use of sound?’ or, as Dudley Andrew might put it, ‘What does his use of sound tell us about de Heer’s “submerged reef of values” (1993, 83)?’ This research thesis attempts to analyse these questions in its consideration of both Rolf de Heer as aural auteur and the role sound plays in his eclectic and impressive body of work.

6 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

1.2 Overall Objective of the Thesis.

In short, this research thesis was inspired by the great diversity in de Heer’s œuvre, the absence of any major scholarly study of his body of work and the possibility an original contribution to auteur theory could be made with consideration of the aural aspects of his auteurism. The overall objective of this thesis is therefore an expansion of the concept of the auteur and the methodology of auteur analysis to incorporate study of the aural auteur’s signature, focussing on the varied and under-researched work of Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer (already identified by some as an auteur).

1.3 Specific Aim of the Study.

The specific aim of the study is the addressing of the deficiency in the scholarly literature on this overlooked yet distinguished Australian film-maker through the publication of a collection of seven refereed papers. The published papers are ‘book- ended’ in this thesis by a literature review and a unifying essay and the thesis also includes, in the appendices, three published interviews by the author with de Heer and two of his sound crew. This PhD by Published Papers is therefore presented in three parts: Part One. The research problem, subject, objectives/aims, methodologies and the literature review. Part Two. The seven refereed and published papers of the thesis. Part Three. The unifying essay.

1.4 Account of Research Progress

Linking the Research Papers.

The QUT PhD Regulations state:

“14.1.1 The Queensland University of Technology permits the presentation of theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the format of published and/or submitted papers ... For the purpose of this Regulation, papers are defined as

7 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and other forms of written scholarly works which are subject to a process of peer review similar to that of refereed journals. … 14.1.2 Papers submitted as a PhD thesis must be closely related in terms of subject matter and form a cohesive research narrative” (see http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation%20 of%20PhD%20Theses).

There are seven refereed publications forming the core of this thesis. The thesis is structured around the relationships between these papers, forming a cohesive research narrative as illustrated in Figure 1.

A PAPER UTILISING GENRE ANALYSIS AND SIGNALLING AN INTEREST IN THE AUTEURISM OF ROLF DE HEER

▼

TWO PAPERS UTILISING STANDARD AUTEUR ANALYSIS

▼

A PAPER ARGUING FOR THE METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATION OF THE THESIS: AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS

▼

THREE PAPERS UTILISING AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS

Figure 1. The Structure of the Thesis. Thus this research into the films of Rolf de Heer proceeds from genre analysis (a theoretical approach considered by some to be antithetical to auteur analysis, but which needs must be considered because, as Raphaëlle Moine noted, it is possible to talk of “the genre of the ‘auteur film’” [2008, 97]), to standard auteur analysis and, finally, to the innovative aural auteur analysis.

8 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

1.5 The Subject: Why Rolf de Heer?

Rolf de Heer has been awarded numerous accolades for his contributions to Australian culture and arts, including the 2007 “Don Dunstan Award” by the Adelaide Film Festival, the 2006 “South Australian of the Year” by the South Australian Government and the 1998 “Chauvel Award” by the Brisbane International Film Festival, but little attempt has been made at interpreting his life’s work as a unified body of specific films, that is, as an auteur analysis. In consideration of this, the reasons for choosing de Heer over any other Australian film-maker for an exploration of the potential for not just an auteur analysis, but a specifically aural auteur analysis, are threefold.

Firstly, despite his success and his significance in the landscape of Australian film- making, no major academic publication or thesis exists on de Heer and his work. The literature is devoid of any text or video documentary, scholarly or otherwise, that might be considered an auteur analysis of his entire œuvre, which to date consists of twelve feature films. As he has recently won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Prix (‘Impact of Music on Film’) at the Flanders International Film Festival Ghent, Belgium, and six Australian Film Institute awards including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Direction’ (with Peter Djiggir) and ‘Best Sound’ for the first Aboriginal Australian language feature film (2006), the undertaking of an auteur analysis that attempts to explore his complete body of work is timely and will go some considerable way towards remedying this gap in the literature.

Secondly, although he is a renowned collaborator, de Heer’s œuvre to date stamps him as one of the most notable innovators in Australian cinema, and several critics have already labelled him an auteur. David Stratton wrote: “Aussie auteur Rolf de Heer has established himself as an uncompromising film-maker” (1998, paragraph 1); Jake Wilson declared: “Rolf de Heer is one of the very few auteurs who regularly succeeds in getting features financed in Australia” (“Looking both ways”, 2003, paragraph 5, original emphasis); and Ali Sharp stated definitively: “de Heer’s presence is a victory for auteurism” (2004, 34). Such comments certainly suggest a comprehensive auteur

9 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

analysis of his work is appropriate. Additionally, as de Heer is the writer/director and oft-times editor and/or producer of his films,6 the usual arguments against a film’s individual authorship, due to the necessarily collaborative nature of film-making, are less relevant to his work than to that of some other studio aligned directors who have little to no involvement in writing, editing and/or producing the finished cinema product.

Thirdly, while more main-stream than avant-garde, de Heer’s films frequently feature an elevated presence of sound, at times raised to a level of dominance amongst the numerous interactions informing the narrative. Several critics have added to this researcher’s motivation to study the auteurism of de Heer with their writing about his use of sound. Cat Hope comments that: “each of de Heer’s films merits a detailed treatise on the way they feature innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production stages, resulting in some of the most challenging and exciting cinema made in Australia today” (2004, paragraph 15). Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca even invented a new name for the cinema-goer at (1993) when they said “In de Heer’s film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator” (2004, 78) and I have argued elsewhere that Hickey-Moody and Iocca’s label “aurator” can also be used for the person experiencing Ten Canoes (2006) (Starrs 2006, 18). Hence, in this doctoral study particular attention is paid to interpreting the aural auteurial flourishes in de Heer’s films as evidenced by his innovative use of sound.

6 The thesis will only concern itself with de Heer’s feature length fiction films that have received cinematic release. The documentary The Balanda and the Bark Canoes (Molly Reynolds, and Rolf de Heer 2006) and the telemovie Thank You Jack (Rolf de Heer 1986) will not be analysed. The films for which de Heer has only been credited as producer (The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Richard Flanagan 1999] and Spank! [Ernie Clark 2001]) or script editor (Serenades [Mojgan Khadem 2002]) will likewise not be studied in the thesis, nor will the short films he worked on as a student at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in the early 1980s.

10 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

1.6 The Methodologies and Research Plan for the Thesis.

The hypothesis of this thesis is multi-layered. It firstly proposes that auteur analysis is a methodology that continues to neglect sound in deference to examination of the image and that this methodology should be revised to incorporate the aural. It secondly proposes that Rolf de Heer is an Australian auteur who has an aural signature that is implemented at a very early stage in the film-making process and which can be detected in his finished films. Finally, it proposes that this aural signature is unconsciously imprinted in his films and that this signature reflects a Weltanschauung, or world-view, in which the voices of marginalised, non-hyper-masculine people, or those one might call ‘unlikely protagonists’, are fore-grounded.

In an attempt to evidence these speculations, the starting point for the research was the interviewing of some of the key players in de Heer’s film-making practice (see Appendix 12.3). Thus, the first research strategy of the thesis, apart from a comprehensive and ongoing review of the literature (with its concomitant and requisite viewing/hearing of the literature’s referenced films), was primary research in the most fundamental sense: that being recorded, semi-structured interviews with Rolf de Heer; his composer for ten of his twelve films, Graham Tardif; and the sound recordist/designer for five of his twelve films, Jim Currie.7 These interviews attempted to explore the opinions of the key personnel involved in the use and production of sound in the films of Rolf de Heer and were subsequently published in reputable journals8 (but not subjected to a process of refereeing or peer review).

The three interviews, whilst constituting valuable primary research, do not form the core of this thesis (although they play an important role in its trajectory). Rather, the thesis fundamentally consists of seven refereed and published (or accepted for publication)

7 Research ethics approval for the schedule of interviews was granted by the Queensland University of Technology on 24 October 2006 (application approval no. 0600000816 - see Appendix 12.4). 8 The interviews have been published (or accepted for publication) in Metro Magazine and RealTime+Onscreen (see Appendix 12.2).

11 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

papers which aim to serve as a sustained auteur analysis of de Heer’s works. In this regard, the thesis is as concerned with researching the methodology of auteur analysis as much as it is with researching de Heer’s auteurial use of sound.9 This interest stems from the realization that the techniques of auteur analysis are not well documented, are often misunderstood and sometimes taken for granted. Consisting of close textual analysis of each of a film-maker’s films followed by consideration of her or his complete œuvre, the standard strategy of auteur analysis is significantly employed in this thesis. However, it certainly is not a well-detailed methodology. Andrew Tudor stated: “To look at films as work of an auteur involves close textual analysis rather than brief critical comment. Unfortunately, we are still not entirely sure of the language in which the text is written” (1973, 131, original emphasis). Such uncertainty about the language of texts is reflected in the uncertainties in advice on how to read such filmic texts. Nor is the language of the aural well understood. Caryl Flinn noted: “The problem facing film music scholars is how to talk concretely and specifically about the effects generated by a signifying system that is so abstract”(1992, 7), and one can safely conclude that the same absence of an accessible and functional syntax also exists for the discussion of film sound.

The process of textual analysis, where a film is considered no less a text than a collection of written words, was described by Deborah Thomas as the “reading” of films. Thomas wrote of the benefits to be gained from textual analysis: ... such accounts invite those to whom they are offered to revisit the films and see for themselves, enriching their own experiences with new depth and bringing significant details to their attention in fresh and productive ways, while ultimately encouraging such viewers to make up their own minds as to how true to their own experiences of the film the readings may be, and how illuminating and important the issues that they raise (2001, 1-2).

Alan McKee wrote: “When we perform textual analysis on a text, we make an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of that text ... by

9 Indeed, in the initial stages of this doctoral research the author’s intention was to explore the methodology of auteur analysis through the production of a biographical video, or ‘biopic’, about Rolf de Heer. Could this particular medium, illustrated with videotaped interviews and excerpts from commercially released films, tell more about the auteurism of a director such as de Heer than a written paper? De Heer’s reluctance to be the subject of a film himself soon put paid to that idea and the research trajectory of a PhD by Published Papers was engaged with instead.

12 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. people who consume them” (2003, 1-2). While this is a simplistic account of the methodology of textual analysis, it is one many theorists have come to rely on. Here McKee, like Thomas, points to the centrality of individually subjective interpretation in textual analysis, a characteristic which earns the frequent criticism of it being an overly vague methodology with very little basis in empirical evidence. Certainly, several studies embark upon textual analysis without much attempt by the author to justify or explain the procedures involved, assuming that the treatment of the cultural artefact as a text, and its subsequent subjective interpretation by the researcher, is a common knowledge to be taken for granted. For example, Richard Middleton’s Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (2000) enters into no discussion as to the meaning or methodology of its titular technique. Yet not all textual analysis is so qualitative and methodologically arbitrary. Differentiation must be made between this kind of interpretative textual analysis and the more quantitative techniques of content analysis and reception studies.10 The latter’s content analysis is another textual approach in which the frequency of screen events or data is counted and tabulated, diminishing the subjectivity of the analysis somewhat. On the other hand, genre analysis and semiotics are prime examples of the former kind of textual analysis, in that they seek to analyse media texts as structured wholes with the aim of investigating latent, connotative meanings as they exist for the individual researcher (although most genre analysts and semioticians would probably still argue for wide-ranging significance of their findings). Alternatively, reception (or audience) studies depend on the qualitative interpretations of not a lone critic, but upon a collection of interviews and questionnaires conducted with audiences. Such reception studies, whilst reverberating with the chosen audience’s historically-significant ‘logic of the tribe’, are not the methodology of choice for this thesis, given the size (and relative scarcity11) of de Heer’s œuvre. Other approaches to textual analysis include the specific use of psychoanalytic and feminist theory, which are particularly useful lenses through which one might view the films of Rolf de Heer as demonstrated in this thesis (see Chapter 2.6). Regardless of the exact methodology used,

10 See, for example, Klaus Krippendorff and Mary Angela Bock (2009) for more on content analysis and Janet Staiger (2005) for more on reception studies. 11 Rolf de Heer’s first film, (1984), for example, is not available for purchase and is only held by a few Australian repositories in VHS format. They are understandably reluctant to lend the tape as it has not, to the author’s knowledge, been digitised for DVD distribution.

13 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

the textual analyst must resist the temptation to declare her or his interpretation to be the only valid explanation of a text’s meaning. Most critics comply with Glen Creeber’s advice: “rather than prescribing a rigid or fixed meaning to a text, contemporary textual analysis tends to explore the playfulness and open-ended textures of textual meaning” (2006, 34, original emphasis). The aim should be one of opening up the text to reveal how it works rather than closing it down in an attempt to fix its singular ‘meaning’.

Perhaps it is germane to now note that the main concern of this thesis - the neglect of sound in auteur analysis - is accompanied by a similar emphasis on the image in textual analysis generally. In discussing (the fallacy of) authorial intention, McKee continued his argument that, “a post-structuralist approach to meaning-making doesn’t accept that any text has a single correct interpretation” (2003, 67). Yet textual analysis generally suffers from a slavish dedication to prioritizing analysis conducted with the eyes and tends to foreground these interpretations as correct. Hamid Naficy noted that “textual analysis, or close reading of images, [has] for over two decades ... placed its emphasis on the primacy of the text and of vision as arbiters of truth” (2001, 3000). Similarly, prominent auteurist John Caughie wrote: ... the methods of decipherment or decoding through an investigation of the language and signification of mise-en-scène [i.e. everything visible within the frame, from camera angles to actor’s direction to lighting] provided the foundation for the textual analysis that secured for Film Studies a place of grudging respect in the humanities and the academy (2008, 414).

For Naficy and Caughie, the procedure of textual analysis has always been about “decoding” vision and mise-en-scène “as arbiters of truth”. Similarly, auteur analysis, as a technique involving textual analysis, makes McKee’s “educated guesses” as to the most likely meaning of a film, and overwhelmingly does so based on interpretation of the image alone, but with the defining knowledge that an individual text is a part of a film-maker’s œuvre. In fact, it is this nominal categorization of films made according to an assumption of their shared authorship that qualifies the textual analysis as auteur analysis. It is from such a subjectively determined grouping that an exact procedure of auteur analysis must somehow be gleaned, separated from the detritus of both

14 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. romanticism and structuralism, and then permitted to emerge as a bona fide technique of textual analysis.

Achieving recognition as a legitimate research technique is not helped by the fact that the procedures of auteur analysis methodology are somewhat indistinctly described in the literature. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, however, in their outline of two approaches to the methodology of textual analysis, pointed towards a position for auteur analysis within textual analysis: First, there are those approaches concerned to analyse the formal mechanisms by which a text produces a position or positions for reading, organizing its own consumption in the implied model or preferred reader ... the intra-textual determinations of reading (2002, 14).

Bennett and Woollacott went on to describe the second approach, in which:

... attention focuses on the extra-textual determinations of reading, particularly on the situationally determined frameworks of cultural and ideological reference which supply the grids of intelligibility through which different groups of readers read and interpret a given text (ibid).

While the “extra-textual” conduct of the auteur analyst and her or his peers is not to be discounted, it is the “intra-textual” reading of a body of work that is particularly relevant to the auteur analyst, as this unique “reader” attempts to locate meanings that recur throughout the film-maker’s œuvre. Dugald Williamson, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, provides a useful template for such an attempt when he wrote of the “authorial model of critical practice” (1989, 43) - which can be understood to be another name for the model of auteur analysis - as having three main procedures. The first is fundamental: “A basic procedure of authorial criticism is to use the author’s name as a means of classifying texts” (ibid). The subsequent procedures are less unassailable: “A second main procedure of authorial criticism is to treat the author as the origin of a work’s form and meaning. ... A third and related tenet of authorial criticism is that the author constitutes a principle of unity in writing” (ibid). According to this definition, the author, or auteur, serves as origin and unifier of the text’s meaning. It must be noted, however, that Williamson makes no mention of ‘conscious intent’, fallacious or otherwise, and the possibility that a meaning may be unintended or unconsciously imprinted in a film forms

15 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

the basis for much conjecture in film and literary studies. Williamson defended his second and third procedures of auteur analysis with the following comment: One usually defines the work of an author by demonstrating a certain continuity or, quite possibly, significant discontinuity, between the parts of the œuvre. This authorial unity and significance does not inhere in the texts themselves, however, but is constructed through critical definition and interpretation. It emerges within a particular system of reading and writing about texts (ibid).

Thus, only with application of the “particular system” of auteur analysis by a diligent critic can the authorial signature be elucidated. Finally, Williamson made some more concrete suggestions for the process of auteur analysis: In authorial criticism, one guarantees the unity of an individual’s work by carrying out a number of activities: by operating comparisons, selecting certain traits (themes, events, characters) as relevant, by excluding discursive elements that are not easily aligned with the image of a single source and so on (cf. Foucault, 1977, 128) (46).

The “selecting [of] certain traits” as part of the methodology recalls McKee’s advice regarding “educated guesses”: auteur analysis is a fundamentally subjective methodology that relies on the analyst’s personal judgments to select “similarities and patterns of aesthetic significance” (44) or, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith put it, “the purpose of criticism becomes therefore to uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subject and treatment a structural hard core of basic and often recondite motifs” (1967, 10). While a film-maker may frustratingly work in a range of various genres, these diversities in subject matter are not the concern of auteur analysis; rather the hidden and abstruse “motifs” or themes that can be detected across that film-maker’s body of work are of interest.

In addition to these somewhat vague and esoteric words of advice on the methodology of auteur analysis, Laura Mulvey has made a useful suggestion for the budding auteurist researcher. Although further cementing the neglect of sound in much filmic textual analysis with comments such as “meaning could be generated from the cinematic image itself” (2005, 229), Mulvey also offered some practical advice on the conducting of a textual analysis, when she noted how “the critical practice of close reading has greatly enhanced understanding of ‘auteur’ cinema” (241). Critical to such a “close reading” of

16 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. filmic texts, Mulvey suggested, is the use of VHS tapes, rather than celluloid prints attended to in the cinema, which bring with them the potential for: “repetition and return [permitting] the chance insights and unexpected encounters that come with endless repetition” (230). The procedure of repeated rewinding of tapes (or, one assumes, DVDs) is rarely possible (or affordable) when a film is watched and heard in the commercial Cineplex. This simple advice for the conduct of textual analysis helpfully contributes to an understanding of the technique of “close reading” which she and other auteur theorists speak of, and prompts the suggestion of an equally simple procedural technique for aural auteur analysis: the reception of films with just the soundtrack playing minus the vision. Such a technique has been labelled “masking” by Michel Chion (1994, 187-8) and his preferred methodology involves playing a chosen sequence of film (that is, videotape or DVD) several times but in vastly different ways. The first screening attended to is the usual combination of audio with visual, the second is with sound muted and the third is with image removed (i.e. masked). Freed from the authoritarian regime of the visuals, this enlightening approach of the third technique recommended by Chion has been the fundamental technique with which the films of Rolf de Heer have been read in the preliminary activity of the research for this thesis. Thus the procedures of repetitive replay and the hiding of the image when reading a film-maker’s corpus are the key techniques of this thesis’ methodological approach to aural auteur analysis. Of course, such a rarely-used methodology conducted across a substantial œuvre such as de Heer’s results in a very close but time-consuming reading and this fact may discourage critics from privileging aural analysis. However, this researcher is unaware of any theorist who has specified an alternative methodology as exact as this for aural auteur analysis and this uncomplicated combination of Mulvey’s “repetition and return” and Chion’s “masking” represents, in itself, the beginnings of a novel, structured methodology that enables the privileging of the reception of an auteur’s aural signature.

To summarise so far, the methodological procedures of this thesis may be seen as a heuristic journey: from interviews with the film-makers to aurally privileged readings of the films, to the writing up of several aural auteur analyses of the work of Rolf de Heer.

17 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

This collection of seven papers - each refereed and published (or accepted for publication) in reputable academic journals and/or conference proceedings - represented a second journey of investigation which posed the question as to whether these submissions would duly succeed or fail in the ‘real’ world of international publishing.12

The first refereed published paper appeared in the glossy Australian film, television, radio and multimedia journal Metro Magazine in 2007 and was entitled “The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that weren’t?” It is a standard genre analysis of one of de Heer’s best known films, The Tracker (2002) and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005). Significantly, this paper signals an interest in the auteurism of de Heer, an interest pursued in all the subsequent articles. Although this article focuses on the anti- western genre of film-making in Australia, it serves as an appropriate place for beginning the journey of this thesis by published papers, since genre analysis and auteur analysis are approaches to film study that are often anecdotally said to exist in uneasy opposition within the academic departments of film scholarship (Dix 2008, 145).13 It is also an appropriate starting point for consideration of, as Raphaëlle Moine put it, the “the genre of ‘auteur film’” (2008, 97), for the thesis was intent on explicating the unifying features of the ‘genre’ of films one might call ‘de Heer’. While this first paper does not address de Heer’s use of sound in detail, it retains a place in the thesis due to its value in utilising a textual analysis methodology with which to compare the traditional auteur analyses that follow, thus contributing to a comprehensive account of de Heer as auteur.

The subsequent two refereed papers14 each consist of standard15 auteur analysis. The first is entitled “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and

12 Success or failure being determined by the recommendations of anonymous referees and the author’s attendance to their required revisions. 13 Genre analysis began to overtake auteur analysis as the leading form of film criticism in the 1970s and 80s (Dix 2008, 145) but this preference seems to be undergoing a reversal recently, if the abundance of new texts on auteurism is any indication (see the introduction to the Literature Review in Chapter 2 of this thesis). 14 A third refereed paper was almost included in this standard auteur analysis section, entitled “‘If we stretch our imaginations’: The monstrous-feminine mother in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project (2003)”, and which was published in Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies in 2008. While this article identifies a core component of de Heer’s “submerged reef of values” (Andrew 1993, 83), that being his belief in the primacy of good child-rearing for the betterment of humanity, it is really more about the contention that so-called Grand Theory is not the only way to interpret film: psychoanalytic theory is

18 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

Dr. Plonk (2007)” and was published online in Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts in 2007. The second is entitled “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song” and was published online in M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture in 2008. Significantly, while analysis of de Heer’s use of sound does not feature prominently in these two papers, they do, like the preceding genre analysis paper, constitute both a point of comparison and departure for the final three papers of the thesis which emphatically use aural auteur analysis. They also draw conclusions as to de Heer’s “submerged reef of values” (Andrew 1993, 83), such as his concern for the vulnerable and/or marginalised populations of the world.

The first of these two standard auteur analyses concludes that de Heer believes those marginalised, controlled and often unheeded members of the world community, women and environmentalists, have opinions to be voiced which could well save the planet from ecological Armageddon. This paper, entitled “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, makes the point that it is not “eco- heroes” (Starrs, “Eco-warnings”, 2007, paragraph 2) that will avert the coming eco- apocalypse, but ordinary people who make ordinary changes to their lives. In each of the two titular films, de Heer almost obsessively focuses on his adopted Australia, and foreshadows a comment elicited by Judith Hatton in a recent interview: “JH: It’s not just a bit of fun. You gently comment on the way our country is run. RDH: I can’t help myself. (laughing)” (2008, paragraphs 9 and 10). Although de Heer’s commitment is to a better world, he starts his campaign by giving voice to those oppressed people in his own Australian backyard, and he does so by featuring two non-Hollywood protagonists; an extra-terrestrial alien in the form of a young woman (Epsilon) and an eccentric scientist (Dr. Plonk).

The second paper of this section concludes the duo of standard auteur analyses, and is entitled “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song”. This film is also instantly recognizable for its Australian milieu and emphasises de Heer’s discounted (in favour of evolutionary film theory) as an explanation for the horror of the egregious parents in Bad Boy Bubby and Alexandra’s Project. Nevertheless, this paper concludes with brief recognition of de Heer’s auteurial depiction of the perversity of Bubby’s mother, Flo, and Emma and Sam’s mother, Alexandra. 15 That is, non-aural auteur analysis.

19 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Weltanschauung in which non-hyper-masculine protagonists and their positive outcomes are fore-grounded. Heather Rose, a severely disabled young woman, triumphs over her mean-spirited, controlling carer to win the love of a sensitive and able-bodied man. This paper also explores de Heer’s active denial of sole authorship as he attributes the film to its writer and star, Rose. Such modest rejection of primary authorship is a trait rarely seen among mainstream film-makers who often seem to cultivate auteur status, and speaks volumes about de Heer’s generous, caring and non-egotistical personality.

The third category of the collection of refereed papers, consisting solely of the fourth publication of the thesis, is entitled “Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie aural auteur”. It deserves a section of its own since it argues the need for a new, revised conceptual framework for auteur analysis that combines existing scholarly writing on the traditional procedures for auteur analysis with the innovative study of a film-maker’s auteurial use of sound, that is, an aural auteur analysis. First presented at the Indian Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 January 2008 in Kolkata, India and accepted for refereed publication in subsequent conference proceedings in 2009,16 a revised version of this paper is presently also undergoing refereeing for publication in Metro Magazine. This article represents the point at which the thesis turns away from traditional or standard auteur analysis and attempts to break new ground in favour of aural auteur analysis. It also introduces the notion of a particularly Australian film-making auteurist perspective, as exemplified by the signature Weltanschauung of de Heer.

The final three refereed papers are specifically and exclusively (to the extent it is possible, given the inevitable interaction between sound and image) ‘aural’ auteur analyses, each dedicated to searching for a sonic signature in de Heer’s films and critically drawing upon Bruce Johnson and Gaye Poole’s methodology in their brief study of ’s use of sound, in that they attempt to discover the “acoustic binaries that sketch thematic oppositions” (1998, 133) in de Heer’s filmic œuvre. This section consists of a trio of aural auteur analysis papers which ask the question “What does de

16 See the letter of acceptance in Appendix 12.1.

20 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

Heer attempt to say via his use of sound?” and draw the conclusion that de Heer’s use of sound reveals an authorial signature interest in foregrounding the voices of non-hyper- masculine protagonists.

The first paper of this last category locates de Heer’s foregrounding of a feminist project in his film-making with analysis of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000). Particular attention is paid to de Heer’s use of a female voice-over narrator and his reworking of the original hyper-masculine script. Entitled “’An avowal of male lack’: Sound in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories”, it was refereed and published in Metro Magazine in 2008. The second paper highlights de Heer’s manipulation of post- production audio to align audiences with his unlikely, non-hyper-masculine, child-like protagonists via the aural point of view. Entitled “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, it has been accepted for refereed publication in the Routledge journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video in 2010.17 The third paper is entitled “Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer” and has been accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January 2008, in Delhi, India.18 It has also been revised and submitted for refereed publication in Cinema Journal. This final paper identifies de Heer’s interest in privileging the voices and eco-spirituality of Aboriginal Australians in the films The Tracker, Ten Canoes and Dr. Plonk. It represents a fitting conclusion to Part Two as it is a prime example of this thesis’ overall claim that de Heer’s aurally imprinted signature worldview is one in which the voices of marginalised people are fore-grounded, rather than those of the hyper-masculine, exploitative, controlling protagonists seen so often in Hollywood cinema.

Upon contemplation of these seven papers, the reader may well conclude that auteur analysis is just one of several methodologies grouped under the aegis of textual analysis, and as such understandably - even deservedly - draws the criticism that it is overly subjective, personalised and relativist. For this reason, the auteur analyst must be alert to

17 See the letter of acceptance in Appendix 12.1. 18 See the letter of acceptance in Appendix 12.1.

21 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

the possibility that her or his interpretations may be delivered, as Joke Hermes might call them, in the style of an “ecclesiastical-type authority, laid down in paternalist missives akin to the encyclical letter” (2005, 92). Glen Creeber acknowledges, “This is one of the greatest problems with textual analysis, its apparent willingness to predetermine and categorise all meaning for all viewers [sic]” (2006, 43, original emphasis). Nevertheless, the methodology of this thesis is not inappropriate, nor is it without worth, for as Creeber also stated: ... if a text and its reader can produce so many meanings why bother carrying out textual analysis at all? However, post-structuralism would argue that if all meaning is interpretative then textual analysis is, at least, honest, transparent and realistic about what it does and what it can achieve (38, my emphasis).

The existence of the auteur in the contemporary commerce and landscape of Australian film-making cannot realistically be denied and must be accepted, no matter how grudgingly that acceptance may be made by opponents to auteurism in general (see Chapter 2.2 of this thesis). However, at the heart of the research plan for this exegesis involving this author’s interpretative aural auteur analysis, as presented in the published papers, is the sincere desire that at the very least they will be seen as “honest, transparent and realistic”.

22 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

CHAPTER 2. The Literature and Contextual Review.

“Auteur is a term that dates back to the 1920s, in the theoretical writings of French film critics and directors of the silent era” (Hayward 1992, 12).

23 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2.1 Preamble to the Literature and Contextual Review. In the foreword to the published screenplay of his cult hit Bad Boy Bubby (1993), Rolf de Heer made a hesitant admission: ‘Where did that come from?’ This is a question I am often asked, either about parts of Bad Boy Bubby or about the whole of it - I usually answer with an ‘I don’t know’. The answer for the whole film is too long and complicated, and as for the individual parts, I often genuinely don’t know (1997, 7, original emphasis).

De Heer himself is unable to locate, it seems, the origin of the ‘de Heer’ signature, hence the identification of this film-maker as an auteur may well be heuristic: such a nomination generates interest in investigating further the films he has authored that one may not have viewed and heard in a quest to understand the meaning/s of his auteurial imprint. Indeed, at the commencement of this research study, the author had witnessed just five de Heer films: Dingo (1991) - a jazz film set in the Outback; Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - a weird anti-religion horror film; The Tracker (2002) - an anti-western; Alexandra’s Project (2003) - a feminist psycho-thriller; and Ten Canoes (2006) - an Aboriginal Australian dreamtime fable. This list represents less than half of Rolf de Heer’s body of work, but what a range of style and genre! Such a diversity that the author could not help but wonder, theoretically, if anything connected de Heer’s disparate oeuvre of twelve feature films, a questioning that led logically to a fascination with auteur theory in an attempt to discover the origin and meaning of the ideas in de Heer’s films. Alternatively, the analysis might help to explain the “long and complicated” process of how his ideas come to be in his films, if he genuinely does not know from where they originate. Certainly, the signature imprints of a film-maker visible (or audible) in her or his films detected by auteur analysis may be present without her or his conscious desire. These signature ideas, themes, or stylistic forms may be produced and reproduced in the other films of her or his œuvre, in such a way that the film-maker’s underlying pre-occupations may be recognised, surmised and perhaps even celebrated. An analysis of such signatures can result in a richer understanding of the film-maker’s “world view” (Caughie 1981, 10), “submerged reef of values” (Andrew

24 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

1993, 83) or “personal vision” (Polan “Auteur desire” 2001, paragraph 2)19 and may even result in that film-maker earning the esteemed mantle of ‘auteur’.

But what is an auteur? How did the term originate? What are the criticisms of ‘auteurism’? Why is sound of little apparent interest to auteurists? Although the literature on the subject of auteurism dates back more than half a century, and despite the belief by some that: “auteur theory had fallen from grace in the academy as a hopelessly romantic and old-fashioned way of looking at texts” (Thompson 1997, 246), these questions are still being asked by film scholars. Bruce Kawin went so far as to say: “It appears, for one thing, to be the only debate ever to affect the film industry” (2008, 193). The ongoing fascination with the subject is evidenced, for instance, by the dedication of entire issues of the film journals Screening the Past (no. 12, 2001), The Velvet Light Trap (vol. 57, no. 1-2, 2006), and Film-Philosophy (vol. 10, no. 1, 2006) to the topic of auteurism; and the publication of three recent book-length collections of essays on cinema authorship (Wexman 2003; Gerstner and Staiger 2003; and Grant 2008). Well-known film theorist Claudia Gorbman also made a useful contribution of relevance to this thesis when she lately recognised the music-loving director, such as , Jean-Luc Godard or Stanley Kubrick, with the distinction of a new label, that of the “mélomane” (2007, 149). With these diverse writings, debate on the subject of auteurism has been revitalised if not literally resuscitated, and this thesis intends to add to the ongoing debates by undertaking a detailed auteur analysis of Rolf de Heer’s films, culminating in a collection of papers emphasising his use of sound. Before that contribution could be achieved, however, an effective understanding of the salient steps in auteurism’s birth, growth, decline and eventual renaissance in the course of the last fifty-plus years had to be arrived at.

19 Once again, as witnessed by the ubiquity of the term “personal vision”, the hegemony of the image in film criticism makes itself apparent.

25 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2.2 The History and Development of Auteurism.

The notion of an artwork having an individual author responsible for its inception has not always been accepted in western societies. For centuries it was God who was seen as the locus of an artist’s creativity - not any mere human - and it is only since the Renaissance that the individual artist’s name has been associated with her or his artistic creation. In the early years of silent cinema the writer, not necessarily the director, was accorded auteur status. Susan Hayward has noted that: Auteur is a term that dates back to the 1920s, in the theoretical writings of French film critics and directors of the silent era. At that time, the debate centred on the auteur (author of script and film-maker as one and the same) versus the scenario- led film (scripts commissioned from authors or scriptwriters) - a distinction that fed into the original high-art/low-art debate (1996, 12, original emphasis).

Nonetheless, as the major studios grew in strength, authorship of films began to be associated with their stabled stars who were the main foci of marketing campaigns. It is only since the late 1940s, however, that cinema has acquired the concept of an auteur director, this being the time when a rift between notions of commercial cinema and art cinema began to be constructed by French film journalists.

In 1948, the “debate” (as Hayward called it), became earnest, when French film-maker, left-wing intellectual and critic Alexandre Astruc devised the metaphor of the caméra- stylo. By this he meant that the film camera could potentially be wielded as a novelist or poet might wield her or his pen, becoming “a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language” (1968, 18). Astruc’s article, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant- garde: la caméra-stylo” (Graham 1968), contained the first cogent suggestion that film could be read as a text, and that a good film does not come about from the toil of a production crew but rather, from the creative and intellectual force of the director and her or his leadership. Before Astruc, it was generally believed that the monolithic nature of studio film-making meant a solitary authorial voice could not make itself seen or heard in a film. Film criticism, predominately sociological, assumed a cinematic work could do little more than reflect the ideology of capitalism, being, in itself, a commodity or a product of capitalist ideology. For some, this meant film could not be perceived as

26 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. art at all. Where artistic value was at all recognised in film, it was usually a case of a so- called ‘quality’ production that dealt with a serious social issue. The work of reviewers saw films “less often aesthetically evaluated than topically synopsized” (Sarris 1996, 15), but from the 1950s on there became evident a kind of art cinema, in which a director’s voice sometimes intruded upon the capitalist ideal to the extent of disrupting the verisimilitude of traditional narrative.

In 1951 Andre Bazin co-founded Des Cahiers du Cinéma, an influential film journal still in the business of publishing film analysis today, and which is renowned for keeping film studies in “a prolonged stage of romantic adolescence” (Schatz 2006, 91) due to its writer’s indulgent praise of the film-makers they revere. Bazin is often regarded as the father of auteurism due to his recognition and appreciation of the authorial style and Zeitgeist of film-makers such as Charlie Chaplin and Jean Renoir, and his opposition to the nearly theory-free political commitment of Positif and other French journals. A time of Cold War tension, anti-Stalinism and left-wing political upheaval, the 1950s in France was characterised by much political debate, but it was left to one of the more polemical critics at Cahiers, François Truffaut, to actually coin the controversial phrase La politique des auteurs in his article, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma Française” (Truffaut 1954). He used this often misunderstood label in collaboration with his colleagues at Cahiers to effectively apotheosise Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, whose work had been denied them during the war due to the occupation and restriction by Axis forces on American culture.20 Despite knowing that American directors were working within the repressive studio machinery of the Hollywood system and that the types of films made and their scripts were often decided for them, Truffaut believed that even directors under the control of the major studios could nonetheless achieve a personal style in their work through their preoccupations with the themes they emphasised, the visual mise-en-scène they crafted and the formal styles they employed. Marilyn Fabe noted that Truffaut praised such

20 At this point it is relevant to note that the Hollywood films the French critics were suddenly exposed to were neither dubbed nor sub-titled, which meant their appreciation was primarily based on a visual experience, a possible factor in their neglect of the role of auteurial sound.

27 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

directors: “for making visually innovative films from their own stories. These directors were true auteurs” (2004, 122, my emphasis). Nevertheless, the reality was that most Hollywood directors had little artistic control and Robert B. Ray wrote that “In some ways, in fact, the MGM system converted all of its directors into Allen Smithee” (2001, 55), invoking the Director’s Guild of America sanctioned pseudonym used by film- makers wishing to distance themselves from work in which their creativity had been curtailed. Truffaut also criticised the psychologically realistic French films of Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, Rene Clement and others, because their ‘quality’ films were more ‘writerly’ than ‘directorly’. Indeed, Craig Saper summarised the prevailing Cahiers attitude with the comment, “Using the French word for ‘author’ was meant as an ironic attack on those critics who wanted to privilege the screenwriter’s literary skills over the superficial stylistic panache of a film’s director” (2001, 31-2). This “ironic attack” favoured those directors with visual flair but also has had long lasting repercussions in the reception of the term auteur and the ongoing understanding amongst non-French speakers that it refers to the primacy of the screen image in film- making artistry. Thus, the polemical impetus of La politique des auteurs immediately assumed specific and precise meanings, positioning the visuals at the fore. It also called for the adoption of a strong stance in favour of some directors and against others, ‘romanticising’ and elevating the stature of French film-makers Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, and Jean Cocteau, and of American directors D. W. Griffiths, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and British-born Hitchcock.

The beginning of the New Wave of French cinema, or Nouvelle Vague, was to some extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying their theory to the real world by directing their own films, in their own visually flamboyant styles. Unsettling techniques such as shots that go beyond the usual 180º axis,21 jump cuts and rapid scene changes exemplified the work of directors such as Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. These visual trademarks were employed to not just mesmerise the audience

21 The 180° rule - also known as ‘crossing the line’ - is an important film-making maxim which holds that two actors in a scene should always appear to maintain the same left/right relation to the other. When the imagined axis between the two is ignored, audiences can become confused, believing the actors have changed positions on the set. A prime example is the use of the deliberately disorienting technique in the Australian film Kiss or Kill (Bill Bennett 1997).

28 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. with illusory imagery and elaborate narrative, but to deliberately exceed the common expectations of cinema-goers. Thus, they respected Hollywood directors such as Nicholas Ray who, according to Diana Holmes, “was less well received at home than in France: those very qualities of introspection and ‘poetic’ experimentation with colour, lighting and framing that made him an ‘auteur’ for Cahiers were often seen in the United States as pretentious” (2007, 161). In French film-making, visual ‘pretension’ was to be applauded as artistic self-expression by a creative auteurial director.

However, all was not peaceful in the Cahiers coterie, as André Bazin resisted the shift towards romantically recognizing the director as the sole source and organiser of meaning in a film, as though the individual film artist was some kind of impossibly gifted elite. He criticised auteur theory in a 1957 issue of Cahiers (Bazin 1985), preferring a sociological approach to film criticism that accounted for the historical moment of production and the undeniable influence of the forces of society. Bazin believed that the film-maker should be self-effacing and act as a passive recorder of the real world rather than an authorial manipulator of its appearance. Cinematic language should be transparent, films should act as windows on the world and individual style should not affect the mise-en-scène, rather the inner meaning should be permitted to shine through unassisted, allowing the film-goer to come to her or his own conclusions without authorial manipulation. This position prompted other Cahiers writers to postulate a distinction between auteurs and metteurs-en-scène. The latter, which John Caughie defined as “a director without a consistent signature” (2008, 412), were deemed inferior to the former because the metteur-en-scène director’s work lacks the inspiration and personal expression of creativity necessary to constitute a unique and substantial world-view. With such a distinction, the Cahiers critics controversially separated Hollywood directors such as Hitchcock into the former category and John Huston into the latter.

The French idea of the auteur gained momentum in America in the 1960s through the writings of Andrew Sarris (the editor of the English issue of Cahiers du Cinéma) in the journals Film Culture and Movie, and this popularity of “auteur theory” (as he translated

29 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

the phrase La politique des auteurs), led to his widely read canon of great directors. In The American Cinema (1968) Sarris set up a system whereby directors were graded according to how far their personal world-views were able to transcend the hierarchical film-making systems under which they toiled. With that, he established a pantheon of significant directors whose names alone were considered a criterion of greatness, in this polemical book still today disparaged as “a veritable mania of evaluative categorisation … idle diversion [rather] than a task for disciplined film scholarship” (Dix 2008, 139). Nevertheless, the widely quoted Sarris stated that there were three premises of auteurism which could be equated with “circles”: an outer circle comprising “technical competence of the director as a criterion of value” (2000, 132), a middle circle comprising “personal style” with the premise that “the distinguishable personality of a director is a criterion of value” (ibid); and an inner circle comprising “interior meaning”, which he attempted to explain as being “… extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material. This conception of interior meaning comes close to what Astruc defines as mise-en-scène, but not quite” (ibid). Sarris’ difficulty with defining the term ‘mise-en- scène’ was further evidenced by his next few lines: Dare I come out and say what I think it to be is an élan of the soul? Lest I seem unduly mystical, let me hasten to add that all I mean by ‘soul’ is that intangible difference between one personality and another, all things being equal (2000, 133).

The concept of mise-en-scène is, thanks to Sarris’ woolly writing, somewhat indistinct as he attempted to give it a numinous meaning related to the emotional tone of the cinematic production. Regardless of the slipperiness of this term, it is important to note the persistently non-aural nature of its definition: Sarris compared mise-en-scène to the “vision of a world the director projects” (ibid). Sarris later again attempted to elaborate on its meaning: The art of the cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scène. … The whole point of a meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement (1996, 36, original emphasis).

In other words, Sarris is referring to the signature a director leaves on her or his films - the “personal statement” - and the “mystical” possibility a director is unintentionally

30 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. leaving it. With auteurism, the term mise-en-scène became closely associated with directorial techniques such as the arrangement of visual components within the frame, the position, angle and motion of the camera, as well as the movement of actors. The director’s contribution to the film’s sound, if indeed there was any, was largely ignored.

In his classic text Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, first published in 1968, which Robin Wood describes as “probably the most influential book on film in English of the last decade” (2006, 233), Peter Wollen responded to Sarris’ advancement of La politique des auteurs, when he offered the first cogent explanation for the process whereby a director’s signature was ‘mystically’ left on a film. He wrote in his 1972 revision: … it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unintended meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the individual involved. ... [Auteur analysis] consists of tracing a structure (not a message) within the work, which can then post factum be assigned to an individual, the director, on empirical grounds (1972, 167-8).

In some ways, this concept of a film’s ‘internal’ meaning - existing outside of any external evidence, including even an authorial director’s own understanding of its meaning - relates to Monroe C. Beardsley and William K. Wimsatt’s “intentional fallacy” (1954), which asserts there is no such thing as an unmediated communication between author and reader. Whatever intention the author may have had remains irrelevant to its actual reception. Hence, the unconscious intent is no less valid than the attributed author’s overtly stated intent, even if that nominal author protests at the auteur analyst’s interpretation of that unconscious intent.

Wollen revisited his notion of the unconsciously imprinted signature, in the wake of structuralism, in his 1998 edition, as follows: The director does not subordinate himself [sic] to another author; his source is only a pre-text which provides catalysts, scenes which fuse with his own preoccupations to produce a radically new work. Thus the manifest process of performance, the treatment of a subject, conceals the latent production of a quite new text, the production of the director as an auteur (1998, 76).

From this perspective, therefore, these unconscious signatures may be traced a posteriori within the film and may be named antonomastically, for example, ‘Ford’, ‘Hitchcock’,

31 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

or, as may even result from this thesis, ‘de Heer’. These terms are more than simply metonymic, however, for they indicate the important discovery of a director’s unconsciously imprinted signature. Wollen further elaborated upon this concept, taking up where Sarris left off in describing the mysteriously imprinted mise-en-scène of an auteur: ... it is possible to decipher, not a coherent message or world-view, but a structure which underlies the film and shapes it, gives it a certain pattern of energy cathexis. It is this structure which auteur analysis disengages from the film (1998, 115).

This delineation between a “world-view” and a “structure” might be misleading to some, but Wollen was not saying here that there is no message or world-view in an auteurist signature. Rather, he was suggesting that it is not necessarily “coherent”. In other words, it is to be found there, in the structure of the film, but it may require a close examination, applied to all the films in that particular film-maker’s œuvre. Wollen went on to position this structured world-view or message with regard to other forms of creativity: There can be no doubt that the presence of a structure in the text can often be connected with the presence of a director on the set, but the situation in the cinema, where the director’s primary task is often one of co-ordination and rationalization, is very different from that in other arts, where there is a much more direct relationship between artist and work. It is in this sense that it is possible to speak of a film auteur as an unconscious catalyst (ibid).

Although Wollen’s two ideas of the authorial director as an unconscious producer of meaning and of the authorial director as catalyst in the production of meaning may appear similar, the difference formed sufficient impetus for rewritings of his monograph. The transition from the first text of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1972) as a pre- structuralist notion of the author as the creator of meaning to his third text (1998) in which the post-structuralist notion of the author figures as a construct of the reader, was very significant in the theoretical milieu surrounding Roland Barthes’ 1967 publication of the “Death of the author” (the English translation was published in 1977). This seminal essay planted a seed of contention where any authorial status was being applied to a text or film, claiming that it is only a convenient tool for critical analysis which operates to freeze one of numerous meanings, whilst bearing little relation to the actual function of the text. Barthes wrote: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that

32 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (1977, 147). According to this view, the multivariate, intersecting cultural forces that inform a film and contribute to the practice of reading a film are the true points of interest in understanding the workings of cinema in the society in which it is situated. Also in France, Michel Foucault asked “What is an author?” (translated in 1977) and his and Barthes’s works were seen as the culmination of a mode of literary criticism in which writing was understood to be de-individualised and subject-less, representing an intriguing chiasmus with the film theorists of Cahiers, many of whom saw film as a subjective and personalised text, narrated, as it were, by the auteur director. This level of debate and conflict was, in many ways, typical of the intellectual environment of Paris in the late 60s and when the first English versions of Foucault and Barthes’s work began appearing a decade later, the mood in the UK and America was definitely leaning away from auteurism. Despite the highly-influential, ongoing nature of Foucault and Barthes’ ideas, however, the notion of a film having a distinctive author persists. Auteurism survives and prospers today as an important and legitimate mainstay of film analysis.

Surprisingly, considering the plethora of discussion about the relative merits and shortcomings of auteur theory, little has been written about the methodology of actually conducting an auteur analysis. In his 1967 book-length study of the films of Italian neo- realist film-maker Luchino Visconti, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith wrote of a first standard almost identical to that of Dugald Williamson’s: “As a principle of method the theory requires the critic to recognise one basic fact, which is that the author exists, and to organise the analysis of his [sic] work round that fact” (Nowell-Smith 1967, 9). However, Nowell-Smith acknowledges that the defining characteristics of the nominal author’s presence are not always readily apparent, and hence, The purpose of criticism becomes therefore to uncover behind the superficial contrast of subject and treatment a structural hard core of basic and often recondite motifs. The pattern formed by these motifs, which may be stylistic or thematic, is what gives an author’s work its particular structure, both defining it internally and distinguishing one body of work from another (1967, 10).

Wollen later added to Nowell-Smith’s advice to seek a “pattern” with the following:

33 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Perhaps it would be true to say that it is the lesser auteurs who can be defined as Nowell-Smith put it, by a core of basic motifs which remain constant, without variation. The great directors must be defined in terms of shifting relations in their singularity as well as their uniformity (1998, 70).

According to this view, these “shifting relations” will be discovered after examination of a film-maker’s entire œuvre. Wollen here revisits the concept of a body of work seeming to aspire to be that one ‘perfect’ film: Renoir once remarked that a director spends his [sic] whole life making one film; this film, which it is the task of the critic to construct, consists not only of the typical features of its variants, which are merely its redundancies, but of the principle of variation which governs it, that is its esoteric structure, which can only manifest itself or ‘seep to the surface’, in Levi-Strauss’s phrase, ‘through the repetition process’ (ibid).

Hence, according to Wollen, the motifs that characterise this fabulous, unrealised “one film” may more typically be found expressed in different films in a film-maker’s œuvre, as recurrent tropes and themes. Richard Maltby wrote that the antinomies of an auteurial preoccupation also reveal social meaning pertaining to the director’s culture: “The recurrent thematic consistencies or binary oppositions from which this myth could be distilled were usually attached both to the unconscious preoccupations of the director, and to those of the wider group for which she [sic] was taken to speak” (2003, 505). Thus, the researcher who looks for evidence of auteurism can attempt to “distil” the less obvious thematic patterns, antinomies or motifs, which may vary from work to work, in the director’s overall body of films. This is an underlying principle of the methodological approach undertaken in this thesis.

Less problematic to many theorists in film studies was the ‘competing’ methodology of genre analysis, an approach in which the identity and function of the alleged author became irrelevant. Thus, with the post-structuralist de-emphasis on authorship, the early 1970s saw genre analysis begin to be seriously adopted as a critical discipline in opposition to auteur theory, as the aftermath of France’s May 1968 political and intellectual uprisings combined with the enabling influence of agitative, post- structuralist French theorists to lessen the position of auteurism in the academy.22 One

22 Although there had been the seminal 1940s works by Robert Warshow (“The Gangster as Tragic Hero” and

34 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. inherent problem with this interpretative approach, however, is what Rick Altman called “genrification” (1999, 65), whereby well-known genre films such as the horror or the western23 evolve and change until previously accepted genre boundaries are blurred and near-meaningless.

Thus, towards the end of the century, auteurism seemed to make a comeback in the face of the seemingly less unassailable genre studies with Wollen proclaiming, “I am still an auteurist” (159). Fortunately for him, many other theorists were willing by then to concede that the two ‘death-knells’ to auteurism delivered by Barthes and Foucault, were, in fact, mere glancing blows that served, ultimately, to simply redirect critical attention for a while. In 1995, the journals Film Criticism and Film History each ran entire issues devoted to auteurism. The heady days of the 1950s aesthetic of romantic adulation of directors became known as first-wave auteurism with the current, second wave taking on a more commercial tone. The notion of the film director struggling against the stultifying pressures of studio heads to present an artistic world vision seemed to morph into a new meaning. Pam Cook wrote, with a barely discernible tone of cynicism, of the late 1990s appropriation of auteurism by Hollywood: It is as if a romantic, literary notion of the author has been succeeded by a designer notion of the author: the author is now depicted as an irrepressible individuality appreciated and paid for by her or his ability to contribute to product differentiation, a process whose results are then redescribed by the film publicity-marketing system in terms of the conventional romantic notions of the author. This is convenient for business and promotional purposes (cf. Spielberg – Scorsese) as the author shifts between two statuses: exemplary individual and brand name/corporate logo (1999, 313).

Unlike the days in which Alfred Hitchcock’s appropriation of the role of auteur was met with disdain for “reduc[ing] the writers, the designers, the photographers, the composers, and the actors to little other than elves in the master carpenter’s workshop” (Spoto 1983,

“Movie Chronicle: The Westerner” which dealt mainly with the two genres’ capacity for mythologizing history [reprinted in Warshow 1962]), the concept of the auteur hardly figured in these articles. Hence, it should be emphasised that although the rise of post-structuralism was certainly removed from auteurist concerns, there was no covert project for opposing the concept of the auteur for the sake of ‘shoring up’ genre studies. Nevertheless, genre analysis began to overtake auteur analysis as the leading form of film criticism in academia in the 1970s and 80s (Dix 2008, 145), although many film scholars were to occupy themselves with audience studies as the 80s and 90s advanced. 23 See the first paper of this thesis for discussion on the genrification of the Australian anti-western, as epitomised by The Tracker (Rolf de Heer 2002).

35 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

495), the commercial benefits of auteurism began to influence Hollywood’s movers and shakers. In a 2004 issue of Cinema Journal Derek Nystrom further argued for a new meaning of auteur; “we can understand auteurism to be a kind of professional- managerial class strategy” (19). Referring to Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s definition of the professional-managerial class (PMC) as “consisting of salaried menial workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations” (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979, 12), Nystrom claimed the PMC also organises and supervises the workers in the best interests of film capitalism, as the Ehrenreichs had further explained: Indeed, the reason Roger Corman and American International Pictures (AIP) were so influential in helping many New Hollywood film-makers (such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese) get their start is because neither Corman’s nor AIP’s films had ‘orthodox’ union contracts and could therefore employ workers without union cards, often at extremely low pay and under exploitative working conditions (20).

In other words, the rise of these commercially successful “New Hollywood” auteurs was achieved through the exploitative diminishment, within the film industry, of labour’s power. This aspect of auteurism is related to one of its most frequent criticisms, in that the second wave is an overtly commercial construct and such animadversion is addressed further in the next section of this literature review. Meanwhile, the journals The Velvet Light Trap and Film-Philosophy in 2006 have sustained auteurism as the subject of academic interest with the former journal’s edition notable for its re- examinations of studio authorship, auteurism in documentary film-making and case studies of individual auteurs such as Orson Welles, George Romero and David Mamet. Film-Philosophy addressed auteurs Chris Marker, Patrice Leconte, Jean-Luc Godard and Terrence Malick. Cook released the third edition of her in-depth text on film theory, The Cinema Book, in 2007, and of its 610 pages, 98 are devoted to the subject of film authorship, suggesting a revitalisation of auteurism in academic pedagogy. Despite the continued discussion of auteurism, however, many theorists’ understanding remains shaped most significantly by the work of Peter Wollen (particularly his pre-structuralist emphasis on the director as unconscious catalyst of a detectable signature in her or his

36 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. films), as the progenitor of much of this increasingly sophisticated and re-energised attention to the topic.

And what of the auteur of the future? In the Internet age, still in its infancy when Wollen released his third edition of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, we now see auteurs bypassing the high costs of marketing and distribution completely as they post their videotaped films on YouTube and elsewhere online. In the early 21st century, there is an expectation that with the ready availability of low-cost, high definition video cameras and cheap editing software, more and more auteur ‘films’ will be produced. These ultra low cost videos may well reflect an individual director’s unique ideas and world-views and hybridise genres beyond recognition, freed as they are from the commercial restraints of monolithic studios and profit-driven producers as a new age of democratisation of the film industry commences, writ small on the mobile telephone’s screen. With an explosion in numbers of these Internet auteurs imminent, the criticism that the collaborative nature of film-making precludes the possibility of a single film author may become increasingly irrelevant as more and more film-makers begin to control every aspect of the film. The YouTube auteurs of the future may well do everything themselves, rendering irrelevant the historical progression from romantic auteurism to post-structuralist denial of the author to New Hollywood commercialisation of the auteur. Nevertheless, an understanding of the criticisms of traditional auteurism remains helpful - especially as the subject of this thesis, Rolf de Heer, appears to be resolutely committed to making cinema in 35 mm celluloid - and it is to the arena of the critiques of classic auteurism the next section of the thesis’ literature review will now turn.

37 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2.3 Criticisms of Auteurism.

Despite numerous attempts to dismiss auteurism, including James Naremore’s comments that it is “surely dead [and] never really a theory” (1990, 20, 21) and general disquiet around its whimsical subjectivity and lack of rigour, the desire to treat a collection of films by the same director as representative of an artist’s Weltanschauung remains intriguing to many film-goers and critics alike. Paul Watson described the allure of auteurism as a “theoretical peccadillo, the seemingly irresistible urge to scratch the author-itch” (2007, 93). Nevertheless, there are valid censures and at least five main critiques are levelled against auteurism. Many are related to that indeterminate historical moment when Bazin’s liberal-humanist theory and the iconoclastic auteurism of the Cahiers cohort were radically overtaken by leftist critiques of mainstream cinema’s ‘apparatus’.

2.3 a) The Collaborative Nature of Filmmaking.

Critics of auteur theory perhaps rightfully claim that it fails fully to account for the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Although some film-makers, such as de Heer, are the writer, director and producer of their films - and therefore less susceptible to this criticism - they still must necessarily call upon the skills of others. Wollen’s 1968 conception of the auteur in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema is certainly vulnerable to this first criticism. He wrote of the contributions to the film-making process additional to those of the director: ... sometimes these separate texts - those of the cameraman or the actors -may force themselves into prominence so that the film becomes an indecipherable palimpsest. This does not mean, of course, that it ceases to exist or to sway us or please us or intrigue us; it simply means that it is inaccessible to criticism. We can merely record our momentary and subjective impressions (1968, 71).

Wollen seems to suggest here that auteur theory, as it relates to the authorial director, is the only workable means for film criticism. But as was mentioned by Spoto in his work on Hitchcock, an auteurist vanity can have dire consequences in the - by necessity - collaborative field of film-making. What is ‘Hitchcock’ without the musical

38 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. compositions of Bernard Herrmann? What is ‘Welles’ without the cinematography of Gregg Toland? Perhaps one should also ask: ‘What is ‘Rolf de Heer’ without the compositions of Graham Tardif or the sound design of Jim Currie?’ On the other hand, Orson Welles declared “Theatre is a collective experience; cinema is the work of one single person” (qtd in Kael 2002, 12), and of Toland Welles said: “I had a great advantage not only in the real genius of my cameraman but in the fact that he, like all men who are masters of a craft, told me at the outset that there was nothing about camerawork that any intelligent being couldn’t learn in half a day. And he was right” (53). Such hubris, which prompted Citizen Kane (1941) writer Herman Mankiewicz to comment bitterly on Welles, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God” (54), would appear, from the research of this thesis, to be commendably lacking in the collaborations of de Heer.

2.3 b) Not ‘Author’ but ‘Scriptor’.

Fierce critiques of concepts of the meta-textual author also serve as arguments against the acceptance of what Julia Kristeva called a “transcendental signifier” (1980, 13). In the latter part of the 20th century the notion of the author sustained what many believed at the time to be its ‘death knell’ as post-structuralist thinking argued that meaning is only constituted by the reader and not determined by the author. In place of the ‘dead’ author, Barthes suggests the “scriptor”, who is always and already immersed in language: “In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate” (1977, 145). Michel Foucault further explained how the author is culturally embedded:

The ‘author function’ is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy (1977, 130-1).

39 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Like Barthes, Foucault suggested a less stable, more complex subject, which is integrated with and produced by fluid and interacting discursive institutions and processes. Julia Kristeva also theorised an unstable subject as author, the “subject-in- process” (1980, 13). In other words, the notion of a single identity possessing, due to the attribution of the title of author, a key to any final meaning or signified, is challenged by writers such as Barthes, Foucault and Kristeva. A film, indeed any text, is little more than a kind of cultural putty for an audience to decode as they wish; shaping its malleable form until it fits with whatever interpretation suits the film-goer and her or his social milieu. From this perspective, there is never any ‘truly totalised meaning’ and therefore, no ‘truly totalised author’ for any given text. Although such a critique might, at first glance, sit uneasily with notions of the film auteur, it can actually be perceived as helpful, in that it claims that any reading of a text/film must be considered valid, even if it is entirely at odds with the designated auteur’s stated intention. A reading that is attributed to the unconscious imprinting by a film director remains a legitimate one amongst many.

2.3 c) The Auteur Label as Marketing Tool.

Another criticism of auteurism is that it may deteriorate into a shallow commercial enterprise, intent solely on financially capitalising on the name of a director. According to Sarris, auteur theory leads audiences to believe that a bad John Ford is better than a good Henry King (to use his example) or, as he put it: “the worst film of a great director may be more interesting though less successful than the best film of a fair to middling director” (1996, 17). If a director is an auteur then there must be something of value even in her or his least accomplished films, for indeed, as an auteur, s/he must be incapable of making a bad film. While such logic is patently flawed, the auteur figures prominently in the hyperbolic spectacles of contemporary film marketing and publicity. Timothy Corrigan summarised the growing importance of the director as a “commercial strategy for organizing audience reception” (1991, 103). One outcome of this kind of commerce of authorship is that auteurs are fabricated much faster: for example, Quentin Tarentino was declared an auteur by the media after only one film.

40 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

2.3 d) The Masculinity of Auteurism.

There is also much opposition to the phallocentricity of auteurism. Most directors identified as auteurs are heterosexual, white males and one must acknowledge the criticism these privileged positions attract. Kaja Silverman noted in 1988 that the auteur often serves as a site where “male lack is disavowed” (1988, 188). Typically, mainstream cinema is “engendered through a complex system of displacements which locate the male voice at the point of apparent textual origin” (45). The male auteur is complicit with the ideological project of the dominant cinema of our time, perpetuating a controlling male subject and a pervasive male gaze. Silverman argued: In his most exemplary guise, classic cinema’s male subject sees without being seen, and speaks from an inaccessible vantage point … It is thus through an endless series of trompes l’oeil that classic cinema’s male viewing subject sustains what is a fundamentally impossible identification with authoritative vision, speech and hearing (51-54, original emphasis).

Silverman was to later elaborate in Male Subjectivity at the Margins the psychoanalytic- based notion that there is an illusory idea of classical male subjectivity that abides by a phallic standard “predicated on the denial of castration, alterity, and specularity” (1992, 3). In other words, male auteurs make films that objectify and repress the feminine for the benefit of male spectatorship. Resisting the industrial and commercial restraints inherent in big budget film production, the auteur will endow the film with meaning through the force of his authority, independence and autonomy - his traditionally masculine traits. Diana Holmes traces this maleness to the French cinephiles who begat auteurism, stating “Cahiers criticism was a discourse that assumed its era’s male-for- universal perspective on the world … an unconscious androcentrism and ‘othering’ of women” (2007, 169).

Despite the collaborative milieu of their working environment, non-female auteurs such as Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and John Ford were able to triumph as the unified enunciating subject, and anecdotes abound testifying to the ‘alpha maleness’ of such individuals. When he proclaimed the advent of “the age of the auteurs”, Jacques Rivette commended those masculine auteurs who had “a virile anger” (1981, 41). Pauline Kael

41 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

criticised Sarris for being “enthralled with [his] narcissistic male fantasies” that auteurists such as he staged within “the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence” (1963, 26). Carrie Tarr has noted that “the concept of the auteur, if ostensibly ungendered, remains resolutely masculine” (1999, 3). One female film-maker, Sally Potter, has been labelled not auteur, but rather “auteure” (Columpar 2003, 108), in recognition of the maleness of the first term.

Rolf de Heer, on the other hand, has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis 2006) and has developed a reputation for gently evincing and amplifying the voice of the disadvantaged, the marginalised, the ‘Other’. As Adrian Martin has pointed out, de Heer tends to identify with “the figure of the naive visionary” (2000, 30), someone who is isolated or alienated from mainstream society, and in several of his films this otherwise unheard voice is female. For instance, the ecologically moralistic Epsilon (1995) tells the story of an extra-terrestrial with a vastly superior intellect, housed in the body of a beautiful woman, who harangues a ‘macho’ man about the environmental plunder of the Earth by humans, all presented in the grandmotherly tones of a female voice-over narrator. As a protest against her warring mother and father, the little girl in The Quiet Room (1996) becomes mute, with her feelings voiced by a stream-of-consciousness voice-over. In Dance Me To My Song (1997) the audience is exposed throughout to the sound of the laboured breathing of a woman with severe cerebral palsy who expresses herself through a computerised voice-box and eventually finds the love that constantly evades her able-bodied, loud-mouthed but emotionally- stunted carer. Alexandra’s Project (2003) features an alienated wife who finds a voice via her video recorder and asserts herself from her emotionally isolating, domineering husband. Likewise with his film The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, de Heer positions the film-goer via an identifying stance with the feminine: a female voice-over narrates the story. Such examples suggest that if de Heer is an auteur, he is not one in the traditional mould of a male egotist objectifying and repressing the feminine for the benefit of a male audience.

42 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

2.3 e) The Dominance of the Visual in Auteurism.

The final criticism of auteurism the thesis will concern itself with is the fundamental problem it addresses: that there is an emphasis on the visual mise-en-scène over sound and a related insufficiency in the methodology of auteur analysis. Philip Brophy noted the absence of any theoretical conception of auteur sound: While the notion of mise-en-scène at its most rudimentary spotlights theater [sic] direction as the core vein of ‘director cinema’, auteur sound, for the bulk of the 20th century, conforms to the European notion of direct sound: visuals are directed, while sounds are simply direct. Theorists have long smothered the ontological investigation of so-called direct sound with poor metaphorical assignations of truth and honesty (Brophy “Bring the noise” 2006, 16).

Practitioners, too, have often avoided overstepping the limits of what they perceive audiences will accept as realistic (i.e. “truth and honesty”), when it comes to sound. This despite the widespread knowledge that sound works very effectively on the film-goer. Perhaps because Cahiers critics watched un-dubbed and un-subtitled Hollywood films previously denied them in occupied France, the auteurial imprint has, since its inception, been sought on a visual level only.

Be it an examination of the auteur’s image or sound, little has been written on how best to conduct an auteur analysis or the preferred methodology for a thorough auteur analysis of a ‘suspected’ auteur’s body of work. Wollen described conducting a structural analysis in which there is searching for a core of repeated motifs, which are frequently expressed as thematic opposites, or antinomies. Building on the work of Vladimir Propp on Russian fairy-tales, Wollen in 1968 first advocated reducing a film to antinomic pairs. Within the films of John Ford, Wollen identified the following sets of pairings: ... the most relevant are garden versus wilderness, plough-share versus saber, settler versus nomad, European versus Indian, civilized versus savage, book versus gun, married versus unmarried, East versus West. ... The master antinomy in Ford’s films is that between the wilderness and the garden. ... crystallised in a number of striking images. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, for instance, contains the image of the cactus rose, which encapsulates the antinomy between desert and garden which pervades the whole film (1998, 66).

43 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Such antinomies are seemingly dominated by visual motifs, exemplified by Ford’s cactus rose. Wollen was still advocating an auteur analysis which seeks pairs of opposites in 2003 when he found in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz 1942) the “idealism- cynicism double” (cited in Gerstner and Staiger 2003, 66). Despite the significance of sound to this particular film (what is Casablanca without the song “As time goes by”?), Wollen steadfastly refused to consider the aural in his auteur analysis, stating: “[Auteurs] succeed not just because of their pivotal position in the production process, but because they fight, as Curtiz did, to exercise control over script changes, casting decisions, set design, editing, and even camera positions and shots” (1998, 70). Gilles Deleuze, too, in the beginning of his authorship study, privileged the image over sound in film: “The great directors of the cinema ... think with movement-images and time- images instead of concepts” (1996, xiv). Such an attitude that over-values image in auteurism reached its conceptual zenith with Roger Horrocks’ declaration regarding the “direct film” work of Len Lye (in which he created film without a camera, painting or scratching directly onto the celluloid): “Direct animation can be regarded as the only form of filmmaking that literally fits the auteur theory as the touch of the artist is physically present in each frame, with a recognizable sense of signature” (cited in Gerstner and Staiger 2003, 176, original emphasis). Horrocks does redeem himself slightly with the concession, “A critic seeking to claim Lye as an auteur can also cite the distinctive rhythmic vitality of his work (in the syncopated way it combines images with music)” (ibid), but the emphasis on auteurial image over auteurial sound is unmistakable.

An exception to this rule, however, is the brief study of Peter Weir’s films by Bruce Johnson and Gaye Poole, who conduct the closest thing to the only Australian aural auteur analysis this researcher is aware of (although they limit their study to film music only). While not addressing his entire œuvre, their examination of part of Weir’s work reveals certain antinomies, or, as Johnson and Poole call them, ‘polarities’. In Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), they identify the following sound-based polarities of: ... the organic timeless sounds of birds, wind and insects set against the ‘little fidget wheels’ of clocks and chimes in muted Edwardian interiors invoke the nature/culture polarity. The use of rhythm-based as opposed to tonally-based

44 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

music helps to activate oppositions between abandonment and restraint: drums versus harmony, rock versus Mozart (1998, 129).

A similar binary opposition was found in Gallipoli (1981): “Weir again constructs acoustic binaries that sketch thematic oppositions such as exotic/familiar (Muezzin chant followed by a coo-ee), civilised order/violence (an opera record on the battlefield)” (133). In foregrounding the importance of sound in their research, Johnson and Poole signal a change that this thesis aims to rework and advance: a re-appropriation of auteur theory from a position in which the image is considered the primary vehicle for the authorial director’s imprint upon the film, to a position in which the director’s imprint on the soundtrack is considered in auteurist terms. However, whilst they acknowledge Wollen’s emphasis on the director’s unconscious preoccupations, Johnson and Poole did little to determine if Weir is aware of his preoccupations. The question was never put to him. Poole almost managed to elucidate an opinion from Greg Bell, sound effects editor/supervisor on The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977) and Gallipoli (1981), when she asked: In terms of the sound and music do you think you could call Peter an auteur? Bell: Auteur, absolutely. Peter gets the best people to do the jobs but it all flows from Peter. It’s Peter’s mind that’s driving everything (128).

If Poole had clarified Bell’s meaning in the last sentence or put the question to Weir himself an opinion could have been formed about whether Weir’s pre-occupations were unconscious or not. From the very start of this thesis, it was intended that this auteur analysis would not be plagued by ‘if onlys’. De Heer and his collaborators on sound have been interviewed in an attempt to gather primary research material, in order to construct an understanding of de Heer as a potential aural auteur and explore the possibility that he is unaware of a preoccupation with sound (see Chapter 2.7). This is not, however, to be an attempt to locate de Heer’s intention/s but rather, his absence of conscious intention, notwithstanding Paisley Livingstone’s reductionist contention that “authorship does entail that the expressive utterance is an intentional action” (2005, 301). Of course, be they unconscious or intended, auteurial signatures have been found in the work of other Australian film-makers, and it is in this direction the literature review now heads.

45 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2.4 Auteur Analyses of Australian Film-makers.

In the process of manoeuvring into a position from which a thorough auteur analysis may be conducted on the work of de Heer, it may well be beneficial for the researcher to be familiar with similar work completed on his peers. In addition to the chapter by Johnson and Poole, several book length auteur analyses have been conducted on well- known Australian film-makers. However, none addresses the methodology of auteur analysis in any detail nor considers the aural component of an auteur’s work in any depth. Indeed, the work of Johnson and Poole on Weir is starkly contrasted by a book length auteur analysis by Jonathan Rayner (2003) which barely mentions sound in Weir’s films at all. Rayner made the un-interrogated observation “... nearly all [Weir’s films of the 1970s] quot[e] from classical music” (8) and in his extended study of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir 1975), Rayner only hinted at an aural auteurism whilst detailing Weir’s visual mise-en-scène: Picnic earned praise for its period recreation, and it helped to establish some of the elements of Weir’s style and vision: the amalgamation of the normal and the abnormal; collisions between society and individuals, and between societies and external forces; visual hallmarks of bleached, pale lighting, soft-focused nostalgic haze, and meticulous art direction; reinforcing or undermining the image with conspicuous or incongruous sound (59).

Nevertheless, despite his giving just an inkling of information regarding Weir’s “conspicuous or incongruous sound”, a worthy and thorough auteur analysis regarding the non-aural aspects of his subject’s work is conducted. Rayner also significantly stressed his novel perception of Weir’s fusion of European auteurism with Hollywood genre revisionism: Weir’s œuvre exhibits a stylistic unity in which European and American concepts of auteurism converge. His career is marked by a European brand of art-film auteurism, based on personal writing and visual expression, in Australia, and by an American brand of auteurism, based on genre revision, in Hollywood (12).

This distinction between an Australian brand of auteurism, characterised by European- styled “personal writing and visual expression”, as compared to the less obvious

46 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. auteurial signature evident in the cautious “genre revision” of American film-makers, is developed further in the fourth paper of this thesis, entitled “Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie aural auteur.” Rayner explains Weir’s Australian auteurist signature in Picnic at Hanging Rock: “Weir’s signature as identified in his first feature films (a predisposition to mysticism, open-endedness and significantly detailed mise-en-scene) gave him an art-film reputation in keeping with the aspirations of the Australian national cinema” (20). This detection of a unique transition from a so-called European brand of auteurism, based on “personal writing” to an American brand, based on “genre revision”, begs further examination. Indeed, I suggest in my paper that there is a distinctively Australian form of auteurism, cultivated in a uniquely Antipodean film- making milieu, as encouraged by governments interested in developing a National Cinema, and swayed stylistically by European influences, that sees Australian auteurs such as de Heer combine the personal and writerly auteurism of Europe with the genre revision tendencies of American auteurs.

Despite Rayner’s interesting suggestion regarding nationality and auteurism, however, it must be noted that Rayner persists in an emphasis on the visual mise-en-scène with scant attention paid to the aural auteurist signature of Weir. In his concluding comments, Rayner again makes a passing reference to sound, whereas his interpretation of Weir’s combination of supposed American and European auteur styles is fore-grounded: While his films remain grounded within genre narrative structures and expectations, their execution (in divergence from convention, the frustration of expectation, and characteristic stylistic expression) connects them strongly with the European art-film tradition and its emphasis upon auteurist structures of meaning interpretable on innumerable individual bases ... These abiding themes are manifested in recurrent, recognizable stylistic features (the foregrounding and juxtaposition of soundtrack music, constriction of vision within the frame, and emphasis on the imagery of still photography and other visual art) (259-60, my emphasis).

Although overshadowed by his emphasis on image-based auteur analysis, this brief mention of Weir’s use of sound is, nevertheless, encouraging to critics wishing to consider the aural in the work of this pre-eminent Australian film-maker.

47 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

While Rayner’s auteur analysis can be usefully compared to the much shorter study by Johnson and Poole, another Antipodean film-maker, , the director of critically acclaimed films such as The Piano (1993) and Sweetie (1989), has been the subject of two very different book-length auteur analyses. The most recent, by Kathleen McHugh, elides any reference to auteur theory altogether, yet is still relevant to this thesis as it examines briefly Campion’s use of what David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson call “Internal diegetic sound [, which] is that which comes from inside the mind of a character; it is subjective and can’t be heard by other characters” (2008, 284),24 in Passionless Moments (1983). Several of this film’s scenes explore, through sound, the internal psychology of the on-screen characters such as the young boy Lindsay (James Pride): They do so through a sophisticated and sustained use of voiceover narration in conjunction with an emphasis on filmic sound honed and focused by a complete absence of dialogue. ... The alarm that we hear is therefore coded as internal diegetic sound - it too is in his head, an experience that the spectator shares with him but that the other character’s in Lindsay’s world cannot (2007, 32, 34).

Here, McHugh acknowledges what I would identify as an authorial signature in Campion’s surreal and perceptually confusing treatment of melodrama, aurally depicting a protagonist’s “memories, fantasies, wishes, regrets, thoughts, and mental speculations” (33). Inexplicably, however, McHugh does not identify this as an auteurial flourish, or to recognise Campion’s occasional use of sound to strengthen this signature: The visual field of her films is often distorted by tight or eccentric framings, wide-angle lenses, persistent shadows, and other techniques that distort or limit or confuse our perspective on the action. These surreal framings visualize character affect and transform it into spectator’s perceptual disorientation within the diegesis overall (50, my emphasis).

Sound is important in Campion’s work but rather than returning to the briefly mentioned aural point of view in Passionless Moments, McHugh links Campion’s mise-en-scène with her selection of music: In another remotivation of melodramatic convention, Campion frequently constructs her soundtracks from compelling songs that do not accompany the visuals to which they are applied so much as comment ironically on them. She

24 Or what I will come to refer to as an aural point of view in the sixth published paper of the thesis, entitled “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”.

48 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

selects songs from various genres (gospel, pop, bebop, traditional) that cannot be fully appropriated to the dramatic situation to which they are applied because of significant temporal, geographical, cultural or religious disjunctions between the two (ibid).

Here McHugh noted a tendency for a similar aural auteurial signature to that identified by Rayner as “conspicuous or incongruous sound” in the work of Weir, but also like Rayner, neglected to consider it in detail as such. Although not directly identifying her work as an auteur analysis, McHugh immediately invites this description by referring to Harriet Margolis’ inclusion of Campion’s name in Sarris’ “pantheon of great directors” (1). Nevertheless, McHugh surreptitiously slipped in the notion of Campion as auteur, attempting to contextualise Campion’s work with that of artists (Mexican) Kahlo and (German) Beuys: Though much ink will later be spilled concerning Campion’s identity as either a New Zealand or Australian filmmaker, such a focus linking the auteur with the nation misses a larger point - the participation of the artist within a global political, social, and aesthetic milieu that includes Mexico and Germany (9, my emphasis).

Later, McHugh further avoids positioning her own work as an auteur analysis when she bemoaned “the endless critiques of auteur theory, some of which have cited the example of Jane Campion” (17). McHugh’s work thus disregards any theoretical basis for her singling out Campion from her collaborations with other film artists and also to account for the role of sound in Campion’s attempts to re-motivate melodrama.

Dana Polan, on the other hand, addressed sound in the work of Campion in his 2001 auteur analysis from the very outset. Noting a shift from the “military aggressiveness” of television’s The Iron Chef's music to the softer music of Campion’s The Piano when a female contestant appears, Polan asserted: [The Piano’s] soundtrack is assumed to easily, automatically, inevitably and logically connote the realm of the feminine personal, a space of romance sparked and thwarted, a site in which emotional life asserts its irreducible importance even against the demands of a masculinised and professionalised world. ... a veritable fixed signifier of affect, emotion and inner value - all associated intimately with the particularity of being a woman (Jane Campion, 2001, 2).

49 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Like McHugh’s reluctance to call her book an auteur analysis, Polan stated early in his work an intent to resist an auteur analysis of Campion, noting of The Piano, This film divides the career of its director. As a consequence, a traditional authorial analysis which would look at thematic continuities and artistic refinements in the unfolding of an overall aesthetic project crashes up against discontinuity, against the fragmentation of an œuvre (7).

For Polan, an auteur analysis within the usual strictures of the theory is inappropriate for Campion’s œuvre, seemingly unaware of Williamson’s advice that “One usually defines the work of an author by demonstrating a certain continuity or, quite possibly, significant discontinuity, between the parts of the œuvre” (1989, 43). Furthermore, apart from the initial interest in the femininity of The Piano’s music, sound is also not of much concern for Polan, even in the example of Passionless Moments, and both sound and music are left entirely un-indexed in his monograph. Apparently, for both McHugh and Polan, aural auteur analysis is not a methodology worthy of sustained attention or even acknowledgement in their studies of the films of Jane Campion.

Finally, the Australian film-maker is also the subject of two quite disparate auteur analyses. The director of My Brilliant Career (1979), High Tide (1987), The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992) and Charlotte Gray (2001), Armstrong is the subject of Felicity Collins’ book-length auteur analysis. Once again, we witness an auteur analysis that accepts blithely an assumption that the term ‘auteur’ is unambiguous, unproblematic and well-understood, to the extent no discussion of its meaning is required - not even to contextualise the book’s methodology. Collins does make a brief explanation of her auteur analysis intent: “One of the purposes of this monograph is to look at each film on its own terms, as well as to look for overall patterns which shape the films into a body of work attributable to an auteur, or at least to a singular sense of cinema” (10, original emphasis), but her methodology is not explained in detail. Other writers such as Mary G. Hurd, in her short book section on Armstrong in Women Directors and Their Films (2007), make no mention of auteurism whatsoever. Neither Collins’ or Hurd’s works address their subject’s use of sound in what has become the commonplace disavowal in Australian analyses of the aural auteur.

50 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

2.5 Towards An

Auteur Analysis of Rolf de Heer.

The films of Rolf de Heer have not received extensive academic attention and no auteur analysis of his œuvre has been attempted. While reviews and interviews have appeared frequently, little scholarly analysis of his body of work has occurred relative to the number of films he has released and the positive receptions they have received by festival judges and the public. There have been several journal articles published: Keane (1995), Caputo (2002), Capp (2003), Wilson (2003), Gillard (2004), Hope (2004), Hickey-Moody and Iocca (2004), Oster (2005) and Starrs (2006) are the authors whose work constitute the bulk of academic attention to de Heer’s œuvre and these have addressed varying elements of his film-making. The quarterly Australian journal of film and television, Metro Magazine, and the Australian online film journal, Senses of Cinema, have dominated the literature with regard to de Heer and both have suggested avenues for further investigation, but monographs still appear that pay his work little or no attention. Several texts on Australian film elide de Heer’s output altogether. Saskia Vanderbent’s Australian Film (2006), for instance, makes no mention of him at all. Indeed, de Heer himself has not furthered his auteurial status, preferring not to contribute to any DVD extras such as ‘Director’s Cuts’ or ‘Director’s Commentaries’ on his Vertigo Productions’ digitisations of individual films. Andrew Dix sees the commonplace Director’s Cut as “represent[ing] a consolidation of auteurism, not only mediating the relation between spectator and film but tending to inflect spectator interpretation in the author’s preferred terms” (2008, 151). Cementing the perception of himself as a non-egotistical director de Heer has, in interview and in practice, effectively distanced the concept of ‘de Heer as auteur’ from the reception of his work.25

Hence, this thesis will serve to consolidate the scattered threads of inquiry de Heer’s films have stimulated, and contribute to a comprehensive body of knowledge on his

25 As he did with the credits in Dance Me To My Song (1997) when he ensured that the film begins with the title “A film by Heather Rose” (see the third paper of this thesis entitled “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song”).

51 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

work. The auteur analysis of Rolf de Heer’s films is structured from the general to the specific (at least as far as this approach is accepted by the editors of journals to which papers are/were submitted), attempting to address each film in chronological order and seeking out in the analysis of his use of sound, the structural presences/absences and the acoustic binaries within, that characterise his œuvre. This collection of published refereed papers will form a considerable original contribution to the body of knowledge on Rolf de Heer and to auteur theory in general and to the role of sound in auteur theory in particular. Before that commences, however, an understanding of the conceptual basis for de Heer’s employment of sound to inscribe his Weltanschauung must be achieved, as viewed through the lenses of psychoanalytic and feminist theory.

52 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

2.6 Psychoanalytic Film Sound Theory and

the Aural Construction of Subjectivity.

One may note - with warranted suspicion, perhaps - that the influence of so-called Grand Theory in academia which saw the (temporary) disintegration of the figure of the author in the late 60s and 70s, occurred at the same time feminism began to evaluate a previously neglected tradition of (and potential for) female authorship in literary and film studies. Recognition of feminist ‘ruptures’ in the work of Dorothy Arzner (see Ramanathan 2006 or Mayne 2008), for example, set in place new directions of research and feminist film theorists have found much in psychoanalytic film theory of relevance.

In 1975 Laura Mulvey triggered a long (and ongoing) enterprise to describe the gendered gaze of the scopophilic film-goer when her paper “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” first appeared in the British journal Screen. Her theory of spectatorship proposed that the cinematic apparatus of Hollywood constructs a patriarchal subjectivity whereby the audience is encouraged to identify with an active, controlling male protagonist, thus voyeuristically reducing female characters to passive objects of desire. The male gaze is the dominant position constructed by Hollywood for the audience,26 eroticizing the female character as an object, in contrast to non- mainstream cinema such as de Heer’s in which females (or other non-dominant, non- hyper-masculine identities) are usually the featured agents of narrativity. Mulvey hints at the possibility, with feminist intervention, that the female character can be the maker and not simply the bearer of meaning.

Indeed, it must not be assumed that only female directors such as Arzner can be feminists. Although Rolf de Heer is a white, male, heterosexual writer/director, the key to understanding his characteristic use of sound nevertheless lies in a feminist and psychoanalytical reading of what Melissa Iocca and Anna Hickey-Moody call his “aural

26 Consider here the work of Alfred Hitchcock and his use of blonde female victims (see Walker 2005).

53 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

construction of subjectivity” (2005, 122), particularly regarding such unlikely protagonists as the 35 year old man-child in Bad Boy Bubby (1993), the extra-terrestrial alien occupying the body of a young woman in Epsilon (1995) or the mute little girl in The Quiet Room (1996). While they confine their study to his cult hit Bad Boy Bubby, Iocca and Hickey-Moody note de Heer’s use of binaural sound recording to create a “pre-Oedipal soundscape” and the music choices he makes as contributing to “a marked move away from insipid approaches to film soundtracks” (ibid) which can be interpreted as an attempt to nullify the patriarchal male voice of Hollywood (this argument is pursued in the sixth paper of the thesis entitled “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”). Thus, the theorization of subjectivity, identity and sound the thesis draws upon, in its analysis of de Heer’s aural construction of non-hyper-masculine and therefore unlikely agents of narrative, is significantly grounded in psychoanalytic and feminist scholarship. While there is often a male voice, complicit with a male gaze, functioning on an unconscious level to construct subjectivity in much of the so-called “insipid” soundtracks of mainstream Hollywood cinema, de Heer at times encourages the audience to identify with innocent, vulnerable, child-like or non-hyper-masculine subjects. In contrast to Hollywood’s traditionally controlling male auteurs, he coaxes the audience, through innovative, signature-like aurality, to align their sympathies with less ‘macho’ heroes. This assertion hints at the conceptual framework underpinning the thesis: that de Heer’s world-view, itself an unconsciously imprinted auteurial signature as Wollen would suggest, serves to position the audience on the side of the unlikely protagonists favoured by such a world-view. A probable example of what Philip Brophy calls an “aural auteur”, de Heer writes, directs and post-produces his films utilizing not only the full potential of the visual mise-en-scène, but also the processes of the acoustic unconscious, possibly aware of the gendered tendencies of mainstream cinema.

Mulvey is not the only feminist film critic to criticise the phallocentricity of Hollywood. Noting “Hollywood’s tendency to recycle music” in her study Strains of Utopia, (1992, 3), Caryl Flinn argues that genre films (especially melodramas and film noirs) keep alive an otherwise dull connection between film music and romantic, nostalgic notions of utopia and restricted gender roles. She stated, “Music extends an impression of

54 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect, unintegrated world. This is the utopian function I believe has been assigned to music in general and to film music of the 1930s and 1940s in particular” (1992, 9). These “remote, impossibly lost utopias” (10) involve masculine, heroic agents of narrative and the female objects of their (and the positioned audience’s) desire, and characterise the classical Hollywood film scores idealised in Hollywood’s major studio years. They are, perhaps, the kind of film scores that Iocca and Hickey-Moody describe as “insipid”, in comparison with the imaginative and stimulating aural soundscapes created by de Heer in constructing his alternative world-view.

This subject positioning of such alternative cinema may be uncomfortable for audiences accustomed to the usual dominant gendered stance, as Anahid Kassabian suggested:

Obviously, removing a heterosexual masculine look does not remove masculine subjectivity from the circuits of desire in a film. But the kind of familiar visual erotic pleasure produced by looking at a female body through identification with a male character is interrupted when the looking and desiring character is a female one (Hearing Film, 2001, 86). Tania Modleski, in her analysis of the ambiguous attitudes to women in some of Hitchcock’s films, described the male gaze in terms of a “patriarchal unconscious” (1990, 58). Such structuralist models of psychic identification are based largely on the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, and include the work of Kathryn Kalinak, who in her 1982 article “The fallen woman and the virtuous wife”, identified the only two roles the male gaze of Hollywood permits women characters to depict, these being the least troublesome objects for the male gaze. It seems the male gaze is bifocal; audiences are encouraged to see only whores or goddesses when women are on screen.

The case for an auditory correlate of the ubiquitous male gaze is less clear. Maggie Humm acknowledged that “feminists rarely trace the ways in which women in mainstream films often lack independent vocal energies as well as independent images” (1997, 40), although two years later Elizabeth Weis argued that overheard conversation is “an aural analogue of voyeurism” and that there is an “erotics of cinematic

55 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

eavesdropping” (1999, 79). Recently, Robert Ryder suggested that in Walter Benjamin’s 1938 work on the optical unconscious there lurks a latent theory of the “acoustical unconscious”:

Just as Benjamin’s acoustical déjà vu involves an echo stepping into the light of consciousness out from the darkness of a life seemingly passed by, the ‘other’ nature of the camera involves a similar process whereby a space interwoven with the unconscious ‘steps into’ a space interwoven with consciousness (2007, 141). This unconscious aural mechanism permits greater identification with Hollywood’s typically hyper-masculine agents of narrative who, although insensitive and aggressive, are valorised by the Hollywood apparatus as powerful and superior. In the late 1980s, seminal work such as Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror (1988) explored the tropes of masculinity in crisis and the disruption of spectator pleasure, suggesting film music takes the audience back to a pre-linguistic moment, when, surrounded by the mother’s voice, they soak in an acoustic bath of affect, or what Mary Ann Doane called a “sonorous envelope” (1985, 170). Silverman further suggested this pre-Oedipal fantasy is constructed retroactively by the individual and although it is therefore a Lacanian méconnaisance, or misrecognition, it nevertheless functions powerfully. Silverman argued:

The female subject’s involuntary alignment with the various losses which haunt cinema, from the foreclosed real to the invisible agency of enunciation, makes possible the male subject’s identification with the symbolic father, and his imaginary alignment with creative vision, speech and hearing. Indeed, not only is woman made to assume male lack as her own, but her obligatory receptivity to the male gaze is what establishes its superiority, just as her obedience to the male voice is what ‘proves’ its power (1988, 32).

The docile screen female acquiesces to the auditory equivalent of the male gaze, obsequiously obeying his every enunciation. As previously mentioned in the section on criticisms of auteurism, Silverman contends that the auteur often serves as a site where “male lack is disavowed” (188) and that typically, mainstream cinema is “engendered through a complex system of displacements which locate the male voice at the point of apparent textual origin” (45). The female character is written and performed with a “receptivity” to the male voice (310) which is therefore complicit with the controlling male gaze of mainstream, commercial Hollywood cinema. Silverman later affirmed in

56 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. her paper “Dis-embodying the female voice” that Hollywood crafts women so they are “associated with unreliable, thwarted or acquiescent speech” (1990, 310). Not only is the male voice powerful and superior, but the female voice is also either compliant or erroneous. In those relatively rare films in which a non-hyper-masculine character becomes the narrative agent, the audience’s construction of subjectivity is neither automatic nor accustomed; rather, the audience must be coaxed into identification with the unlikely subject.

Certainly, the film-maker’s choice of music is important in encouraging the typical patriarchal subjectivity. Geetha Ramanathan argued that “certain types of music itself is associated with dangerous female sexuality whereby visual expressions of female sexuality are signalled and developed through the score, the soundtrack conspiring with the visual apparatus in the representation of women” (2006, 109). Musical clichés serve to fill the cinematic space with male desire, at the expense of the female character’s independence and narrative agency. Anahid Kassabian argued more generally that such coaxing works because film music “conditions identification processes, the encounters between film texts and film-goer’s psyches” (Hearing Film, 2001, 1). Kassabian identified two kinds of soundtrack music, differentiated according to whether they are compiled or original scores. This delineation is significant because film music with original, composed scores condition “assimilating identifications [… which are] structured to draw perceivers into socially and historically unfamiliar positions [… and] they encourage unlikely identifications” (2, original emphasis). Compiled scores, on the other hand, “bring the immediate threat of history [… in that] perceivers bring external associations with the songs into their engagements with the film [ … and offer] affiliating identifications” (3, original emphasis). According to Kassabian, classical Hollywood film scores produce audiences who are “quite tightly tracked into identification with a single subject position - usually one that does not challenge dominant ideologies” (“Listening for identifications”, 2001, 170). Lacking the resources of a dedicated music supervisor or the cross-promotional power of modern media conglomerates, and constrained by budgetary concerns, nearly all of de Heer’s films

57 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

have composed scores producing “assimilating identifications”: they coax the film-goer into identifying with his unlikely subjects.

Kassabian’s reference to the film-goer’s psyche again recalls psychoanalytic film theory, that one rare area of academe that has given due attention to film music. Because of the generally accepted view that film music ‘works’ when it is inaudible, that is, not consciously perceived by the audience member, the affect of film music sits comfortably with psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity. In her landmark book, Unheard Melodies (1987), Claudia Gorbman sets out the reasons ‘unheard’ film music works, although she conceded: “… of course, music can always be heard. However ... a set of conventional practices has evolved which result in the spectator not normally hearing it or attending to it consciously” (1987, 76). Gorbman put forward seven principles by which film music operates inaudibly, including the necessity for the invisibility of the technical apparatus responsible for non-diegetic music (i.e. that music not produced within the world depicted in the frame or implied frame) and the necessity that the film’s music is not meant to be consciously heard and should be subordinate to dialogue and visuals (73- 78). These two key principles serve to help maintain unquestioning acceptance of the illusion of the superior male voice. Moreover, Gorbman cited composer Max Steiner who stated that sound producers prior to 1932 believed non-diegetic background music unacceptable, as audiences would be perplexed by the question of where the music was coming from (1987, 54). The so-called inaudibility of film music was a pragmatic guideline, if not an expectation, from the very start, and the 1920s author of numerous silent film music scores, Erno Rapée, felt that if the audience came out of the cinema almost unaware of the musical accompaniment to the film, the musical director had done her or his job well (cited in Lack 1997, 34). Certainly, Gorbman needed no convincing that film music creates meaning via a mechanism of which the audience remains unaware. By re-imagining the score to the bicycling scene in Jules et Jim (François Truffaut 1962) she convincingly demonstrated how the meaning of the scene changes with differing soundtracks. Thus, transposing the score to a minor key would make the scene sadder, an increase in tempo would make the scene more optimistic, and addition of tubas would make the scene comical (1987, 16-17). According to Gorbman, this

58 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. example of “commutation” in a film’s music is significant because it shows how “narrative film music ‘anchors’ the image in meaning” (84).

Jeff Smith related the ‘inaudibility’ theories of Gorbman to psychoanalytical “suture theory” of the 1970s and 80s in which theorists such as Raymond Bellour, Daniel Dayan, Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, Christian Metz and Jean-Pierre Oudart shared a unifying interest in how the classical realist film removed all evidence of its cinematic construction (such as camera movement, framing, editing etc.) and established a position for the spectator which bound him or her into the fiction. By masking the mechanics of film-making, this suturing produces a seamless text with much less visible discourse construction. Such ‘suturing’ would also encourage an audience’s compliance with the male gaze and voice. Furthermore, because of its so-called inaudibility and abstraction, film music is also especially effective at binding the audience member into the fictive world of a film. Smith stated that, according to proponents of psychoanalytic inquiry, film music:

... stakes a special claim on the spectator’s psyche by returning the subject to a preoedipal, pre-linguistic state, and restaging the primordial childhood experience of maternal loss. Film music skulks guerrilla-like in the perceptual background, attacking the subject’s resistance to being absorbed in the diegesis and warding off potential censorship by the subject’s preconscious (1996, 233). According to this view, film music is utilitarian and encourages the subject to be “absorbed in the diegesis” and, therefore, less critical or wary. It also fends off two threatening displeasures. Firstly, there is the “terror of uncertain signs” as Roland Barthes has called the apparently meaningless image (1977, 32-51). Film music uses its culturally encoded connotations to harness the visual signifier otherwise threatens to confuse the spectator and effectively yokes the diegetic information to a meaning. The second displeasure Barthes claimed film music protects the film-goer from is the awareness of the mechanics of film-making. “Inaudible” music, as previously mentioned, results in smoothing or suturing of the gaps, the masking of the spatial and temporal discontinuities inherent in the technology of cinema, thus aiding the seamless process of patriarchal identification.

59 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Of course, such psychoanalytically-based theorising as to the ontology of film sound is not without its detractors. For all these processes to work on an unconscious level, the music is at best unobtrusive; however Smith argued that film music must be heard at least on some level for it to support the narrative: “Far from being ‘inaudible’, film music has frequently been both noticeable and memorable, often because of the various demands placed upon it to function in ancillary markets” (1996, 230). Why would the sale of soundtracks be such a lucrative aspect of film marketing, Smith asked, if film- goers are not attending to the film’s music? He contended:

[If Gorbman] is right in claiming that ‘noticeable’ music reminds the viewer of cinema’s materiality and thereby weakens the subject-effect, we must then conclude that the spectator is constantly slipping in and out of the very subject position that the text has constructed for him [sic], incessantly moving between identification and cognition, pleasure and unpleasure, belief and disbelief, rapture and distance (1996, 237). Certainly, the positioning of subject and audience undergoes constant negotiation, although, as occurs in numerous de Heer’s films, when subjectivity is constructed early in the film’s narrative, the audience member generally remains loyal. As shown in the fifth paper of the thesis, “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, sound can be used to coax the audience to identify with his unlikely protagonists, especially if used early in the film’s story.27 A narrative arc, in which the concerns of the first subject identified with are resolved, is sought by the traditionally meaning-seeking, closure-loving audience, and the enigmas and paradoxes thrown up by the film’s narrative in the name of conflict are generally resolved in favour of the first identified protagonist. When, as in the case of several of de Heer’s early films, the protagonist is not a typical Hollywood action hero, the aural point of view can be used early in the story to successfully align an audience with a less obvious hero/heroine.

27 A prime example is that of Orville in Tail of a Tiger (1984), who ‘hears’ - along with the audience - an electronic whirr when he spins tin lids like aeroplanes within the first few minutes of the film (Starrs 2010, 4). Another example occurs in the opening minutes of Dingo (1991) in which the pre-pubescent John ‘Dingo’ Anderson ‘hears’ music in the noise of an approaching jet, carrying, as it happens his jazz idol-to-be, Billy Cross (played by the legendary trumpeter Miles Davis in his only ever film role). It must be noted that the original script by Marc Rosenberg does not suggest that the music Dingo apparently hears should be heard by the audience, let alone before the jet itself is even heard or seen (see Rosenberg 1992, 3). This aural point of view oriented inclusion of the audience into the headspace of the young Dingo is entirely de Heer’s invention.

60 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

Additionally, Smith criticised psychoanalytic film sound theories because of “the question of intermittence” (237). If the soundtrack binds the spectator into the fiction, why does she or he remain bound in those films where the film music is not constant? Again, it is arguable that the audience’s identification is also intermittent and the construction of subjectivity is a changing process involving constant negotiation and re- negotiation. Nevertheless, this is a concern that needs to be acknowledged; film sound should not be considered the exclusive domain of the acoustic unconscious.

Another disputative voice regarding psychoanalytic cinesonic theory is that of Rick Altman, who criticised not only Theodore Adorno and Hanns Eisler’s landmark 1948 text, Composing for the Films, for “attribut[ing] to hearing a pre-capitalistic nature, being more direct and more closely connected with the unconscious” (1992, 38), but also decried the work of Doane, Silverman, Chion, Gorbman et al. According to Altman, the “similar danger that lurks” in these theories is that they are “apparently predictive of sound’s role in any situation whatsoever” (38-9). Certainly, film sound is a complex phenomenon that operates differently in various situations and psychoanalytic theory is just one valid approach to explaining it.

Human speech, on the other hand, is a part of film sound that can be theorised about very confidently. Dialogue is one component of the soundtrack to which the audience is constantly alert; it is rarely “unheard”. Michel Chion asserted in The Voice in Cinema (1999), following on from his earlier work Audio-vision: Sound on Screen (1994), that when we hear any human voice in the cinema: “the ear is inevitably carried toward it, picking it out, and structuring the experience of the whole around it” (1999, 5). Furthermore, in film sound recording and in post-production, the voice and the intelligibility of dialogue are privileged over all other sounds: what Chion calls “vococentrism” (6). Thus, one technique common to many Hollywood films of the so- called Golden Age of studio production, the use of a voice-over narrator, serves to position the audience in predictable, conventional ways. This is because, as Joan Copjec stated, voice-over narration “definitively links the hero to speech” (1993, 183). This is a

61 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

conventional sound form de Heer occasionally resorts to in an œuvre otherwise characterised by a largely unconventional use of sound. It must be noted, however, that his voice-overs are delivered, in contrast to most Hollywood productions, by female protagonists, as in Epsilon (1995), The Quiet Room (1996) and The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000), and not the male “hero” Copjec implies is the usual source of such omniscient narration. The voice-over narrator, although never unheard, frequently presents a point of view of the events unfolding on the screen that is, like the word of God, ubiquitous, all-seeing and infallible, and although the audience attends to this most obvious enunciation from the film-maker, there still exists an unconscious affect of identification. The audience identifies with the voice-over narrating subject because of its implicit authority.

Undoubtedly, the soundtrack is extremely influential in terms of any film’s emotional impact. Arguably it can be more influential than the visual image. As director and composer Mike Figgis claimed:

People say, ‘Why do you want to shoot on 16mm?’ I’d be happy to shoot it on High 8 and blow it up. I think the shittier it looks, or the more abstract you can make the image, by whatever means, the more chance you’re going to have of saying something that will hit the unconscious rather than the front of the head. … As long as you have enough money to make sure that the soundtrack sounds like a film, because that’s the one thing people do expect (2003, 6). Figgis identified the way sound can unconsciously trigger emotional states, and director David Lynch - whose work has been described as producing a “kind of aural uncanny” (Dix 2008, 154) - would seem to agree: “Sound is 50 per cent of a film. In some scenes it’s almost 100 per cent. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion to a film” (Lynch 2003, 52). Likewise, Rolf de Heer acknowledged: “Sound is, from my point of view, 60% of the emotional content of a film” (qtd. in Starrs 2007, 18). But this comment reveals more than just agreement with Lynch; the “point of view” de Heer speaks of is, in most of his films, that of an unlikely protagonist whose position the audience is encouraged to identify with on an unconscious level. As Iocca and Hickey-Moody argue, de Heer’s uses of sound in Bad Boy Bubby deviate from Chion’s “vococentricism” and “make conscious the pedestrian sounds of the everyday,

62 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. challenging Claudia Gorbman’s [1987] assertion that ‘the volume, mood and rhythm of the sound track must be subordinate to the dramatic and emotional dictates of the film narrative’” (124-5). More recently, however, Gorbman noted that with the digital revolution in music, auteurist directors are able to employ sound in ways previously unimagined:

The strictures and underlying aesthetic of the classical rules of song music simply no longer hold. Melodies are no longer unheard, song lyrics are perceived to add rather than detract from audio-viewing, and the sky’s the limit with respect to the possible relations between music and image and story (2007, 151).

Gorbman also seems to acknowledge the potential for Brophy’s “aural auteur”, writing: the ‘auteur director’ has placed a premium on asserting control of the texture, rhythm, and tonality of her or his work, and of the social identifications made available through music choices … The auteur can write in cinema, using sound as well as the camera (2007, 156). Directors such as de Heer are no longer pressured by the economics or conventions of Hollywood to restrict their work to the production of “insipid” soundtracks in which the male voice complies with the male gaze or in which the music strives to be unheard. The film soundtracks produced by Rolf de Heer are rich with meaning and psychoanalytic affect. This questioning about the unconscious workings of sound prompt questions about the unconscious of the director who uses them. The next section of this thesis will summarise the collaborative nature of de Heer’s film-sound production, as explored in the interviews, and will go some way towards determining if this sonic richness results from unconscious preoccupation/s.

63 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2.7 Collaborations in Context: The Interviews with Rolf de Heer, Graham Tardif and Jim Currie.

After consideration of the literary and social context of auteurism, its history, criticisms, the related psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives and auteur analyses of a number of other Australian film-makers, it is important to recognise the collaborative context in which de Heer personally operates. Most of the music in his twelve feature film soundtracks has been composed by Graham Tardif while five of the most recent de Heer films have had sound designed and recorded by Jim Currie, and one might expect these two technicians to figure significantly in any contextual consideration of de Heer as an aural auteur. As has already been flagged in the discussion of Johnson and Poole’s aural auteur analysis of some of the films of Peter Weir, this thesis was not going to neglect to interview those key people responsible for the production of sound in the films of Rolf de Heer. Poole asks Greg Bell, sound supervisor on several of Weir’s films, In terms of the sound and music do you think you could call Peter an auteur? Bell: Auteur, absolutely. Peter gets the best people to do the jobs but it all flows from Peter. It’s Peter’s mind that’s driving everything (1998, 128).

But Poole does not put the question to Weir himself, nor does she explore the possibility it is an unconscious preoccupation, as Wollen might suggest. In an attempt at not committing the same oversight, this thesis had the goal of conducting semi-structured, open-ended interviews with de Heer, Tardif and Currie.

Although difficult to co-ordinate, the interviews were quite productive and all three have since been published.28 Mixing a few musical metaphors, one can conclude from these interviews that de Heer, Currie and Tardif collaboratively improvise their roles in the usually separate and rigidly distinct phases of pre-production, shooting and post- production as ideas reverberate between the members of the trio like riffs played by performers in a well-oiled jazz ensemble. Indeed, one wonders what might have

28 The Tardif interview has not been published in its entirety, rather, it is in the form of a short paper, as per the requirements of the editors of the journal RealTime+Onscreen (see Appendix 12.2.2).

64 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One. eventuated if a group interview could have been organised with these three practitioners: would evidence of an unconscious level of communication, evolved over years of fruitful teamwork, surface to surprise this interviewer? Would the syntax of a hitherto unknown language make itself heard? Would a verbal shorthand, a sign system known only to them, struggle to make itself understood? Unfortunately, these possibilities remain mere speculation. The difficulties in pinning each down to a mutually acceptable time and place for something as apparently insignificant as a PhD student’s focus group and interview were insurmountable. As it was, Tardif’s interview occurred more than a year after the initial emailed request. Geographical constraints were considerable as this interviewer lives thousands of kilometres away from the homes and workplaces of each of the subjects. Although all three are Australian, Tardif lives and works in Thailand, the home of his wife and the workplace of his full-time employer, World Vision International. The interview with him eventually had to be conducted over the telephone. Jim Currie lives on acreage in rural South Australia and does not have a permanent workplace, being a freelance sound recordist for various film and TV productions. An interview was secured with him on one of the few rare days he was in Adelaide (attending the 2007 Adelaide International Film Festival). Only de Heer was at the time stable in lifestyle enough for interviews to be guaranteed to take place at relatively short notice; his studio is based in Hendon, a suburb in Adelaide, South Australia, and is near the home of his partner and children. Nevertheless, his time is often short with numerous journalists also pressing to interview him. It was eventually conducted at 7 am at the Adelaide airport as he waited for his flight to Melbourne to rehearse The Stiletto Sisters’ performance of the score to Dr. Plonk. That was the only window of opportunity that presented itself during the seven days the interviewer was in Adelaide for that city’s 2007 International Film Festival, which culminated in the premiere of Dr. Plonk on closing night, receiving rapturous applause from de Heer’s hometown crowd. Despite the logistical difficulties, however, an interview with each of these people was eventually secured and conducted, with the results being duly published (although not refereed, and therefore not formally submitted for examination as part of the thesis). The details of the resulting publication of the interviews29 are as follows:

29 See Appendix 12.2 for the published versions of the interviews.

65 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “The sounds of silence: An interview with Rolf de Heer”, Metro Magazine, Melbourne: Australian Teachers of Media, no. 152, 2007, 18-21.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Graham Tardif and the aural auteur”, RealTime +Onscreen, : Open City, no. 85, 2008, 27.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “De Heer de Sound: Jim Currie on designing sound for Rolf de Heer”, Metro Magazine, Melbourne: Australian Teachers of Media, no. 161, 2009 (forthcoming).

The semi-structured nature of the interviews meant that the questions posed were not exactly the same for all three subjects. The aim was to follow a particular programme of questioning, as evidenced by the following documents:

Questions for Rolf de Heer;

1. With Dr. Plonk you’ve made a silent film. Do you think audiences don’t care about sound? Why have you made a silent film?

2. You’re rehearsing a live band, The Stiletto Sisters, to perform Graham Tardif’s soundtrack at the premiere of Dr. Plonk. Is there going to be much difference for the audience seeing this compared to when it’s screened in ordinary cinemas?

3. In Bad Boy Bubby you used thirty-two cinematographers but only one sound designer, Jim Currie, and one composer, Graham Tardif. Why was that?

4. How do you feel about academics Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocco suggesting in Metro Magazine the label “aurator” be used for the person who experiences your films?

5. How do you hold onto your personal vision for a film when collaborating with other artists?

6. What do you think an auteur is and are you one?

7. Do you think your films give a voice to marginalised people, those whom might otherwise not be heard, for example, women, children, Aboriginal Australians?

8. Are you conscious, while you are making them, of any imprint or signature you leave on your films that indicates a preoccupation with the non-masculine voice?

66 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

9. Who do you think this has had an influence on you as a film-maker?

10. What’s next for Rolf de Heer?

Questions for Jim Currie and Graham Tardif;

1. What do you think is Rolf de Heer’s ideological stance in his films?

2. With Dr. Plonk he’s made a silent film. Do you think Rolf de Heer doesn’t care about sound?

3. In Bad Boy Bubby Rolf de Heer used thirty-two cinematographers, but only one sound designer; Jim Currie, and only one composer; Graham Tardif. Why do you think he was prepared to experiment with the vision and not the sound?

4. How do you feel about academics Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocco suggesting in Metro Magazine the label “aurator” be used for the person who experiences Rolf de Heer’s films?

5. Do you think Rolf de Heer has a preoccupation with giving a voice to marginalised people, those whom might otherwise not be heard?

6. Is he a macho kind of director?

7. Why do you think de Heer doesn’t make action films?

8. What do you think an auteur is and is Rolf de Heer one?

9. Is he an ‘aural’ auteur?

One interesting outcome from the interviews related to the question ‘Is Rolf de Heer an auteur?’ De Heer’s own response was diplomatic but evasive: “Oh, look, I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. It’s for other people to make those sorts of calls on it” (Starrs “Sounds of silence” 2007, 20), whereas both Tardif and Currie were strongly in the affirmative. When asked if his “recurring theme” of giving a “voice to marginalised people” is unconsciously expressed, de Heer’s answer is unexpectedly enthusiastic: “Yes. I’m sure. I’m sure there are degrees of unconscious [expression]” (ibid). De Heer then elucidates his auteurial “submerged reef of values” (Andrew 1993, 83) when he concludes, “what I try to do is make films that don’t reduce people as human beings” (Starrs “Sounds of silence” 2007, 21). As just mentioned, both Tardif and Currie were adamant that de Heer is an auteur, and specifically an ‘aural’

67 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

auteur. Tardif stated, “With his combination of the sound and the music, he is an aural auteur” (Starrs “Graham Tardif”, 2008, 27) and Currie concurred: “I think that’s quite a justifiable term to use with Rolf, yeah.” (Starrs “De Heer de sound”, 2009, forthcoming). From these interviews one can draw the conclusion that de Heer does not consider himself to be an auteur, whereas his collaborators think he is and have no trouble understanding why this thesis should consider him an aural auteur. Furthermore, it can be cautiously concluded that the de Heer signature is, indeed, unconsciously imprinted.

The above questions were only a guide to each interview; what actually happened is that unanticipated directions were explored with different questions as the opportunities arose and some questions were (unfortunately) overlooked completely. Nevertheless, the main questions: ‘Is Rolf an aural auteur?’ and ‘To what extent is his auteurism an unconscious mechanism?’ were successfully addressed. Answers to the questions posed in each interview were assumed to be honest, independent and ungroomed responses. The interviews were conducted with a style of “‘interested listening’ [that] rewards the respondent’s participation but does not evaluate [their] responses” (Fontana and Frey 2005, 702). Nevertheless, and despite all efforts to remain impartial, one must concede that this researcher was not an entirely a passive, detached participant in these interviews and, as Andrea Fontana and James Frey stated, “[The interview] is a contextually bound and mutually created story” (2005, 696). Regardless, it can be assumed the responses were genuine and that they support the argument of this thesis that de Heer unconsciously imprints a sonic signature in his films. This primary research constitutes the final contextual consideration underpinning the refereed and published papers of the thesis. However, as Klaus Jensen noted, “the disambiguation of interview discourses (or the conclusion that an ambiguity is unresolvable) is the outcome of data analysis and will remain an inference” (2002, 240). The only way to circumvent this potential “ambiguity” is to weigh responses with textual and cinematic evidence, and that it is the task of the published papers of the thesis, as can be seen in the next section of the thesis, Part Two.

68

PART TWO.

The Seven Refereed and Published Papers of the Thesis.

Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

CHAPTER 3. A Paper Utilising Genre Analysis and Signalling an Interest in the Auteurism of Rolf de Heer.

69 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

3. Preamble to the First Refereed and Published Paper of the Thesis.

Robin Wood described auteur and genre theory as “disparate approaches” (2003, 61). After all, auteurs do not usually produce “anonymous genre fodder” (Watson 2007, 98) and “the emergence of genre criticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s is usually understood as either a development, qualification, corrective or outright rejection of auteurism” (110). Thus it was useful to commence the refereed writing of this thesis with a genre analysis of one of de Heer’s films.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that weren’t?” Metro Magazine (ISSN: 0312-2654), Melbourne: Australian Teachers of Media, no. 153, 2007, pp. 166-172.

Brief Abstract. This paper addresses the following question: does the presence of Aboriginal Australians, like the presence of Native American Indians in Hollywood westerns, serve to include The Tracker (Rolf de Heer 2002) and The Proposition (John Hillcoat 2005) in the western genre? The conclusion it draws is that the Aboriginal Australian, particularly when played by David Gulpilil - the cinematic face of proud Aboriginality - can be understood as an important cipher enabling the categorisation of films such as these as Australian anti-westerns. Like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), both can be seen, in the words of Brian McFarlane, as “meditations on racism”. But like an anti-John Wayne, Gulpilil’s presence signifies righteous Indigenous resistance to white injustice, and both de Heer and Hillcoat use him effectively as they paint pictures of an outback in which Aboriginal Australians alone belong. The article thus relates Ford’s auteurial ‘European/Indian’ antinomy, as identified by Wollen, to de Heer’s ‘European/Aboriginal Australian’ antinomy thereby departing from a metteurs-en-scène depiction of a Hollywood western, and in doing so flags the auteur analyses of de Heer to follow in the subsequent six papers of the thesis.

Length: 5303 words.

70 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

71 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

CHAPTER 4. The First of Two Papers Utilising Standard Auteur Analysis.

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4. Preamble to the Second Refereed and Published Paper of the Thesis.

The second and third published papers of the thesis are auteur analyses, but they do not yet employ the thesis’ novel methodology of ‘aural’ auteur analysis. Although there was plenty of Mulvey’s “repetition and return” (2005, 230) there was none of Chion’s “masking” (1994, 187-8) in the methodology used while studying these cinematic texts. Rather, they are standard versions of textual analysis of a selection of films chosen because they are considered to be the work of a single author, this being the criterion that instantly qualifies them as auteur analyses.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007).” Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts (ISSN: 1749-9771 - online), UK: University of Edinburgh, no. 5, 2007. http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/starrs.html

Brief Abstract. The possibility is considered that de Heer has followed Epsilon (1995) with another filmic eco-warning, Dr. Plonk (2007), in which his auteurist world view regarding respect for the environment can be detected. In the first of these two eco- politically correct films there is excessive voice-over narration from a sanctimonious grandmother and hectoring monologue from an extra-terrestrial angel-like antagonist to persuade a messianic hero-figure to save the world. In contrast, it is argued that de Heer has subsequently made a silent film in which the messianic saviour fails: the eponymous Dr. Plonk is imprisoned and makes a subtle, unspoken plea to the audience to get out from in front of their television sets and save the world from ecological apocalypse themselves instead of engaging in unhelpful eco-hero worship. Length: 5701 words.

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“Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer's Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)” D. Bruno Starrs (Queensland University of Technology).

While a culture of celebrity candidacy threatens to turn the election race for the office of the leader of the free world, the US presidency, into performance (low) art; while the travesties of religious fundamental extremists promote more internecine hatred; and while wars are fought over control of the Earth’s finite fossil fuel resources, contemporary cinema audiences, like the rest of the community, are offered few reasons to be optimistic. Movie makers seem to frequently delight in depicting our irredeemable present and apparently bleak future. Wheeler Winston Dixon argues: “The cinema of the 21st century makes our most violent dreams of self-destruction simultaneously mundane yet instantly attainable” (Dixon 132), as there are now a multitude of different ways for humanity to enact the nightmare of self-extinction. In addition to the usual trepidation regarding nuclear apocalypse, recent years have seen an increase in fears of global cataclysm due to climate change resulting from the Greenhouse Effect. Disturbing visions of world-wide rising sea-levels as the polar ice caps melt and wild weather events destroying whole communities now suggest a man-made disaster resulting not from a decision to carelessly detonate a nuclear bomb, but the accumulated effects of decades of irresponsible behavior by individual consumers and big business alike. But such an outcome is considered by many in the general community to be more preventable than a deranged individual’s decision to press the doomsday button, and viewers of Al Gore’s eco-political campaign in An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim 2006) are easily rallied to the ecological cause by this eco-warning: it is a cautionary film which both frightens and encourages useful individual action.

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Another film-maker who has contributed to the genre of the eco-warning film is Australian writer, director and sometime producer Rolf de Heer. Released twelve years apart, de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007) reflect two very different approaches to ecological agenda in film. The former uses relentless harangues from both an extraterrestrial antagonist and a grandmotherly narrator to bully the audience into acceptance of the threat their lifestyles present to the future of the planet and humanity, whereas the latter uses slapstick comedy and references to the apocalypse so unremarkable they may even pass unnoticed by an audience engrossed in the physical humor. Although in an interview he dismisses his latest work as “an aberration, in a way, in that it’s a bit of froth” (Starrs 20), it is evident upon analysis that de Heer has not stopped making films with a social conscience, rather he has simply disguised his usual message in a packaging of light comedy. The plot remains essentially the same as his previous filmic eco-warning: an enlightened male individual - or ‘eco-hero’ - struggles to convince the world of its impending ecological doom. Mark J. Lacy describes with disappointment the apparently eco-politically correct, counter-capitalist cultural movies such as Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993) and The Lost World (Steven Spielberg 1997) as contributing to an unhelpful eco-mythology in which:

... dynamic individuals confront the dangers of ‘risk society’ and restore order and security (maintaining their status as escapist myths) [... and] reinforce the (neo)liberal political imaginary (where the ingenuity of the individual can overcome structures of instrumental rationality), limiting alternative ways of articulating the ‘political’ (Lacy 636).

As Marxists claim religion functions as an opiate of the masses, preventing action by the proletariat, likewise some eco-warning films discourage individual action and uprising.

This paper considers if de Heer’s ongoing ecological concern, in failing to offer either religious guidance or secular direction and unhelpfully gestating hope for an heroic ‘dynamic individual’ to save us all as we sleep, also disappoints by perpetuating the eco- mythology Lacy despairs of. If this is the case, then although Epsilon and Dr. Plonk may not be instantly recognizable as genre films, they both represent textbook examples of what Judith Hess Wright argues is the mainstream genre film functioning politically to support the maintenance of the social status quo by offering “absurd solutions to

82 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. economic and social conflict” (Wright 42), instead of encouraging individuals to take individual responsibility for preventing the end of the world. This paper also considers if television, regarded by many to be a soporific enemy of action and solely concerned with promoting consumerism, has the potential to effectively carry the message of eco- warning.

The religious notion of the Apocalypse as suggested by the Book of Revelation is one that suggests world-wide destruction, Edenic renewal and the unveiling of God, for a select few, amidst a glorious utopia. Prophets of the Judeo-Christian faiths make the teleological prediction of a new era of salvation for the pious, and the literature of western culture frequently drew on such eschatology for its end-of-times narratives in the apocalyptic discourse of the centuries following the exile down to the end of the Middle Ages. In contemporary culture, however, the cinema has overtaken church writings in terms of audience reach. The first film explicitly concerned with the aftermath of global man-made apocalypse was the British-made Things To Come (William Cameron Menzies 1936), the screen version of H.G. Wells’ 1933 novel The Shape of Things To Come, which predicts the Second World War and the devastation caused by air-borne bombing raids. Then Hollywood began exploiting the genre with Five (Arch Oboler 1951), which, in its story of the survivors of nuclear war struggling to survive in a hostile radiation-ravaged environment, established the thematic conventions for later films of this genre, including the romantic plot device of the new Adam and Eve who must repopulate the Earth. Frequently expressed is a curiously reassuring sentiment of joy and optimism regarding a world cleansed of the corrupt old order by the re- invigorating apocalypse. The less optimistic Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner 1968) was soon followed by other dystopic movies such as Silent Running (Douglas Trumball 1972) and Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer 1973), and each stressed growing concerns in Western society about the future of the world given the alarming rates of over-population, despoliation of nature, nuclear arms proliferation and depletion of resources. Many earlier films had been primarily concerned with apocalypse caused by alien invasion, as H. Bruce Franklin points out: “Whereas the alien and monster films of the fifties showed our worthy civilization menaced by external powers, these movies

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[futuristic films since 1970] typically project our awful future as a development, often inevitable, of forces already at work within our civilization” (Franklin 48-9). Exemplified by Mad Max (George Miller 1979), in which the world is desert and petrol is still valued as a scarce resource for the filthy habit of driving fast cars, and Twelve Monkeys ( 1996), in which out-of-control eco-warriors try to wipe out destructive humanity with the aid of time travel, Toni Perrine notes that, far from glorifying eco-heroes, “Most postnuclear films depict a dystopic future of neobarbarianism” (Perrine 21). Less concerned with the natural environment, other secular doomsayers predict an Orwellian nightmare of maximum social efficiency and minimal individual freedom as a result of over-exploitation of late capitalist production techniques or ultra-utilitarian governments, as illustrated by Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997). Many films allude to the biblical Revelation with James Cameron’s Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991) foregrounding the concept in the film’s title.

Although he avoids any overt reference to religion, ‘The Man’ (played by Syd Brisbane) in de Heer’s 95 minute film Epsilon (1995), enlightened by the revelations of a sexy female alien (Ulli Birve), serves as a messianic savior-hero as at the end of the film’s narrative he devotes his life to warning the rest of humanity of its impending doom. In this, his fifth feature film, De Heer indirectly resorts to a postmodern retelling of the Judeo-Christian vision with his mythopoeic construction offering a sense of hope for the audience, despite the absence of any actual imaging of the ecological disaster to come. The feel of mythology is furthered by the absence of personal names, as Albert Moran and Errol Vieth summarise: “De Heer removes specificity and particular identity from the characters, as in The Tracker (2002), generalizing the characters by not naming them (‘She’, ‘The Man’, ‘Grandmother’)” (Moran and Vieth 137). The meta-narrative of post- modernism may be reduced to several tenets, one of which suggests that a future social order beyond capitalism is conceivable - and indeed, preferable - if the concomitant product of capitalistic drive, unfettered environmental exploitation resulting in cataclysmic obliteration of not just humankind but the entire Earth, is not ceased. Such a postmodern alternative seems to interest de Heer, but rather than the idea, proposed by classicists, that this environmental decline is predetermined and inevitable, de Heer’s

84 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. counter-hegemonic discourse seems at least superficially optimistic that change can be wrought. If the warning is heeded, a turnaround in the direction of ecological degradation may be achieved by the action of certain venerable individuals. De Heer’s cautionary sub-text in Epsilon is not a nihilistic acceptance that humanity’s immorality will result in a divine retribution, but rather that greed and ignorance can be countered by a singular male hero’s application of rational knowledge, forethought, and his life’s work to the task.

The Man’s role of travelling eco-hero for the planet in Epsilon is foreshadowed by the grandmother (Alethea McGrath) narrating the story at the film’s start, retelling her encounter with the Earth’s savior to two small children around a campfire as one might imagine the tales of legendary heroes and their deeds have been passed down from generation to generation for millennia, and we frequently hear her voice-over continuing to narrate throughout the film. Certainly, The Man is constructed in accordance with Joseph Campbell’s definition of the master-narrative’s hero: “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return” (Campbell 30). We first discover him camping alone, under the stars, in a remote outback Australian location. For the bulk of the film the beautiful but hectoring alien blasts the simple earthling with pro-Green rhetoric about the way the world’s ecology is being destroyed by unthinking people: “Having the Earth mentality is the one thing that is truly unforgivable in the rest of the Universe”, she self-righteously declares. Since this spacewoman is able to zap herself and her bewildered witness anywhere instantly, she takes him first to see the smog and pollution of an unidentified Australian city, then to the outskirts of Las Vegas - where he disappears for the night to play the casinos - and then to a landscape denuded of trees, all the time offering up scathing annotations about the stupidity of humanity. This is his initiation into the role of eco-hero. Finally, he returns to human civilization to serve his monomythic purpose. The metaphorical dragon to be vanquished and slain by The Man is the monster of ecological ignorance and his muse was the beautiful alien who stumbled, naked and lost, into his surveyor’s camp. Utilizing long takes obeying the primacy of the extended and seemingly un-mediated shot and featuring spectacular time-

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controlled vision of stars and clouds in the un-still sky, de Heer’s camera suggests the enlightening - possibly even therapeutic - potential for contemporary environmental cinema. The mere act of displaying such sublime landscapes and awe-inspiring imagery of nature may serve a conservationist function by changing the spectator’s consciousness about the environment: Temporarily removed from her or his concrete and glass existence and transported to climes of unsullied and uncorrupted natural beauty, the audience is reminded of its own role as polluter. But what does this film suggest is the practical means the audience member should adopt to avert such eco-cide? Nothing more than patiently waiting for an unencumbered figure of performative masculinity to receive enlightenment from a female alien, like an angel delivering the Annunciation, before commencing his wandering odyssey of ecological evangelism through which he single-handedly saves the world.

Similarly, de Heer’s latest feature film may be interpreted as failing to give useful advice on the means by which ordinary members of the audience can rectify the situation of impending ecological apocalypse. Indeed, the 84 minute black and white silent film Dr. Plonk (2007) is even less optimistic than Epsilon: the ecological evangeliser that is the eponymous, time-travelling protagonist is mistaken for a terrorist by our twenty-first century contemporaries and locked up, never to be released, his warning to the law- makers of a century ago unheard and unheeded. As Tom Redwood understated, “Dr Plonk takes on a rather substantial subject for a slapstick comedy: it is a film about the end of the world” (Redwood 14). In 1907, a seemingly rational scientist and inventor, Dr. Plonk (Nigel Lunghi, a street performer also known as ‘Mr. Spin’), is married to a caring woman (Magda Szubanski) with a faithful man-servant (Paul Blackwell) in a well-appointed Adelaide mansion. The good doctor calculates that the world will end in 101 years, but his warnings are ignored by the Prime Minister of the day so he invents a time machine and travels to the future, intent on bringing back incontrovertible proof. What he discovers in 2007 is a polluted, over-industrialised world in which ordinary folk sit side by side in their comfortable living rooms, mesmerised by wide-screen television, as outside the eve of the apocalypse apparently approaches. But the exact nature of the catastrophe remains unclear: it is neither expressed nor explained by de Heer. It is not

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God’s destruction of the universe and salvation of the morally just that is presented as the eschatological rationale behind the forthcoming apocalypse. Nor is there an Armageddon-like nuclear conflagration to be feared. Attempting to return to the year of 1907 with a TV set (which is what we can only surmise he believes to be the culprit, as the film’s narrative is restricted to a handful of intertitles), Dr. Plonk is mistakenly imprisoned after much Keystone Kops styled hi-jinks. Will our enlightened male savior escape his Kafkaesque prison and succeed in his mission of ecological warning? Like The Man in Epsilon, who is doomed to wander the Earth alone as he preaches eco- awareness, Dr. Plonk is an essentially tragic figure and unfortunately, De Heer's narrative here peters out. The end of the world - as vaguely portrayed as it is in Dr. Plonk - is a fate that seems sealed.

Of course, mainstream cinema is rarely utilised as a site for detailing an ecological manifesto. Indeed, Judith Hess Wright argues that genre film serves to maintain the status quo because westerns, science fictions (particularly those featuring threatening aliens), horror and gangster films:

... produce satisfaction rather than action, pity and fear rather than revolt. They serve the interests of the ruling class by assisting in the maintenance of the status quo, and they throw a sop to oppressed groups who, because they are unorganized and therefore afraid to act, eagerly accept the genre film’s absurd solutions to economic and social conflicts. [...] Genre films address these conflicts and solve them in a simplistic and reactionary way (Wright 42).

According to Wright, Hollywood’s genre films discourage audiences from rebelling against social change and they do this by neglecting to deal with the social or political problems of the immediate present, preferring to set their dramas in the past (as with westerns) or future (as with science fiction). The social revolution demanded by our warming planet involves large numbers of people eschewing conspicuous, wasteful consumption and reducing their individual ‘carbon footprint’. It is the place of documentary films such as the Academy Award winning An Inconvenient Truth to outline rational, productive steps to take to avert eco-disaster now: steps such as implementing taxes on carbon emissions. Narrative films such as de Heer’s should be, as he asserts himself, no more than a superficial “bit of froth”, but one must question if in

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the distant wake of his unproductive Epsilon, his apparently equally unhelpful twelfth feature film, Dr. Plonk, really is an “aberration”, since both portray a disobliging eco- political myth in which a messianic eco-hero sets about saving the world, while we audiences sit back and watch.

But perhaps this is de Heer’s guileful project? Whereas his message in Epsilon was loud and clear thanks to relentless diatribe from the alien and too frequent voice-over narration from the sanctimonious grandmother, Dr. Plonk, with its complete absence of narration, may be a far subtler attempt to educate the audience. There are no voices to be heard at all in de Heer’s latest film and although his decision to make a black-and-white silent film has been attributed to his discovery of unused film stock deteriorating in his refrigerator at home, it is just as likely the writer/director was responding to the box- office failure of Epsilon, with its excessive voices. Narrative authority is rendered virtually unquestionable by the voice-over, as Sarah Kozloff says: “The voice-over couches a film as a conscious, deliberate communication” (Kozloff 139). Michel Chion tells us that the human voice and the intelligibility of dialogue are fore-grounded in film recording and post-production: “In stating that sound in the cinema is primarily vococentric, I mean that it almost always privileges the voice, highlighting and setting the latter off from other sounds” (Chion 5). But superior to all diegetic voices in the cinema is the voice-over of the invisible narrator. He or she commands respect, exudes authority and her or his utterances are usually vital to the audience understanding the film. Too much voice over, however, as beginning scriptwriters are told, is something to be avoided. Robert McKee, author of Story (1997), is played by Brian Cox delivering a seminar to students in the film Adaptation (Spike Jonze 2002) in which he says: “And God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends, God help you. It’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.” Rather than court accusations of “flaccid writing”, de Heer may have decided to take the opposite approach to message delivery in Dr. Plonk. Claiming that: “Sound is, from my point of view, 60% of the emotional content of a film” (Starrs 18), de Heer seems to have learnt a great deal from the box office failure of Epsilon and concluded

88 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. that if his ecological message of warning could not be delivered by ‘shouting’, perhaps the desired result could be achieved by ‘whispering’.

In Dr. Plonk, his second attempt at a didactic eco-warning on film, De Heer has also avoided a Manichean depiction of cinema’s usual eco-villains such as those David Ingram argues the ‘film vert’ is characterised by: “The second recurrent villain in the environmental movie [after the white hunter] is the representative of big business: the property developer, oil tycoon or nuclear plant manager” (Ingram 3). This absence of an obvious scapegoat may lead to a guilty conclusion: the villain is ourselves. The people of Dr. Plonk’s future (that is, the citizens of 2007) are shown sitting idle, watching widescreen TV as the world turns around them. Rather than sitting back and applauding as a messianic saviour figure averts apocalypse, de Heer may be subtly suggesting we get out from in front of the television and take action ourselves. He certainly does not hesitate to condemn television in interview, stating: “If I could do one thing to improve all of humanity it would be to get rid of television. It has had such a negative social effect in every society that it’s been introduced to ... it’s allowed society to get as consumerist as it is” (Starrs 21). This statement may be interpreted as authoritarian and dismissive to the so-called masses. Certainly, de Heer’s powerful animadversion smacks of the long-standing Marxist tradition that holds that mass culture and media such as television deceptively lull the population into thinking they’re content with our fundamentally unequal society, while advertising actively creates consumer desires which audiences come to perceive as ‘needs’. Such a stance sits easily with Wright’s view of the genre film serving to support the status quo but it is not just class stasis that is encouraged, but the refusal of a different future too. As the box in the corner of the living-room that is always on, television serves to deaden the population to new ideas through their repetition, thus consolidating the present culture of simultaneous resignation and disavowal that seems to characterise many people’s attitudes to an impending ecological or nuclear apocalypse. The once-new abstraction of man-made apocalypse has been staged and re-staged so many times on the small screen, run and re- run as the disaster movie of the week or the nightly shock-horror news bulletin, that we have become numb to its threat and inured to its imminence. Life in our TV culture is a

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constant post-apocalyptic state in which the end of the world is only a metaphor. Like the horrifying symbol of the mushroom cloud appropriated by music videos or computer games, both the nuclear and greenhouse gas caused apocalypse have been diminished to the status of fable. A global zeitgeist of fear, unfocused and unresolved, has morphed into ennui. As to life after the apocalypse - that uninviting tableau is itself un-screenable if TV’s advertising revenue is to continue. Television has an insatiable appetite for the visual image, but a post-apocalypse world is entirely theoretical, and, if it includes an absence of humanity, it is virtually invisible: there is nothing to watch in the post- apocalypse wasteland. As Paul Boyer wryly observes, “Perhaps the only adequate television treatment of nuclear war would be two hours of a totally blank screen in prime time. But who would sponsor it?” (Boyer 362). The addition of commercials, intersecting a message of eco-warning like blows to the cranium, serves to dilute the apocalyptic threat even further. This dependence upon what television producers deem fit for our digestion, so frequently determined by advertising interests, is what de Heer may be so belligerent about and why he apparently believes the micro-environment of the darkened cinema remains a site where his eco-warnings to humanity may still be heeded.

As well as being guilty of promoting rampant consumerism, television has been widely criticised for reducing viewer’s social capital, by which Robert D. Putnam means the

... features of social life - networks, norms, and trust - that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives [...] TV viewing is strongly and negatively related to social trust and group membership [... and] other indicators of civic engagement, including social trust and voting turnout (Putnam 1996).

The privatization of leisure time that solitary TV viewing seems to result in means people are less likely to engage in their community and less likely to participate in ecologically sound group activities such as recycling drives, environmental clean-up days or supporting election campaigns for politicians with positive ecological agendas. Like de Heer’s TV audiences depicted in Dr. Plonk’s future, people with low social capital sit immersed in their widescreen television while the apocalypse descends around them. But as Steven Maras hints, Putnam’s theory is becoming outdated as television

90 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. viewing becomes interactive: “Indeed, it is possible that Putnam’s lack of generosity towards television masks a different issue to do with the changing nature of cultural engagement and participation, and how it happens” (Maras 106). With the rapid growth of the adaptation of free to air television to incorporate mobile telephone and other interactive content, Putnam’s theory loses currency; television viewers are engaging more in social networks. Increases in bandwidth have seen new media technologies proliferate and streaming digital video, both professionally produced and user-generated, is a familiar medium for the person Christina Spurgeon and Gerard Goggin call the “consumer-citizen” (Spurgeon and Goggin 319), noting that “Both the solitary broadcast [television] audience member and the mobile communications [phone] consumer no longer make sense” (318). Spurgeon and Goggin foreshadow a not-too-distant future in which business interests shape entirely new areas of interactive retro-fitting of what used to be called televisual entertainment: “Scalable, consumer-citizen customization media and communications, for example selecting a unique combination of mobile handset, ringtone and wallpaper and then using this device to participate in deciding the outcome of a talent quest, is only the beginning of this trajectory” (326). These “New Circuits of Culture” (ibid.) may offer alternatives to the closed culture of television in which the marketers of advertising dictate content, alternatives in which consumer-citizens exercise greater civic participation. This realization leads me to wonder if de Heer’s disdain for the medium of television is closing off potential reception of his eco- warnings by consumers whom are not only technologically enabled but actively inclined to institute personal change? Spurgeon and Goggin’s consumer-citizen may not only be the potential audience for eco-warning, he or she may also participate in on-line statistical evaluation of community opinions. Compared to the effort involved in attending a polling booth in person, the consumer-citizen may some day participate in the relatively undemanding process of voting via their mobile telephone. Short Message Service (SMS) has been responsible for voter turnout in the multi-millions for popular contests such as Chinese TV’s Super Girl’s Voice (chaoji nusheng) (see Jakes 2005). Last year Taylor Hicks won the final of American Idol in an election that nearly 64 million people voted in - more than voted in the 2004 US presidential elections - and this year Australian politicians began posting their campaign videos on YouTube (see Meikle

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2007). Increasingly, the electronic device that is always on is not the TV set but the interactive multi-media device that in reductive terms is known as the mobile or cell telephone, and unlike the inhibition of civic engagement the traditionally private mode of television viewing promotes, the interactive technologies can result in increased civic engagement, by which interacting audiences develop stronger senses of interpersonal trust, reciprocity and teamwork in their pursuit of communal objectives. With the astounding growth in and acceptance of such technology it is not such an inconceivable prediction that governmental election votes may someday be cast by citizens using their mobile phone or its technologically advanced equivalent in a simultaneously virtual and actual environment they have become engaged in by the audiovisual content streamed to them on their self-same hand-held multimedia device. In China, the country Spurgeon and Goggin call “the world's largest consumer market for mobile handsets and services, with more than 350 million mobile subscribers” (321), the authoritarian Communist Party is justifiably concerned at the ability for mobile phone led revolt by political dissidents: interactive technology has the potential to overthrow governments. Others have recognised the potential for a paradigm shift in the way politics works: Axel Bruns speaks of increasingly more active “produsers” of democracy, i.e. individuals who, empowered by the new media to simultaneously consume, use, produce and create new content in a knowledge economy, turn their technology towards politics:

... a shift towards produsage may revive democratic processes by leveling the roles and turning citizens into active produsers of democracy again. The beginnings of this shift may already be visible in the increasing role of blogs and citizen journalism in recent elections in the U.S. and elsewhere ... (Bruns 7).

Curiously, de Heer's limn of the woeful present in Dr. Plonk is devoid of any cyber-age digital technology despite the likelihood that the online consumer-citizen may be just the audience de Heer should be seeking for his eco-warnings.

The world’s most famous eco-politician, although not presently running for office, is Al Gore. His slide show has been presented to corporate audiences everywhere and his filmic eco-warning has had great impact. But, as Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann contend, An Inconvenient Truth utilises the rhetorical strategy of environmental

92 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. nostalgia, and “mainly succeeds not because of its predictions but because of the eco- memories it evokes” (Murray and Heumann 2007). The film suggests “... we can go ‘home’ to a world more like that of the 1970s by making a few changes, not by giving up our lives [... Gore] serves as a personal example and a conveyor of hope” (ibid). While his rhetoric may be derided as a crudely over-determined signification of a romantic Earthly perfection, his eco-warning - regardless of its methodology - succeeds in motivating audiences to change their lifestyles. Perhaps, if Gore had gained the US presidency back in 2000, he could have been the messianic individual male who single- handedly saves the world, but instead, the former vice-president campaigns for people to make small lifestyle changes by reminding them of a not-too-distant utopic past. Nor is de Heer necessarily interested in the role of messiah. But although his impassioned railing against the idiot box might alienate some constituents, his interest in improving humanity is fore-grounded by his comments such as the above regarding TV and while he has never indicated any such proclivity, I wonder if the man who was awarded the title of South Australian of the Year in 2006 has considered a post-cinema career on the hustings? Celebrity candidates have frequently parlayed their idolatry for votes, usually drawing upon constituent’s recognition of their achievements in the popular world of movies or sport. Were de Heer to run for office, canny voters might be reminded of his recent cinematic effort to improve humanity in which, like Gore and Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, the taking of individual responsibility is indirectly promoted, in lieu of maintaining the status quo by proffering Wright’s “absurd solutions” involving Lacy’s heroic “dynamic individuals”. At first glance his two eco-warning films both seem to be further examples of Lacy’s unhelpful eco-mythology, a “(neo)liberal political imaginary” in which a messianic male figure stands up and saves the world in blithe disregard for the more realistic difference to be made by individuals everywhere changing their lifestyles. But de Heer’s second film shows that even a man with wealth and education enough to build a time machine cannot save the world alone. Rather than perpetuating a cultural anxiety regarding apocalypse due to untrammeled technology as the science fiction films of the twentieth century did or an inevitable consummation of humanity’s greed as the dystopic visions of Toni Perrine’s neo-barbarianism depict, de Heer has struck a subtle blow against fatalistic apathy. Adopting a quieter approach than

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the admirable Al Gore’s plan for a “mass persuasion campaign” (Raju 2007), de Heer makes no stump speeches for he is interested in gently encouraging his audiences themselves taking responsibility for averting the apocalypse. Demonstrating the communication skills of a consummate eco-politician himself, de Heer’s last shot in his latest film is of the would-be messianic savior, alone and impotent. His avatar, Dr. Plonk, is shown gripping his prison bars as he stares directly at the camera, not shouting but silently pleading with his eyes to we, the audience, to mobilise ourselves and do something, be it recycle waste, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or even take an interest in eco-politics. Time will tell if my prediction of government elections being determined by online voting eventuates or if we are all wiped out beforehand by global apocalypse. Hopefully, if and when Dr. Plonk is eventually broadcast on the ubiquitous small screen de Heer so despises, the new culture of interactive television consumption via the mobile multimedia telephone will result in audiences heeding his subtle eco-warning, changing their lifestyles and voting for an eco-politician, rather than engaging in unhelpful eco- hero worship.

Works Cited.

Bruns, Axel. “Produsage: Towards a broader framework for user-led content creation.” In Proceedings Creativity & Cognition 6, Washington, DC, 2007. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00006623/01/6623.pdf

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. NY: Pantheon, 1985.

Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.

Franklin, H. Bruce. “Future imperfect.” American Film. 8 (1983): 46-9, 75-6.

Ingram, David. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter Press, 2004.

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Jakes, Susan. “Li Yuchun: Loved for being herself.” Time Asia, 3 October 2005. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://www.time.com/time/asia/2005/heroes/li_yuchun.html

Kozloff, Sarah. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. California: University of California Press, 1988.

Lacy, Mark J. “Cinema and ecopolitics: Existence in the Jurassic Park.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30.3 (2001): 635-45.

Maras, Steven. “Social capital theory, television, and participation.” Continuum, 20.1 (2006): 87-109.

Meikle, Graham. “20th Century politics meets 21st Century media.” ABC News Online, 12 February 2007. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://www.abc.net.au/news/opinion/items/200702/s1844193.htm

Moran, Albert and Vieth, Errol. Film in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Murray, Robin and Heumann, Joseph. “Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and its skeptics: a case of environmental nostalgia.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 49, 2007. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/inconvenTruth/index.html

Perrine, Toni. Film and the Nuclear Age: Representing Cultural Anxiety. NY and London: Garland, 1998.

Putnam, Robert D. “The strange disappearance of civic America.” The American Prospect, 7.24, 1996. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/assoc/strange.html

Raju, Manu. “Gore’s global warming plan goes far beyond anything Capitol Hill envisions.” CQ Today, 2007. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://public.cq.com/docs/cqt/news110-000002475002.html

Redwood, Tom. “Silence is a virtue: Dr. Plonk and Passio.” Metro, 152 (2007): 14-17.

Spurgeon, Christina and Goggin, Gerald. “Mobiles into media: Premium rate SMS and the adaptation of television to interactive communication cultures.” Continuum, 21.2 (2007): 317-329.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “The sounds of silence: an interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro, 152 (2007): 18-21.

Wright, Judith Hess. “Genre films and the status quo.” Film Genre Reader III, Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: Texas University Press, 2003.

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Films Cited.

Adaptation (2002), dir. Spike Jonze.

An Inconvenient Truth (2005), dir. David Guggenheim.

Dr. Plonk (2007), dir. Rolf de Heer.

Epsilon (1995), dir. Rolf de Heer.

Five (1951), dir. Arch Obeler.

Gattaca (1997), dir. Andrew Niccol.

Jurassic Park (1993), dir. Steven Spielberg.

Mad Max (1979), dir. George Miller.

Planet of the Apes (1968), dir. Franklin J. Schaffner.

Silent Running (1972), dir. Douglas Trumball.

Soylent Green (1973), dir. Richard Fleischer.

Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991), dir. James Cameron.

The Lost World (1997), dir. Steven Spielberg.

The Tracker (2002), dir. Rolf de Heer.

Things To Come (1936), dir. William Cameron Menzies.

Twelve Monkeys (1996), dir. Terry Gilliam.

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CHAPTER 5. The Second of Two Papers Utilising Standard Auteur Analysis.

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5. Preamble to the Third Refereed and

Published Paper of the Thesis.

This paper, published online in M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, is a substantially reworked version of a conference paper entitled “Dance Me To My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The story of a disabled dancer” presented at the Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series, University of Auckland, 13th August 2007 and accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song,” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture (ISSN: 1441-2616 - online), vol. 11, no. 3, July 2008. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/49

Brief Abstract. This paper asserts that in Dance me To My Song, Julia (played by Heather Rose, a woman with cerebral palsy who also co-wrote the film) is not held up as an object of pity, rather is a fully embodied character, thus defying the “normality drama” (Darke 1998) of disability which aims to “reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other”. Director de Heer seems to be giving credit for authorship to Rose where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than her carer, the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates an auteurial desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower her/him. Length: 4267 words.

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M/C Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2008) - 'able'

D. Bruno Starrs

Enabling the Auteurial Voice in Dance Me to My Song

Despite numerous critics describing him as an auteur (i.e. a film-maker who ‘does’ everything and fulfils every production role [Bordwell and Thompson 37] and/or with a signature “world-view” detectable in his/her work [Caughie 10]), Rolf de Heer appears to have declined primary authorship of Dance Me to My Song (1997), his seventh in an oeuvre of twelve feature films. Indeed, the opening credits do not mention his name at all: it is only with the closing credits that the audience learns de Heer has directed the film. Rather, as the film commences, the viewer is informed by the titles that it is “A film by Heather Rose”, thus suggesting that the work is her singular creation. Direct and uncompromising, with its unflattering shots of the lead actor and writer (Heather Rose Slattery, a young woman born with cerebral palsy), the film may be read as a courageous self-portrait which finds the grace, humanity and humour trapped inside Rose’s twisted body. Alternatively, it may be read as yet another example of de Heer’s signature interest in foregrounding a world view which gives voice to marginalized characters such as the disabled or the disadvantaged. For example, the developmentally retarded eponyme of Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is eventually able to make art as a singer in a band and succeeds in creating a happy family with a wife and two kids. The ‘mute’ girl in The Quiet Room (1996) makes herself heard by her squabbling parents through her persistent activism. In Ten Canoes (2006) the Indigenous Australians cast themselves according to kinship ties, not according to the director’s choosing, and tell their story in their own uncolonized language. A cursory glance at the films of Rolf de Heer suggests he is overtly interested in conveying to the audience the often overlooked agency of his unlikely protagonists.

In the ultra-competitive world of professional film-making it is rare to see primary authorship ceded by a director so generously. However, the allocation of authorship to a member of a marginalized population re- invigorates questions prompted by Andy Medhurst regarding a film’s “authorship test” (198) and its relationship to a subaltern community wherein he writes that “a biographical approach has more political justification if the project being undertaken is one concerned with the cultural history of a marginalized group” (202-3). Just as films by gay

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authors about gay characters may have greater credibility, as Medhurst posits, one might wonder would a film by a person with a disability about a character with the same disability be better received? Enabling authorship by an unknown, crippled woman such as Rose rather than a famous, able- bodied male such as de Heer may be cynically regarded as good (show) business in that it is politically correct. This essay therefore asks if the appellation “A film by Heather Rose” is appropriate for Dance Me to My Song. Whose agency in telling the story (or ‘doing’ the film-making), the able bodied Rolf de Heer or the disabled Heather Rose, is reflected in this cinematic production? In other words, whose voice is enabled when an audience receives this film? In attempting to answer these questions it is inevitable that Paul Darke’s concept of the “normality drama” (181) is referred to and questioned, as I argue that Dance Me to My Song makes groundbreaking departures from the conventions of the typical disability narrative.

Heather Rose as Auteur

Rose plays the film’s heroine, Julia, who like herself has cerebral palsy, a group of non-progressive, chronic disorders resulting from changes produced in the brain during the prenatal stages of life. Although severely affected physically, Rose suffered no intellectual impairment and had acted in Rolf de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby five years before, a confidence- building experience that grew into an ongoing fascination with the filmmaking process. Subsequently, working with co-writer Frederick Stahl, she devised the scenario for this film, writing the lead role for herself and then proactively bringing it to de Heer’s attention. Rose wrote of de Heer’s deliberate lack of involvement in the script-writing process: “Rolf didn’t even want to read what we’d done so far, saying he didn’t want to interfere with our process” (de Heer, “Production Notes”).

In 2002, aged 36, Rose died and Stahl reports in her obituary an excerpt from her diary:

People see me as a person who has to be controlled. But let me tell you something, people. I am not! And I am going to make something real special of my life! I am going to go out there and grab life with both hands!!! I am going to make the most sexy and honest film about disability that has ever been made!! (Stahl, “Standing Room Only”)

This proclamation of her ability and ambition in screen-writing is indicative of Rose’s desire to do. In a guest lecture Rose gave further insights into the active intent in writing Dance Me to My Song:

I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world …

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The message I wanted to convey to an audience was “As people with disabilities, we have the same feelings and desires as others”. (Rose, “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation”)

Rose went on to explain her strategy for winning over director de Heer: “Rolf was not sure about committing to the movie; I had to pester him really. I decided to invite him to my birthday party. It took a few drinks, but I got him to agree to be the director” (ibid) and with this revelation of her tactical approach her film-making agency is further evidenced.

Rose’s proactive innovation is not just evident in her successfully approaching de Heer. Her screenplay serves as a radical exception to films featuring disabled persons, which, according to Paul Darke in 1998, typically involve the disabled protagonist struggling to triumph over the limitations imposed by their disability in their ‘admirable’ attempts to normalize. Such normality dramas are usually characterized by two generic themes:

first, that the state of abnormality is nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization – as represented in the film by the other characters – is unquestionably right owing to its axiomatic supremacy. (187)

Darke argues that the so-called normality drama is “unambiguously a negation of ascribing any real social or individual value to the impaired or abnormal” (196), and that such dramas function to reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other. Able-bodied characters are typically portrayed positively in the normality drama: “A normality as represented in the decency and support of those characters who exist around, and for, the impaired central character. Thus many of the disabled characters in such narratives are bitter, frustrated and unfulfilled and either antisocial or asocial” (193). Darke then identifies The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) as archetypal films of this genre.

Even in films in which seemingly positive images of the disabled are featured, the protagonist is still to be regarded as the abnormal Other, because

in comparison to the other characters within that narrative the impaired character is still a comparatively second-class citizen in the world of the film. My Left Foot is, as always, a prime example: Christy Brown may well be a writer, relatively wealthy and happy, but he is not seen as sexual in any way (194).

However, Dance Me to My Song defies such generic restrictions: Julia’s temperament is upbeat and cheerful and her disability, rather than appearing tragic, is made to look healthy, not “second class”, in comparison

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with her physically attractive, able-bodied but deeply unhappy carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy). Within the first few minutes of the film we see Madelaine dissatisfied as she stands, inspecting her healthy, toned and naked body in the bathroom mirror, contrasted with vision of Julia’s twisted form, prostrate, pale and naked on the bed. Yet, in due course, it is the able-bodied girl who is shown to be insecure and lacking in character. Madelaine steals Julia’s money and calls her “spastic”. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Madelaine perversely positions Julia in her wheelchair to force her to watch as she has perfunctory sex with her latest boyfriend. Madelaine even masquerades as Julia, commandeering her voice synthesizer to give a fraudulently positive account of her on-the-job performance to the employment agency she works for. Madelaine’s “axiomatic supremacy” is thoroughly undermined and in the most striking contrast to the typical normality drama, Julia is unashamedly sexual: she is no Christy Brown.

The affective juxtaposition of these two different personalities stems from the internal nature of Madelaine’s problems compared to the external nature of Julia’s problems. Madelaine has an emotional disability rather than a physical disability and several scenes in the film show her reduced to helpless tears. Then one day when Madelaine has left her to her own devices, Julia defiantly wheels herself outside and bumps into - almost literally - handsome, able-bodied Eddie (John Brumpton). Cheerfully determined, Julia wins him over and a lasting friendship is formed. Having seen the joy that sex brings to Madelaine, Julia also wants carnal fulfilment so she telephones Eddie and arranges a date. When Eddie arrives, he reads the text on her voice machine’s screen containing the title line to the film ‘Dance me to my song’ and they share a tender moment. Eddie’s gentleness as he dances Julia to her song (“Kizugu” written by Bernard Huber and John Laidler, as performed by Okapi Guitars) is simultaneously contrasted with the near-date-rapes Madelaine endures in her casual relationships.

The conflict between Madeline and Julia is such that it prompts Albert Moran and Errol Vieth to categorize the film as “women’s melodrama”:

Dance Me to My Song clearly belongs to the genre of the romance. However, it is also important to recognize it under the mantle of the women’s melodrama … because it has to do with a woman’s feelings and suffering, not so much because of the flow of circumstance but rather because of the wickedness and malevolence of another woman who is her enemy and rival. (198-9)

Melodrama is a genre that frequently resorts to depicting disability in which a person condemned by society as disabled struggles to succeed in love: some prime examples include An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957) involving a paraplegic woman, and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which a strong-spirited but mute woman achieves love. The more conventional Hollywood romances typically involve attractive, able-bodied characters.

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In Dance Me to My Song the melodramatic conflict between the two remarkably different women at first seems dominated by Madelaine, who states: “I know I’m good looking, good in bed ... better off than you, you poor thing” in a stream-of-consciousness delivery in which Julia is constructed as listener rather than converser. Julia is further reduced to the status of sub-human as Madelaine says: “I wish you could eat like a normal person instead of a bloody animal” and her erstwhile boyfriend Trevor says: “She looks like a fuckin’ insect.” Even the benevolent Eddie says: “I don’t like leaving you alone but I guess you’re used to it.” To this the defiant Julia replies; “Please don’t talk about me in front of me like I’m an animal or not there at all.” Eddie is suitably chastised and when he treats her to an over- priced ice-cream the shop assistant says “Poor little thing … She’ll enjoy this, won’t she?” Julia smiles, types the words “Fuck me!”, and promptly drops the ice-cream on the floor. Eddie laughs supportively. “I’ll just get her another one,” says the flustered shop assistant, “and then get her out of here, please!” With striking eloquence, Julia wheels herself out of the shop, her voice machine announcing “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”, as she departs exultantly. With this bold statement of independence and defiance in the face of patronising condescension, the audience sees Rose’s burgeoning strength of character and agency reflected in the onscreen character she has created. Dance Me to My Song and the films mentioned above are, however, rare exceptions in the many that dare represent disability on the screen at all, compliant as the majority are with Darke’s expectations of the normality drama.

Significantly, the usual medical-model nexus in many normality films is ignored in Rose’s screenplay: no medication, hospitals or white laboratory coats are to be seen in Julia’s world. Finally, as I have described elsewhere, Julia is shown joyfully dancing in her wheelchair with Eddie while Madelaine proves her physical inferiority with a ‘dance’ of frustration around her broken-down car (see Starrs, "Dance"). In Rose’s authorial vision, audience’s expectations of yet another film of the normality drama genre are subverted as the disabled protagonist proves superior to her ‘normal’ adversary in their melodramatic rivalry for the sexual favours of an able- bodied love-interest.

Rolf de Heer as Auteur

De Heer does not like to dwell on the topic of auteurism: in an interview in 2007 he somewhat impatiently states:

I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. … Look, I write the damn things, and direct them, and I don’t completely produce them anymore – there are other people. If that makes me an auteur in other people’s terminologies, then fine. (Starrs, "Sounds" 20)

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De Heer has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis “Working together”) which is possibly why he handed ownership of this film to Rose. Of the writer/actor who plied him with drink so he would agree to back her script, de Heer states:

It is impossible to overstate the courage of the performance that you see on the screen. … Heather somehow found the means to respond on cue, to maintain the concentration, to move in the desired direction, all the myriad of acting fundamentals that we take for granted as normal things to do in our normal lives. (“Production Notes”)

De Heer’s willingness to shift authorship from director to writer/actor is representative of this film’s groundbreaking promotion of the potential for agency within disability. Rather than being passive and suffering, Rose is able to ‘do.’ As the lead actor she is central to the narrative. As the principle writer she is central to the film’s production. And she does both.

But in conflict with this auteurial intent is the temptation to describe Dance Me to My Song as an autobiographical documentary, since it is Rose herself, with her unique and obvious physical handicap, playing the film’s heroine, Julia. In interview, however, De Heer apparently disagrees with this interpretation:

Rolf de Heer is quick to point out, though, that the film is not a biography. “Not at all; only in the sense that writers use material from their own lives. Madelaine is merely the collection of the worst qualities of the worst carers Heather’s ever had.” Dance Me to My Song could be seen as a dramatised documentary, since it is Rose herself playing Julia, and her physical or surface life is so intense and she is so obviously handicapped. While he understands that response, de Heer draws a comparison with the first films that used black actors instead of white actors in blackface. “I don’t know how it felt emotionally to an audience, I wasn’t there, but I think that is the equivalent”. (Urban)

An example of an actor wearing “black-face” to portray a cerebral palsy victim might well be Gus Trikonis’s 1980 film Touched By Love. In this, the disabled girl is unconvincingly played by the pretty, able-bodied actress Diane Lane. The true nature of the character’s disability is hidden and cosmeticized to Hollywood expectations. Compared to that inauthentic film, Rose’s screenwriting and performance in Dance Me to My Song is a self- penned fiction couched in unmediated reality and certainly warrants authorial recognition.

Despite his unselfish credit-giving, de Heer’s direction of this remarkable film is nevertheless detectable. His auteur signature is especially evident in his technological employment of sound as I have argued elsewhere (see

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Starrs, "Awoval"). The first distinctly de Heer influence is the use of a binaural recording device - similar to that used in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - to convey to the audience the laboured nature of Julia’s breathing and to subjectively align the audience with her point of view. This apparatus provides a disturbing sound bed that is part wheezing, part grunting. There is no escaping Julia’s physically unusual life, from her reliance on others for food, toilet and showering, to the half-strangled sounds emanating from her ineffectual larynx. But de Heer insists that Julia does speak, like Stephen Hawkings, via her Epson RealVoice computerized voice synthesizer, and thus Julia manages to retain her dignity. De Heer has her play this machine like a musical instrument, its neatly modulated feminine tones immediately prompting empathy.

Rose Capp notes de Heer’s preoccupation with finding a voice for those minority groups within the population who struggle to be heard, stating:

de Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication (21).

Certainly, the importance to Julia of her only means of communication, her voice synthesizer, is stressed by de Heer throughout the film. Everybody around her has, to varying degrees, problems in hearing correctly or understanding both what and how Julia communicates with her alien mode of conversing, and she is frequently asked to repeat herself. Even the well- meaning Eddie says: “I don’t know what the machine is trying to say”. But it is ultimately via her voice synthesizer that Julia expresses her indomitable character. When first she meets Eddie, she types: “Please put my voice machine on my chair, STUPID.” She proudly declares ownership of a condom found in the bathroom with “It’s mine!” The callous Madelaine soon realizes Julia’s strength is in her voice machine and withholds access to the device as punishment for if she takes it away then Julia is less demanding for the self- centred carer. Indeed, the film which starts off portraying the physical superiority of Madelaine soon shows us that the carer’s life, for all her able- bodied, free-love ways, is far more miserable than Julia’s. As de Heer has done in many of his other films, a voice has been given to those who might otherwise not be heard through significant decision making in direction. In Rose’s case, this is achieved most obviously via her electric voice synthesizer.

I have also suggested elsewhere (see Starrs, "Dance") that de Heer has helped find a second voice for Rose via the language of dance, and in doing so has expanded the audience’s understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per Mike Oliver’s social model of disability, rather than the more usual medical model of disability. Empowered by her act of courage with

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Eddie, Julia sacks her uncaring ‘carer’ and the film ends optimistically with Julia and her new man dancing on the front porch. By picturing the couple in long shot and from above, Julia’s joyous dance of triumph is depicted as ordinary, normal and not deserving of close examination. This happy ending is intercut with a shot of Madeline and her broken down car, performing her own frustrated dance and this further emphasizes that she was unable to ‘dance’ (i.e. communicate and compete) with Julia. The disabled performer such as Rose, whether deliberately appropriating a role or passively accepting it, usually struggles to placate two contrasting realities: (s)he is at once invisible in the public world of interhuman relations and simultaneously hyper-visible due to physical Otherness and subsequent instantaneous typecasting. But by the end of Dance Me to My Song, Rose and de Heer have subverted this notion of the disabled performer grappling with the dual roles of invisible victim and hyper-visible victim by depicting Julia as socially and physically adept. She ‘wins the guy’ and dances her victory as de Heer’s inspirational camera looks down at her success like an omniscient and pleased god. Film academic Vivian Sobchack writes of the phenomenology of dance choreography for the disabled and her own experience of waltzing with the maker of her prosthetic leg, Steve, with the comment: “for the moment I did displace focus on my bodily immanence to the transcendent ensemble of our movement and I really began to waltz” (65). It is easy to imagine Rose’s own, similar feeling of bodily transcendence in the closing shot of Dance Me to My Song as she shows she can ‘dance’ better than her able-bodied rival, content as she is with her self-identity.

Conclusion: Validation of the Auteurial Other

Rolf de Heer was a well-known film-maker by the time he directed Dance Me to My Song. His films Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996) had both screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. He was rapidly developing a reputation for non-mainstream representations of marginalized, subaltern populations, a cinematic trajectory that was to be further consolidated by later films privileging the voice of Indigenous Peoples in The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the latter winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes. His films often feature unlikely protagonists or as Liz Ferrier writes, are “characterized by vulnerable bodies … feminized … none of whom embody hegemonic masculinity” (65): they are the opposite of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, controlling heroes. With a nascent politically correct worldview proving popular, de Heer may have considered the assigning of authorship to Rose a marketable idea, her being representative of a marginalized group, which as Andy Medhurst might argue, may be more politically justifiable, as it apparently is with films of gay authorship. However, it must be emphasized that there is no evidence that de Heer’s reticence about claiming authorship of Dance Me to My Song is motivated by pecuniary interests, nor does he seem to have been trying to distance himself from the project through embarrassment or dissatisfaction with the film or its relatively unknown writer/actor. Rather, he

106 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success.

Firstly, it is a rare exception to the disability film genre defined by Paul Darke as the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film- making industry. Despite being an unpublished and unknown author, the label “A film by Heather Rose” is, I believe, a deserved coup for the woman who set out to make “the most sexy and honest film about disability ever made”. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalized peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her. He both acknowledges their authorial voices and credits them as essential beings, and in enabling such subaltern populations to be heard, willingly cedes his privileged position as a successful, white, male, able-bodied film-maker. In the credits of this film he seems to be saying ‘I may be an auteur, but Heather Rose is a no less able auteur’.

References

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

Capp, Rose. “Alexandra and the de Heer Project.” RealTime + Onscreen 56 (Aug.-Sep. 2003): 21. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue56/7153›.

Caughie, John. “Introduction”. Theories of Authorship. Ed. John Caughie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 9-16.

Darke, Paul. “Cinematic Representations of Disability.” The Disability Reader. Ed. Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Cassell, 1988. 181- 198.

Davis, Therese. “Working Together: Two Cultures, One Film, Many Canoes.” Senses of Cinema 2006. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/ten-canoes.html›.

De Heer, Rolf. “Production Notes.” Vertigo Productions. Undated. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=10&display =notes›.

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Ferrier, Liz. “Vulnerable Bodies: Creative Disabilities in Contemporary Australian Film.” Australian Cinema in the 1990s. Ed. Ian Craven. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co., 2001. 57-78.

Medhurst, Andy. “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship.” Screen 32.2 (1991): 197-208.

Moran, Albert, and Errol Vieth. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Oliver, Mike. Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983.

Rose Slattery, Heather. “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation.” Words+ n.d. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm›.

Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).” Topoi 24.1 (2005): 55-66.

Stahl, Frederick. “Standing Room Only for a Thunderbolt in a Wheelchair,” Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 2002. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html›.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of Silence: An Interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro 152 (2007): 18-21.

———. “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003).” Metro 156 (2008): 148-153.

———. “Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The Story of a Disabled Dancer.” Proceedings Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series 2007. Ed. Mark Harvey. University of Auckland, 2008 (in press).

Urban, Andrew L. “Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, Australia.” Film Festivals 1988. 6 June 2008. ‹http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm›.

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CHAPTER 6. A Paper Arguing for the Methodological Innovation of the Thesis:

Aural Auteur Analysis.

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5.1 Preamble to the Fourth Refereed and Published Paper of the Thesis.

This paper represents the turning point of the thesis. From this point on, the methodology of analysis is no longer standard auteur analysis, in which little to no attention is paid to the possible signature use of sound in a film-maker’s body of work, rather it is an approach in which the aural is emphasised.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Revising the Metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie Aural Auteur” (accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference - “Re- imagining Australia and India: Culture and Identity”, 22-24 January 2008, Kolkata, India. A revised version is currently also undergoing refereeing by Metro Magazine).

Brief Abstract. Auteurism has, since its inception in the 1950s by the critics of Des Cahiers du Cinéma, neglected the potential role of sound in deference to the visual mise- en-scène: the auteur is literally defined by Astruc’s metaphor of the caméra-stylo, by which he meant that the camera could potentially be wielded by the director as a novelist might wield a pen. This paper argues that a review of the role of the aural in the practice of the auteur is both overdue and necessary, and also suggests a further role for nationality when considering the kind of auteur a film-maker may be. Australian film- makers may be characterised by the combining of a European auteurist interest in what Jonathan Rayner calls “personal writing and artistic vision” and an American auteurist interest in “genre revision” (2003: 12). The paper concludes by suggesting that a typically Australian sonic signature may - with detailed aural auteur analysis - be detected in the work of Rolf de Heer and proposes the incorporation of the analysis of a film-maker’s use of sound in any conceptual framework for the methodology of auteur analysis. Length: 5606 words.

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Front cover of the conference handbook.

111 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Revising the Metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie Aural Auteur.

In his auteur analysis of celebrated Australian film-maker Peter Weir, Jonathan Rayner stated: “[Weir’s] career is marked by a European brand of art-film auteurism, based on personal writing and visual expression, in Australia, and by an American brand of auteurism, based on genre revision, in Hollywood.”1 This distinction between the auteurism of the two continents is curiously undeveloped in the literature and in this paper I suggest that there actually exists a typically Australian kind of auteur in whose work the European tendency for “personal writing and visual expression” is combined with American “genre revision”, as exemplified by writer/director Rolf de Heer. Furthermore, I propose this categorization of Australian auteurism can be shown to be the evolutionary product of a trajectory of film-making characterised by two distinct – yet interacting – influences, the effect of the Australian government’s attempt to cultivate a National Cinema and the belated recognition of sound artistry in film-making. This last factor leads me to the conclusion that auteur analysts ought to concern themselves as much with the aural as they do with the visual signatures left on a film, as has traditionally been their neglectful approach based, as it were, on the French- originated metaphor of the caméra-stylo.

European Auteurism.

The notion of an artwork having an individual author has not always been accepted in western culture. For centuries it was God that was seen as the locus of an artist’s creativity and not any mere human. It is only since the Renaissance that the individual artist has been associated with her or his creative discourse and it is only since the late 1940s that cinema has acquired the concept of an auteur, when a rift began to be constructed between notions of commercial cinema and art cinema, although Susan Hayward cited it as earlier:

Auteur is a term that dates back to the 1920s, in the theoretical writings of French film critics and directors of the silent era. At that time, the debate centred on the auteur (author of script and film-maker as one and the same) versus the scenario- led film (scripts commissioned from authors or scriptwriters) - a distinction that fed into the original high-art/low-art debate.2

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It was in 1948, however, that the argument for auteurism became really earnest when French film-maker, left-wing intellectual and critic Alexandre Astruc devised the metaphor of the caméra-stylo, by which he meant that the movie camera could potentially be wielded as a novelist might wield a pen. His article, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo”3, contained the first cogent suggestion that an artistic film does not come about from the toil of a production crew but, rather, from the creative force of the director and her or his leadership. The film could become the end result of the director’s self-expression and creativity through artistic use of the caméra- stylo. Astruc imagined the cinema eventually breaking free of the restrictive demands of narrative to attain a position in which images become a creative and self-expressive means of writing just as subtle and flexible as that of poetry and prose. Before Astruc’s manifesto it was generally believed that the monolithic nature of studio film-making meant a solitary authorial voice could not make itself seen or heard in a film. Film criticism, predominately sociological, assumed a movie could only reflect the ideology of capitalism, being little more than a commodity product. For some, this meant film could not be perceived as art at all. Where art was recognised in the movies, it was usually a case of a ‘quality’ production dealing with a serious social issue and the work of reviewers saw films “less often aesthetically evaluated than topically synopsized.”4 But from the 1950s on there became evident a kind of art cinema, in which a director’s voice sometimes intruded to the extent of disrupting the verisimilitude of traditional narrative. An informed and educated audience could seek these marks of authorship and identify more with that author than even with the characters portrayed.

1951 was the year when Astruc’s contemporary, André Bazin, co-founded the French film journal Des Cahiers du Cinéma and he is often regarded as the father of auteurism due to his recognition and appreciation of the authorial style and Zeitgeist of such film- makers as Charlie Chaplin and Jean Renoir, and his opposition to the un-theorised political commitment in other French journals of film criticism such as Positif. But it was left to one of the more polemic critics at Cahiers, François Truffaut, to champion the phrase politique des auteurs in his 1954 article, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma Française”. He used this label in collaboration with others of the Cahiers camp to

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virtually apotheosise American directors such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, whose work had been denied them during the war.5 Although American film- makers were working within the repressive studio machinery of the Hollywood system and the types of films and their scripts were often decided for them, the French critics such as Truffaut believed that such artists could nonetheless achieve a personal style in their work through their preoccupations with the themes they emphasised, the mise-en- scène they enacted (i.e. everything visible within the frame, from camera angles to actor’s gestures to set design and lighting) and the formal styles they employed. Truffaut attacked the psychologically realistic French films of Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, Rene Clement and others, because their ‘quality’ films were more ‘writerly’ than ‘directorly’, most being screen adaptations of literary works.

The proponents of La politique des auteurs made immediate and specific demands. First, they called for the adoption of a strong stance in favor of some directors and against others, elevating the stature of French film-makers Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, and Jean Cocteau, and of American directors D. W. Griffiths, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and British-born Hitchcock. Secondly, the auteurist partisans called for the re-evaluation of those Hollywood directors ensconced in studio systems who therefore had to overcome many more obstacles than their European counterparts, even if their work was ostensibly commercial and seemingly non-artistic. During the years in which studio systems reigned supreme over Hollywood, directors were generally required to subject their artistic visions to the whims of domineering studio moguls and influential movie stars. They were part of movie ‘factories’ and that they were able to leave their identifiable personal signatures on their films in the form of a personal world vision and a distinctive cinematic style was therefore proof of their artistic prowess. Having overcome the limitations of the hierarchical structure of Hollywood movie-making, such directors deserved higher status, according to the Cahiers critics. Thirdly, the beginning of the New Wave of French cinema, or Nouvelle Vague, was to some extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying their philosophy to the real world by directing their own films, as exemplified by the work of directors such as Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. Visual effects such as jump cuts, rapid changes of scene, and shots

114 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. that go beyond the usual 180º axis were used to not just mesmerise the audience with illusory imagery and elaborate narrative, but to deliberately exceed the common expectations of cinema-goers. This is what Rayner, in his appraisal of Peter Weir, most probably refers to as European auteurism, that is, film directing based on personal screen-writing and visual expression as evidenced by analysis of the mise-en-scène. It must be noted, however, that Rayner did not arrive at any conclusion regarding the European disavowal of film sound artistry.

American Auteurism.

The French critic’s idea of the film-making auteur slowly gained momentum in America in the 1960s through the translations and writings of Andrew Sarris in the journals Film Culture and Movie, and the popularity of ‘auteur theory’, as he rendered the phrase La politique des auteurs, led to the formation of his canon of great directors. Sarris was the editor of the English edition of Des Cahiers du Cinéma and in his book The American Cinema (1968) he set up a system whereby directors were graded according to how far their personal world-views were able to transcend the hierarchical film-making systems under which they laboured. It was a controversial pantheon of significant directors whose names alone were to be considered a criterion of greatness. Sarris stated three premises of auteurism that he equated with “circles”: an outer circle comprising “technical competence of the director as a criterion of value”, a middle circle comprising “personal style” with the premise that “the distinguishable personality of a director is a criterion of value”; and an inner circle comprising “interior meaning” which he attempted to explain as being:

… extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material. This conception of interior meaning comes close to what Astruc defines as mise-en-scène, but not quite. It is not quite the vision of a world a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life. It is ambiguous, in any literary sense, because part of it is embedded in the stuff of the cinema and cannot be rendered in noncinematic terms.6 Here Sarris alludes to the primacy of the image for auteur analysis but the concept of mise-en-scène remains somewhat more complicated than the meaning it possesses in the theatre-world. Sarris later attempted to elaborate on its tenor:

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The art of the cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scène. […] The whole point of a meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement.7

In other words, Sarris was referring to the signature a director leaves on her or his films and the mysterious possibility a director is unintentionally leaving it and thus, with auteurism, the term mise-en-scène became closely associated with techniques such as the arrangement of visual components within the frame; the position, angle and motion of the camera, as well as movement of actors etc. within the frame. All, one must note, at the expense of the possibly auteurial contribution of sound.

British-born Hollywood director Alfred Hitchcock is renowned for cultivating his persona as auteur, as he revelled in his status as ‘the master of suspense’ and made cameo appearances in many of his films and personally introduced his TV series. Of the book of tape recorded interviews with Hitchcock by Truffaut, biographer Donald Spoto comments that:

Truffaut’s interviews established Hitchcock’s status as the quintessential auteur […] Hitchcock’s career was indeed in crisis, and he and Universal needed to have his accomplishments codified and celebrated by a respected colleague in the industry […] It also hurt and disappointed just about everybody who had ever worked with Alfred Hitchcock, for the interviews reduced the writers, the designers, the photographers, the composers, and the actors to little other than elves in the master carpenter’s workshop.8

This quotation reveals two interesting insights that have led many to reject auteurism: firstly, identifying a director as an auteur is considered a good move for that director’s career and has often been the motivating factor in industry use of the term. Secondly, the label of auteur, especially if welcomed by the director, tends to belittle the achievements of those many artisans the director has necessarily collaborated with. Of course, these are not the only criticisms of auteurism, but with the reductions in costs of film-making associated with advances in high definition videography, auteurism is undoubtedly sustainable still as the basis for academic discourse. More and more independent

116 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. directors are able to impress their artistic signature on their cinematic output. But for the Hollywood film-making industry, an auteur is one who stretches, or revises, the boundaries of known genres, not indulging in writing films of a personal nature but, rather, churning out commodities audiences can compare to others of its ilk.

Certainly, a convincing argument can be made for the existence of a recognizably European mode of auteurism, based, as Rayner puts it, on a director’s personal writing and visual expression, and the evidence abounds in the cinema of the Nouvelle Vague. But what evidence exists for the claim that American auteurs are characterised by genre revisionism? Rayner argues:

Hollywood’s films can be divided into several conventionalised genres within a standard mode of linear narrative filmmaking, whereas art cinema (and all non- American, and particularly non-English-language, films, irrespective of their ‘artistic’ or ‘industrial’ circumstances of production, are circulated or received ‘like art films’ outside their countries of origin) can have as many genres as author-directors and an equal number of modes that may or may not conform to Hollywood narrative.9

It seems to Rayner that a simple yet defining difference exists for the directors of Europe and America: the first group is unrestrained by financial concerns, hence freeing its members to write and direct personal material while the latter group’s members are forced by studio apparatus to conform to that which has previously been shown to succeed at the box office. Even if one accepts the many exceptions and illogicalities to this reductionist and artificial schism, one must needs ask where the Australian film maker stands. In a similarly reductive argument, I would put it that the Australian auteur, supported by considerable government schemes, is able to both subvert genres and indulge in personal writing, and furthermore, is able to experiment with art-film techniques (such as sound design, as I will shortly argue). This is due to a distinctly Australian interest in telling a distinctly Australian story, that is, in the development of a National Cinema, which, while diverging from mainstream cinema, still manages to attract significant box office returns.

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Australian Auteurism.

Since the 1970s in Australia, when the separate states established film financing organizations and tax incentives via the 10B (a) legislation were enacted, thus encouraging the so-called ‘Renaissance,’ films that varied from the mainstream have been regularly produced, and these films have been frequently described as Australian art films. Kathleen McHugh, in her study of Australian film-maker Jane Campion (Sweetie (1989) and The Piano (1993)), describes the establishment of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), with its deliberately cultivated identity as an ‘arty’ institution, as commensurate with the goal of combining a uniquely Australian auteur style with mass marketability: … the goal of national industries and national film schools was to produce filmmakers whose vision would be sufficiently distinct from the Hollywood model to be claimed for a national perspective, while also remaining sufficiently similar to that model to be commercially viable in the international film market.10

Thus, a uniquely Australian National Cinema was cultivated in the 1970s, one which sought to marry the artistic creativity of the film auteur with the industry requirements of box office performance, a disavowal of the perceived culture versus commerce binary. The most obvious and readily identifiable example of such commercially viable Australian film-making is the ‘period’ film, as exemplified by several productions released in the years 1975 to 1982. Such films were set in the not so long ago days of Australia’s colonial past and are characterised by authentic costuming and props. Lest the reader think that merely setting a film in the days of one’s forebears is enough to qualify the work as an art film of the Australian National Cinema, I would like to draw attention to a definition offered by Norman Holland, which states the art film is always a “puzzle film,”11 hence the period film Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir 1975) is a typical art film in that it confounds audience expectations of narrative resolution. Not unlike a detective film, the puzzle film offers a riddle or enigma that engages the characters, and the audience, in some significant struggle to comprehend. Unlike the detective film, however, the puzzling Australian art film seeks to involve the filmgoer in an unresolved narrative without offering a sense of closure. Things rarely wrap up nicely with everybody ‘living happily ever after’ in an art film and characters often seem

118 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. relatively directionless, not striving for the attainment of a certain goal, which when fulfilled typically signals the end of the mainstream film. As David Bordwell put it, “Firstly, the art cinema defines itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode, and especially against the cause-effect linkage of events.”12 Instead of a standard story arc, there may be an acknowledgement of failure on the protagonist’s behalf, or the character’s perplexed status may continue unchanged, or only a partial or not entirely satisfactory explanation may be offered. The audience is encouraged to speculate about the solution to the puzzle beyond the end of the film, and, indeed, about the meaning of the film generally. But as Bordwell notes, the riddle also concerns the intent of the author, not just the outcome of the story: “In the art cinema, the puzzle is one of plot: who is telling this story? How is this story being told? Why is this story being told this way?”13 Because of the art film’s interest in both realism - with its ‘real’ (not studio) locations, and ‘real’ problems - and in auteurial motivation, there is frequent and deliberate ambiguity, hence the reader of this type of film needs to undertake a particular strategy of meaning-seeking:

The art cinema seeks to solve the problem [of merging the realist and expressionist aesthetics] in a sophisticated way: by the device of ambiguity. [...] Thus the art film solicits a particular reading procedure: Whenever confronted with a problem in causation, temporality, or spatiality, we first seek realistic motivation. (Is a character’s mental state causing the uncertainty? Is life just leaving loose ends?) If we’re thwarted, we next seek authorial motivation. (What is being ‘said’ here? What significance justifies the violation of the norm?).14

Thus, the art film depends on a unique narrative strategy that hovers between the classical narrative of mainstream Hollywood and an alternative modernist or avant garde type of filmic disposition in which the auteur voices her or himself via ambiguity. Narrative is not disregarded as much as it is in the avant garde or modernist film, however, and the Australian art film retains many characteristics with the classical Hollywood product. Verisimilitude and naturalism are still guiding characteristics and attention is still paid to hiding the film-making apparatus in the Australian National Cinema, which, unlike many of the films produced by Hollywood, are exercises in puzzlement and personal writing.

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Non-visual Australian Auteurism.

The freedom to indulge in Rayner’s so-called personal writing and artistic vision, as cultivated by support for an Australian National Cinema, has led to Australian film- makers experimenting with more than just the visual components of mise-en-scène, reflecting a departure from the hallmarks of European auteurism and prompting this paper’s call for the metaphor of the caméra-stylo to be revised. Sound is an area that has attracted the interest of those directors looking to capture the discerning public’s attention, although Australian academic and film-maker Philip Brophy continued to lament in 2003:

Everyone was still treating cinema as a theatrical medium, a visual medium, a photographic medium, a literary medium, but never a sonic medium. I realized that a whole range of film people who are meant to be sharp and intelligent were really missing an obvious point, which is that cinema is an audio-visual medium.15 Brophy’s criticism of the priority given by auteur analysts to the visual signature a film- maker leaves, was further articulated: … auteurism is forensically cited via the non-sonic discourses of literature, theater, and photography […] visuals are directed, while sounds are simply direct. Theorists have long smothered the ontological investigation of so-called direct sound with poor metaphorical assignations of truth and honesty.16

Gradually, however, the numbers of film-makers recognising the potential of sound artistry are increasing and one Australian auteur that has not missed the “obvious point” is writer/director/producer Rolf de Heer, a graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and poster-boy for this country’s National Cinema. While his films are more main-stream than avant-garde, the work of de Heer often features an elevated presence of sound, at times raised to a level of dominance amongst the numerous interactions informing the narrative. Music scholar Cat Hope comments: “each of de Heer’s films merits a detailed treatise on the way they feature innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production stages, resulting in some of the most challenging and exciting cinema made in Australia today.”17 Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca invented a new name for the cinema-goer at Bad Boy Bubby (1993) when they said “In de Heer’s film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator.”18 Furthermore, D. Bruno Starrs has argued the label ‘aurator’ can also be used for the

120 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. person experiencing de Heer’s award winning Ten Canoes (2006).19 Indeed, de Heer may be, to use the term coined by Philip Brophy in describing Indian film director Satyajit Ray, an “aural auteur.”20 Such a possibility can only be determined if a model of auteur analysis in which sound is considered to be at least as important as the mise-en- scène is thus duly applied to his oeuvre. Of course, the recognition of aural auteurism should not be at the expense of ascknowledging the collaborative efforts between director, sound editor and composer, but as Claudia Gorbman recently wrote, “The auteur can write in cinema, using sound as well as the camera,”21 and if one seeks auteurial inscriptions in the Australian National Cinema one must surely now incorporate the analysis of sound into the methodology used.

Returning to Rayner’s subject, the films of Peter Weir, it is encouraging to note that an aural auteur analysis, however brief, has already been conducted on his work. Bruce Johnson and Gaye Poole, although limiting their study to Weir’s use of music, conducted the only examination of an Australian film-maker’s auteurial use of sound to date. While not addressing his entire oeuvre, their analysis of part of Weir’s work reveals certain antinomies, or as they call them, polarities. For example, in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975),

… the organic timeless sounds of birds, wind and insects set against the ‘little fidget wheels’ of clocks and chimes in muted Edwardian interiors invoke the nature/culture polarity. The use of rhythm-based as opposed to tonally-based music helps to activate oppositions between abandonment and restraint: drums versus harmony, rock versus Mozart.22

Johnson and Poole find a similar binary opposition in Gallipoli (1981): “Weir again constructs acoustic binaries that sketch thematic oppositions such as exotic/familiar (Muezzin chant followed by a coo-ee), civilised order/violence (an opera record on the battlefield).”23 In foregrounding the importance of sound in their research, Johnson and Poole signal a change in auteur analysis that this paper seeks to advance: a re- appropriation of auteur theory from a position in which the image is considered the primary vehicle for the authorial director’s imprint upon the film. Like Rayner, they also identify a shift in Weir’s auteurism from personal writing, in an European style, whilst

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resident in Australia, to the auteurial style of genre revision whilst working in America, as indicated by “some effacement of his signature by the ‘professional values’ of Hollywood.”24 Perhaps, had Weir remained making films in Australia, he might have explored further his personal writing for film, while simultaneously reconstituting familiar genres, as de Heer has managed to do. In other words, the Hollywood’s studio effective constraint of directors to genre revision is not an overarching factor in Australian auteurism. Thus, combined with his personal writing we also see glib genre revision in the work of de Heer: in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project (2003), de Heer confounds genre expectations of the horror film by making the monster feminine;25 in Dance Me To My Song (1997), de Heer subverts Paul Darke’s genre of the normality drama into a disability dance drama;26 and in The Tracker (2002), de Heer overhauls the genre conventions of the western into an anti-western.27

While there may be a defined artistic personality known as the Australian film auteur, who is detectable through the signature of the unusual role played in her or his oeuvre by not just mise-en-scène but by innovative use of sound, it must also be conceded that this auteurial influence is nothing less than intervention of an underlying ideological-generic structure. In a position of relevance for Australian film studies, Robin Wood calls for a “‘synthetic’ analysis [...] going beyond an interest in the individual auteur”28 to recognise the “complex fabric in which, again, ideological and generic determinants are crucial.”29 I would suggest that de Heer’s complex fabric and ideology sustaining his world-view, in contrast to the capitalist ideal listed by Wood,30 as being served so loyally by most of Hollywood, is one in which somewhat leftist ideals succeed over consumerism and patriarchy. Rather than encouraging the audience to identify with a controlling male protagonist, what I call the non-hyper male subject is privileged. De Heer likes to commence a film within standard generic conventions but a project involving his anti-patriarchal/white hegemony attitudes soon begins to grow and burst forth from such generic expectations. Analysis of the decisions de Heer makes at that level of film-making he most enjoys, sound post-production, in which he “get[s] to mix it”,31 soon reveals a joyous tendency to amplify non-dominant voices, those discourses in which the feminine is favoured over the masculine; indigenous over coloniser;

122 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. imagination over physical prowess; community ideals over business. Not for de Heer the auteurial capitalist ideology and braggadocio of John Ford’s wilderness/garden antinomy, as indicated by the visual signifier of the cactus rose.32 Nor in Australia’s secular, progressively equalitarian society is Hitchcock’s leitmotif of Catholic guilt, original sin or the loss of innocence in which the blonde woman is victimised a welcome ideology. Rather, de Heer’s signature world-view concerns an amplification of the voice of the non-dominant people in society. As Adrian Martin has pointed out, de Heer tends to identify with “the figure of the naive visionary,”33 someone who is isolated or alienated from mainstream society, for example, children and Aboriginal Australians. In many of his films this otherwise unheard voice is female. The ecologically moralistic Epsilon (1995) tells the story of an extra-terrestrial with a vastly superior intellect, housed in the body of a beautiful woman, who harangues a man about the environmental plunder of the Earth by humans, all presented by the grandmotherly tones of a female voice-over narrator.34 As a protest against her warring mother and father, the little girl in The Quiet Room (1996) becomes mute, with her feelings voiced by a stream of consciousness voice-over. In Dance Me To My Song (1997) the audience is exposed throughout to the laboured breathing of a woman with severe cerebral palsy who expresses herself through a computerised voice-box and eventually finds the love that constantly evades her able-bodied, loud-mouthed but emotionally stunted carer.35 Alexandra’s Project (2003) features an alienated wife who finds a voice via her video recorder and asserts herself from her emotionally isolating husband.36 Likewise with his film The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, de Heer positions the filmgoer via an identifying stance with the feminine: significantly, a female voice-over narrates the story.37 De Heer not only writes personally for the non-hyper-male subject’s voice, but employs rare tricks with sound, including the use of binaural sound recording technology (see Hickey-Moody and Iocca 2004) or the aural point of view38 to position the audience in the same diegetic space as his unlikely protagonists and thereby confound generic expectations.

De Heer’s auteurial signature is not very mainstream Hollywood, but neither, I would suggest, is it an unusual world-view for Australians of his approximate generation.

123 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Indeed, for myself, it seems a common world-view: de Heer and my contemporaries, raised in the relative peace and prosperity of the liberating 60s under the influence of myriad counter-cultures, whilst seeing the benefits of capitalism, are also able to see the benefits of the socialist aspects of our Australian society. In an era of globalization, Australia is a leading example of Alvin Toffler’s “third wave” civilization,39 in which knowledge and information industries prevail, rather than agrarian or factory assembly line industries. In such advanced economies, equality is achieved by brain power not muscle power and the implementation of egalitarian ideals not racial or sexist ideologies. Neither bourgeois entertainer nor metteur-en-scène, Rolf de Heer is, unquestionably, an auteur who indulges in personal writing, but he also is one who is influenced by a multi- cultural, tolerant, anti-sexist, anti-racist Aussie ideology to subvert Hollywood genres. In revising Astruc’s metaphor of the camera-stylo, de Heer’s filmic signature serves as a reminder that there is a neglected concept in the academy of not just an aural auteur but of an Aussie aural auteur.

124 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

Notes.

1. Jonathan Rayner, The Films of Peter Weir (NY: Continuum, 2003), p. 12.

2. Susan Hayward, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (NY: Routledge, 1996), p. 12.

3. Peter Graham, The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (NY: Doubleday, 1968).

4. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-68 (NY: De

Capo Press, 1996), p. 15.

5. At this point it is relevant to note that the Hollywood films the French critics were suddenly exposed to were neither dubbed nor sub-titled, which meant their appreciation was primarily based on a visual experience, a probable factor in their neglect of the role of auteurial sound. 6. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the auteur theory in 1962,” in P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film

Culture Reader (NY: Cooper Square Press, 2000), pp. 128-133.

7. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-68 (NY: De

Capo Press, 1996), original emphasis, p. 36.

8. Donald Spoto, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (NY: Collins 1983), p. 495. 9. Rayner, pp. 3-4. 10. Kathleen McHugh, Jane Campion (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2007), p.

14.

11. Norman Holland, “The Puzzling Movies: An Analysis and a Guess at Their Appeal,”

Journal of Social Science, 1 January 1964, pp. 71-96.

12. David Bordwell, “The art cinema as a mode of film practice,” in Leo Braudy and

Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, (NY, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), pp. 774-782.

13. Bordwell, p. 779.

14. Bordwell, original emphasis, p. 779.

15. Raffaele Caputo, “Very sound: A Philip Brophy interview,” Metro Magazine, 136,

125 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2003, p. 112.

16. Philip Brophy, “Bring the noise,” Film Comment, 42.5, 2006, p. 16.

17. Cat Hope, “Hearing the story: Sound design in the films of Rolf de Heer,” Senses of

Cinema, 2004. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/sound-design- rolf-de-heer.html

18. Anna C. Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca, “Sonic affect(s): Binaural technologies

and the construction of auratorship in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby”, Metro Magazine, 140, 2004, pp. 78-81.

19. D. Bruno Starrs, “The audience as aurator again? Sound in Rolf de Heer’s Ten

Canoes” MetroMagazine, 149, 2006, pp. 18-20.

20. Philip Brophy, “Punk ambient”, Film Comment, 42.4, 2006, p. 16.

21. Claudia Gorbman, “Auteur music”, in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and

Richard, eds., Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 149-162.

22. Bruce Johnson and Gaye Poole, “Sound and Author/auteurship: Music in the

films of Peter Weir”, in Rebecca Coyle, ed., Screen Scores: Studies in

Contemporary Australian Film Music (North Ryde, NSW: Australian Film,

Television and Radio School, 1998), pp. 124-140.

23. Johnson and Poole, p. 133.

24. Rayner, p. 124.

25. See D. Bruno Starrs, “‘If we stretch our imaginations’; the monstrous-feminine

mother in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project (2003),” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, no. 9, 2007.

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=10&id=990

26. See D. Bruno Starrs, “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me to My Song”,

126 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 11.3, July 2008.

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/49

27. See D. Bruno Starrs, “The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that

weren’t?,” Metro Magazine, 153, 2007, pp. 166-72.

28. Robin Wood, “Ideology, genre, auteur,” in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre

Reader III, (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2003), p. 60-74.

29. Wood, p. 68.

30. Wood, p. 63.

31. In the production notes for The Tracker (2002), de Heer reveals his love of mixing

sound in post-production: “To experience all the elements and hopes for the first time is, for me, the very best of all aspects of film making (it’s why I say to myself, during the most difficult parts of any shoot, ‘It’s all right, stick with it, you get to mix this’)” in Rolf de Heer, The Tracker DVD extra (Vertigo Productions 2002).

32. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: British Film Institute,

1998), p. 66.

33. Adrian Martin, “Wanted: Art cinema,” Cinema Papers, December, 2000, pp. 30-3.

34. See D. Bruno Starrs, “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon

(1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, no. 5, 2007. http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/starrs.html

35. See D. Bruno Starrs, “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me to My Song”,

M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 11.3, July 2008.

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/49

36. See D. Bruno Starrs, “‘If we stretch our imaginations’: The monstrous-feminine

127 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

mother in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project (2003)”, Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies (ISSN: 1465-9166), University of Nottingham, no. 10, 2008. http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=10&id=990

37. See D. Bruno Starrs, “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old

Man Who Read Love Stories (2003)” Metro Magazine, 156, 2008, pp. 148-153.

38. See D. Bruno Starrs, “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer,”

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 27.5 (forthcoming 2010).

39. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (NY and Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981).

128 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

CHAPTER 7. The First of Three Papers Utilising Aural Auteur Analysis.

129 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

7. Preamble to the Fifth Refereed and Published Paper of the Thesis.

The following three papers are the most innovative of the thesis, in that they seek to foreground an auteur analysis of the films of Rolf de Heer in which the signature use of sound is examined. Almost all of de Heer’s feature films are discussed here: the sixth paper of the thesis considers Tail of a Tiger (1984), Incident at Raven’s Gate (1988), Dingo (1991), Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996); the seventh paper considers The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000); and the eight paper considers The Tracker (2002), Ten Canoes (2006) and Dr. Plonk (2007). Only Alexandra’s Project (2003) and Dance Me To My Song (1997) are not considered with an aural auteur analysis in the papers of this section.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video (ISSN: 1543-5326 - online, 1050-9208 – hard copy), NY, London: Routledge, vol. 27, no. 5, 2010 (forthcoming: see letter of acceptance in Appendix 12.2).

Brief Abstract. With reference to psychoanalytic and feminist film sound theory, this paper argues that Rolf de Heer’s use of Edward Branigan’s 1984 concept of the aural point of view (APOV) in his early films (Tail of a Tiger [1984], Incident at Raven’s Gate [1988], Dingo [1991], Bad Boy Bubby [1993] and The Quiet Room [1996]) permit greater audience identification with the unlikely protagonist/s and help define writer/director/producer de Heer as an aural auteur.

Length: 7386 words.

130 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer.

Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer has written, directed and/or produced twelve feature films, none of which feature the typically hyper-masculine, controlling heroes that much of mainstream or classical Hollywood cinema is renowned for. In this paper I argue that in de Heer’s early films his unlikely protagonists are made the subject of audience identification through use of what Edward Branigan in 1984 called the “aural point of view” (Branigan 94) or APOV.1 This post-production technique enables the audience to hear what the character on screen apparently imagines her or himself to have heard, serving to “‘humanize’ machine perception [...] by focusing on character, adjusting framing to the human body, and emphasizing psychological interiority” (Lastra 2000, 140-1). The key to understanding the mechanism by which de Heer’s characteristic use of the APOV works to support a unique, auteurial world-view lies in what Melissa Iocca and Anna Hickey-Moody call his “aural construction of subjectivity” (Iocca and Hickey- Moody 122) regarding such unusual and unlikely protagonists as the socially awkward pre-teen Orville in Tail of a Tiger (1984, Rolf de Heer), the young eponym of Dingo (1991, Rolf de Heer), the 35 year old man-child in Bad Boy Bubby (1993, Rolf de Heer), or the mute little girl in The Quiet Room (1996, Rolf de Heer). Although they confine their study to his cult hit Bad Boy Bubby, Iocca and Hickey-Moody note de Heer’s use of binaural sound recording to create a “pre-Oedipal soundscape” - signaling their pertinent psychoanalytic interpretation of this film - which contributes to “a marked move away from insipid approaches to film soundtracks” (ibid), suggesting here the tameness of much of what Hollywood makes audiences hear. Thus, the theorization of subjectivity, identity and sound this paper draws upon, in its analysis of de Heer’s aural construction of non-hyper-masculine and therefore atypical agents of narrative, is grounded in psychoanalytic and feminist film scholarship. I subsequently argue that complicit with the well-known, controlling, male gaze of classical Hollywood cinema is a male voice functioning on an unconscious level to construct identification with the heroes of dominant patriarchal ideology in most of the so-called “insipid” soundtracks of mainstream Hollywood cinema: a voice de Heer has been actively engaged in nullifying. In five of de Heer’s first films he encourages the audience to identify with innocent,

131 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

vulnerable, child-like or un-masculine subjects through innovative, signature-like aurality. But I suspect he has come to see these manipulations as obvious and ‘clunky’, even amateurish, and has since sought to engage audiences with his unlikely protagonists via well-honed narrative in his more recent films rather than the disruptive act of post-production manipulation of the APOV. Nevertheless, these early film’s use of this mechanism to guide subjectivity deserve scrutiny, and serve well in explaining this film-maker’s present ideological stance.

Film Theory and the Aural Construction of Subjectivity.

In 1975, Laura Mulvey triggered an ongoing project to investigate the gendered gaze of the scopophilic filmgoer in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Mulvey 6-18). Her analysis of spectatorship proposed that the cinematic apparatus of Hollywood constructs a patriarchal subjectivity whereby the audience is encouraged to identify with an active, controlling male protagonist, thus voyeuristically reducing female characters to passive objects of desire. The male gaze, Mulvey argued, is the dominant position constructed by Hollywood for the audience (and by extension, mainstream dramatic feature films elsewhere), in contrast to non-mainstream cinema, in which females (or other non- dominant identities) are sometimes the agents of narrativity. Later, Mulvey hinted at the possibility, with feminist intervention, that the female character could be the maker and not simply the bearer of meaning, and even “to assert a women’s language as a slap in the face for patriarchy” (Mulvey, 1979, 4). Only a few feminist film theorists, however, have been inspired to examine the way sound reinforces the male gaze. Maggie Humm acknowledged this deficiency, stating that “feminists rarely trace the ways in which women in mainstream films often lack independent vocal energies as well as independent images” (Humm 40). Noting “Hollywood’s tendency to recycle music” in Strains of Utopia (1992), Caryl Flinn was one of those rare feminists when she argued that Hollywood’s genre films (especially melodramas and film noirs) kept alive an otherwise dull connection between film music and romantic, nostalgic notions of utopia and restricted gender roles. Flinn wrote, “Music extends an impression of perfection and

132 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. integrity in an otherwise imperfect, unintegrated world. This is the utopian function I believe has been assigned to music in general and to film music of the 1930s and 1940s in particular” (9). These “remote, impossibly lost utopias” (10) involve masculine, heroic agents of narrative overpowering (if not physically then mentally) the female objects of their (and the audience’s) desire, and which generally characterise the classical film scores idealised in Hollywood’s major studio years. They are, perhaps, the kind of film scores that Iocca and Hickey-Moody describe as “insipid” in comparison with the aural soundscapes created by de Heer in depicting his alternative world-views. The unexpected subject positioning of such alternative cinema as de Heer’s may be uncomfortable for audiences accustomed to the usual ideological stance of Hollywood, as Anahid Kassabian argued:

Obviously, removing a heterosexual masculine look does not remove masculine subjectivity from the circuits of desire in a film. But the kind of familiar visual erotic pleasure produced by looking at a female body through identification with a male character is interrupted when the looking and desiring character is a female one (Hearing Film, 2001, 86). The case for an auditory correlate of the ubiquitous male gaze, however, has not been convincingly argued. Robert Ryder suggests that in Walter Benjamin’s 1938 work on the optical unconscious there lurks a latent theory of the “acoustical unconscious”:

Just as Benjamin’s acoustical déjà vu involves an echo stepping into the light of consciousness out from the darkness of a life seemingly passed by, the “other” nature of the camera involves a similar process whereby a space interwoven with the unconscious “steps into” a space interwoven with consciousness (Ryder 141). I would suggest that this unconscious aural mechanism permits greater identification with Hollywood’s typically hyper-male agents of narrative who, although insensitive and aggressive, are typically valorised by the Hollywood apparatus as masculine and superior. Kaja Silverman argued:

The female subject’s involuntary alignment with the various losses which haunt cinema, from the foreclosed real to the invisible agency of enunciation, makes possible the male subject’s identification with the symbolic father, and his imaginary alignment with creative vision, speech and hearing. Indeed, not only is woman made to assume male lack as her own, but her obligatory receptivity to the male gaze is what establishes its superiority, just as her obedience to the male voice is what “proves” its power (Silverman 1988, 32).

133 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Thus there is a male voice cooperating with the controlling male gaze of mainstream, commercial or classical Hollywood cinema. A prime example is that of the music in Star Wars (George Lucas 1977), as Neil Lerner argues: And in case Lucas’s screenplay did not make clear [Princess] Leia’s role as a relatively passive object, [John] William’s motif for her (slow, alluring, with the rising major sixth suggesting a passionate longing) further confirms that her character is associated with these reactionary gender roles […] In contrast, it is made apparent from the opening moments of the film that Luke is at the centre of Star Wars, as Williams’ score presents the heroic title theme, a melody that becomes Luke’s leitmotif throughout the film (2004, 99).

Lerner summarises that “William’s music – building, sequencing, ultimately climaxing – conspires with the images to announce this significant step towards Luke’s achievement of (one type of ) manhood. […] Film and score return us to a time of unproblematic masculine dominance” (101). Of course, the screenplay usually precedes music composition, with dialogue locking characters into their gendered roles, and Silverman later affirmed in her paper “Dis-embodying the Female Voice” that Hollywood crafts women so that they are “associated with unreliable, thwarted or acquiescent speech” (Silverman, 1990, 310) and that the female character is written and performed with a “receptivity” to the male voice (ibid), helping shore up patriarchal ideology in the same way the male gaze does. In those relatively rare films in which the non-hyper-masculine male is made the narrative agent, the audience’s construction of subjectivity is neither automatic nor accustomed. Rather, the audience must be coaxed to identify with the improbable subject. From the very start of his film-making career, audience identification with such unlikely protagonists has been gently encouraged by de Heer.

Tail of a Tiger (1984, Rolf de Heer).

Not long after graduating from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney in 1980 de Heer began directing his first film, Tail of a Tiger. The unlikely protagonist of this believe-in-yourself story is 12 year old Orville Ryan, a buck-toothed, bespectacled, bookish type who is obsessed with airplanes. His daydreams involve airplanes, flying, and finally being accepted into the local gang of kids who play with

134 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. remote-controlled model airplanes. The gang cruelly destroy Orville’s model Tiger Moth, but the slightly built lad finds an abandoned flour mill where he discovers a broken down Tiger Moth biplane and its broken down, alcoholic caretaker, Harry Campbell. The biplane becomes the engine of his triumph over the gang.

In this, his first feature film, de Heer toyed briefly with sound effects and Branigan’s APOV, crafting subjectivity for the audience in two short scenes involving the Orville and some rubbish in an empty alleyway. Within the first few minutes of the film, the optimistic Orville is shown throwing paint tin lids against a wall in a deserted alleyway. As they spin, an electronic whirring sound is heard: from Orville’s point of view (we surmise) the tin lids are flying like an aeroplane. With this momentary lapse in aural realism, de Heer allows the audience to enter into the mindset of this frustrated young boy, whose actual voice is seldom acknowledged by his peers. He is a victimised individual, not a controlling hyper-masculine identity, yet de Heer effectively constructs him as protagonist of the film. Despite continual rejection from his peers, it appears the boy’s spirit is not quashed and he can make paint tin lids fly with electronic pizzazz. De Heer here foreshadows his even bolder forays into APOV in feature films to follow and consolidates the meaning in Tail of a Tiger, when, humiliated after the gang have destroyed his model biplane and just before he discovers the real Tiger Moth, de Heer shows Orville returning to spinning tin lids. This time, reflecting the boy’s psychological dejection, the sound they produce is just a dull clang as they fall impotently against the wall. With these two APOVs, de Heer garners greater subjective alignment from the audience with his unlikely protagonist.

The auditory technique involved here may be better understood when illustrated by an example from another, better known film. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), one of the first sounds the audience hears is that of an electronically synthesised helicopter. Disconcertingly, however, it registers with the audience - on a sometimes unconscious level - that the noise is not quite right. As Randy Thom, who worked as a sound effects mixer on this film, explained:

135 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

… it’s Captain Willard’s brain that we’re listening to. […] The main reason that POV is so important in terms of our being able to make a contribution is that once the audience realises or feels that what they are seeing and hearing is being filtered through the brain of one or more of the characters in the film […] then they’re willing to accept almost anything you give them in terms of sound. At that point, once we get that idea across, we’re no longer in a straitjacket of objectivity (2003, 124). Such a “straitjacket of objectivity” was deliberately loosened by de Heer when he first employed the APOV in Tail of a Tiger. But he is not alone when it comes to aural manipulation of subjectivity: since Apocalypse Now other Australian directors have made similar departures from sonic realism. Kathleen McHugh notes the use of an APOV by director Jane Campion in her film Passionless Moments (1983) to:

… represent internal psychological states. They do so through a sophisticated and sustained use of voiceover narration in conjunction with an emphasis on filmic sound honed and focused by a complete absence of dialogue. […] The film uses yet innovates the conceit of the deadline by making the immanent crisis all in Lindsay’s head. The alarm that we hear is therefore coded as internal diegetic sound – it too is in his head, an experience that the spectator shares with him but that the other characters in Lindsay’s world cannot (McHugh 32-4). Although McHugh prefers to call it “internal diegetic sound”, it is the same technique of the APOV sound sequence that de Heer has tentatively explored in Tail of a Tiger.

Incident at Raven’s Gate (1988, Rolf de Heer).

De Heer’s second film, the 94 minute science fiction/horror/thriller Incident at Raven’s Gate, is noteworthy for how much he achieved on a shoestring budget in a genre usually characterised by Hollywood fiscal excess. The film is about an alien invasion - with a difference. De Heer’s aliens invade an outback community but remain unseen for the length of the film. Philippa Hawker applauded the “particularly imaginative use of sound” in this low-budget thriller in which “sound and image create the disorientation, rather than the effects” (Hawker 278). In imparting the disorienting sense of mystery and intrigue, sound provides a special focus for several of the film’s characters. Taylor, the policeman, has a hearing aid and uses it effectively when his detective work requires eavesdropping. But when it is taken away from him, he is engulfed in a silent world as

136 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

Hemmings (a mysterious UFO scientist) undertakes a noiseless meeting with another unidentified but official-looking character. The audience is encouraged to hear from Taylor’s point of view, and just as he is unable to process what is going on, so the audience remains uninformed. Indeed, it is through sound, and specifically the use of another two striking APOV sequences, that the audience witnesses the first sign that something very strange is going on at Raven’s Gate. When fast-driving Eddy is chased by the cop their car stereo’s sound tracks mysteriously swap: Eddie’s punk rock music is replaced by the Verdi opera of Taylor and vice versa. That the abhorrent punk noise keeps on playing after Taylor takes it out of the machine and crushes the cassette underfoot signals that something weird is going on. The use of contrasting types of music further defines these two characters in other key moments of the film, too, such as when barmaid Annie is killed. The tragedy is heightened by the sound of Verdi, and thus the soundtrack is effectively used to accentuate certain events and manipulate our reactions to these two very different characters, neither of whom compares to Hollywood’s Stallone or Schwarzenegger in terms of braggadocio or the need to control. Non-melodic, industrial sound is also used to signify the alien’s activity (the most unusual - but unshown - character in this film). Indeed, the alien’s imposition upon the internal sound diegesis of Eddie and Taylor, when their car’s sound systems swap, indicate the potential for more than just the internal universe of the on-screen character to be represented by the APOV, and this is why McHugh’s brief description of “internal diegetic sound” is perhaps inadequate: the sound in Eddie or Taylor’s head may well be in the heads of the aliens, too. Result: more unlikely protagonists. Thus, de Heer develops a newer, bolder use of the APOV than in his previous attempt in Tail of a Tiger.

Dingo (1991, Rolf de Heer).

De Heer’s next film, Dingo, also known as Dingo, Dog of the Desert, can be described as an obvious vehicle for its star, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, but de Heer chose not to do a veiled biopic. Instead, the film begins with the adult John “Dingo” Anderson

137 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

aiming his trumpet at the sky, improvising a baleful blues lick in the vast Australian outback. Alone, his music echoes around him hauntingly. The vision and the film’s titles fade to reveal a scene of utmost relevance to this paper’s argument: the twelve year old John Anderson breaking off an arm wrestle with his mate, overseen by the precocious Jane (Dingo’s wife to be), because he - and he alone - suddenly hears music. It is the afternoon of January 14, 1969, and a TNT jet freight plane is unexpectedly arriving on the dusty airstrip of Poona Flat, somewhere in outback Australia. The music the boy hears is the characteristically muted trumpet of Miles Davis, but all the townsfolk of Poona Flat can hear is the roar of the jet engines. Magically, the audience is privy to this little boy’s perception of events.2 On board the jet is the legendary Billy Cross (Davis) and his eccentric ensemble. Davis’s brand of contemporary cool jazz erupts, rolling across the desert town like a tsunami. For a few brief moments, the parochial township is transported to another time and place. Black women in Caribbean head-dress and coloured sunglasses anachronistically mingle with the Aussie beer-and-shorts crowd. The vision fades to black before displaying a close-up of Cross/Davis performing in the dark of what might be a Parisian nightclub. Then this hybrid of jazz icon and de Heer creation re-boards the plane and disappears, but not before inviting the captivated young boy called “Dingo” to look him up sometime in France. Once more an unlikely protagonist is moulded through use of the APOV.

Dingo is the first film for which de Heer published a diary and these notes reveal his considerable interest in recording and mixing the sound. For example, the diary reads:

It was Miles who suggested Michel Legrand to co-compose the music. […] He’s more film/traditional and Miles more avant-garde, so it was a great combination. […] The bulk of the soundtrack was composed with their only references being the script, a few pages of my notes and a one hour tape of Australian bush sounds we’d made for them. […] The sound mix went so well that Pete [Smith, the film’s music mixer] and I ended up doing the soundtrack album for Warner Brothers in America at Hendon [de Heer’s Adelaide studio] too (De Heer 1991). De Heer continues in his web diary about the influence of the film’s first musical piece, “Kimberley Trumpet” on his film-making process:

138 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

I found the piece incredibly evocative - it “told” me how to shoot it […] Pete Smith, the music mixer, understood instinctively the dramatic relationship between what was happening on the screen and what could be drawn out of the music, and each time we ran through it I was deeply moved ... (De Heer 1991). De Heer apparently enjoyed editing the film to the music and Tom O’Regan stated of the result: “De Heer cuts and frames his shots as much as possible to the music, attempting not just a film about jazz but a jazz film” (O’Regan 174). Takes varied in length and purpose with seemingly self-indulgent fancy as de Heer improvised on standard editing procedure. The before-mentioned opening sequence is a prime example: within the adult Dingo’s flashback to his momentous first meeting with Cross, de Heer cuts to a contemporary shot of the trumpeter performing in a nightclub, before returning to the enacted memory of the adult Anderson. This bold, unexpected transition from flashback to flashforward to flashback again indicates a director unafraid to explore inventive film- making, and complements his use of the APOV, making the technique appear a less distracting intervention by the post-production obsessed director when the film’s overall manipulation of sound is considered.

Bad Boy Bubby (1993, Rolf de Heer).

De Heer’s next film, Bad Boy Bubby, presents a disturbing depiction of a modern urban Frankenstein’s monster. Its horror involves the graphic depiction of mother/child intercourse, matricide and patricide. The story focuses on Bubby, who has been raised for apparently all of his 35 years in complete isolation by his domineering mother, Flo. Less the suffocating mother-hen than the punishing matriarch, Flo uses Bubby for emotionless sex - he’s only told he’s “good boy Bubby” when servicing her - and she deceives him into believing the air outside is poisonous, wearing a gas-mask whenever she leaves their drab, windowless and cockroach-ridden, cement-box apartment. His long-estranged alcoholic priest of a father, Pop, whom Bubby does not recognise or even remember, arrives unexpectedly, triggering a bizarre act of murder in which Bubby asphyxiates both his scabrous parents with clingwrap, leading to his escape and heuristic journey into the world of sonic wonder outside the front door.

139 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Certainly, sound is an important component of any audio-visual horror experience. As Jonathan L. Crane said:

If science privileges sense data across observers, then the horror film trumps science by offering indelible sounds and memorable images that would rattle even the most dispassionate of research fellows. The malevolent soughing that runs through the Friday the 13th series, Bernard Herrmann’s electric psychostrings, the two-note riff of the great shark (Crane 153). In Bad Boy Bubby writer/director de Heer used sound to demarcate the two distinctly different worlds: the hell-hole of Flo’s dank and dirty apartment and the marvel of the unexplored universe outside. The disjointed, minimalist dialogue between Flo and Bubby is embedded in a claustrophobic, industrial, almost metallic soundscape, recalling the sonic atmosphere of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1978). These deadening, uninspiring aural circumstances, entirely devoid of music, are soon left behind. Once freed, Bubby experiences an astonishing series of growth-enhancing meetings with sound and music, from his initial encounter with a Salvation Army choir he hears from afar and compulsively seeks out to the barking of an aggressive Alsatian dog. The second part of the film is richly saturated with diegetic and non-diegetic music and sound.

Yet there is more to the depressing atmosphere of the apartment than the absence of sonic variety: the manner in which the sounds of Bubby’s melancholy prison is recorded and heard contributes vastly to its sense of oppressiveness. De Heer’s long time collaborator, sound designer Jim Currie, developed a binaural headset for the actor, Nicholas Hope, to wear beneath his wig throughout the film, and Bad Boy Bubby is one of the first feature films to utilise the recordings from binaural microphones as a key feature of the soundtrack. This device, constructed by Fred and Margaret Stahl, permits the stereo focus of the sound to change according to the movements and direction of the actor’s head, and for his own breathing and bodily functions to be closely and intimately recorded. The left and right channels of the recording are kept separate all the way from the beginning of the recording process through to the playback in the cinema. Rather than encouraging a critical distance from the text of the film the binaural playback serves to increase identification with the wearer of the binaural headset. In interview, de

140 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

Heer stated “[The binaural recording technology] is extremely subjective to the character […] it affects the viewer emotionally” (Gregory 2005). This close identification with Bubby also stamps his authority as the protagonist of the narrative, in much the same way Linda Aronsen regards voice-over narration: “Make sure that the character speaking in voice-over is meant to be the protagonist, because the audience will assume that it is; indeed, any character speaking in voice-over will take over the film” (Aronsen 63). Sounds only Bubby can hear, like thoughts only he is privy to, place us in his world. Thus, an intense, claustrophobic, unsettling feeling is choreographed by the close identification of the audience with Bubby’s head and its position relative to the sonic environment of the apartment. In assessing the effect of the binaural microphones on the receptor audiences, Hickey-Moody and Iocca coined a new term for the cinema-goer at Bad Boy Bubby when they said “In de Heer’s film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator” (Iocca and Hickey-Moody 78), claiming that in privileging the intimate noises of Bubby’s existence and producing an intensely claustrophobic atmosphere of “gurgling, eating and pissing”, the audience is forced to identify with him and alternatively to be disgusted by him. Whilst making us see things (or rather, hear things) from his point of view, the sounds of Bubby’s bodily functions also actively work towards a position of disrupted pleasure for the grimacing audience, according to Hickey-Moody and Iocca. One particularly nauseating example occurs when Bubby experiments with cling-wrap, enfolding his own face until the rustle of the plastic and the struggle of Bubby’s breathlessness becomes almost too much for the “aurator” to bear. Hickey-Moody and Iocca’s proposal of this new term may be interpreted as a response to the call by Rick Altman for a “new vocabulary, more attuned to the way film sound makes, rather than processes, meaning” (Altman 249). With the listener positioned between the two microphones, i.e. virtually between Bubby’s ears, he or she is perfectly synchronised with the protagonist’s sonic journey: the aurator hears through the left ear that which Bubby hears through his left ear, hears through the right ear that which Bubby hears through his right ear. What’s more, the highly sensitive microphones accurately track the distance of sounds from their source and enable the aurator to position the source: to the left or right in front or the left or right behind Bubby. Thus they experience sound literally from the perspective of Bubby. This

141 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

effectively challenges the “vococentrism” of Michel Chion’s model of aural importance (Chion 5): the conventional sound hierarchy with dialogue positioned at the top, is dismantled and reversed. Diegetic sounds not normally incorporated into the audience’s experience of the universe of the film become unnervingly persistent and loud.

Iocca and Hickey-Moody later stated: “From a psychoanalytic film theory perspective, the use of silence, sound and minimal dialogue in the first part of the film constructs a fantasy of pre-Oedipal containment, as Bubby’s perverse life of confinement and abuse with his mother is established” (126). Adopting Kaja Silverman’s concept of the sonic envelope of the mother’s voice which surrounds the child before it can engage in language or even understand its identity (1988, 72), they note that Bubby is in a similar state of infantile containment. All his physical needs are met by Flo, who confines him in a small space, “almost as if he were in a perverse nursery or a dark womb” (Iocca and Hickey-Moody 127). But, Flo’s voice is not the familiar comforting voice of a sonorous maternal envelope. “Flo’s aggressive and abusive tones and statements” (127) contrast with the pre-Oedipal bliss of infantile containment and thus contribute to Bubby’s unusual and non-hyper masculinity. The affective influence of Flo and Pop’s verbal abuse is such that Bubby has a victimised and vulnerable subjectivity in the eyes of the audience. As a result of his sonic circumstances Bubby earns the audience’s uncomfortable sympathy and they identify even further with this victim of a most cruel upbringing. Fortunately, Bubby finds a creative outlet - and cathartic salvation - in music, as he finds an audience for his parrot-like renditions of past abuses via his position as the idolised lead-singer of the pub band “Pop and the Clingwrap Killers”.

I would suggest that Bad Boy Bubby is little short of an extended APOV. Indeed, the amplified and evocative sound environment produced in the film recalls the experimental soundscapes of the films of Philip Brophy, which have been chronicled as: “… the organization of more complex spatio-temporal relationships [that explore] methods which have the potential to extend and enrich the vocabulary of film sound and perception” (Samartzis 50-1). By using the binaural microphone system, de Heer

142 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. literally and subjectively positions the aurator in the headspace of a most unlikely and non-hyper-masculine protagonist. With a conventional soundtrack, Bad Boy Bubby would have an entirely different effect on its audience.

The Quiet Room (1996, Rolf de Heer).

De Heer’s fourth film was the environmentally didactic Epsilon (1995, Rolf de Heer) which involved much motion control photography of night skies and desert vistas. It features a voice-over from a wise grandmother recounting her meeting with a former surveyor who, after falling for an extra-terrestrial in the shape of a beautiful woman, becomes intent on saving the world from eco-disaster (see Starrs, “Filmic ecowarnings”, 2007). As such, this film conforms with de Heer’s ongoing project to privilege non- controlling or even feminist idealistic protagonists, but does not include the use of an APOV, and therefore is not considered for the purposes of this paper. A year later, however, came another film in which de Heer encouraged audiences to identify with an unlikely protagonist - a mute little girl - via the APOV.

It can easily be argued that in his early films Rolf de Heer was a film-maker of consistently limited means. His aspirations with each venture may not have been to make the next Hollywood blockbuster, or even the work of his life, but to make a movie with the resources available, if for no other reason than to keep a roof over his family’s head. The website statistics box for The Quiet Room lists the film stock used as “short ends – various stock” (de Heer 1996): the ingenious director made a film out of bits of unexposed film left over from previous projects! What’s more, he cast his own children.3 The result is the story of a stubbornly determined little girl self-sequestered in her pretty, blue-walled bedroom. But although her parents dote on her, this is no home, sweet home scenario. With fatalistic cynicism, she watches her goldfish die, acts out happy families with her Barbie dolls and draws crayon pictures of her own dysfunctional family. De Heer had explored childhood in the past (most notably with Tail of a Tiger), but The

143 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Quiet Room signalled his most intense examination of child psychology to date, as he created an intellectually fascinating but emotionally draining study of one little life under severe strain: that of a seven-year-old only daughter and of the three-year-old she once was. Making her silent enabled de Heer to probe and explore her inner life, using voice over interior monologue to reveal her mental reasoning and emotional turmoil.

When her father sits her down to talk about the impending separation, he begins by saying, “This isn’t easy,” and the child, in her voiced internal monologue, responds, “Yes it is - just don’t say it.” Nursery rhymes are modified within her head; “Hey diddle diddle, my Dad did a piddle, right on the bedroom floor. My dear Mum yelled to see such a mess, so my Dad did a little bit more. Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Mum.” and “Mum be nimble, Dad be quick. Mum and Dad, you make me sick.” The binaural headset, de Heer’s technological contribution to the APOV, and also used so effectively in Bad Boy Bubby, is employed yet again, this time to record the narration of the little girl and differentiate it from her onscreen speaking voice, as rarely heard as it is. Thus, sound designer Peter Smith and composer Graham Tardif’s unobtrusive score keep the child’s narration always up front and close, and her parents can be overheard arguing in other parts of the house, creating an unusual eavesdropping effect - a technique also explored by Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation (1974). A sense of aural voyeurism is developed, akin to Elizabeth Weis’s “erotics of cinematic eavesdropping” (Weis 79). Sonic subjectivity is compounded when de Heer employs a particularly evocative APOV: as the little girl is having her hair brushed by her mother, the noise of the hairbrush is distorted and amplified, eventually blending into the sound of waves breaking on the sand as the little girl fantasises about taking her longed-for dog for a run on the beach. For a few brief seconds, we hear things as the protagonist, the mute little girl, seems to imagine them. This combined with the binaural sound recording and the eavesdropping effect gives a heightened sense of identification with yet another unlikely protagonist.

144 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

Conclusion: Rolf de Heer’s Emergence as an Aural Auteur.

Undoubtedly, the soundtrack is extremely influential in terms of a film’s emotional impact. Perhaps it is ultimately more influential than the visual image. As director and composer Mike Figgis claims:

People say, “Why do you want to shoot on 16mm?” I’d be happy to shoot it on High 8 and blow it up. I think the shittier it looks, or the more abstract you can make the image, by whatever means, the more chance you’re going to have of saying something that will hit the unconscious rather than the front of the head. […] As long as you have enough money to make sure that the soundtrack sounds like a film, because that’s the one thing people do expect (Figgis 6, my emphasis). Figgis identifies the way sound can unconsciously trigger emotional states and director David Lynch would seem to agree: “Sound is 50 per cent of a film. In some scenes it’s almost 100 per cent. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion to a film” (Lynch 52). Likewise, Rolf de Heer acknowledges, “Sound is, from my point of view, 60% of the emotional content of a film” (qtd. in Starrs, “Sounds of silence”, 18). But this comment reveals more than just agreement with Lynch: the “point of view” de Heer speaks of is, in most of his early films, not just his own but also that of an unlikely protagonist whose position the audience is encouraged to identify with on an unconscious level, hence the relevance of a psychoanalytic theorising to this paper. As Iocca and Hickey-Moody argue, de Heer’s uses of sound in Bad Boy Bubby, “make conscious the pedestrian sounds of the everyday, challenging Claudia Gorbman’s [1987] assertion that “the volume, mood and rhythm of the sound track must be subordinate to the dramatic and emotional dictates of the film narrative” ” (Iocca and Moody 124-5). More recently, however, Gorbman notes that with the digital revolution in music, auteurist directors are able to employ sound (although she wrote specifically of music) in ways previously unimagined:

The strictures and underlying aesthetic of the classical rules of song music simply no longer hold. Melodies are no longer unheard, song lyrics are perceived to add rather than detract from audio-viewing, and the sky’s the limit with respect to the possible relations between music and image and story (Gorbman 2007, 151).

145 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Gorbman also seems to acknowledge the potential for Philip Brophy’s “aural auteur” (“Punk Ambient”, 2006, 16), writing:

... the “auteur director” has placed a premium on asserting control of the texture, rhythm, and tonality of her or his work, and of the social identifications made available through music choices […] The auteur can write in cinema, using sound as well as the camera (2007, 156). Well before such critical writing, however, de Heer realised the potential for the APOV to strongly align the audience with his protagonist/s, no matter how non-mainstream he made them. Particularly powerful when used near the beginning of the narrative, he would no doubt agree with Thom regarding his statement: “Once the audience realises or feels that what they are seeing and hearing is being filtered through the brain of [the protagonist/s] then they’re willing to accept almost anything you give them in terms of sound” (2003, 124). The “poor metaphorical assignations of truth and honesty” (“Bring the Noise”, 2006, p. 16) that Brophy accuses theorists of hiding behind when they ignore the auteurial potential of the aural seem even less relevant when de Heer’s work is examined. Hickey-Moody and Iocca’s “aurator” (2004, 78) enjoying the sonic experimentation of de Heer, finds him or herself subjectively aligning not with a controlling, masculine matinee idol, but rather a less macho mortal, be it either Orville, Eddie, Taylor, Dingo, Bubby or the mute little girl. But surprisingly - considering its effectiveness - De Heer has not returned to obvious use of the APOV since The Quiet Room. Certainly, sound remains an area of interest and the role of the aural is still at times raised to a level of dominance amongst the numerous interactions informing the narrative, with Cat Hope urging “each of de Heer’s films merits a detailed treatise on the way they feature innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production stages, resulting in some of the most challenging and exciting cinema made in Australia today” (Hope, 2004). Dance Me To My Song (1997, Rolf de Heer) features an aphasic girl who finds love via her computerised voice synthesiser; a female voice-over narrates The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000, Rolf de Heer); The Tracker (2002, Rolf de Heer) employs Aboriginal folksinger, Archie Roach, as a singing narrator; the alienated wife in Alexandra’s Project (2003, Rolf de Heer) finds a voice via her video recorder; the Ganalbingu people of Arnhem Land speak in their own, non-English tongue for the

146 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. length of Ten Canoes (2006, Rolf de Heer); and Dr. Plonk (2007, Rolf de Heer) is a silent film in which the musical soundtrack cues the film’s slapstick humour.

Undeniably, study of de Heer’s use of sound is an ongoing project: de Heer is still film- making and he should be considered a writer/director in his prime. This immigrant from Holland to the multicultural success story that is the contemporary Australian milieu preaches the pricking of our collective ears to those less voluminous voices of the marginalised in this multi-faceted Antipodean society, particularly those who are still innocent and child-like, and this world-view can be read even in the films from the emerging de Heer. In short, his Zeitgeist is that such non-dominant entities deserve to be heard and valued. And, as the continuing diversity of his oeuvre suggests, he is committed to exploring new stories, earning the subjective identification of the audience with his unlikely protagonists through innovative narrative rather than the intrusive post- production techniques – as effective as they were – employed in his early films. Now, with twelve feature films to his credit, de Heer says “I haven’t got the faintest idea what’s next … It could be anything” (qtd. in Starrs, “Sounds of silence”, 18), but audiences can be confident of hearing (and seeing) some unusual cinema as this aural auteur continues to re-negotiate mainstream film-making’s patriarchal, controlling male gaze and male voice.

147 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Notes.

1. The author recognises that sound has been experimented with since it first became available to filmmakers, most obviously in avant-garde, art, and animated films, but also in feature-length narrative films, including mainstream studio films; and that this work has, also from the inception of sound, been the subject of a continuous stream of critical and theoretical writing. This essay is particularly interested in exploring the specific notions of ‘aural point of view’ and ‘the aural construction of subjectivity’ in de Heer’s work.

2. It must be noted that the original script by Marc Rosenberg does not suggest that the music Dingo apparently hears should be heard by the audience, let alone before the jet itself is even heard or seen (see Rosenberg 1992, 3). This APOV-oriented inclusion of the audience into the headspace of the young Dingo is entirely de Heer’s invention.

3. De Heer elucidates on the motivation for this: “[The Quiet Room] was another case of “How do I pay the rent next month […] And so I thought, “What do I know well?” […] So I decided to cast my seven-year-old daughter and having done that, I couldn’t not cast my three-year-old because of the potential psychological damage she might suffer. But by this time I was thinking the character was an only child. So what do I do about that? Ah … if I cast the younger one as the same character but four years earlier, that would work because my daughters sort of look alike. Having cast my seven-year-old daughter, I now had this huge problem because she’d been in one small scene of my previous film and had been very self-conscious, not fluid like kids normally are. […] “Maybe if she doesn’t talk I can get away with it. So why doesn’t she talk? Well, maybe she was born that way. Or maybe she’s decided not to talk. If she’s decided not to talk, maybe I can hear her thoughts, and that’s really what I’m interested in – what do seven- year-olds think? Why has she decided not to talk? Maybe because her parents were fighting and this is her protest” (de Heer, 2005).

148 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

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problem of irony”, in Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare, ed. Steven Jay Schneider, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 142-156.

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impulse and the financial imperative in film-making”, Longford Lyell Lecture, Melbourne: National Film and Sound Archive, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 27 November 2005, http://www.nfsa.afc.gov.au/whats-on/2005- longford-lyell-lecture.html (accessed 17 February 2008).

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Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990): 309-329.

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152 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

CHAPTER 8. The Second of Three Papers Utilising Aural Auteur Analysis.

153 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

8. Preamble to the Sixth Refereed and Published Paper of the Thesis.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “An Avowal of Male Lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories” Metro Magazine, Melbourne: Australian Teachers Of Media, no. 156, 2008, pp. 148-153.

Brief Abstract. This paper argues that an aural auteur analysis of Rolf de Heer’s 2003 film adaptation The Old Man Who Read Love Stories reveals he has emphasised a feminine reading of Luis Sepúlveda’s 1989 novella, Un Viejo Que Leia Novelas de Amor. His rejection of Michel Beaulieu’s “semi-exploitative, violent, masculine, hunting film script”, preferring to foreground the maternal, ecologically responsible cipher of the wounded jaguar in a narrative in which excessively machismo values are disavowed, presented by voice-over from an unidentified female narrator, serves as a rare exception to Kaja Silverman’s and other feminists’ expectations of the male auteur.

Length: 4579 words.

154 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

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CHAPTER 9. The Third of Three Papers Utilising Aural Auteur Analysis.

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9. Preamble to the Seventh Refereed and Published Paper of the Thesis.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer.” (accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January 2008, Delhi, India. A revised version is currently also undergoing refereeing by Cinema Journal).

Brief Abstract. Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca invented a new name for the cinema-goer at Bad Boy Bubby (1993) when they wrote: “In de Heer’s film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator” and I have argued the label ‘aurator’ can also be used for the person experiencing Ten Canoes (2006). This Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime fable features dialogue recorded entirely in the Ganalbingu language of the Indigenous people it stars, and is a prime example of what I would suggest can be labelled ‘The Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer’. The Tracker (2002) and Dr. Plonk (2007) have also included depictions of Aboriginal Australians and each of the trio utilises Cat Hope’s “innovative sound ideas” to present what I argue is an aural auteur’s signature revealing a post-colonial Australian world- view that privileges the justice system and eco-spirituality of Aboriginal Australians. Length: 7300 words.

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Front cover of the conference handbook.

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Sound in the Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer.

Despite his reputation as a cinematic collaborator, Dutch-born Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer’s innovative and varied oeuvre has prompted many critics to invoke the French label auteur.1 Such comments suggest a comprehensive auteur analysis of his work is appropriate and as de Heer is the writer, director and producer of most of the films bearing his name, the usually valid criticisms of authorship based on the collaborative nature of film-making are less relevant to his work than to that of other directors. While his alternative-styled cinema is more main-stream than avant-garde, de Heer’s films often feature an unusually elevated presence of sound over the visual mise- en-scène, at times raised to a level of dominance amongst the numerous interactions informing the narrative and this has been acknowledged in the literature. Cat Hope comments: “each of de Heer’s films merits a detailed treatise on the way they feature innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production stages, resulting in some of the most challenging and exciting cinema made in Australia today.”2 Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca even invented a new name for the cinema-goer at Bad Boy Bubby (1993) when they wrote: “In de Heer’s film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator”3 and I have argued the label “aurator” can also be used for the person experiencing Ten Canoes (2006).4 This film5 features dialogue recorded entirely in the Ganalbingu language of the Indigenous Aboriginal Australians it stars, and is a prime example of what I would suggest can be labelled ‘The Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer.’ Three of his recent films have included depictions of Aboriginal Australians and each of the trio utilises Hope’s “innovative sound ideas” to present what I argue is an aural auteur’s signature6 revealing a post-colonial Australian world-view that privileges the justice system and eco-spirituality of Aboriginal Australia.

The Aboriginal Australian Singing Voice as Narrator in The Tracker.

Most of de Heer’s previous feature films (Tail of a Tiger (1984), Incident at Raven’s Gate (1988), Dingo (1991), Bad Boy Bubby (1993), Epsilon (1995), The Quiet Room (1996) and Dance Me To My Song (1997)) are recognizably set in Australia, yet no

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Aboriginal person or depiction of an Aboriginal face appears in any.7 In 2002, however, de Heer changed public perception of his work when The Tracker was released as he drew unblinking attention to Australia’s history of maltreatment of its Indigenous Peoples. As I have recently argued, in this film de Heer subverts the genre conventions of Hollywood to create an Australian anti-western, whereby the European coloniser’s celebration of the subjugation of American Indians is contrasted by a sense of Aboriginal mastery of the dead heart of Australia, in which the European coloniser is little more than a bumbling invader.8

The story of The Tracker starts suddenly, with no exposition other than brief subtitles identifying the characters and an opening lament sung by well-known Indigenous Australian singer Archie Roach. Vision grows from Peter Coad’s still painting of the landscape into shots of three non-Indigenous troopers on horseback (the so-called Fanatic, Follower and Veteran) led by the pedestrian and eponymous Aboriginal Tracker (played by the popular Aboriginal Australian actor David Gulpilil), well after a manhunt for an Aboriginal fugitive has commenced. The Tracker, with impressive bush skills and ecological expertise, follows the fugitive’s almost invisible trail and procures food in what appears to the non-Indigenous men to be a desolate, lifeless environment. Little information about the alleged crimes of the wanted Aboriginal man is proffered, nor how the rag-tag bunch of pursuers came to be formed, and eventually the narrative culminates in the brutalised Tracker recycling the neck chains he is forced to wear into a weapon of freedom and justice, using them to hoist the indignant and racist-to-the-end head trooper from his own petard. The sparse script written for the Aboriginal Australian Tracker in this scene is telling in its humanist attitude to the subaltern contemporary Australian non-Christian religions de Heer seems interested in: as Gulpilil’s character puts it, “God respect Aboriginal law as much as he respect white fella’s law. Maybe more.” When the Aboriginal fugitive rapes an Aboriginal girl he is finally speared in the leg as decreed fit punishment by Aboriginal Elders. This element of extra-judiciary punition is deemed natural, non-problematic and just, as this conclusion to the affairs enables the Tracker, and the audience, to experience closure and move on.

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Although it may at times look like one with its visual iconography, The Tracker certainly does not sound like a Hollywood western. There is no Yodelling Cowboy or Indian tom-toms and the ukulele-playing Follower is soon compelled to abandon and remorsefully burn his instrument in the face of the Fanatic’s genocidal mission. Avoiding a cliché soundtrack, the accompanying music to the film is not the Aboriginal musical icons of didgeridoo and clap sticks, yet it nevertheless has a distinctly Aboriginal Australian sound. This is the result of a fruitful collaboration between non- Indigenous Australians de Heer as lyricist and Graham Tardif as composer, distinctively filtered through the emotive larynx of Aboriginal folk-rocker Archie Roach as singer. The haunting, plaintive interstitial ballads add vastly to the sombre, melancholy atmosphere created by the film and Michael Atherton notes: “The use of the off-camera singing voice as a narrator is central to the narrative of The Tracker.”9 According to de Heer, the songs are “somehow additive to the action – they don’t describe the action, but they’re additive to it and some of it, they are reflective of it.”10 The musical numbers comment on the film’s diegesis, putting the rare sympathetic words of a non-Indigenous male director/writer into the onscreen Zeitgeist of an Aboriginal character for a tale of post-colonial justice found. De Heer also stated,

The words of the song glued themselves to Gulpilil’s character, it was as if he was singing them in his mind while the white men rounded up the small group of bush blacks, chained them, interrogated them in a language they didn’t understand and then shot them out of frustration and because they were ‘only’ black. The song had elements of a lament, not only for the Tracker but for all Australian Indigenous people.11

The music is simultaneously modern (electric) and ancient (traditional language), and as Jake Wilson said: “These contemporary laments, backed by [steel resonator] guitar and Hammond organ, create a kind of fourth-dimensional perspective that complicates our response to the linear narrative – an extraordinary effect, like looking down a corridor of time between past and present.”12 This effect hopefully alerts contemporary Australians to the perils in mirroring the mistakes of the past.

On his official website for Vertigo Productions de Heer posted a diary of the seven weeks spent shooting The Tracker, and the many weeks spent in post-production. This

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journal makes apparent his particularly strong interest in the audio side of his film- making. In week one of shooting, on Tuesday, 27 February, 2001, he wrote; “I hate shooting. I love the writing, like the pre-production (on this film, loved the pre- production), love the post-production (I tell myself during the worst times of any shoot, ‘It’s okay, you get to do the sound mix on this’), but overall I hate shooting.”13 He also explains how the quest for the narrating singer began; “Wednesday, May 9, 2001; […] the vocalist ought to be indigenous [sic], preferably older and with a rough rather than a smooth voice (we’d come to the conclusion a long time ago that the vocalist should be male […]).” Eventually, de Heer was to settle upon the very popular choice of Archie Roach to sing the movie’s ballads. De Heer was also involved in the selection process for accompanying musical instruments; “Thursday, May 10, 2001; […] where dobro, where Hammond organ, where accoustic [sic] or where electric guitar. The tone/mood of each song was decided upon (as best we could with words as well as with the real communicator, music itself).” De Heer’s diary is now clearly that of a sound artist enjoying his work:

Wednesday, May 30, 2001; Another piece of music arrived, and, as is our wont, everything was stopped to deal with that. Receiving and fitting fresh music is about our favourite activity in the entire editing process, a delicious sense of anticipation, sometimes completely fulfilled, sometimes partially, sometimes disappointing.

Then de Heer gives a telling insight into his philosophy regarding the importance of considering sound first and image second:

Thursday, May 31, 2001; […] there are those who argue, with some justification, that it’s better to cut the image and make sure it works in story-telling terms without any reliance on sound […] I’m not sure I agree, because sometimes you shoot stuff to work with sound in a very specific way [...] without the sound working, the cut simply doesn’t yet work, and there’s no way of knowing, apart from blind faith, whether it ever will.

De Heer also delivers insights into the song-writing process, a skill he admits he is not well practiced at, and reveals how he came to record the original version of the songs with himself standing in as vocalist:

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Wednesday, July 25, 2001; […] I thought I’d better provide a more accurate guide track for whoever is going to be our vocalist (and that’s another story). The only way to do this was to sing the words myself, and record that. Todd (Telford, the studio sound engineer […]) after an initial laugh or two set to the task of trying to make me sound half reasonable (“Don’t worry, I’ll stick on a ton of reverb...”), and we threw down some very rough recordings.

Soon, de Heer’s own vocal renditions were refined by Archie Roach himself. Referring to the rehearsal process, de Heer wrote; “Monday, September 17, 2001; We had to call a break then ... people sat silently, I was overwhelmed, Archie was overwhelmed. To have sung this song to these images in his father's language was an experience that rocked him to the core.” More insights into the satisfaction de Heer derived from mixing sound to the visual were included in his last notes on post-production: “Friday, October 5, 2001; It’s hard to imagine that mixing atmospheres and foley [sic] can bring such enjoyment, such satisfaction. But it does, and today was a day of great enjoyment for me, and equal satisfaction.”

Roach and his band later performed the songs live in front of sold-out screenings of the film in Melbourne and Adelaide. These unique events had profound effects on the audience (evoking the spirit of the old black and white silent movies with their live accompaniment, thus collapsing the years between 1920 and the 21st century Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to say ‘sorry’ to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australians into a single, wince-inducing epoch of national shame) and signifying how much narrative and emotional clout the songs themselves hold. With the sung narration serving so powerfully, de Heer has played away from a dialogue heavy text; after the songs, the silences carry the greatest emotional tension and impact in this film. While developing the script de Heer said he began to get a strong sense of what the film should be, “and it didn’t involve a lot of talking … Cinema doesn’t necessarily need a lot of dialogue. If there’s a particular sort of story that’s told in a particular way – and that’s really what I wanted – it has a sparse feel to it.”14 Playing over the top of the first shocking massacre scene, the song “My people” speaks volumes about Australia’s shameful acts of genocide, although when the killing begins the soundtrack suddenly becomes empty. Devoid of all sound but that of gunfire and the victim’s screams, the vision cuts to a still shot of another of Coad’s distinctively child-like paintings of the

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slaughter. When the vision of the troopers finally returns we see the lead trooper cleaning his gun and extolling to it, “Well spoken. Nice to have a comrade who speaks English”, cementing his and our colonial shame.

Finally, de Heer repeats his mantra expressed in the opening pages of this diary:

Wednesday, October 10, 2001; To experience all the elements and hopes coalescing for the first time is, for me, the very best of all aspects of film making (it’s why I say to myself, during the most difficult parts of any shoot, ‘It’s all right, stick with it, you get to mix this’).

With this comment, de Heer confirmed his active interest in sound as a primarily joyful part of his film-making and flagged a decisive factor in the consideration of his status as an example of Philip Brophy’s “aural auteur”, in that his work “simultaneously problematises the presumed literary criteria for authorship, and complicates the assumed musicological criteria for composer.”15 De Heer’s aural auteurism can also be detected in his subsequent Aboriginal Australian films.

Emphasizing an Aboriginal Australian Language in Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer 2006).

Ten Canoes (2006) opens with the colloquial and cheerful voice over English narration of David Gulpilil (from The Tracker), in an accent recognizable to many as Aboriginal Australian. Gulpilil begins by expounding on his people’s eco-spiritual theories of creation and reincarnation, before introducing the naked ‘native’ huntsmen marching by, chatting in their own language. By insisting Ten Canoes be voiced in the Ganalbingu tongue of its Aboriginal Australian participants, writer/co-director/co-producer Rolf de Heer has made a subtle statement about Indigenous pride and accented the sorry state of affairs regarding many contemporary Aborigines in Australia. In this film the ‘magpie goose people’ of Arnhem Land are portrayed as empowered people who are in control of their language, their culture and their lives, rather than conforming with the frequent media presentation of Aboriginal peoples as passive victims of colonial aggression, disrespect and maltreatment. When discussing the seemingly perennial Aboriginal problems of substance abuse, domestic violence, long-term unemployment and reduced

170 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. life expectancy, the descriptor ‘disadvantaged’ is a term that immediately springs to the minds of some commentators, but de Heer reminds us that it should not be used as an automatic synonym for Indigenes. It is not Aboriginality that causes these problems per se, but the way Aboriginal people are marginalised by the coloniser’s society. Identifying and addressing the causes of the woe that infiltrates the lives of many contemporary Australian Aborigines remains important, nevertheless, one must not assume they have always been that way – or will always be so. With the help of its unique, gentle and unobtrusive soundtrack, an era of idyllic well-being preceding non- Indigenous settlement of Australia can be imagined, and de Heer convincingly takes the filmgoer back to that black and white time of a thousand years ago – and suggests an even earlier more rapturous Dreamtime which cameraman Ian Jones has lensed in vibrant colour. For the non-Aboriginal de Heer, the starting point was an old black-and- white photograph of canoe-making taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the 1930s, which Gulpilil proudly showed him there on site in Arnhem Land: it is an artefact that has become part of the predominantly oral history of the Ramingining people. With their eager participation and assistance, the film was shot on their land: in and around the Arafura Swamp in north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia in May and June, 2005, amidst man-eating crocodiles, mosquitoes and leeches. Such trying circumstances certainly tested the physical endurance of both camera and sound crews.

This, De Heer’s second Aboriginal Australian film, is the story of Dayindi, played by 17-year-old Jamie Gulpilil (son of David Gulpilil). Dayindi covets one of the wives of his older brother, and to teach him correct cultural protocol, the crafty older brother (Peter Minygululu) tells his potential rival an instructive ancestral story. It is a cautionary Dreamtime tale of doomed love, kidnapping, sorcery, bungling misadventure and ill-directed revenge which begins seriously with David Gulpilil’s voice-over narration; ‘Once upon a time in a land far, far away…,’ before he dissolves into giggles and steers the film’s ten bark canoes into the mythical waters of Arnhem Land for ‘a story like you’ve never seen before.’ It is also, I believe, a story unlike any the audience has ever heard before.

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Referring to the sound design and production in de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer, 1993), Hickey-Moody and Iocca call de Heer’s audience member an “aurator, and secondly a spectator.”16 They argue that in privileging the intimate noises of Bubby’s existence through the use of binaural microphones and producing an intensely claustrophobic atmosphere of “gurgling, eating and pissing”,17 the audience is forced to identify with him and alternatively to be disgusted by him. With the listener positioned between the two microphones, i.e. virtually between Bubby’s ears, he or she is perfectly synchronised with the protagonist’s journey; the aurator hears through his left ear that which Bubby hears through his left ear. Michel Chion’s hierarchy of aural importance18; the conventional sound model with dialogue occupying the highest, most important position, is dismantled and reversed by use of the binaural microphones. Diegetic sounds not normally incorporated into the audience’s experience of the universe of the film become fore-grounded; they are unnervingly persistent and strident. The evocative sound environment produced in Bad Boy Bubby recalls the experimental sound-scapes of the films of Philip Brophy, which have been chronicled as “the organisation of more complex spatio-temporal relationships … [that explore] … methods which have the potential to extend and enrich the vocabulary of film sound and perception.”19 Indeed, understanding the significance of de Heer’s use of sound in this and his other films requires academic attention at least equivalent to that which Anahid Kassabian has argued is given to the subject of “reading” in literary studies and “spectatorship” in film studies.20 With a conventional soundtrack, Bad Boy Bubby would have an entirely different effect on its audience, rather, the diegetic dialogue is re-positioned in Chion’s hierarchy.

In some respects, de Heer has continued his pre-occupation with satisfying the ‘aurator” in the audience with Ten Canoes. Sound recordist Jim Currie and composer Tom Heuzenroeder sought the “best way to capture the sonic authenticity of the Arnhem Land wetlands.”21 With what journalist Sam Oster describes as a proscenium arch look, that is, mostly wide shots, there was nowhere to place boom microphones and because the actors were almost naked, lapel microphones were not an ideal option. Unscripted takes and a desire not to interrupt the action with battery changes and conventionally

172 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. interruptive sound recording systems were also important. Oster reports that: “De Heer approached Adelaide University to produce a custom device for dialogue recording, and was put in touch with Dr. Matthew Sorell, the research director of the Convergent Communications Research Group at the university.” 22 The recording devices were hidden in the naked actor’s hair or hung from their necks in traditional pouches and synchronised to a horn sounded on the set each morning. The use of these ‘hair’ microphones resulted in about 100 hours of sound recording per shoot day with Currie having to process about three gigabytes of information each evening. The outcome being that, as Currie, describes; “all these fragmented bits and pieces that we’d shot over the seven weeks had come together to form a shape that I’d never seen before.”23 With its incidental music of traditional Aboriginal instruments, dialogue and singing performed in Ganalbingu and its Aboriginal accented voice-over by Indigenous actor Gulpilil, Ten Canoes recalls de Heer’s earlier subversive western, the didactic meditation on racism that is The Tracker (2002). Like the singing narrator, Archie Roach, Gulpilil’s voice is instantly recognizable to many Australians as an archetypal Aboriginal Australian. The authentic Aboriginality and the “alien sounds of chirrups, croaks and slithers”24 ensured Ten Canoes had a sound-scape quite unlike any the “aurator” at the Cannes film festival would have heard before.

In interview de Heer elaborated on how his respect for the Ganalbingu-speaking actor’s preferences over-ruled the expected foreign market needs: … in Italy they normally dub everything and I said, ‘No, they cannot dub the dialogue. The actors don’t give permission.’ But if we force them to put out a completely sub-titled version, it really marginalises it to small arthouses. What you do is get a good Italian storyteller, one with a third world accent of some sort (because clearly we’re not going to find someone who speaks fluent Italian with an Australian indigenous [sic] accent, nor would anybody in Italy recognize it as an Australian indigenous [sic] accent) an African-language accent for example, and you have the storyteller tell that story in that way, then you have an Italian version that would play more broadly, while it still preserves their cultural desire to have their language heard and known.25

Not only does the emphasis on an Aboriginal Australian language further the effect of elevating the status of the Aboriginal culture, the storytelling technique of recounting

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that which is also being seen delivers additional Aboriginal Australian authenticity. De Heer describes Aboriginal storytelling style as one of “cascading repetition”: For example: ‘See that man there, see that man sitting on a rock. Now, that man on that rock, he’s thinking. He’s sitting on that rock and he’s thinking about something. That man, see him, thinking about …’ There might be three concepts in a sentence, and the next sentence repeats those concepts and adds a new one. One of the original concepts might get dropped off and another one put in, but the others are always repeated, sometimes in a different order, and sometimes with a slightly different or elaborated meaning. It’s a painful way of storytelling. They’ll talk about something that’s really obvious that we would never say because it’s not part of the story.26

Liz Conor also notes that apart from the obvious significance in fore-grounding the Ganalbingu language of the Aboriginal Australians it features, Ten Canoes is notable for its storytelling style. Conor wrote: If we are alert to the things that set pre-contact Aborigines apart from us, de Heer affirms that one real difference lies in the manner of storytelling. The gentle unwinding of events, which include murder, abduction, jealousy and longing, stands in contrast to the addictive heightened emotion of epic Hollywood.27

By privileging the Ganalbingu dialogue for the actors, an Indigenous accent for the English voice-over by well-known Aboriginal Australian actor Gulpilil, and a “gentle”, Aboriginal Australian style of cascading repetition narration of story-within-a-story, de Heer’s film articulates as Aboriginal Australian in three ways and serves as a rare example of cinema that elevates the marginalised Aboriginal people and their too often overlooked culture. Indeed, the fundamental goal of most of de Heer’s films can be seen as one of providing an amplified voice for the unheard, the marginalised, the ‘Other’. As Adrian Martin has pointed out, de Heer tends to identify with “the figure of the naive visionary,”28 someone who is isolated from mainstream society. Part of the isolation de Heer’s protagonists endure stems from the struggle to master spoken language. In Bad Boy Bubby the socially inept male protagonist mimics the phrases and gestures of those he meets as he stumbles from situation to situation, until, by repetition and sheer good luck, he achieves the zenith of societal struggle; a happy suburban family. As a protest against her warring mother and father, the little girl in The Quiet Room (Rolf de Heer, 1996) becomes mute. The disabled female protagonist in Dance Me To My Song (Rolf

174 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. de Heer, 1997) can only express herself through a computerised voice-box. In Alexandra’s Project (Rolf de Heer, 2003) the alienated wife finds a voice via her video recorder and asserts herself from her emotionally isolating husband. Sandy George, in The Australian newspaper, seemed to agree with Martin, stating: “His film, delivered in spite of language difficulties and extreme physical challenges, is another that gives voice to Australians who don’t usually have one.”29 Despite their isolation from mainstream society, the Ramingining people have had de Heer tell their story eloquently, and regardless of their unfamiliarity with the English language, have continued to be heard as the press clamoured for interviews; also in The Australian, Nicolas Rothwell reported: “Bobby Bununngurr recalls being in the canoes on set as more than acting, as being ‘full of life, the spirits are around me, the old people they with me, and I feel it, out there I was inside by myself, and I was crying’.”30

But with its embedded English narration, its process of bringing the non-Aboriginal filmgoer into a story-world that effectively remakes the participants as actors (the cast of mainly non-professionals ‘performing’ as authentic Aboriginal characters in their own Aboriginal culture and in their own Aboriginal home, but simultaneously cultivating venerated status as storytellers), questions may be asked about the extent to which empowerment of the Ganalbingu people really occurs. Does use of the colonizing European’s language for the voice over indicate de Heer’s underlying contempt for his subjects as he controls and moulds the narrative to his own cinematic ends? Or does his refusal to ‘mute’ the Ganalbingu tongue by dubbing it in English serve to further empower the colonised Aboriginal people? In this writer’s opinion, it is the latter. The Aboriginal Australian sounds coming from a non-Indigenous director are not problematic; Ten Canoes was first shown at an outdoor basketball court in Ramingining without sub-titles at all, much to the chagrin of the few non-Aboriginal Australians in the audience at the time.31 For national and international release the concession to non- Ganalbingu speaking audiences in providing English narration is not disempowering but rather is pragmatic. Unlike the heavy-handed didacticism of his earlier treatise on 1920s injustice to Aboriginal Australians in The Tracker, de Heer has subtly articulated his concerns about Aboriginal Australians today. Rather than relying on guilt over the

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European coloniser’s past malfeasance, well-placed humour engages the non-Indigenous audiences in both the voice-over and the plot; a long running joke about the sweet tooth of one ‘Honey Man’; gags about men’s sexual performance; and comic depictions of flatulence, all illustrate the universal humanity of the near-naked characters yet fail to detract from their dignity as pre-colonization, non-industrial, Indigenous Peoples. Indeed, the mere fact Ten Canoes seeks to tell a Dreamtime story, and not a contemporary western, Christian-influenced narrative, indicates the writer/director’s respect. No other film to date focuses to the same extent on simply recounting a Dreamtime world-view. Some non-indigenous directors have even invented their own ‘Dreamtime’ legends, such as Werner Herzog did with his Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). Other films have provided brief depictions or references, but Ten Canoes is the first to dedicate itself entirely to such. De Heer’s story is that of the people of Ramingining and is arguably authentic. All this I have already contended elsewhere, with particular emphasis on de Heer’s use of the Aboriginal accent,32 but without the placement of the film in context of de Heer’s oeuvre of Aboriginal Australian films and with the elision of any tangential reference to the Aboriginal Australian justice meted out in Ten Canoes. When a major plot development requires the settling of a serious inter-tribal dispute, the punishment via spearing the leg is once again non- problematically presented as an acceptable, normalised, extra-judiciary process. As in The Tracker, de Heer seems to be saying in Ten Canoes that tribal justice, being swift, sufficiently (but not excessively) punitive, and involving the Elders of the offended party, is superior to non-Indigenous justice systems when dealing with aberrant Aboriginal Australian behaviour. That the criminal eventually dies from the leg-spearing is an event made seemingly less tragic by the spiritual notions of reincarnation the wise- sounding narration from Gulpilil presents to frame the story within the Aboriginal Australian connection to the land: the dead man will return to the status of a little fish in the billabong, where he will wait to be born again.

In enabling the around 800 inhabitants of Ramingining to tell their own story in their own language of Ganulbingu, with Aboriginal accented English voice-over, in their own way of cascading repetition and foregrounding Aboriginal Australian spirituality and

176 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two. judiciary, de Heer has empowered them to the extent the social malaise of their contemporary indigenous Australians seems an anomaly, not the expected norm, and as the film’s success at Cannes indicates, he has managed to reach a very large and appreciative audience. As I have reported elsewhere,33 de Heer’s project in remote Northern Australia has blossomed into numerous other community-enriching ventures such as a program for training local youth in video production. Ten Canoes is an overwhelmingly positive contribution to the cinematic articulation of the Aboriginal Australian voice.

The Inter-textual Aboriginal Australian in Dr. Plonk.

De Heer’s latest film, Dr. Plonk (2007), is a black and white silent film, shot like a Chaplin or Keaton homage on a hand-cranked antique camera. It is the story of the eponymous, time-traveling protagonist from 1907 who is mistaken for a terrorist by our twenty-first century contemporaries and locked up, never to be released. His warning to the law-makers of a century ago about the perils of ecological negligence (and, possibly, television addiction) remain unheard and unheeded.34

The plot revolves around a seemingly rational scientist and inventor, Dr. Plonk (Nigel Lunghi), who is married to a caring woman (Magda Szubanski) with a faithful man- servant (Paul Blackwell) in a well-appointed mansion in de Heer’s hometown of Adelaide, South Australia. The hard-working doctor calculates that the world will end in 100 years, but his warnings are ignored by the Prime Minister of the day so he invents a time machine and travels to the future, intent on bringing back incontrovertible proof. What he discovers in 2007 is a polluted, over-industrialised world in which ordinary folk sit side by side in their comfortable living rooms, mesmerised by wide-screen television, as outside the eve of the apocalypse apparently approaches.

This entire film is an exercise in aural auteurism in that de Heer has decided there should be no voices to be heard at all and although his decision to make a black and white silent film has been attributed to his discovery of unused film stock deteriorating

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in his refrigerator at home, a more astute filmgoer will observe the many inter-textual references this film voices. Of course, Dr. Plonk is not actually silent at all: with a frenetic, relentless, authentically period soundtrack performed by the strings, piano and accordion of ‘The Stiletto Sisters’ and composed by Graham Tardif, the film seems unnaturally blanketed in sprightly wall-to-wall music, permitting equally unnatural and unexpected visual moments of self-reflexive inter-textuality.

Regarding the Aboriginal Australian people, de Heer unexpectedly inserts a scene early in the film in which Dr. Plonk accidentally travels back in time 100,000 years, with the Indigenous locals emphatically claiming this land as theirs rather than the property of the colonisers of the last 200 odd years. Encased in his coffin-shaped time machine, Dr. Plonk is immediately surrounded by aggressive spear-wielding Aboriginal men who carry him and his contraption onto a fire. The curious thing about the depiction of the Aboriginal Australian men is their costuming: they wear obviously fake afro wigs and grass skirts. Such a visual cliché recalls ignorant and condescending depictions of Pacific Islanders by Hollywood in its wartime musicals and comedies. With this spurious portrayal, de Heer seems to be silently directing the audience to his previous two productions in which he has more accurately depicted Aboriginal Australians. As Jake Wilson summarises,

The most inspired scene involves an encounter with an Aboriginal tribe straight out of Ten Canoes – they’re even filmed in the same way, lined up on the horizon as if for an anthropological photograph. More than an in-joke, the shot is a key to de Heer’s ongoing project: the fiction of time travel is revealed as literally a way of rewriting history, a short cut to the long view.35

The comic depiction of cannibals enacting the primitive justice of summary execution is later juxtaposed with the comic depiction of inept 2007 ‘Keystone Kops’-styled policing in which the innocent, well-meaning Dr. Plonk is branded ‘terrorist’ and indefinitely incarcerated, as has happened recently in Australia’s real-life involvement in America’s war against terrorism. Somewhere between the two extremes lie workable judiciaries, one of which, de Heer seems to be suggesting, is the meditative tribal council that characterises judicial decision-making in The Tracker and Ten Canoes. Although de

178 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

Heer’s latest film features the shortest depiction of Aboriginal Australians in all three films mentioned here, it nevertheless conforms to an authorial interest in foregrounding a sense of holistic justice, as intuitively practiced by Indigenous Australians. The Aboriginal people of 100,000 years ago, who instantly set out to burn – or perhaps, cook – Dr. Plonk, are shown inaccurately in the moments before he successfully returns in his smouldering time machine to 1907. By depicting them in ridiculous costume, de Heer underlines the erroneousness of such a savage characterization. The audience is reminded of his authentic portrayals of Aboriginal people in the other two films this paper addresses. Unfortunately, regarding sound and the Aboriginal Australian, Graham Tardif’s energetic score only changes slightly for this scene, bashing out a couple of bars that merely hints at what early silent film composer Erno Rapee might have called ‘Jungle Music’. Nevertheless, this musical cliché serves to further consolidate the deliberate inaccuracy of de Heer’s ironic depiction of Aboriginal Australians.

Denouement: De Heer Amplifies the Indigenous Voice and Empowers Aboriginal Australians.

De Heer explained to journalist Michael Fitzgerald; “People talk about, What is a white director doing making an Indigenous story? But I’m not, … They’re telling the story, largely, and I’m the mechanism by which they can.”36 Like an amplifier, de Heer takes the oral history of Ramingining, its spiritual and judicial meanings and broadcasts them to his predominantly Christian, courtroom-based legal world of non-Indigenous Australia. When approaching these remote people, De Heer has, in my opinion, realised the potential for unintended cultural arrogance and was prepared to hide any halo of prestige his career had so far created. He stated he decided to: … relinquish the almost absolute power normally associated with producing and directing a film and cede it to the people I’d be making this with; give them editorial control and as much responsibility for the film as we, the white film makers, had responsibility. […] It was my (semi-conscious) reasoning that all this had to be dismantled, that notions of superiority and privilege had to make way for a perception by all those involved, white and black, of themselves as equals in the venture.37

179 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Cat Hope lauds de Heer for his tendency to “feature innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production stages”38 but I would suggest that his aural ideation anticipates even the scripting stage. In interview, de Heer stated “Sound is sixty percent of the emotional content of a film”39 and his online diary reflects his love for post-production sound editing. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that he is constantly aware of how he wants his films to not just look but sound. In The Tracker, he wanted the film to sound as if it were the post-colonial voice of Aboriginal people, so he utilised a recognizably Aboriginal Australian singing narrator whose music is simultaneously modern and ancient. In Ten Canoes he wanted the Ganalbingu people to sound empowered and in control of their pre-colonial culture so he directed all actors to speak in their native language and insisted that even his Italian producers refrain from dubbing the film for overseas markets. In Dr. Plonk, a film in which he is primarily concerned with western society’s headlong descent into environmental apocalypse and associated dependence on television, he manages to slip in an inter-textual reference to tribal justice, a form of which he so ruthlessly parodies in his subsequent depiction of 2007 treatment of a terror suspect in the same film. Sound in de Heer’s latest offering features much less of an interest in amplifying the Indigenous voice than the previous two Aboriginal Australian films, and this writer concedes Dr. Plonk may not deserve to be included in the nominal grouping. Nevertheless, when its role as an inter-textual signpost to his other work is considered, Dr. Plonk serves to remind audiences of the typically non-authentic Aboriginal films produced by less respectful film-makers.

De Heer is not the first to attempt to lend an Aboriginal acoustic sensibility to their films: Marjorie Kibby describes the soundtrack to Rabbit-proof Fence (Philip Noyce, 2002) as expressing “an Australia that is something closer to the Aboriginal perception of it, the land as a living thing with a spirit and a voice,”40 yet its didgeridoo combined with world music ranging from North American drumming to Ravi Shankar’s sitar falls somewhat short of authentically articulating the aurality of Australian Aboriginality. In his auteur analysis of another Hollywood-based Australian film-maker Peter Weir, Jonathan Rayner stated: “[Weir’s] career is marked by a European brand of art-film auteurism, based on personal writing and visual expression, in Australia, and by an

180 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

American brand of auteurism, based on genre revision, in Hollywood.”41 This distinction between the auteurism of the two continents is curiously undeveloped in the literature and I would tentatively suggest that there actually exists a typically Australian kind of auteur in whose work an interest in specifically Australian issues predominates. Such Australian auteurism is not rare but usually sees promising writer/directors succumbing to the world-view flattening effect of Hollywood and its cash incentives. Resisting tinsel-town, de Heer remains based in small-town Adelaide, South Australia, surviving from film to film and making the French terminology used to describe him seem artificial, affected and foreign. Nevertheless, despite the over-alliteration of the phrase ‘Australian Aural Auteur’, such a mantle may, indeed, be appropriate for Rolf de Heer.

181 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Notes.

1. David Stratton wrote: “Aussie auteur Rolf de Heer has established himself as an uncompromising film-maker” (David Stratton, “The Quiet Room, Variety Review”, Vertigo Productions (1998). URL: http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film-id=4&display=reviews [29 December 2007]); Ali Sharp stated: “de Heer’s presence is a victory for auteurism” (Ali Sharp, “The old man and the jungle,” Metro Magazine, no. 140 (2004), p. 34) and Jake Wilson declared: “Rolf de Heer is one of the very few auteurs who regularly succeeds in getting features financed in Australia” (Jake Wilson, “The lady vanishes: Alexandra’s Project and Rolf de Heer”, Senses of Cinema (2003). URL: www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/26/alexandras-project.html [29 December 2007]).

2. Cat Hope, “Hearing the story: Sound design in the films of Rolf de Heer”, Senses of Cinema, (2004). URL: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/sound-design- rolf-de-heer.html [29 December 2007].

3. Anna C. Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca, “Sonic affect(s): Binaural technologies and the construction of auratorship in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby”, Metro Magazine, no. 140 (2004), pp. 78-81.

4. D. Bruno Starrs, “The audience as aurator again? Sound and Rolf de Heer’s Ten

Canoes”, Metro Magazine, no. 149 (2006), pp. 18-21.

5. Ten Canoes won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival and six Australian Film Institute awards including Best Picture and Best Direction (shared with Aboriginal Australian Peter Djiggir).

182 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

6. Hence in this paper particular attention will be paid to the use of sound in these Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer in order to explore if the term coined by Philip Brophy in describing Indian film director Satyajit Ray, that of “aural auteur” (Philip Brophy, “Punk ambient,” Film Comment, vol. 42, no. 4 (2006) p. 16), may be usefully appropriated to describe this celebrated film-maker, or, if indeed, due to the proclivities of maverick film-makers like de Heer, the term auteur deserves even further categorization.

7. Not that de Heer was without experience in filming Indigenous Peoples before The Tracker (2002): his work commenced in 1997 (belatedly released in 2003) on The Old Man Who Read Love Stories features the Indigenous Shuar of Amazonian Ecuador. But the film is in no way depictive of Australia or Aboriginal Australians and that is why it is not under consideration in this paper. Even de Heer prefers not to refer to this film, preferring to discuss a much earlier unproduced Aboriginal Australian film The Other Side of the Frontier, in his recent paper on working with Indigenous Peoples, “Personal reflections of whiteness and three film projects,” Australian Humanities Review, no. 42 (Aug-Sep. 2007). URL: http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August- September%202007/Deheer.html [29 December 2007].

8. D. Bruno Starrs, “Two westerns that weren’t? The Tracker and The Proposition.” Metro Magazine, no. 153 (2007), pp. 166-172.

9. Michael Atherton, “The composer as alchemist: An overview of Australian feature film scores 1994-2004,” in Rebecca Coyle (ed), Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and Cultural Identities, (London: John Libbey, 2005), p. 237.

10. Rolf de Heer, The Tracker DVD extra, SBS Movie Show 2002: unpaginated.

11. Rolf de Heer, “Personal reflections of whiteness and three film projects,”

183 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Australian Humanities Review, no. 42 (Aug-Sep. 2007). URL: http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August- September%202007/Deheer.html [29 December 2007].

12. Jake Wilson, “Looking both ways: The Tracker”, Senses of Cinema (2003). URL: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/24/tracker.html [29 December 2007].

13. Production Notes, Vertigo Productions website. URL: http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film-id=8&display=extras [29 December 2007].

14. Production Notes, ibid.

15. Philip Brophy, “Punk ambient,” Film Comment, vol. 42, no. 4 (2006), p. 16.

16. Anna C. Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca, “Sonic affect(s): Binaural technologies and the construction of auratorship in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby”, Metro Magazine, no. 140, (2004), p. 78.

17. Anna C. Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca, ibid.

18. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman, (NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 5.

19. Philip Samartzis, “Avant-garde meets mainstream: The Film Scores of Philip Brophy”, in Rebecca Coyle (ed), Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian Screen Music, (Sydney: AFTRS, 1997), p. 50-51.

20. Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identification in Hollywood Film

184 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

Music, (NY: Routledge, 2001), p. 65.

21. Sam Oster, “Walkie talkie”, Inside Film, no. 80, (September 2005), p. 45.

22. Sam Oster, ibid.

23. Sam Oster, ibid.

24. Sam Oster, ibid.

25. Mike Walsh, “Ten Canoes and Rolf de Heer”, Metro Magazine, no. 149 (2006), p. 17.

26. Mike Walsh, ibid.

27. Liz Conor, “Ten Canoes: A timely release”, Liz Conor: Comment and Critique, (July 15 2006). URL: http://lizconorcomment.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html [29 December 2007].

28. Adrian Martin, “Wanted: Art Cinema," Cinema Papers, (December 2000), p. 30.

29. Sandy George, “Storybook charm avoids guilt buttons”, The Australian, (21 March 2006). URL: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18537860- 5001562,00.html [29 December 2007].

30. Nicolas Rothwell, “Top end tales”, The Australian – The Arts, (27 May 2006). URL: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19233398-16947,00.html [29 December 2007].

185 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

31. There are currently three versions of the film: (1) the Ganalbingu languages dialogue version with English narration and English subtitles; (2) the Ganalbingu languages dialogue and narration version with English subtitles and (3) the Ganalbingu language and narration version without any subtitles.

32. D. Bruno Starrs, “The authentic Aboriginal voice in Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes (2006),” Reconstructions: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 7, no. 3 (2007). URL: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/073/starrs.shtml [29 December 2007].

33. D. Bruno Starrs, “From one photo to Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer 2006) to many canoes,” Artciencia.com, vol. 3, no. 7 (2007). URL: http://www.artciencia.com/Admin/Ficheiros/BRUNOSTA397.pdf [29 December 2007].

34. See D. Bruno Starrs, “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007), Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, no. 5 (2007). URL: http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/starrs.html [29 December 2007].

35. Jake Wilson, “Dr. Plonk – Film review”, TheAge.com.au, (30 August 2007). URL: http://www.theage.com.au/news/film-reviews/dr- plonk/2007/08/30/1188067256355.html [29 December 2007].

36. Mike Fitzgerald, “Keeping time with Rolf”, TIME Pacific, (20 March 2006), URL: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1172744,00.html [23 April 2006].

186 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

37. Rolf de Heer, “Personal reflections of whiteness and three film projects,” Australian Humanities Review, no. 42 (Aug-Sep. 2007). URL: www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August- September%202007/Deheer.html [29 December 2007].

38. Cat Hope, ibid.

39. D. Bruno Starrs, “The sounds of silence: an interview with Rolf de Heer” Metro Magazine, no. 152 (2007), pp. 18-21.

40. Marjorie D. Kibby, “Sounds of Australia in Rabbit-proof Fence”, ed. Rebecca Coyle, Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and Cultural Identities, (London: John Libbey, 2005), p. 157.

41. Jonathan Rayner, The Films of Peter Weir, (NY: Continuum, 2003), p. 12.

187

PART THREE. Conclusion. Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

CHAPTER 10. The Unifying Essay.

“If we take out the title of the film and THE END and put all the films together, we will have the figure of one man [sic], of an auteur, the life of an auteur, transferred in many characters naturally” (Bernardo Bertolucci qtd. in Gelmis 1970: xiii).

189 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

10.1 Preamble to the Unifying Essay.

The prejudice shown by most auteur analysts in favour of the visuals prevents appreciation of the considerable richness of film sound artistry. The late 20th and 21st century cinemas, with their powerful surround sound speaker systems, are able to emotionally and physically touch audiences. The advanced technology of the multiplex can hurl sonic waves at the film-goer, rolling stereophonically from side to side of the auditorium and prompting an uncanny sense of physical orientation to the filmic world depicted. Veritable walls of crystal clear, static-free sound can force the film-goer backwards in their seats, almost rattling the teeth in their skulls as they are physically bombarded with the film’s soundtrack. Impossible to avoid, the bass register palpably shakes the tiered cinema floor that rakes away from the silver plinth which film-goers perceive only in blinking intermissions, raising their adrenaline levels and other bodily responses as it assaults the ears. Alternatively, subtly insinuated auditory sensations can gently caress the “aurator” as they raise hairs on necks or set them choking back tears with the soundtrack’s expertly manipulated subjectivity for and identification with the on-screen character. Non-diegetically, queasy glissandos and eerie Theremin can spook the audience member who is emotionally aligned with the protagonist in one scene while luxuriant strings and tympani can embolden that same audience member in the next. Diegetic sounds of nature, like the incessant whirr of cicadas, can be amplified to produce stultifying tension. Audiences can be taken into the headspace of the onscreen character as they ‘hear’ her or his thoughts while other scenes employ god-like voice- over narration to impress a sense of veracity. Indeed, frequently exercising many of these auditory extremes in the one work, the modern film soundtrack is an extraordinary tool for manipulating the emotions and understandings of an audience. While seeing patrons jostle for the best seats there is no such thing as a badly positioned chair for the blind cinema-goer (of which there are many), who most surely is bewildered by the priority given by analysts to explaining only the visual meaning of a film’s director. Although all this was not unknown to the researcher before commencing this doctoral study, it is important to note how this belief has been concretised with the journey of the thesis.

190 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

10.2 The Journey of the Thesis.

One suspects that as with most PhD theses, the journey this body of research undertook was not entirely predictable. The first unplanned contingency involved the ambition of making a creative work, that being a video documentary, or ‘biopic’, on the films and life of Rolf de Heer, but this was soon reluctantly abandoned. It had been hoped that such a study would provide another unique insight into the psychology of this intriguing film-maker and even serve as a new kind of auteur analysis in itself. De Heer’s indifference to that goal and unwillingness to provide any archived material of his life (such as personal photographs), or, indeed, to permit interviews with his family members, was soon politely communicated (although the thesis is certainly much richer as a result of him making himself available for an interview). Before this realisation, however, this researcher was labouring under the belief that the thesis would consist of 40% practice (or creative work) and 60% exegesis30 - the compulsory training31 and initial milestones32 were completed with this goal in mind. Fortunately, it was possible to consolidate work towards a revised goal of publishing refereed papers before the date of the confirmation seminar (2 November 2007) loomed too large.

There were other unexpected but significant events in the journey of this thesis. One could not predict, for example, the different ways editors conducted their refereeing processes. Ideally, each paper would have been published promptly and in a way that would have made the order of publication of the thesis’ papers a chronologically sensible and ordered process for the reader. Unfortunately, some journals took more than two years from submission to eventual publication (the last, in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, is not expected to be in print until November 2010), while others took as little as three months. An intention to proceed from the general to the specific, chronologically and one film at a time, as recommended by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith in

30 This is a relatively low weighting for the creative component in a university that many student practitioners are drawn to because of the opportunity to submit a thesis that is up to 75% creative work. 31 “IFN001 – Advanced Information Skills (AIRS)” was completed in November 2006 with a result of 7 (85/100) and “KKP601 - Approaches to Inquiry in the Creative Industries” was audited in first semester 2007. 32 ‘Stage 2’ of the PhD thesis was completed and approved in May 2007.

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his auteur analysis of film-maker Luchino Visconte,33 was unfortunately not achieved: there is little semblance of chronological order in the films analysed. Nor was it predicted that Rolf de Heer would produce no film in 2008 - not that the researcher would begrudge de Heer a vacation - but another source of inspiration for the research, that being the prospect of his thirteenth feature film possibly resulting in publication of an extra paper, was to remain unrealised. The optimistically round figure of ten refereed publications aspired to in the confirmation seminar was not to be achieved within the time frame of the thesis.

Nevertheless, the thesis has succeeded in the publication of eight refereed papers.34 The non-chronological publication dates of the rest of the papers aside, the first article to appear in press, “The Tracker (Rolf de Heer 2002) and The Proposition (John Hillcoat 2005): Two westerns that weren’t?” in issue 153 of Metro Magazine, does represent a logical starting point for the collection of papers of the thesis. Johnson and Poole note that in 1954 for the critics of Cahiers du Cinema: “auteur theory became a method whereby former genre films were reconsidered in terms of the aesthetics of authorship” (1998, 125) and Raphaëlle Moine suggested that a director’s oeuvre can be considered to be “the genre of the ‘auteur film’” (2008, 97). Thus, this first paper published on the work of de Heer (and his contemporary director, John Hillcoat), serves to signal the author’s interest in an auteur analysis of de Heer. In the subsequent papers of the thesis the films are considered, not in terms of genre, but in terms of the “aesthetics of authorship”, whereby the individual signing his name to the films is de Heer.

Surprisingly, there was a keen preparedness of editors of journals not even dedicated to film sound to consider the submissions. Despite this researcher being a comparatively unknown author, no editor seemed to consider the subject matter unsuitable even for consideration. As Gavin Moodie pointed out, the “publications editor makes an initial

33 Nowell-Smith wrote: “rather than focus exclusively on elucidating the common underlying structures, ... consider the films singly, attempting in the analysis of each to bring out its relationship, hidden or overt, to the rest of [the director’s] work” (1967, 12). 34 The eighth paper - “‘If we stretch our imaginations’: The monstrous-feminine mother in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project (2003)”, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, no. 10, 2008 – has not been included as one of the papers of the thesis as it deviates too much from auteur analysis in its consideration of evolutionary film theory.

192 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three. judgment on the paper’s suitability” (2005, 2), before forwarding the paper for refereeing, and this each editor seemed willing to do. This enthusiasm, one may assume, was due to the dearth of writing on the films of Rolf de Heer, be it genre analysis, auteur analysis or this researcher’s innovative aural auteur analysis.

Of course, there is some unavoidable overlap in the papers. Unlike the requirements of a monograph, it was necessary to repeat the introduction to the paper’s subject, Rolf de Heer, before steering away into new, unpublished argument. Many of the key quotations culled from the literature are repeated. Nevertheless, this has not been done to the extent that a charge of self-plagiarism could be levelled, nor could accusations be made that the researcher has utilised Moodie’s cynical advice to capitalise on the “minimum publishable unit” (2005, 7), whereby the number of an author’s publications is increased by maximizing the overlap in each, adding only one new item of information to each subsequent paper. Rather, each of the published articles is sufficiently different to its companions for a reader of the collection to remain engaged and motivated to read on. However, while it is hoped that the reader will receive these papers as a coherent collection of work, there are some matters that were not addressed.

193 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

10.3 The Film Sound Industry in Australia.

One shortcoming of this thesis’ entirely textual analysis approach to understanding a film auteur is that this methodology tells us little about the actual conditions of the film’s production, an issue Andre Bazin would have stressed be considered. The fact that de Heer has steadfastly declined offers from Hollywood to leave his home-town of Adelaide and direct big budget blockbusters35 is unlikely to be considered relevant to an editor or referee perusing a paper based on the textual analysis of one or more of his films. Nevertheless, such a rejection of the siren calls from the big end of film-making speaks volumes about de Heer’s cinematic world-views. As he said in interview, “What I try to do is make films that don’t reduce people as human beings” (Starrs “The sounds of silence” 2007, 21), suggesting that in his opinion, the Hollywood tradition does little for humanity’s improvement. Without the pressures of Hollywood, de Heer has been able to operate undisturbed and unfettered in his own studios, experimenting with writing and editing, particularly the production and post-production of film sound, all the while making films “that don’t reduce people as human beings”.

The acceptance for publication of the final three papers, which concentrate on de Heer’s use of sound, reflect an awareness of the underdevelopment of critical attention to de Heer and to sound in the film industry in Australia generally. Brophy wrote critically of the situation in this country, at times denigrating the conservatism of our film-makers: Sound and music mostly come to the fore in post-production. Traditionally, sound designers, sound editors, sound effects recordists, sound recording engineers, Foley artists and sound mixers will be actively employed on a film once the film has reached fine-cut (2001, 60).

One suspects that Brophy is justified in claiming that too many film-makers in Australia leave consideration of the first component of the term ‘audio-visual’ to the last stage of production, that of the “fine-cut”. Some possibly even take the end of shooting as their cue to start working on (or at least looking for) another project, seemingly content that their ‘rough-cut’ will be ‘fixed in the mix’ by audio technicians who have somehow

35 See comments by Jim Currie regarding De Heer’s rejection of an offer to direct a Chainsaw Massacre film in “De Heer de sound: Jim Currie on designing sound for Rolf de Heer” on page 251 of this thesis.

194 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three. intuitively absorbed an understanding of the director’s goals. Such reluctance or inability to communicate with sound personnel after the shoot is not restricted to this country, of course. Stephen Deutsch wrote: It is relatively easy for any composer worth the name to provide music to fit a particular mood, far harder to judge what mood is required by the scene, and how much of it should be provided musically. Directors are often of little help here, sometimes not knowing themselves (or not being able to articulate) what emotional triggers need squeezing (2007, 6).

Deutsch recommended that composers proactively interrogate directors: “… after seeing the rough-cut of a scene, a composer might ask whether the director was totally satisfied by the performances, whether there might be some emotional nuance missing, or worse, too prevalent” (ibid). Unfortunately, one suspects, by the time there is a rough-cut, too often the typically harried film director has her or his mind on the next job already.

Brophy puts this directorial deafness in Australia down to two main factors: the unrealistic and meagre sound training provided in our film schools and the ingrained insecurity of film-makers in the national industry. With regard to the first, he wrote: “tertiary/undergraduate film schools and courses [... cover] areas like cinematography, editing, production management and even sound recording ... but more under the rubric of directorial delegation than via strategic discussions with craftspeople” (2001, 58). He neatly summarised the poverty of aural communication in what might be called ‘Film- making in Australia 101’ with the comment: … film training around the country accords hardly a passing regard to the way that sound and music affect the visual, dramatic and structural formation of a film. Again, directors are aurally impaired by training that claims sound to be something that happens after image (61).

Indeed, a cursory glance at the recommended textbooks for Australian undergraduate film studies reveals an under-emphasis on training students to design a film for sound. Martha Mollison’s 568 page tome entitled Producing Videos: A Complete Guide (2003) has a mere eleven lines on sound design, although she did make the point that “… for many videos sound design would (and should) have started in the project development stage, now is the time [post-production] to face the reality of what material is actually at hand” (251). It is easy to see how this advice could be overlooked or not received at all

195 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

by the trainee film-maker. Regardless, Mollison’s text is on the recommended reading lists of most film-making schools in the country. Other texts are even less generous to sound personnel. Allan Rowe and Paul Wells advised budding film-makers that: “The final element in constructing the ‘image’ of a film is the soundtrack” (2003, 76, my emphasis) in Jill Nelmes’ text An Introduction to Film Studies (1996), and this demeaning attitude to film sound artistry seems prevalent in the texts recommended to students.

The second industry factor, Brophy wrote, relates to the unwillingness of some Australian film-makers to be bold and inventive when it comes to sound: Industry peers seem ever ready to scoff, scorn and scathe: that music is too ‘brooding’; that atmosphere is too ‘loud’; that effect is too ‘unnaturalistic’; that mix is too ‘noticeable’. Most frighteningly, otherwise intelligent and creative sound and music professionals working in the industry eventually start thinking the same way, second-guessing the constricted ‘myopic deafness’ of directors, producers and distributors (62).

Conservatism in the industry of film-making, given the expense usually involved and the potential for box office failure, is certainly no uniquely Australian characteristic, but the readiness of de Heer to experiment with sound marks him as an exceptional director. It is perhaps to be expected that journal editors and conference convenors would be interested in scholarly writing on his bold work.

196 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

10.4 Overseas Aural Auteur Analyses.

Also not reflected in this collection of refereed published papers was the discovery that other film-makers have been recently subjected to aural auteur analysis overseas, even if this term was not actually used as a descriptor for the research. One of the latest studies indicates the novel potential for an auteur to aurally stamp a signature on her films through a subversive choice of Argentinean language for dialogue, begging an obvious comparison with de Heer’s use of the Ganalbingu language in Ten Canoes, as outlined in the seventh paper of the thesis, “Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer”, currently being refereed by Metro Magazine. Dominique Russell stated, “[Director Lucrecia] Martel herself identifies one inspiration for the [Argentine cinema] movement to pay close attention to audio as artists’ response to the abuse of language and the disdain for Spanish in cinema under the military dictatorship (1976-1982)” (2008, 1). Under a repressive military regime, Martel and her contemporaries were subjected to governance in Spanish whereas in the “language of ordinary people ... Buenos Aires tones predominate” (ibid), and Martel was able to make a political statement, suggesting part of her Weltanschauung perhaps, via her use of film sound.

In this limited version of an aural auteur analysis, Russell also quoted Martel as saying, “to be faithful to [a] childlike viewpoint, I worked with the idea that the sound could tell more than the image, including more than the words” (qtd. in 2008, 2) and this prompts a reconsideration of de Heer’s stated affinity with the child-like point of view. In the DVD extra of Bad Boy Bubby, de Heer admitted: “In some ways, I’ve never been able to lose the child-like part of me. Children are a great fascination for me. If a small child was to come into the room now I’d sort of forget everything else that was going on” (qtd. in Gregory, 1993). De Heer continued this revelation about his personal views in an interview with Peter Malone: “The preciousness of childhood for me is important, above almost anything else ... If a plot has no bearing on childhood, for some reason it’s less interesting for me” (2001, 58) and in interview with Andrew L. Urban: “I've been interested in kids and the way they think a long time ... since I was four” (qtd. in Urban “De Heer, Rolf”, undated). De Heer summarised this aspect of his world-view: “I care

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immensely about how children are treated and what happens to them, and how cycles of violence are repeated later in life as adults” (qtd. in Caputo and Burton 2002, 51).36 With this director’s preoccupation with childhood it is worth noting Argentinean director Martel’s similar preoccupation and Russell’s linking of it to sound.

Other papers have been appearing from overseas which, although not being sustained aural auteur analysis conducted over a director’s entire œuvre, are nevertheless very insightful analyses of individual films. In the case of Randall Barnes’ work on sound in the films of the Coen brothers, it is possible that they may, with future publications, end up being an aural auteur analysis by published papers comparable to that of this thesis. Barnes’ first paper on Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen 1991) is a promising example, suggesting that the more creative of independent US film-makers are considering sound before, rather than after, shooting. Barnes reported that there were many scripted sound effects for Barton Fink and that the “Composer and supervising sound editor were given copies of the script to use as the basis for preliminary discussions in pre-production” (2007, 2). Later Barnes had a paper on sound in the Coen brother’s Raising Arizona (1987) published in the debut issue of the promising journal The Soundtrack in which he wrote that: By commencing their collaboration with their supervising sound editor and mixer and their composer at the script stage, the Coens communicate their commitment not just to these crew members, but also to a mode of production that prioritizes the soundtrack’s position in the construction of the film (2007, 27) .

The result is a soundtrack in Raising Arizona that constructs narrative as much as the visual components of the film, particularly with regard to the featured repetitiveness of the protagonist’s actions. Certainly, Barnes shows much potential for delivering a sustained aural auteur analysis as his subjects, the Coen brothers, like de Heer, are quite prolific in their film-making output. With the examples set by Russell, Barnes and the writer of this thesis, perhaps more theorists will be submitting papers of aural auteur analysis for future publication.

36 In my paper “If we stretch our imaginations”, I explore de Heer’s worldview regarding child-rearing in Bad Boy Bubby and Alexandra’s Project.

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10.5 De Heer’s Aural Signature Expressed via Acoustic Binaries?

Johnson and Poole stated that the possibility of a “Film music auteur [... is] a strained reading of the term auteur”, noting: “It is contentious to discuss a director’s use of film music in terms of auteurism - most obviously because directors may be the authors of the choice of music but they are rarely the authors of the music” (1998, 127, original emphasis). Here we can note that de Heer, who almost never uses pre-existing music; who wrote the lyrics to the songs in The Tracker; who works very closely with composer Graham Tardif from sometimes before there is even a finished script; who is closely involved in selection of musical instruments and musicians; and who even participates in the rehearsals of the original film scores (as he did with singer Archie Roach for The Tracker [2002] and with “The Stiletto Sisters” for Dr. Plonk [2007]), contributes considerably to the creation of his film’s music and is therefore arguably an exception to Johnson and Poole’s rule. Rolf de Heer does much more than just choose the music.

Johnson and Poole devoted most of their chapter on an attempt to locate “those structures that disclose the catalyst ‘Weir’” (1998, 126), recalling Wollen’s concept of the auteur as an “unconscious catalyst” (1972, 168), through analysis of Weir’s choice of music. First they paid considerable attention to Weir’s use of mood music on set, a practice de Heer is not renowned for (neither Rolf de Heer, Jim Currie or Graham Tardif mentioned the practice during interview). They also note Weir’s “impulsiveness” (128) in selecting music: the famous choice of Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan pipe music for Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) was apparently only made at the last minute in post-production (128). In contrast, de Heer’s decisions about music have never been last minute affairs. Nevertheless, his reluctance to use pre-recorded music, with its “affiliating identifications ... [which are] “quite tightly tracked into identification with a single subject position - usually one that does not challenge dominant ideologies” (Kassabian, “Listening for identifications”, 2001, 170),37 may mean he is less likely to be considered

37 See Chapter 2.6 of this thesis for more on Kassabian’s “affiliating tendencies”.

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alongside popular music-loving directors such as Quentin Tarentino, as an example of one of Gorbman’s “mélomane[s]” (2007, 149).

The majority of Johnson and Poole’s attention to sound in their chapter is devoted to Peter Weir’s The Plumber (1979) and Gallipoli (1981) and mostly explores the choices of music that chart “acoustic binaries” (1998, 133). They note that such music choices do not necessarily reinforce a metaphorical dichotomy, but may actually act in virtual disavowal of expected aural clichés. In the brief attention they pay to some other Weir films, they cite the example in The Last Wave (1977) in which “the sound of the didjeridu is associated with contained representations of Aboriginality (paintings, photographs), but the technologically sophisticated synthesiser is heard when Aboriginal characters appear” (130). A similarly reversed dichotomy is heard in The Tracker: the naïveté of “The Follower” (Damon Gameau) and the insensitivity of “The Fanatic” (Gary Sweet) are played out diegetically with music in the first quarter of the film. The Follower plunks at his ukulele, strumming “The Copper’s Lament”, until The Fanatic reprimands him for playing “doggerel” and sounding “like some dead animal being strangled”. This musical cipher for The Follower’s own greenness in law enforcement is soon contrasted by the striking sound of the dobro - an electric steel resonator guitar - playing a few sudden notes in a minor key (itself a well-used sonic code in film for ‘menace’) when the Aboriginal fugitive is first sighted by The Tracker. The acoustic binary of the ‘white trooper’s bush inexperience versus Aboriginal Australian sophisticated bush expertise’ is established via de Heer’s choice of musical instruments. Furthermore, the toy guitar continues to function metaphorically in the diegesis of the film: after the first massacre at the hands of the callous Fanatic (a liminal moment in the narrative of the film, marked by an abrupt termination of the extra-diegetic lament from singer Archie Roach about “My people”, and leaving the gunshots and screams to resound loudly in sudden and otherwise total silence), The Follower remorsefully burns his ukulele on the campfire. He has been ‘blooded’ and, now, with the slaughter of innocent Aboriginal Australians plaguing his conscience, there is no joy to be had in songs about the life of a trooper. Thus the fiery sacrifice of the ukulele serves as a musical metonymy: it represents his child-like innocence now forever lost.

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The most striking example of this acoustic binary in The Tracker, however, relates to the narrative function of the songs de Heer has penned - which Richard James Havis calls “adventurous” (2004) - and the language used to communicate them. While mostly elegiac in style and words, it is significant that when The Fanatic is himself chained, and his murderous position subverted, the accompanying song’s English lyrics then change to the words of an Indigenous language. With natural justice served, the Aboriginal Australian’s bush expertise is accentuated by the turn to native song lyrics as The Tracker hoists and hangs The Fanatic by his own petard.

Another acoustic binary identified by Johnson and Poole in the work of Weir that can also be found in the work of de Heer is that of ‘sanctioned order versus riot’, as exemplified by the intrusive and discordant sound of bagpipes. Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989), for instance, features the bagpipe’s “untempered sound weav[ing] through the dormitory fracas” (136), when, in a usually well-ordered New England boarding school, a riot ensues. This acoustic binary is also heard in the prison scene of Bad Boy Bubby (1993), in which Bubby is raped. Amid the structured order usually expected - if not demanded - in a police cell, a pipe band complete with kilts and sporrans is seen unexpectedly and quite incongruously accompanying the brutal anal rape of poor Bubby, who is dumbfounded by the whole inexplicable event. After being arrested due to his unknowing but unwelcome sexual advances, Bubby’s wide-eyed wonder and confusion at the new world he is exploring is further fore-grounded by this acoustic binary of ‘institutionalised order/anti-institutional rape and riot’ as personified by the uniformed marching band of bagpipers blasting out a cacophony of disruptive sound while he is unceremoniously buggered by his cell-mate.

The most consistently relied on and frequently returned to acoustic binary in de Heer’s œuvre , however, is witnessed in his preoccupation with a ‘hyper-masculine/non- masculine’ polarity, as I have argued most deliberately in the paper entitled “‘An avowal of male lack’: Sound in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories” published in Metro Magazine. Where women appear in the diegesis of de Heer’s films, they operate not as loci of male castration anxiety or as objects for the patriarchal and voyeuristic male

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gaze, but as effective agents of narrative. However, it must be understood that this polarity is not necessarily the same as a simple male/female gendered opposition. My reading is that the non-masculine may include the sensitive or child-like male, whereas hyper-masculine means macho, insensitive, exploitative and/or violent. Indeed, although there are a number of women and children lead characters, most of de Heer’s protagonists are male - but sensitive and child-like - and they enjoy success at the expense of more aggressive, controlling or hyper-masculine antagonists.38 None of de Heer’s protagonists is the controlling, macho hero of mainstream Hollywood, and the narrative arcs they engage in often involve them recognising and celebrating these non- hyper-masculine aspects of their personalities. Nurturing respect for the environment is another aspect of the de Heer hero, with only Dr. Plonk failing to benefit from this attitude.39 Thus we see a trend in the binary oppositions of protagonist and antagonist; the former grow through non-masculine behaviour, the latter fail through exploitative, hyper-masculine behaviour.

While this ‘hyper-masculine/non-masculine’ binary is rendered acoustically from the very beginning of de Heer’s œuvre, the instances are not frequent. In his first feature film, the children’s film Tail of a Tiger (1984), de Heer briefly sketches the acoustic binary between the bullying Spike and the sensitive Orville, depicted by Orville’s ability to imagine the electronic sounds of flying when he spins tin lids: a sound the audience also hears, as explicated in this thesis’ paper entitled “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”. This incident, while furthering audience identification with an unlikely protagonist, indicates a refinement of the ‘hyper-masculine/non-masculine’ binary in suggesting that victims of bullying may achieve success through the strength of their imaginations. In fact, a correlation between this and de Heer’s own childhood may be drawn: in interview, Jim Currie mentions that de Heer was victimised as a child: “he used to get beaten up at school” (Currie qtd. in Starrs “De Heer de sound”, 2009, forthcoming - see Appendix 12.2.3). In his next film after Tail of a Tiger, the 1988

38 See Table 1 in Appendix 12.3 of the thesis, which lists the overwhelmingly non hyper-masculine, non- controlling, lead characters in de Heer’s œuvre and notes their mostly positive outcomes. 39 Of course, Dr. Plonk is a non-naturalistic, ironic comedy: the protagonist travels through time to tell the political leaders of 2008 about impending eco-apocalypse, is mistaken for a terrorist and imprisoned.

202 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three. science fiction film Incident at Raven’s Gate, de Heer again creates this acoustic binary, but this time with pre-recorded music (possibly the only time he has not preferred to use original music in his entire career), when the recklessly driving, macho ‘hoon’, Eddie, is characterised by pounding hard rock music and the sensitive Policeman, Taylor, is represented with the stately music of Verdi. Under the apparent influence of extra- terrestrial aliens, the music playing on each car’s stereo swaps, as described in this thesis’ paper entitled “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, and the macho Eddie is only able to resume his aggressive driving when his hard rock music resumes.

This ‘hyper-masculine/non-masculine’ aural binary is also seen elsewhere in de Heer’s body of work. In Dingo (1991), the young hero, John Anderson, hears the muted trumpet of the film’s antagonist, Billy Cross, not the roar of the approaching jet engine carrying the French jazz star to the tiny outback township of Poona Flat. The boy breaks off an arm wrestle - the epitome of machismo contestation - because of the aural distraction, although his opponent, Peter, is entirely unable to hear the music. Insensitive to the sonic intrusion, Peter wants to compound his hyper-masculine success by wrestling again with the other arm. Eventually the roar of the jet is heard by the rest of the township and John’s erstwhile opponent and the crowd of mostly men speed to the airstrip in their battered trucks and ‘utes’. Unable to appreciate the music that is then performed for them, however, they leave without even perfunctory applause, with only John sufficiently taken enough to actually acknowledge to Cross that: “It’s the best thing I ever heard”. His arm-wrestling rival condescendingly asks with a sneer, “Did you get his autograph?” Later the still macho adult Peter returns to Poona Flat, driving a red Ferrari, intent on seducing Anderson’s wife after his own marriage has failed. He is still insensitive to the music and plugs his ears with his fingers as the band ‘Dingo and the Dusters’ rehearse. Weir’s attention to selecting pre-recorded music to create acoustic binaries is absent in de Heer’s work, and may well be a consequence of de Heer’s apparent preference for using original music with its concomitant absence of history. Such original compositions, created in collaboration with Michel Legrand and Miles Davis for Dingo, are examples of Kassabian’s afore-mentioned “assimilating

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identifications ... [which] encourage unlikely identifications” (Hearing Film, 2001, 2, original emphasis). Compared to Frank Dunne (the handsome, macho hero played by in Weir’s Gallipoli [1981]), the pre-pubescent John Anderson is a most unlikely protagonist for audiences to identify with.

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10.6 An Unconscious Weltanschauung?

In the interview conducted with de Heer he was asked, “Are you conscious, while you’re making them, of any imprint or signature or world-view that you leave on your films that indicates a preoccupation with the non-masculine voice?” His response was firmly in the negative: “I don’t have that consciousness at all and I try to avoid signatures and imprints” (qtd. in Starrs “The sounds of silence” 2007, 21), although he later makes a concession to the possibility that there is a signature Weltanschauung to be detected in his work when he concludes: “But look, you know, it’s up to guys who analyse to analyse those things” (21). Previously, the question was put to him that the themes he returns to in his films, the trope of the unheard voices of marginalised peoples, might be an unconscious expression, and he was immediately in agreement: “Yes. I’m sure. I’m sure there are degrees of unconscious [expression]” (20). These comments left this researcher with the conclusion that de Heer, who has an expressed interest in the welfare of children, unconsciously imparts in his films a coherent Weltanschauung or a philosophy for living that rejects the antithesis of happy, healthy childhood as typically represented by Hollywood with its favouring of aggressive, controlling, exploitative hyper-masculinity. That antithesis is most eloquently illustrated by de Heer’s hyper- masculine miners and hunters in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, who proudly assert their machismo, exploitative greed and disdain for mothers (as elaborated in the fifth paper of the thesis, “’An avowal of male lack’ Sound in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories” published in Metro Magazine). It is telling that the old man, Bolivar (Richard Dreyfuss), who lives in peaceful contrast to the ideals of the macho miners, succeeds by gaining a place and a position with Josephina whereby a happy, healthy family may be brought up. Like Bubby, we can see a sensitive, caring individual succeeding despite the hyper-masculine forces around him attempting to gain control over his life, with the realistic goal of a happy family life being his eventual reward.

Even in the film in which the distinctly un-auteurial move of disavowing authorship occurs, Dance Me To My Song (1997), de Heer’s distinctive world-view can still be read, as was argued in the third paper of the thesis, “Enabling the auteurial voice in

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Dance Me To My Song”, published in M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture. However, it must be noted that in acknowledging and nurturing Heather Rose from the very start (i.e. as an actor in Bad Boy Bubby [1993] and then as a screenwriter and actor in Dance Me To My Song [1997]), de Heer was validating her existence in a way that not only permitted and, indeed, helped to create her authorship, but also contributed to a public’s perception of his signature world-view. An individual’s concept of self never exists, according to Georg Hegel, in isolation: it always and only occurs when an Other serves to validate its existence. He wrote in 1806: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (1977, 111). Despite suffering no intellectual retardation, Rose had spent much of her life being cared for as if she were mentally disabled. Thus the significance of de Heer’s acknowledgement of her co-writing and lead acting role cannot be underestimated. What’s more, Rose is doubly an Other: different from de Heer due to her disability, she is also an Other due to her gender. Simone de Beauvoir stated in 1974: “He is the subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other” (2001, xix). Acknowledgement of the Other, however, usually results from a desire to exclude, by either subordination or stigmatization, that Other from society. Hegel noted that there is a concomitant “life- and-death” struggle for dominance (1977, 114), because in acknowledging the Other, “it has superseded the Other, for it does not see the Other as an essential being, but in the Other sees its own self. It must supersede this otherness of itself” (111). This struggle for dominance is not, apparently, even entered into by de Heer, as he leaves his name to surface only in the final credits, supplanted by the opening title “A film by Heather Rose”, and in this we see the true nature of his auteurial Weltanschauung. His is a world-view in which caring for and listening to the vulnerable, be they children, the disabled or marginalised minority groups is paramount. His film-making champions those whose voices are not heard, those unlikely protagonists that are not the controlling, hyper-masculine protagonists so often championed by Hollywood.

This signature interest in giving a voice to the marginalised and unlikely protagonists is seen throughout most of de Heer’s work: the man-child Bubby succeeds by gaining a happy, healthy family with children of his own in Bad Boy Bubby; the children of the

206 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three. future are nurtured by the Man who has learnt from the Alien woman in Epsilon; the macho, demeaning father in Alexandra’s Project loses his family and children due to his insensitivity; the little girl in The Quiet Room eventually sees hope for her family to heal; the excessively macho men in The Tracker (The Fanatic denies the basic human rights of Aboriginal Australians) and Ten Canoes (Ridjimiraril tries to deal with conflict through murder) are executed because they are not good family material (i.e. unlikely to be caring, nurturing parents); and in Dr. Plonk the good scientist is concerned for the future of the planet, although the greedy powers in office in 2007 succeed in imprisoning him. Such a world-view is less obvious in some of de Heer films than in others, requiring close textual analysis to distil it, and the world-view is not always conveyed to the audience via aural flourishes. Nevertheless, there is no doubt de Heer is concerned with the potential for acoustic binaries to reinforce his world-view, although this may not be a conscious awareness.

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10.7 An unconscious Preoccupation With Designing Films For and About Sound?

More easily argued than the existence of acoustic binaries in his films is the possibility that de Heer has a preoccupation with making much of his cinema not just with sound but narratively about sound: its production and its reception by characters in his films. Dingo (1991) is a film about an outback Australian jazz trumpeter’s life-long dream of travelling to France and playing with Billy Cross, his childhood inspiration for becoming a professional musician. Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is a film about an abused man-child whose journey of discovery in the new world he is exposed to is led by his ear and whose eventual success comes about through his becoming a singer in a band. The Quiet Room (1996) is a film about a child’s refusal to speak because all she hears is the constant bickering of her parents: her thoughts are communicated to the audience by voice over narration. Dance Me To My Song (1997) is a film about a woman who literally cannot speak without the assistance of a computer’s voice synthesiser. The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000) is a film about a man who hears the sorrow of the ‘widowed’ jaguar and the at-risk Amazonian jungle she lives in. The Tracker (2002) is a film about the subjugated Aboriginal Australian depicted through songs of Indigenous lament. Alexandra’s Project (2003) is about a man who only hears his neglected wife when she finally forces him to listen to a self-recorded videotape of herself firing verbal missiles of feminist critique. Ten Canoes (2006) is a film about Aboriginal Australian storytelling and the aural record of a people’s history is conveyed to the audience in their own tongue. Dr. Plonk (2007) is a film about a scientist’s words of warning unheeded and in which the story is told not with dialogue but with wall-to-wall music. Even the three films de Heer has only produced or script edited seem to have been chosen because they inspire thoughts about sound: there is the explicit reference to the aural in the titles of Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1999) and Mojgan Khadem’s Serenades (2002) while Ernie Clark’s Spank! (2001) is delightfully onomatopoeic.

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What is ceaselessly interesting for this researcher about de Heer’s preoccupations with an aurally imprinted worldview, is that it is probably not a consciously planned approach. Nevertheless, he did not particularly promote this analysis of his work in the interview with him. Wollen, however, encourages the analyst to find the auteur’s signature, “which it is the task of the critic to construct” (1980, 270), no matter how unconscious and elusive it may be. Richard Maltby wrote of the auteur’s mythic film, the ‘one film’ an auteur spends her or his life’s work trying to make: “The recurrent thematic consistencies or binary oppositions from which this myth could be distilled were usually attached both to the unconscious preoccupations of the director, and to those of the wider group for which she [sic] was taken to speak” (2003, 505). Herein may lie a clue to the task of deciphering de Heer’s signature, or “interior meaning” (Sarris 2000, 132): it is a typically Australian world-view, one that is quite probably already part of the national collective sub-conscious. Psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, can certainly contribute to our understanding of how film sound can position an audience on side with an unlikely protagonist. It is important to notice, however, that the unconscious operates on other levels, too. The director is never able to operate in isolation from society, as Barthes and Foucault argued, but is affected by the community’s ‘collective unconsciousness’, as Carl Jung or Lévi-Strauss might call it.

As has been hinted at in the thesis’ fourth paper, “Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie aural auteur”, Australia is an egalitarian, multicultural, near-utopian society compared to many more authoritarian or singularly homogenised monocultures. Heterogeneity and diversity are the bulwarks against which many contemporary Australians brace themselves when confronted with threats - real or imagined - from bigger, stronger populations. Within this unconscious Australian Zeitgeist de Heer’s Weltanschauung is perhaps commonplace,40 and, in a way, de Heer fits with Bazin’s concept of the ideal auteur: a director whose work reflects the historical and cultural

40 The Australian Government even lists a set of “Australian values” for prospective immigrants to commit to, which include: “equality of men and women […] a spirit of egalitarianism [… and] equal opportunity” (Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2007).

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moment. Present day Australian opinion - if one can be permitted to generalise - embraces an ideology opposed to the controlling, hyper-masculine heroics of Hollywood which, if it ever hears the marginalised, too often seeks to exploit or denigrate them. Likewise, the work of de Heer is relatively immune to Mulvey’s criticism of the typical Hollywood construction of a patriarchal subjectivity in which the audience is encouraged via the male gaze (and the male voice) to identify with an active, controlling hyper-masculine male protagonist, thus voyeuristically reducing female characters to passive objects of desire. Rather, de Heer affirms the egalitarian Australian construction of parity between the genders. Nor does de Heer leave his audiences yearning for Flinn’s “remote, impossibly lost utopias” (1992, 10) by using the insipid soundtracks of classical Hollywood cinema that function to restrict gender roles. With its many female role models, Australia and the Australian de Heer seek to refute Modleski’s accusation of a “patriarchal unconscious” (1990, 58) and as Wollen’s “unconscious catalyst” (1972, 168), de Heer reflects rather than transcends this historical and cultural moment.

The cynic may wonder if perhaps this nation’s collective unconsciousness is no less a myth than a director’s ‘one film’? De Heer’s unawareness - or disavowal - of an auteurist signature, as indicated in his interview with this researcher, also sits well within a post-structuralist criticism such as Lévi-Strauss’, who argued that the ultimate objective of the human sciences is to dissolve, not constitute ‘man’. He wrote “We are not therefore claiming to show how men think in myths but rather how the myths think themselves out in men [sic] and without men’s [sic] knowledge” (qtd. in Leach 1970, 51). Perhaps one can never be sure how much of a world-view detected in a film is the product of the alleged auteur and her or his unconscious preoccupations or the place and the times in which she or he lives - but that does not mean the myth is any less influential, if only insofar as it shapes people’s ideals. Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist Althusserian philosophy would posit that critics should pay close attention to the relationship between the conscious discourse (e.g. the film) and that which is omitted from it, thus shedding light upon the structural activities that gave rise to the discourse. The structural activities giving rise to the discourses of de Heer’s films must surely have at least something to do with the national world-view of this young country Australia,

210 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three. and with this regard, the director’s singular “individual vision” (Grant 2008, 1), tentatively identified as ‘de Heer’, may not be so personal and unique after all. Until, that is, it is compared to the visions depicted in so much mainstream cinema from Hollywood and then we then can see ‘de Heer’ as requiring a particularly unusual reading strategy, one requiring the use of careful hearing as well as sight. While he may not be a ‘tonal terrorist’, preferring as he does to make films that are accessible to the general film-going public, or even as much a music-loving “mélomane” (Gorbman 2007, 149) as pop song-obsessed Tarentino, de Heer nevertheless makes a detectable aural imprint on his films which furthers a typically Australian and egalitarian ethos.

Barry Keith Grant wrote on how auteurism has historically further moved film studies forward:

… there is no doubt that auteurism’s great legacy is that it encouraged a more serious examination of the movies beyond mere ‘entertainment’ and helped move the nascent field of film studies beyond its literary beginnings to a consideration of film’s visual qualities (2008, 5).

This thesis has argued for another move forward in the history of film studies: the more comprehensive examination of an auteur’s use of sound rather than just the film’s “visual qualities”, focusing on one very Australian director, Rolf de Heer, and this thesis has carefully heard this particular auteur’s aural world-view. However, this is certainly not to suggest that the study of auteurism ends here. Indeed, the individual generally held responsible for bringing auteur analysis to English-speaking academia, Andrew Sarris, said of his ‘theory’: “[It is] the first step rather than the last stop in solving the mysteries of the medium” (1990, 21), and aural auteurism is but another step forward. The next step for de Heer, is impossible to predict. Currie postulated, “What will Rolf de Heer do next? ... A cowboy musical with horsemen singing in the desert?” (qtd. in Starrs “De Heer de Sound”, 2009, forthcoming), while academic Brian McFarlane stated, “I hear it rumoured that Rolf de Heer’s next project is a nudist musical set in Antarctica” (2008, 41). Perhaps, the source of such conjecture himself is more serious in his predictions when he says, “I haven’t got the faintest idea what’s next … it could be anything” (De Heer qtd. in Starrs “Sounds of silence” 2007, 21). Undoubtedly, de Heer

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is not film-making’s only aural auteur and his signature world-view is not confined to sound alone: for all we know his next film may be a bold exercise in mise-en-scène.41 An auteur’s pre-occupations and urges to break cinematic conventions means it is impossible for those who analyse to do so in terms of black and white, for in film art shades of grey always exist. Nevertheless, as Roland Barthes said, “to listen is the evangelical verb par excellence” (1985, 250, original emphasis) and this thesis has shown the value in identifying Rolf de Heer as an aural auteur: a film-maker who wants us to listen to as much as watch her or his work.

41 Indeed, several of de Heer’s films have already boldly experimented with mise-en-scène: for example, the use of 32 cinematographers in Bad Boy Bubby; stop-motion control photography of the night skies and scenery to highlight the fragile beauty of nature in Epsilon; and the use of Peter Coad’s paintings to focus audience’s attention on the horror of the massacres in The Tracker, through, paradoxically, the elision of realistic vision of the violence. In fact, another (less innovative) thesis could have been written utilising standard auteur analysis alone of de Heer’s films. Were it not for the excessive alliteration, this alternative thesis might have been entitled Rolf de Heer Aussie Auteur (And Also Aural Auteur).

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11.2 Rolf de Heer's Filmography.

Tail of a Tiger. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. James M. Vernon. Roadshow Entertainment, 1984.

Incident at Raven’s Gate. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Marc Rosenberg and Anthony I. Ginnane. Hemdale/International Film Management, 1988.

Dingo. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Mark Rosenberg, Giorgio Draskovic and Marie Pascale Osterrieth. Meza, AZ: Spectrum Films, 1991.

Bad Boy Bubby. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, and Giorgio Draskovic. Entertainment Film Distributors, Ltd., 1993.

Epsilon. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Domenico Procacci and Giuseppi Pedersoli. Roadshow Entertainment, 1995.

The Quiet Room. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Domenico Procacci, Giuseppi Pedersoli, Sharon Jackson and Fiona Paterson. Fine Line Features, 1996.

Dance Me To My Song. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Giuseppe Pedersoli, Domenico Procacci, David Wolfe-Barry and Paola Corvino. Palace Films, 1997.

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Michelle de Broca, Julie Ryan, Ernst Goldschmidt, Inaki Nunez, Eddy Wijngaarde. Palace Films, 2000.

The Tracker. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan, Bridget Ikin, Domenico Procacci and Bryce Menzies. Fandango, 2002.

Alexandra’s Project. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan, Domenico Procacci, Antonia Zeccola, Sue Murray and Bryce Menzies. Film Movement, 2003.

Ten Canoes. Dir. Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan, Sue Murray, Domenico Procacci, Bryce Menzies, Richard Birrinbirrin, Belinda Scott, Nils Erik Nielsen. Palace Films, 2006.

Dr. Plonk. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer and Julie Ryan. Palace Films, 2007.

232 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

Appendix 12.1 Letters of Acceptance for As-yet-unpublished Papers.

233 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

234 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

235 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Appendix 12.2 The Published Interviews: 12.2.1 Rolf de Heer. 12.2.2 Graham Tardif. 12.2.3 Jim Currie.

236 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

237 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

graham tardif & the aural auteur d bruno starrs on rolf de heer’s composer collaborator

NOT ONLY DOES THE SUBJECT MATTER OF ROLF DE HEER’S FILMS VARY WIDELY, THEIR

SOUNDTRACKS ARE ALSO ALWAYS DIFFERENT AND UNEXPECTED, AND ARE AT TIMES RAISED

TO A LEVEL OF DOMINANCE AMONGST THE NUMEROUS INTERACTIONS INFORMING THE

NARRATIVE. MUSIC SCHOLAR CAT HOPE COMMENTS: “EACH OF DE HEER’S FILMS MERITS A

DETAILED TREATISE ON THE WAY THEY FEATURE INNOVATIVE SOUND IDEAS IN THE

SCRIPTING AND PRODUCTION STAGES, RESULTING IN SOME OF THE MOST CHALLENGING AND

EXCITING CINEMA MADE IN AUSTRALIA TODAY” (WWW.SENSESOFCINEMA.COM). THIS

AUTEUR’S ATTENTION TO THE AURAL IS PERHAPS EXEMPLIFIED BY HIS LONG TERM

COLLABORATION WITH COMPOSER GRAHAM TARDIF, WHOM I INTERVIEWED IN MAY OF THIS

YEAR. TARDIF HAS CREATED THE MUSIC FOR 10 OF DE HEER’S 12 FEATURE FILMS, THE

EXCEPTIONS BEING A CONCESSION TO THE JAZZ ARTISTRY OF THE LEGENDARY MILES DAVIS

AND MICHEL LEGRAND IN DINGO (1991) AND THE INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN PERFORMERS OF

THEIR OWN MUSIC IN TEN CANOES (2006).

Since meeting de Heer when the budding writer/director/producer was still at the Australian Film,

Television and Radio School, and composing the music for his diploma short, The Audition,

Tardif’s subsequent career highs include The Tracker (2002) which he says “was built around the idea of these paintings [by Peter Coad] and these ten or eleven songs going through the film. To a large extent, the music informs [de Heer’s] thinking.” Certainly, de Heer is a director attuned to sound designer Randy Thom’s demand that directors should be “Designing a movie for sound”

(www.filmsound.org), not simply leaving it to the end in the hope it may be somehow improved by the hasty addition of some great music.

Tardif explains how early he is usually involved by de Heer in the process: “We’d have a lot of discussions and we’d sit down and talk about what it should be like and we’d plot the film out together and then I’d come up with the music based on that discussion […] but I’d actually start serious thinking when there’s a finished script.” I asked Tardif how he communicates melodic ideas

243 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

to someone without musical training: “We speak in terms of the feeling of the scene or the underlying emotion that he’s trying to convey rather than discussing diminished sevenths or anything like that. We can talk musical styles, I mean he’s not musically illiterate to the extent that we can’t talk about whether it would be a western style or a percussive, or, you know, he’ll understand that, or whether it’s classical or orchestral or rock.” Thus, Tardif and de Heer decided early in pre-production for The Tracker that they wanted the feel of a live band fronted by an

Indigenous male singer. The result was Archie Roach later performing the songs—which de Heer had penned and Tardif had composed—live at a screening of the film in the Melbourne Concert Hall.

Awards were received for best score from the Film Critics Circle and the IF Awards. The songs serve as an extra character, expressing the sorrow of a subjugated people, and Tardif’s music positively charges the text of the screen’s image.

But Tardif’s scores are not guilty of simply retelling the story or redundantly repeating what the dialogue or visuals have already made clear. He illustrates his occasional intention to juxtapose conflicting emotions by referring to a scene in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000), a film characterised by a lush, epic score performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and a 40-voice choir: “Where they were rowing back across the river after the leopard had been killed, now that was something where I think I used music against what was going on in the action to give a lot more depth to the scene, rather than just replicate what’s going on in the action, to juxtapose the visuals which were quite fast paced, but the music was quite slow and glorious in a way. Rather than give a sense of the pace of the boats and the rowing it was more a sense of what the homecoming actually meant: it was an achievement and a victory but at the same time, because the death of the leopard was not something the old man had wanted to happen, it was a tragedy as well.”

Alexandra’s Project (2003) had an entirely different kind of score. Within a minimalist, synthesised soundscape, the non-diegetic music evokes a sense of tense foreboding that maps the deterioration of suburban family life. Tardif identifies this as one of his favourite works because

“unlike other films in which I had multiple tones and dynamics and instruments to work with, I wanted to push the tension with the minimum tonal range that would actually work with the minimum palette possible, so it was probably my most experimental film.” With such a spare,

244 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

unobtrusive, electronic score, ambient sounds like the turn of a key in a deadlock take on an almost menacing aspect and the hyper-reality of these sounds, amidst the relative silence, informs the audience that Steve, the beleaguered husband, is very isolated and disconnected from any outside help. The sound scenarios in Alexandra’s Project transcend the traditional role of the soundtrack of merely supporting the onscreen image. The auditory elements of the film’s metallic timbre highlight not just Steve’s mental terror but also further the depiction of the suburban brick veneer house as family prison. The integration of all the aural ingredients communicates these ideas effectively, and rather than following the eye, they lead it.

In 2007, de Heer returned to Tardif to compose for his slapstick silent comedy, Dr. Plonk, which

Tardif identifies as another film score he is proud of “because it was 90 minutes of wall-to-wall music.” Performed by Melbourne band The Stiletto Sisters, the combination of violin, piano accordion, double bass and piano is beautifully lively, and one senses this black and white homage to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin would not have worked as well with de Heer’s original idea of accompaniment by a single Wurlitzer organ, regardless of any period authenticity it may have lent.

But Tardif acknowledges the expense involved in composing and recording original music for films rather than pre-recorded songs, “Whenever you go into a studio you have to be really prepared because of the cost of time—$50,000 a day for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. If you’re not

‘there’ when you go into the studio you’re just spending studio time rewriting and that’s really counterproductive. With The Stiletto Sisters I worked with them for a week after the score had been written...we got the score right and then went into the studio for three days to do the recording.”

De Heer’s reliance on original music is in stark contrast to the Australian film industry’s tendencies, as identified by Rebecca Coyle: “In the period from the so-called renaissance of Australian film that occurred in the 1970s, there have been two identifiable ‘eras’ in film music. In the first period, orchestral arrangements were frequently used [… as opposed to] the subsequent era, when

Australian film followed an international tendency to include popular music in soundtracks”

(“Introduction: Tuning up”, Screen Scores, AFTRS, Sydney, 1997). But de Heer’s bucking of the trend is not surprising, for as Tardif puts it: “With his combination of the sound and the music, he is an aural auteur.” RealTime issue #85 June-July 2008 pg. 27

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“De Heer de Sound: Jim Currie on designing sound for Rolf de Heer”

By D. Bruno Starrs.

Starrs: What do you think is Rolf de Heer’s ideological stance in his films?

Currie: Well, if you’re going to examine Rolf de Heer’s ideological stance, and you can only do it in bits, the first bit you wish to examine is crew selection. That’s a fundamental base. It’s almost important as, from my perspective, almost important as the casting of his work. Because the two form the building blocks that enable him to have the realization of his script, of his idea, of his dream. He’s a dreamer. He dreams wonderful things. When we did Bad Boy Bubby [1993] for example, I never questioned that it was a creative work that somebody had come out of their head and then put it all down. However, when we went to Venice [Film Festival], there was a suggestion from the interviewers: “Did you have a problem with your mother? Was there something in your past life or in your childhood that initiated the whole thing of Bad Boy Bubby?” No, of course not, it’s just a creative work. It just came out of his head.

I just thought I’d toss that in.

Starrs: Talking about particular films of Rolf’s, with Dr. Plonk [2007] he’s made a silent film. Do you think that Rolf de Heer doesn’t care about sound?

Currie: Absolutely not. No, Rolf de Heer’s care for sound is possibly the highest that you could imagine. And he involves himself in all levels of the sound work as well. Apart from Dr. Plonk, which he brought through as a musical score, I mean it’s a silent film in the sense that it was shot as a silent film, but it has a musical score that accompanies the work. We discussed how the audience would receive the music. What intention should we have in

246 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three. trying to create the idea of an old time musical? So, for example, we used various combinations of reverb. So although we only had these conversations right at the end of the film, in a short space of time, well, having worked with Rolf for 20 years, it was quite possible because we’re both manoeuvring and moving in the same plane.

Another example: the jumping off point for Rolf and I into a different creative world was Bad Boy Bubby. The first third of the film were recorded by Rolf himself. He knew what he needed, so he went off with a recorder and a mike, by himself, into the factory area and found the sound that he wanted and came back and said to me “Here, work with this.”

I can’t think of many directors that first of all have that level of involvement or have the skills to pick up the recording gear and say, “Yep, I’ll be back”, and off he went and found stuff and said, “Look, here, work with this”. Before that there was [Incident at] Raven’s Gate [1988]. Rolf came into the edit suite just mucking around, and he looks - in those days there were dubbing charts with the tracks all laid out, streamers on them - and he said, “Good, very good.”

He said, “What are these tracks?”

“Stereo tracks.”

He said, “There’s only two of them.”

And I said, “Yeah, that’s right, everything else is in line. The other hundred and so tracks in line.”

And he said, “I thought this was Dolby Stereo. Why are there only two tracks in Stereo?”

247 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

So, already, at Raven’s Gate, at that early stage of his career, he was beginning to question the medium and the method, and incorporating that into his thinking.

“Why are there only two stereo tracks if this is called Dolby Stereo?” “Where is the . . .”

So then we began a discussion and I guess we learnt from each other over 20 years. So when it comes to things like The Tracker [2002], we knew pretty well what we were going to do beforehand and the basis of everything that we’d learnt and put together resolved itself in Ten Canoes [2006].

Starrs: Back to Bad Boy Bubby, he used 32 cinematographers but only one sound designer, yourself, and one composer, Graham Tardif. Why do you think he was prepared to experiment with the vision and not the sound?

Currie: Oh, we were experimenting with the sound. Oh yeah. The lead actor, Nick Hope, had two microphones ala the binaural setup, and that was Rolf’s idea. People gave me the credit for it. And I said “No, it’s not my idea. It’s Rolf’s.” Rolf road-tested the microphones. We put it on the hat that he wears. And we went off and went into traffic, we went into shops, we went around the factory area, in and out of buildings, with me trailing behind with a recorder. So, oh yeah, Bad Boy Bubby was a big experiment in sound right from the start. And then we read in a magazine that there was this new MS microphone from Neumann in Germany. It was a studio microphone, but it wasn’t meant for field work, so we adapted it and stretched it to the limit to use it in the field. So it was one big experimentation all the way through. You couldn’t have 32 recordists, it would be a complete mess. You needed continuity, it was still experimentation, of which he and I were the main protagonists in that experimentation, but you couldn’t have 32 recordists, as you could with the pictures. See the DOPs never got the script before or after, they only got their own scene. Poor dears. But they could light it any way they liked.

248 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

Starrs: Academics, Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocco, suggested in Metro Magazine that the label ‘aurator’ be used for a person who goes to one of Rolf de Heer’s films. Aurator. What do you think of that term?

Currie: What does “aurator” mean?

Starrs: Oh, okay. Rolf was also a bit dumbfounded with that term. Well, they suggested that for the person in the audience of a Rolf de Heer film, sound is more important than vision. Rather than being a spectator, they are an ‘aurator’.

Currie: Cinema overall is 70% sound. Because your ears are far more developed than your eyes. You cannot stop yourself hearing, even if you put your finger in your ears, you still hear. Because it goes through the cheek bones and everything. But eyes are . . . you can shut your eyes and that’s it.

See, the interplay of music with an audience is so special because no matter what the picture does, the music can take them to a new way of considering the image. It’s a transporter. And I regard atmospheres as being on the same continuum. They transport people. They fix the audience. Whether it’s done intellectually or whether it’s sub- conscious, I don’t know. It takes them and puts them in a special spot.

Starrs: Do you think Rolf de Heer’s films give a voice to marginalised people? People who otherwise wouldn’t have a voice - women, children, Aboriginal people, for example?

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Currie: If you’d said to me ‘Does Rolf de Heer show great concern with the environment and the damage done to the environment by the human race?’, I would have said definitely, ‘Yes’. Does he give a voice to marginalised people? Yeah, you could argue that. Well there was the lass with cerebral palsy in the wheelchair [in Dance Me To My Song (1997)]. I mean, yeah. That’s Heather Rose. There’s the Aboriginal people from Ramingining [in Ten Canoes]. But what it did for the people from Ramingining is it gave them a memory. It projects: ‘Yes, they are humorous, they are intellectual, they are an embodiment of their 40,000 years of culture’. Yeah. They’re very proud. They thanked us for assisting them to have a memory for their Aboriginal youth. So that’s how I view Ten Canoes. I mean Ten Canoes was a huge responsibility, because if it wasn’t accepted by the white society, then we would have made something only for ourselves and the Aboriginal community, but its aim was to rest as a document with the Aboriginal community and also go out to the wider world to inform, to entertain. We weren’t sure of that bit because it’s in Ganalbingu and [laughing] there’s not a white person in it!

You know even the ‘Making Of’ documentary [The Balanda and the Bark Canoes (dir. Molly Reynolds, Tania Nehme and Rolf de Heer 2006] was careful that there were only flashes of white people, the rest was focused by Molly Reynolds on the craftsmanship of the canoe making and how Ten Canoes evolved.

But, you only underestimate Rolf de Heer at your peril. I can tell you. And don’t try and second-guess him. Because who would have thought, 15 minutes after we’d finished the last bit of Ten Canoes, the Dolby guy had just left, Rolf said “I’ve got a bit of an apology to make to you, mate.”

I said, “Oh. What’s that?”

He said, “My next film is going to be a silent film.”

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Well, I thought it was one of his Dutch jokes. He’s a very good jokester. He keeps a straight face. But it was true! [laughing]. So you wouldn’t have suspected that, would you? Then, during the making of Dr Plonk,, I said to him “So the next one is going to be a musical? A cowboy musical with horsemen singing in the desert?”

It’s not: “I’m going to do something totally out of left field.” Since Bad Boy Bubby, Rolf has never taken a backward step. He’s always gone to something new, something that challenges him. So it’s not a “I’m going to do something right off the wall this time, I’m going to do something unexpected like Alexandra’s Project [2003].” We went from The Tracker, Alexandra’s Project, Ten Canoes, to Dr Plonk.” I mean, it’s, it’s just who he is.

Starrs: Do you think Rolf de Heer is a particularly macho sort of director?

Currie: No, definitely not. No. No. In fact, because he came to Australia from Holland via Indonesia, and hardly spoke any English, he used to get beaten up at school. But he had a brother. Big boy. And his brother used to wait outside the school and keep all the larrikins and the boofheads away - I mean that was Australia in the 60s and 70s when if you looked different, or you came from an ethnic background you were, you know, a wog, mate. You know? You’d go to the footy and eat pies and pasties. Is he tough? Yes, he’s tough. But, he’s mentally tough. As in a macho guy? Does that mean when he goes into the desert, he walks into the desert without any shoes and socks on? Or in South America, he walks through the swamp … I mean in South America he walked through the jungle … you know, he just went straight off into the … Brave as all getout. Is that macho? I don’t know. I think to put a term onto a filmmaker that he is a ‘macho director’, is not part of what the inner drive of being a filmmaker is all about. And where he is a particularly adventurous filmmaker, mentally adventurous, and physically he backs that up by going into the field … and he won’t do anything that … he won’t risk the film crew in a way that some other producers and directors do. He will be there, like in Ten Canoes, he was there in the water, with the crocodiles – incidentally I was in the

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boat – but he was in the water, with the DOP and with all the other lighting people and people that needed to be in the water to film the action, so if that’s being macho, yes, maybe he is. I don’t see the word macho in my head, he’s just a filmmaker and exposes the intellectual and physical attributes of him achieving the film, achieving the idea, and he’ll do it himself.

Starrs: At the gym that I train at, there are young guys who go to the cinema a lot. They like films with action and car chases and explosions and blood and guts, and not many of them have seen a Rolf de Heer film. Why do you think Rolf doesn’t make films for that demographic?

Currie: I can only answer for why Rolf doesn’t make violent, or a different type of genre film, those car chases and smash and grab things. Years ago he was offered a large amount of money, that would have set him up for life, to do one of the Chainsaw Massacre films.

And me included said to him, “Well, why are you not doing this? You’d get a million US or whatever they pay these directors …”

And he said, “Because I can’t show it to my children.”

Now that was that and we’ve never discussed it again. And he knows that I don’t like violence in films, I don’t like mistreatment of children in film. I back off that. I’ve not done some films because, whether it makes any difference to the filmmaker or not, because they have … in the script there is denigration of children. Not interested. “Oh well, this is a demonstration …” No. You can do those demonstrations in real-world documentaries. It’s not in my lexicon, or Rolf’s, to do so.

Starrs: What do you think an auteur is? And is Rolf de Heer an auteur?

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Currie: Oh yeah, is Rolf de Heer an auteur? Yes, he is. Absolutely. And there are only two of them in Australia. They’re both Dutch, for whatever that means. There’s Rolf and . And to my mind, because I’ve worked with them both - for Paul, 30 years, and Rolf, 20, only because Paul’s older - they are the only Australian filmmakers that can lay claim to being auteurs. An auteur to me is somebody who captures the whole idea of filmmaking, has control of every area, writes the script, is involved in the production and does not seek to create a mountain, but seeks to create a small gem that embodies the human spirit and will be uplifting for the future generations. Whether that’s correct by the academics, I’ve no idea, Bruno.

Starrs: It is a very loaded term.

Currie: Well used, isn’t it?

Starrs: It’s well used. And often misused. And sort of misunderstood. The people who coined it, the French critics in the 1950s, were primarily interested in the visual signature of a filmmaker.

Currie: That’s right.

Starrs: Perhaps because after WWII, when they’d been denied most of the Hollywood films, they were suddenly swamped with Hollywood films of which sound, because it was in a foreign language, was of a lesser consideration to them.

Do you think that Rolf de Heer is an ‘aural’ auteur?

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Currie: Yeah. Because, let me give you an example of Rolf de Heer’s measure of the integration of sound. So if he’s an aural auteur . . . this is when we were in South America, with The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, we were having a meeting, a multi-national crew, there are Dutch, there are Belgiums, there are French, there are Australians. And at that meeting, Rolf stood up and says “One more thing, in a lot of this film, the sound is actually more important than the picture.”

I heard the DOP fall off his chair.

And that would have been a stunning revelation to everybody else for Rolf to say publicly what he and I discuss, and of course the Australian sound crew suddenly were walking on air, because the director had stood up in front of the whole 60 or 70 people and said that.

Starrs: So how does that make him an aural auteur? An auteur of sound?

Currie: He’d already heard the jungle. He’d understood its interrelationships. He understood its interrelationship with the principal character, which was the old man [Richard Dreyfuss]. He knew how the jungle affected the old man and the jaguar, and their relationship. So he was already building those things in his head before we’d even started. He and I had been to all the locations in South America and investigated them. And when you know someone well you just talk about this or that. You know, “It looks good.” “Yeah.” “Well that’s a good sound, yeah, we should get some night sounds, right.”

We built up this expectation between us that I’ll bring back from these locations a catalogue of sounds available. From The Tracker we came back with about 8 hours of different sounds of Arkaroola [in South Australia]. I mean that’s the truth in location that

254 Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three. the audience has, they hear and feel and taste the realness of the location. The same with Old Man in South America and the same with Ten Canoes. There would have been about 16 hours of material and we used every bit of it in the sound design. And that’s Rolf and I, that’s our expectations, that’s what we do. That’s an aural auteur. The dialogue that he uses is very carefully chosen, he understands and he likes the dialogue to be from the location and not post sync. In fact, I can’t think of a film where we’ve done much post sync. We did one word from The Tracker. We didn’t do any on Alexandra’s Project. Dr Plonk didn’t have any. No. And so I think that’s quite a justifiable term to use with Rolf, yeah.

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Appendix 12.3 Table 1. Protagonists and Antagonists - Their Outcomes in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Film Title Protagonist Protagonist’s Antagonist Antagonist’s Outcome Outcome Tail of a Tiger “Orville” – a Realisation of his “Spike” – a Frustration and (1984) sensitive, insecure dream of building bullying juvenile loss of face due to juvenile male with and flying a male. his victim’s a dream. biplane. success. Incident at “Eddie” – an Becomes more “Richard” – a Loses the love of Raven’s Gate insensitive adult sensitive to the controlling jealous his wife. (1988) male. needs of others. adult male. Dingo (1991) “John ‘Dingo’ Becomes a happily “Peter” – an Becomes a Anderson” – a married family insensitive successful sensitive juvenile man and achieves juvenile male who businessman but male with a dream. his boyhood dream cannot hear the fails in his of playing trumpet music and wants marriage and fails alongside his jazz to continue arm to seduce Dingo’s idol. wrestling. wife. Bad Boy Bubby “Bubby” – a Becomes a happily “Flo” and “Pop” – Murdered by (1993) sensitive, married man with Bubby’s Bubby. inexperienced a wife and two insensitive, male man-child. playful children. uncaring parents. Epsilon (1995) “She” – an Rescued and “He” – a macho Becomes a ecologically returned to her and ecologically champion for the sensitive adult home planet. insensitive adult environment. female (from the male. planet Epsilon). The Quiet Room An un-named Forces her parents Her squabbling Realise their (1996) juvenile female. to attempt parents. faults. reconciliation. Dance Me To My “Julia” – a well- Wins the love of a “Madelaine” – an Unable to win the Song (1997) meaning, sensitive, caring man. insensitive, selfish, love of several woman-child. adult female. men.

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The Old Man Who “Antonio Bolivar” Wins the love of The “Slimy Toad” Loses the love of Read Love Stories – a sensitive adult Josephina. Mayor – who Josephina. (2000) male who tries to wants to exploit live in harmony the jungle. with the jungle.

The Tracker “The Tracker” – a Gains his freedom “The Fanatic” – an Is executed for his (2002) sensitive, from the troopers. insensitive, racist crimes. respectful, adult murderer. male. Ten Canoes Dayindi – a young Learns not to covet Minygululu – a Quells potential (2006) man on the verge Minygululu’s wise tribal elder. rivalry through of adulthood. wife. storytelling. Dr. Plonk (2007) “Dr. Plonk” – a Mistaken for a Politicians who They continue sensitive, terrorist and refuse to believe heading for environmentally imprisoned. the predictions of environmental aware adult male. apocalypse. apocalypse.

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12.4 Ethics Application and Approval.

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