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By Deb Verhoeven
During this hugely readable research of Australian cinema, Deb Verhoeven explores the connection among a chain of flicks produced in numerous sessions of Australian background which are associated by means of a typical thread—the repeated snapshot of sheep. Verhoeven makes a speciality of key 'sheep films': The Squatter's Daughter (Hall, 1933) and Bitter Springs (Smart, 1950). either videos are concerned about the nationwide venture, during which sheep turning out to be and state development are seamlessly aligned. yet Verhoeven artfully demonstrates that it truly is accurately of their emphasis on textual re-iteration and repetition that the sheep motion pictures critique an another way ostensibly 'national' vision.
In the method Verhoeven sheds new gentle at the significance and implication of discourses of originality within the Australian cinema.
'Truthfully i'll by no means see those motion pictures in rather an analogous approach back; it really is within the most sensible feel a unusually compelling and unsettling book.'—Professor Tom O'Regan, college of Queensland
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Extra resources for Sheep and the Australian Cinema
Example text
Sheep accompany us in our explorations into the dimensions of an Australian ontology: If I crudely suggest that the Australian sheep films address Australians as animals, I don’t intend to deploy a disparaging metaphor (although in attending some Australian films it might feel as if one is being led like a lamb to the slaughter). Instead, I mean to point towards the way in which the encounter between the national cinema and its audience suggests an understanding or even an assumption of a supplementary subjectivity, a sense of being as an audience that exceeds and questions the everyday experience of identity.
Being ‘speaks’ on behalf of sheep. Sheep have no capacity to represent themselves—no language. The animal is passive in relation to all the dimensions of Being (even when metaphorically positioned as an absent figure of it). Being simultaneously erases and inscribes sheep—sheep that are always-already lost. indd 25 25 8/3/06 5:03:30 PM Sheep are outside Being in so much as they are obscured behind or underneath it (as if Being is a palimpsest). If you scratch away at the surface of Being long enough you might eventually uncover some patiently milling sheep.
4 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1988, p. 66. , p. 67. 6 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, Seabury Press, New York, 1978, p. 357. 7 Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p. 14. 8 Alphonso Lingis, ‘The rapture of the deep’, in Excesses: Eros and Culture, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983, p. 10. , p. 13. 10 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans.