The ambiguities of ancestry: antiquity, ruins and converging traditions of Australian Gothic Cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT ‘Gothic’ is identified as a prominent mode of Australian cinema since the 1970s. In commentary on Australian Gothic films, the aesthetic ancestry is often traced to literary conventions in colonial and pre-colonial British or European literatures. This article draws attention to the convergence of these literary and cinematic traditions and compares the prevalence of landscape as a Gothic figure in Australian films with the architectural elements of historical Gothic literature. The discussion proceeds through the British Gothic novel and its history as analogue of Gothic architecture of the time, and several recent accounts of ‘Australian Gothic’ cinema that invoke this history of the Gothic novel, and the dissonant description of ‘Australian Gothic’ in Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka’s account of Australian Revival films. Two recent productions, Celeste [Hackworth 2018. Australia: Unicorn Films] and the television remake of Picnic at Hanging Rock [Rymer, Kondracki and Brotchie 2018. TV Mini-Series. Australia: Amazon Studios/FremantleMedia/Screen Australia], are compared as recent parodies of Gothic aesthetics that foreground architectural features over landscape. It is argued that while it is important to identify antecedents, the colonial connotations of ancestry are ambiguous and potentially overpower attention to the generative visions in Australian Gothic cinema.