The real gaze in Australian cinema

ABSTRACT This paper takes up Todd McGowan’s rethinking of psychoanalytic film theory to consider what such approaches might disclose in the work of a national cinema. I focus on Australia’s national cinema where it is caught, I argue, between the Imaginary gaze of an aestheticized nationalism and a traumatic ‘Real’ gaze that disturbs the field of cultural vision. I show how Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 Wake in Fright introduces the Real gaze to Australia’s cinematic vocabulary where it is taken up in the film Renaissance and disturbs the aesthetic inquiry into nationalism with the traumatic Real frequently repressed in national discourses. Here I suggest that if a national cinema can be seen to function as a form of ‘public dreaming,’ this Real gaze functions as a national symptom that, as in the psychoanalytic clinic, troubles the story the subject tells about itself. After mapping the emergence of this Real gaze in Wake in Fright, I consider where this visual trope is reworked in more recent Gothic landscape films, such as Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo (2008), before considering how post-Mabo history films reverse the terms of this gaze such that what haunts the national Imaginary is put before the viewer without relent.