(Critical Essay) Rochelle Siemienowicz.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Queensland Press
The history of Australian national cinema is one of visually claiming the nation as our own, of depicting the history, the landscape and the people in such a way as to take possession of them; of allowing a sense of being at home in a place, where there is ambivalence about our right to feel at home. As filmmaker and writer Ross Gibson has argued, `non-Aboriginal Australia is a young society, under-endowed with myths of "belonging"'.(1) The persistent attempt to possess our geographical space and to tell our own stories reveals a profound sense of unease with the idea of Australia as home, whether this be in the depiction of a harsh and alien natural beauty (for example, the weirdly unknowable landscape of Peter Weir's 1975 Picnic at Hanging Rock) or through the narrative use of soul-numbingly bleak and isolating urban social environments, like that seen in Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992). Despite such diverse settings and stories, our cinematic narratives persistently revisit the physical and spiritual dimensions of these themes of displacement, alienation and homelessness.
It is unsurprising that such themes dominate the earlier films of Australia's 1970s cultural renaissance. This was, after all, a period obsessed with the search for national identity and the need for Australian culture to assert itself against perceived cultural imperialism, from both America and Britain. What is notable, however, is that these themes persist after the passing of more than thirty years. Recent films such as Floating Life (Clara Law, 1996), Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer, 1994), Vacant Possession (Margot Nash, 1995), Dead Heart (Bryan Brown, 1995), The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Richard Flanagan, 1998) and Head On (Anna Kokinos, 1998) all in some way draw portraits of homelessness and dislocation.
While there are similarities between the subject matter of these contemporary films and their predecessors there has been a dramatic transformation in the specific kinds of homelessness explored. Speaking of globalisation, Harvey observes that `everything, from novel writing and philosophizing to the experience of laboring or making a home, has to face the challenge of accelerating turnover time and the rapid write-off of traditional and historically acquired values'.(2) The old problems of dislocation and lack of identity have by no means disappeared but in addition Australians now face a new set of challenges in their attempts to create comfortable, secure and hopeful homes -- or to be, in John Howard's terms, `comfortable and relaxed'.
Rather than simply tracing the continuation of these themes of homelessness and alienation from the seventies through to the present, it is perhaps more interesting and constructive to look at some films that offer a radical departure from the grim depiction of Australian home life. These films give a generally positive evocation of the Australian experience of home, while still grappling with some of the specific problems associated with the rapid change, dislocation and capitalist imperatives accompanying the last several decades of accelerated globalisation. The Castle and Floating Life are narratives which illuminate the possibilities and problems of being at home in Australia in the 1990s. Through their depictions of various social, cultural and economic problems, each film sketches out a different strategy for making a home in the face of globalisation.
The Castle -- Re-valuing Home
On a number of different levels this strikingly simple film can be read as a response to globalisation and a reassertion of the values of home, even if that home happens to be a suburban bungalow caricature, complete with hills-hoist and pet greyhounds, next door to an airport runway. For the Kerrigans, their dumpy house is a castle under siege, a precious place that must be defended against a multinational corporate project that needs to displace them in order to expand. The values of this humble home have nothing to do with commercial value. In fact, at the heart of this exuberantly daggy film is the idea that the values of home are fiscally irreducible and contrary to the global logic of flexible capital accumulation. Time and time again the film reminds us that money can't buy what the Kerrigans have; that it's not a house, it's a home; that to offer compensation is to completely miss the point. Inverting the values of capital is a key strategy used by people trying to create and maintain homes for themselves. It could be suggested that the makers of The Castle made the Kerrigan family home appear as aesthetically unappealing as possible in order to reinforce the idea that the value of home has nothing to do with `good taste' or expensive luxury. The fact that the house is evolving in an inelegant and ramshackle way -- new patio, talk of a mezzanine addition, the addition of a granny flat-cum-greyhound shelter -- belies the fact that these things are expressions of creativity, of the family crafting for themselves an environment that expresses their own life-world. The Kerrigans are determined to imprint their small part of the world with their very particular values. They like the aeroplanes landing in their backyard (`beautiful machines', says Darryl Kerrigan, as they roar above his roof); they like their mother's gruesome handicrafts, and their sister's hideous hairstyle. The Kerrigans are unfazed by their lead contaminated soil or the obstruction of their skylines by high-voltage power lines, both at home and also at their Bonnie Doon holiday house. The film's comedy hinges on the family's happiness, tranquillity and love where the audience is tempted to see just an outer suburban eye-sore, overflowing with kitsch.
It is The Castle's loving treatment of kitsch that signals a dramatic shift in popular Australian cinema. It gently yet firmly resists the tendency so prevalent in our comedies of taking Australian kitsch and turning it into something cheap, dirty and a little bit cruel. Previous depictions of Australian suburbia have been dominated by presentations of it as alien, grotesque, or at the very least, boring and ugly. Reviewing the kitsch representations of Dame Edna and the 1970s `ocker' comedies, there is evident a self-loathing amidst the energetic and often hilarious celebration of our national culture. More recently, films like Priscilla Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliot, 1994), Muriel's Wedding (P J Hogan, 1994) and Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992) have continued to represent our culture in ways which, though in many respects affectionate, are still critical, dismissive of the family, and skeptical of the ability for happiness to be found in the ordinariness of suburban existence.
With its particular brand of self-mocking humour and obsessive ethnographic detail, The Castle has an obvious heritage in these films yet it adds a new element: warmth and a genuine belief in the unquantifiable preciousness of ordinary experience. Harvey argues that the rapid change and movement associated with globalisation gives rise to the desire to create, through the home, `a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion'.(3) The home, he argues, `becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression'.(4) In contrast to its predecessors, this film exhibits an affectionate acknowledgement that, while it may seem gauche and unsophisticated, suburbia is nevertheless where most of us live. It is ours and it is real but we may be in danger of losing it if we are not prepared to assert the importance of its humble values, represented by that delightful museum of kitsch, the Kerrigan poolroom. Any important gifts, trophies or photographs immediately go to this room which is the ultimate private exhibition space, a shrine to the values of family, home and the familiar and therefore a space of resistance against the values of instantaneity and disposability.
There are a number of ways in which the Kerrigan family are depicted as, to borrow Michel de Certeau's terms, re-using and re-coding against the grain of capitalism's disciplinary structures. One such re-coding might be seen in the film's depiction of the family's relationship to its television set. The Kerrigans have a `low-brow' love of game shows and Hey Hey it's Saturday, and TV seems to be one of their primary sources of entertainment but there is nothing passive or depersonalising about this. As an affirmation of family values, the TV is always `turned down' during mealtimes. Afterwards it is watched as a prompt for group laughter and discussion. The banal and silly viewing material is re-used by the family to reinforce their togetherness. This can be contrasted with the lead-in to the television program, The Simpsons, where the beloved and dysfunctional family madly scurry to plonk themselves in front of programs that they seem to absorb with alarming and zombie-like eagerness, a fact which is underlined by the creative use of bizarre variations on this arrangement before every ad-break (the ground swallows the couch; the family turn into a group of squatting toads, etc). There is a remarkable innocence in the way the Kerrigans use the box.
The Castle offers a classic example of `Lilliput strategies' in action -- the tactics of `little people' fighting against giant forces.(5) In this case it is the Kerrigan family against a multinational corporate project that has infiltrated all levels of government. The task for these battlers is to save their house from compulsory acquisition. The manner in which they defend themselves clearly refers to contemporary issues of indigenous title. The overt polemic on the importance of constitutional legal rights and the moral importance of the Mabo case for both black and white Australians to really feel at home in this country demonstrates a changing attitude to place, and the conflicting values that can be imposed upon it. Here we see a philosophical merger between the rights of indigenous peoples and the rights of white suburban Australians. It is an important and original connection, particularly in the context of a popular comedy, complicating as it does, a long-standing cultural divide between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.
At a technical level this film also displays some of Harvey's strategies to find `secure mooring', namely the return to basics and the embracing of simplicity in the face of excessively complex social and political change. The story is told through deadpan to camera approach and the most basic cinematography and mise-en-scene. These techniques all speak of unsophistication. As its makers have stated, they wanted the film to be `as basic as it gets' both in style and narrative. Santo Cilauro has been quoted as saying that: `When I think of Australianism I think of Ned Kelly, not because of his rebelling, but because of the words, "stand and deliver". I like the fact that the film is simple: here it is and there's nothing more complicated than that'.(6)
It is not only in the narrative and technical aspects of The Castle that we see a responsive strategy to time-space compression. The production and distribution of the film also demonstrate the Lilliputian strategy. Made by the Frontline team -- Jane Kennedy, Tom Gleisner, Santo Cilauro, Rob Sitch and Michael Hirsh -- this film is the product of what has been described as a media equivalent of a `cottage industry collective working in the mass media'.(7) The group adopted a radically independent and hands-on approach. The project was self-funded and the makers maintained full creative control. Cilauro has said:
The fact that we were putting in our own money meant that we had to stick to that timetable. If we were going to do it on our own terms, then we had to do it with our own money. So, we worked backwards: How much money do we have? There are four of us, so we pooled as much money as we could. Basically, we were told by our fifth silent and non-creative partner ... "You can shoot for ten days, probably eleven, and that's when the catering runs out!"(8)
This grassroots approach to cultural production illustrates strategic resistance to centralised power so prevalent in a globalised media and underlines the paradoxical power that smallness and cheapness brings to the context of filmmaking. More money often brings crippling creative constraints. The independence of these Lilliputian filmmakers reinforces the message contained in the fictional narrative.
The Castle is a departure from Australian cinema in general in that it explores unashamedly utopian longings for home, within the context of real social and political issues. Lorraine Mortimer, a researcher into the sociology of everyday life, suggests that `the film's ethnographic hyperbole is a way of exploring the textures of the world these people have made in the shadow of high-voltage power-lines. It brings home to us the fact that we all make worlds for ourselves in the shadow of toxic realities over which we have little control'.(9) She notes the importance of mobilising people's `perfectly valid hopes and desires' for home and happiness and the traces of something better than what is, in order to resist the `Airlinks' of this world.(10)
Floating Life: Hybrid Home-making
Floating Life gives an outsider's perspective on the difficulties of creating a home and maintaining a cohesive family in the face of global dispersion. Unlike The Castle -- a film that emphasises and celebrates ordinariness -- Floating Life defamiliarises Australian suburbia, depicting it as an eerie and frighteningly expansive place; an agoraphobic's nightmare. Hong Kong director Clara Law traces the journey of the Chan family as they migrate from Hong Kong to live in an outer suburb of Sydney. The elderly couple (Edwin Pang and Cecilia Lee), along with their rambunctious teenage sons, move in with the already resident daughter Bing (Annie Yip) and her husband Cheung (Bruce Poon), who live in a rather sterile suburban `mansion'.
Through the generations, the Chans have been constantly moving countries in search of a home. Displaced to Hong Kong from China in the second world war, they feel the need, as 1997 approaches, to make a new home in Australia. Other family members ale scattered throughout the world. Daughter Yen (Annette Shun Wah) lives in Germany with her German husband and their small child; and a dissolute stockbroker son lingers in Hong Kong, cheating on his girlfriend, counting his ejaculations and waiting for his residency application to be processed. The film is studded with multicultural clashes, sometimes jarring and sometimes strangely harmonious. Feng-shui coexists uneasily with logic and rationality and ancestor worship is accompanied by international high finance. This is the world of the long-distance telephone call, where a six-year-old speaks both German and Cantonese, and dreams of a house where all of her family can live together under one roof. Families reunite uncomfortably in this world, never quite able to leave behind the residues of their very different lives on distant continents, yet struggling devotedly to forge new common ground.
The film shows us Australia through newcomers' eyes: the brittle boxy-looking homes of sprawling suburbia; the stark white light of an Australian summer; the weirdness of the native fauna; and the historical and cultural impoverishment of our young cities. Chau (Toby Chan), one of the young sons, summarises the family's impressions when he describes their first weeks in Australia as being `like a movie', to which his brother Yue (Toby Wong) replies, `A bloody horror movie!'
Balancing this grim picture of suburbia is a positive sense of spacious possibility. Implicit in Floating Life is the notion that this country, because of its very emptiness and openness, provides a space for new beginnings, a place where scattered and displaced families like the Chans, can begin constructing new lives and making new history. As they do so, the film suggests that these newcomers might help to furnish Australia's stark cultural expanses with colour, texture and variety.
Floating Life poses the idea that in this world of `accelarating turnover time and the rapid write-off of traditional and historically acquired values', a home is a deliberate and labour-intensive creation. It is an act of will imposed upon a social landscape that moves too fast for homes to evolve in their natural incremental and organic ways. Making a home under such circumstances requires skilled and purposeful improvisation, a hybridising process in which a home is developed by the difficult blending of old customs and new culture.
The task is an arduous and exhausting one, requiring the migrants to exist in the liminal `floating' position of the title, neither here nor there, Australian nor Chinese, traditional nor modern. Yet to deny one of the oppositions, to take a firm position -- through either clinging to the old, of completely embracing the new -- is shown to be psychologically disastrous. Through the character of the determinedly assimilationist Bing, who eventually suffers a nervous breakdown, this film suggests rigid denial might lead to madness, paranoia and sterility.
Bing has hard edges and sharp words. She organises the rest of her family with fascist intolerance. Obsessive about cleanliness and security, she quickly apprises them of the many dangers of life in the new country -- redback spiders, skin cancer, vicious dogs and everyday thefts. Refusing to eat meat with any fat on it, she swipes a plate of carefully prepared chicken into the bin, screaming at her mother for forgetting to remove the skin. She demands that her brothers speak only English and she forbids her parents to burn incense on the `day of the ancestors' with the pretext that her house, like all Australian houses, is flimsy and therefore `a little fire will burn it down.'
Bing tells her family that she is prepared for anything and in the process reveals her fear and loneliness:
This is a 100% clean, tidy and secure house. I am saving up. I have 2 million Australian dollars so that even if the government goes bankrupt and has no pension for us Asian immigrants, I'll still have enough money. I won't have to beg for help. There isn't anyone to turn to for help.
It becomes apparent that Bing suffers greatly in the process of establishing her new life. The first member of the family to move to Australia, she lived alone for several years waiting for her husband to save enough money to join her, and became self-sufficient and independent. Bing's one real friendship, with a local Chinese restauranteur who supplied her with familiar kinds of grocery items, had to be terminated because the romantic attraction that developed threatened her faithfulness to her husband.
Bing's eccentricities stem not only from her years of hardship and self-denial but also from her resentment towards her newly arrived family. Her account of the many `terrors' of Australian life suggests not only her own fears but her desire to scare her relatives into subjection and timidity. She appears angry that they do not suffer as greatly as she did and that they blend their cultures in a casual, easy manner. Bing's rage at the boys for speaking their native language and at her parents for attempting to follow some of their old customs, hints at her sense of unfairness that she has given up these things, thinking such sacrifice was necessary for survival. Where Bing's family are fluid and flexible -- able to `go with the flow', to float at least to some degree, she is heavy and rigid, a state that threatens to `drown' her in paranoia. The film suggests that creating a new home in the flux-filled world requires a courageous act of will, aiming at a delicate balance between old and new cultures.
Like The Castle, Floating Life exhibits a new strategy for creating visions of home in a globalised world. Using an injection of government funding, SBS provided the financial backing to make the first Australian-produced feature that was mostly not in English.(11) As O'Regan has noted, Clara Law is one of the new breed of filmmakers involved in creating a `diasporic multicultural cinema' which must exist within the international cinema arena but require government support to sustain it.(12) While a multicultural diasporic cinema is certainly a way of creating visions of home from the scattered pieces of various cultures that have been thrown together in a new environment, it is also a cinema that may not necessarily survive without direct support from ideologically sympathetic national governments and their film funding bodies. It is true that international co-productions are becoming much more common. Such collusions, however, are usually still highly dependent on official film funding bodies and specific policies of `cultural exchange', a fact that highlights the necessity of a continuation of such support, at least in the short to medium term, if such iconoclastic explorations of the issue of international homemaking are to continue.
Naficy has classified these diasporic films under the title of `independent transnational genre', which, he argues, allows `films to be read and reread not only as individual texts produced by authorial vision and generic conventions but also as sites for intertextual, cross-cultural, and transnational struggles over meanings and identities'.(13) Naficy describes the directors who orchestrate such struggles as `deterritorialised' -- freed from old and new yet in the grips of both. `Located in such a zone', he suggests, `they become interstitial creatures, liminars suffused with hybrid excess'.(14) It is a fraught and difficult way of creating visions of home yet perhaps, increasingly, the only way forward. The alternative is regression to an imagined cultural purity, a home where there can be no change, no intruders and no dissension, an inhospitable place, a difficult and exclusive environment that would need to suppress and deny the realities of rapid global flows of people, information and capital.
Conclusion
Creating, maintaining and protecting home values, without becoming isolationist or xenophobic, is perhaps the greatest and most important struggle facing Australians into the twenty-first century. For our films to truly tell our stories, they must show these struggles and offer new strategies for adaptation and/or resistance. Departing from Australian cinema's often negative and discouraging depictions of family and home, The Castle and Floating assert the importance of home and the work that must be done to construct and preserve homes that neither deny global realities nor succumb completely to their impersonal and fragmenting logic.
Notes
(1) R Gibson, `Formative Landscapes' in S Murray (ed.), Australian Cinema, St Leonards, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1994, p 45.
(2) D Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989, p 291.
(3) ibid., p 292.
(4) ibid.
(5) R Wilson & W Dissanayake (eds), Global Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Durham, Duke University Press, 1996,
(6) S Cilauro quoted in P Malone, `A house is not a home', Cinema Papers, April 1997, p 12.
(7) L Mortimer, `The Castle, the garbage bin and high-voltage tower: home truths in the suburban grotesque', Meanjin, vol 57, no 1, 1998.
(8) S Cilauro, op. cit., p 11.
(9) L Mortimer, op. cit.
(10) ibid.
(11) F Harari, `The risk takers', The Australian Magazine, Weekend Australian, 18-19 November 1995, pp 20-3.
(12) T O'Regan, Australian National Cinema, London, Routledge, 1996, p 330.
(13) H Naficy, `Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics' in R Wilson & W Dissanayake (eds), op. cit., p 121.
(14) ibid., pp 124-5.
Rochelle Siemienowicz is completing a PhD on globalisation and national identity in contemporary Australian cinema at the department of Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. Seeing film as the eminent narrative form of our time, Rochelle's research interests centre around the social, cultural and economic impact of globalisation on small national cinemas. Rochelle is also the chief film reviewer for The Big Issue magazine. Named Works: The Castle (Motion picture) - Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Floating Life (Motion picture) - Criticism, interpretation, etc.