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.

摘要

本文采用了托德·麦克高恩（Todd McGowan）对精神分析电影理论的重新思考，来考虑这种方法在国家电影院中可能会揭示什么。我认为，我关注的是澳大利亚的国家电影院，它介于审美民族主义的虚幻视线和扰乱文化视野的“真实”视线之间。我将展示泰德·科特切夫（Ted Kotcheff）的1971年的《惊醒世界》（Wake in Fright）如何将“真实视线”引入澳大利亚的电影词汇中，并在电影《文艺复兴》中加以体现，并以经常在国家话语中被压抑的创伤性“真实”打扰民族主义的审美探究。在这里，我建议，如果可以将一个国家电影院看作是“公共梦”的一种形式，那么这种“真正的凝视”就是一种国家症状，就像在精神分析诊所中一样，困扰着受试者讲述自己的故事。在绘制了《惊悚中的唤醒》中“真实凝视”的出现之后，我考虑了一下这种视觉镜在最近的哥特式风景电影（如乔尔·安德森（Joel Anderson）的蒙哥湖（Lake Mungo，2008年））中的重做之处，然后考虑了玛博后的历史电影如何颠倒了这样的凝视使得困扰国家想象的东西被摆在观众面前而毫不留情。