AURAL AUTEUR: SOUND IN THE FILMS OF ROLF DE …Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer. iii LIST OF PUBLICATIONS FORMING PART OF THE THESIS. 1. Starrs, D. Bruno (2007). “The

AURAL AUTEUR:

SOUND IN THE FILMS OF ROLF DE HEER.

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Published Papers

in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT),

Brisbane, Australia.

Supervisors:

Ms. Helen Yeates Lecturer, Film and TV, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT.

Dr. Vivienne Muller

Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literary Studies, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT.

Associate Professor Geoff Portmann Discipline Leader, Film and TV, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT.

Written and submitted by David Bruno Starrs BSc (ANU), PGDipHlthSc (Curtin), BTh (Hons) (JCU), MFTV (Bond), MCA (Melb). Self-archived publications available at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Starrs,_D._Bruno.html January 2009.

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Starrs,_D._Bruno.html�

Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

2


i

ABSTRACT.


An interpretative methodology for understanding meaning in cinema since the 1950s, auteur

analysis is an approach to film studies in which an individual, usually the director, is studied as

the author of her or his films. The principal argument of this thesis is that proponents of

auteurism have privileged examination of the visual components in a film-maker’s body of

work, neglecting the potentially significant role played by sound.

The thesis seeks to address this problematic imbalance by interrogating the creative use of sound

in the films written and directed by Rolf de Heer, asking the question, “Does his use of sound

make Rolf de Heer an aural auteur?” In so far as the term ‘aural’ encompasses everything in the

film that is heard by the audience, the analysis seeks to discover if de Heer has, as Peter Wollen

suggests of the auteur and her or his directing of the visual components (1968, 1972 and 1998),

unconsciously left a detectable aural signature on his films.

The thesis delivers an innovative outcome by demonstrating that auteur analysis that goes

beyond the mise-en-scène (i.e. visuals) is productive and worthwhile as an interpretive response

to film. De Heer’s use of the aural point of view and binaural sound recording, his interest in

providing a ‘voice’ for marginalised people, his self-penned song lyrics, his close and early

collaboration with composer Graham Tardif and sound designer Jim Currie, his ‘hands-on’

approach to sound recording and sound editing and his predilection for making films about

sound are all shown to be examples of de Heer’s aural auteurism.

As well as the three published (or accepted for publication) interviews with de Heer, Tardif and

Currie, the dissertation consists of seven papers refereed and published (or accepted for

publication) in journals and international conference proceedings, a literature review and a

unifying essay. The papers presented are close textual analyses of de Heer’s films which, when

considered as a whole, support the thesis’ overall argument and serve as a comprehensive auteur

analysis, the first such sustained study of his work, and the first with an emphasis on the aural.


ii

KEYWORDS.

Rolf de Heer

auteur analysis

aural auteur

auteurism

auteurist

authorship

textual analysis

film sound

Australian film

aural point of view

binaural sound recording

unlikely protagonist

non-hyper-masculine protagonist

psychoanalytic film theory

Graham Tardif

Jim Currie


iii

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS FORMING PART OF THE THESIS.

1. Starrs, D. Bruno (2007). “The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that weren’t?”, Metro Magazine, (ISSN: 0312-2654), Melbourne, Australian Teachers of Media, no. 153, pp. 166-172. 2. Starrs, D. Bruno (2007). “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, (ISSN: 1749-9771 - online), UK, University of Edinburgh, no. 5. 3. Starrs, D. Bruno (2008). “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song”, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, (ISSN: 1441-2616 - online), Brisbane, QUT Creative Industries, vol. 11, no. 3. 4. Starrs, D. Bruno (2009, forthcoming). “Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie aural auteur”, (accepted for refereed publication in the conference proceedings of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 January 2008, Kolkata, India. A revised version is also currently undergoing refereeing by Metro Magazine [ISSN: 0312-2654], Melbourne, Australian Teachers of Media). 5. Starrs, D. Bruno (2010, forthcoming). “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, (accepted for refereed publication in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, (ISSN: 1543-5326 - online, 1050-9208 - hard copy), London and NY, Routledge, vol. 27, no. 5). 6. Starrs, D. Bruno (2008). “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003)”, Metro Magazine, (ISSN: 0312-2654), Melbourne, Australian Teachers of Media, no. 156, pp. 148-153.

7. Starrs, D. Bruno (2009, forthcoming). “Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer”, (accepted for refereed publication in the conference proceedings of the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January 2008, Delhi. A revised version is also currently undergoing refereeing by Cinema Journal [ISSN: 0009-7101], Texas, University of Texas Press).


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STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY.

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an

award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief,

the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where

due reference is made.

----------------------------------------------------------

Signature - David Bruno Starrs

(also known as D. Bruno Starrs)

----------------------------------------------------------

Date


v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

First and foremost I would like to acknowledge and thank my Primary Supervisor, Ms. Helen

Yeates (50%), lecturer, Film and TV, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT. Helen’s keen eye for

detail was a decisive factor in helping me get the papers of the thesis to a standard where they

were ready for submission for publication and in coalescing the thesis into a unified whole. My

Associate Supervisors, Dr. Vivienne Muller (40%), lecturer, Creative Writing and Literary

Studies, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT; and Associate Professor Geoff Portmann (10%),

discipline leader, Film and TV, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, made my supervisory team

complete by offering advice and assistance from very different perspectives. I feel very fortunate

to have had this most professional trio guiding me from the start (19 September 2006).

Other staff at QUT who deserve thanks include Professor Terry Flew for his guidance regarding

the publishing of papers and Dr. Bronwyn Fredericks for her advice on the choice of language

that is respectful to Aboriginal Australians. Professor Brad Haseman and Mr. Peter Fell deserve

recognition for their invaluable instruction in the courses “KKP601: Approaches to Enquiry in

the Creative Industries” and “IFN001: Advanced Information Retrieval Skills”. Creative

Industries Faculty support staff including Ms. Leanne Blazely, Mrs. Jenny Mayes, Ms. Kate

Simmonds, Ms. Alice Steiner and Ms. Ellen Thompson also warrant acknowledgement for their

eager and helpful assistance.

Panel members at my Confirmation and Final Seminars must be heartily thanked. These QUT

academics include my supervisors as well as Professor Terry Flew, Professor Julian Knowles

and Dr. Susan Carson. Also on the panels were Griffith University staff Dr. Amanda Howell and

Dr. Wendy Keyes, whose contributions were extremely useful. The comments and suggestions

from all panellists have been vitally important in preparing and refining this document.

Thanks must go to the conveners of the international conferences I attended and presented at: a

very important process involved in preparing several of my papers for later publication. These

were the Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series, University of Auckland, New

Zealand, 13 August 2007; the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World

Conference, 2-5 January 2008, Delhi, India; and the Indian Association for the Study of

Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 January 2008, Kolkata, India. Thanks also to the

QUT Research Student’s Centre for their Grant In Aid funding that assisted me with the costs of


vi

travel to the two conferences in India. In 2008, this doctoral study was supported by a Creative

Industries Faculty QUT Postgraduate Research Award for which I am extremely grateful.

Thanks must go to the creators of the films addressed in this thesis, Rolf de Heer, Graham Tardif

and Jim Currie, who gave their time so generously for interviews. I am, of course, deeply

indebted to these film artists for their creative work and enterprising collaborative practices.

Without their inspired output, Australian cinema would be greatly impoverished and this thesis

would not exist.

Finally, I would like to thank the editors and anonymous referees of: Cinema Journal; Forum:

The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts; M/C: A Journal of

Media and Culture; Metro Magazine; Quarterly Review of Film and Video; and

RealTime+Onscreen for accepting (or submitting for refereeing) for publication the papers and

interviews of the thesis.


vii

AUTHOR’S NOTE.

The writing style and terminology utilised in the thesis has been deliberately chosen in order to

support rather than undermine its general argument. Wherever possible, terms that reinforce the

dominance of the screen image are avoided: the word ‘film’ is used in preference to the term

‘motion picture’ or its derivative ‘movie’ and the receivers of a film are referred to as

‘audiences’ or ‘filmgoers’ rather than ‘viewers’ or ‘spectators’. Of course, the term ‘film’ is

itself a less than perfect choice, referring as it does to the photographic medium upon which the

narrative is recorded, but it is certainly less ocular-centric than other terms. In addition, the term

‘film’ can be understood in this thesis as also referring to works that were actually created with

videotape.

Foreign language words and their derivatives are italicised, including the French words ‘auteur’,

‘mise-en-scène’ and ‘genre’ and the German words ‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘Weltanschauung’, although

some of these are terms so often used in English now that they are frequently published without

italics. Where this has been the case in referenced material, quotations from such publications

retain the original absence of italics.

The referencing and citation style of the thesis is QUT Harvard, but the separate published

papers of the thesis have been prepared according to the differing writing and referencing styles

of the journals to which they were submitted and are reproduced as such within these pages.

Australian English is used in the body of the thesis (with a preference for ‘ise’, rather than ‘ize’,

where some dictionaries of Australian English are ambivalent), but not necessarily so in the

published papers or in quotations from other sources.


viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PART ONE: Introduction.

CHAPTER 1. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM, OBJECTIVE/AIMS, SUBJECT AND METHODOLOGIES ............................................................................... 3

1.1 Description of Research Problem Investigated....................................................... 4 1.2 Overall Objective of the Thesis …………………………………………………... 7 1.3 Specific Aim of the Study …………………………………………………….….... 7 1.4 Account of Research Progress Linking the Research Papers ………………….. 7 1.5 The Subject: Why Rolf de Heer? ............................................................................ 9 1.6 The Methodology and Research Plan for the Thesis .......................................... 11

CHAPTER 2. THE LITERATURE AND CONTEXTUAL REVIEW ....................... 23

2.1 Preamble to the Literature and Contextual Review ………………..……..…... 24 2.2 The History and Development of Auteurism ........................................................ 26 2.3 Criticisms of Auteurism .......................................................................................... 38 2.4 Auteur Analyses of Australian Film-makers ........................................................ 46 2.5 Towards an Aural Auteur Analysis of Rolf de Heer ........................................... 51 2.6 Psychoanalytic Film Sound Theory and the Aural Construction of

Subjectivity ...................................................................................................... 53 2.7 Collaborations in Context: The Interviews with Rolf de Heer, Graham Tardif

and James Currie ............................................................................................ 64

PART TWO. The Seven Refereed and Published

Papers of the Thesis.

CHAPTER 3. A PAPER UTILISING GENRE ANALYSIS AND SIGNALLING AN INTEREST IN THE AUTEURISM OF ROLF DE HEER ………………...….... 69

“The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that weren’t?”, Metro Magazine, Melbourne, Australian Teachers of Media, no. 153, 2007, pp. 166-172.

CHAPTER 4. THE FIRST OF TWO PAPERS UTILISING STANDARD AUTEUR ANALYSIS …………………………………………….……………………...... 79

“Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts (online), UK, University of Edinburgh, no. 5, 2007.


ix

CHAPTER 5. THE SECOND OF TWO PAPERS UTILISING STANDARD AUTEUR ANALYSIS …………………………………………………………………....... 97

“Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song”, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture (online), vol. 11, no. 3, 2008.

CHAPTER 6. A PAPER ARGUING FOR THE METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATION OF THE THESIS: AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS …………....... 109

“Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie aural auteur”, (accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 January 2008, Kolkata, India. A revised version is also currently undergoing refereeing by Metro Magazine).

CHAPTER 7. THE FIRST OF THREE PAPERS UTILISING AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS ............................................................................................................................. 129

“The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, (accepted for refereed publication in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, London and NY, Routledge, vol. 27, no. 5, 2010).

CHAPTER 8. THE SECOND OF THREE PAPERS UTILISING AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS ……………………………………………………………………. 153

“An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003)”, Metro Magazine, Melbourne, Australian Teachers Of Media, no. 156, 2008, pp. 148-153.

CHAPTER 9. THE THIRD OF THREE PAPERS UTILISING AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS …………………………………………………………………………………. 162

“Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer”, (accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January 2008, Delhi. A revised version is also currently undergoing refereeing by Cinema Journal).

PART THREE: Conclusion. CHAPTER 10. THE UNIFYING ESSAY ……..…………………………………….... 189

10.1 Preamble to the Unifying Essay ……………………………………….…..…. 190 10.2 The Journey of the Thesis .................................................................................. 191 10.3 The Film Sound Industry in Australia ............................................................. 194 10.4 Overseas Aural Auteur Analyses ....................................................................... 197


x

10.5 De Heer’s Aural Signature Expressed via Acoustic Binaries? ....................... 199 10.6 An Unconscious Weltanschauung? ................................................................... 205 10.7 An Unconscious Preoccupation With Designing Films For

and About Sound? ......................................................................................... 208 11. REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FILMOGRAPHY.

11.1 References/Bibliography ………………………………………...……...…….. 213 11.2 Rolf de Heer’s Filmography ………………………………………...……....... 232

12. APPENDICES.

12.1 Letters of Acceptance for As-yet-unpublished Papers …………………….... 233 12.2 The Published (or accepted for publication) Interviews:

12.2.1 Rolf de Heer …………….…………………………………..………. 237 12.2.2 Graham Tardif ……………..………………………………...…….. 242 12.2.3 Jim Currie ……………………………..…………..……….….……. 246

12.3 Table 1. Protagonists and Antagonists: Their Outcomes in the Films of Rolf de Heer …...………………………………….... 256

12.4 QUT Ethics Application and Approval ………………………….…………... 258 LIST OF FIGURES.

Figure 1. The structure of the thesis ………………………....…………………….... 7 Figure 2. Front cover of Metro Magazine, no. 153, 2007 ………………..……...…. 71 Figure 3. Front cover of the programme from the Indian Association for the

Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 Jan. 2008 ……….. 111 Figure 4. Front cover of Metro Magazine, no. 156, 2008 …………………………. 155 Figure 5. Front cover of the programme from the CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples

in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 Jan. 2008 ………......……….. 164 Figure 6. Front cover of Metro Magazine, no. 152, 2007 …………………...…….. 237 Figure 7. Front cover of Realtime+Onscreen, no. 85, 2008 ………….……...……. 242

PART ONE.

Introduction.


2

Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part One.

3

CHAPTER 1.

The Research Problem,

Objectives/Aims,

Subject and

Methodologies.

“Audio is the last frontier” (Hollywood sound designer,

Tamara Rogers qtd. in Stokes 1995, 77).

“Always a problematic and very special sign, the signature of the author is a mark on the surface of the text signalling its source. The

signature embeds within it - as in hypertext - a genuine fourth dimension, the temporal process that brought the text into being in the first place. The signature moors the film image to a submerged

reef of values by means drawn by camera or pen” (Dudley Andrew 1993, 83).


4

1.1 Description of Research Problem Investigated.

The research problem this thesis addresses is the failure to consider film sound in the

process of auteur analysis, a methodology for the close interpretative study of a film-

maker’s œuvre (or body of work),1 which is usually undertaken in order to seek out an

authorial signature. The film sound to be considered in the thesis includes music,

dialogue and its accents, sound effects and diegetic and non-diegetic sound. It should be

noted from the outset that the thesis will not be a technical treatise on the various

theories of sound or music, the specialised arenas of acoustics and otology or the

practicalities of audio engineering.2

Nor will the thesis serve as a technical exploration

of the film sound industry and the details of the sound recording business in Australia.

Rather, the role of sound as part of a writer/director’s auteurial signature is the particular

focus of the study.

The thesis makes the claim that typically, the auteur analyst only interprets the mise-en-

scène (or the visual components)3

... auteurism is forensically cited via the non-sonic discourses of literature, theater, and photography … visuals are directed, while sounds are simply direct. Theorists have long smothered the ontological investigation of so-called direct sound with poor metaphorical assignations of truth and honesty (“Bring the noise”, 2006, 16).

as she or he studies the film director’s œuvre. Rick

Altman noted, “a surprising number of theoreticians blithely draw conclusions about the

nature of cinema simply by extrapolating from the apparent properties of the moving

image” (1992, 35). Indeed, film sound makes plenty of noise but writing on it is

relatively quiet. The hegemony of vision in the academy persists unshakably, because, as

Philip Brophy indicated:

1 The key word here is œuvre. It is important to note from the beginning that an auteur analyst attempts to consider a film-maker’s entire body of work. An analysis of a single film, selected from a number of films made by an individual, is, therefore, not an auteur analysis. The exception may be where that single paper is considered, as is the case with this thesis, to be one in a collection of papers that analyse the work of a particular auteur. 2 Such investigations are the worthy subject of other research studies (see Rick Altman [1992], Royal S. Brown [1994], Michel Chion [1994, 1999] or James Lastra [2000]). 3 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson define mise-en-scène as follows: “… the term [used] to signify the director’s control over what appears in the frame ... : setting, lighting, costume, and the behaviour of the figures. In controlling the mise-en-scene, the director stages the event for the camera” (2008, 112).


5

According to Brophy, artistic experimentation with soundtracks has been discouraged in

favour of audio that has “truth and honesty”, even while the image is permitted to dance

freely. Yet unlike the spluttering, squawking Kinetophone of yesteryear, modern

cinematography has the potential to collude and contrast with audiography to create

deeply layered audience responses. An audio-fluent film-maker will seek to exploit this

potential from the earliest stage, artistically “designing a movie for sound”, as Academy

Award winning sound designer Randy Thom recommended (2003, 121). From when the

film exists as little more than a germ of an idea in her or his head the aurally attuned

auteur will then work with this potential through each and every stage of production,

eventually producing “soundtracks [that] psychologically excite the auditory membrane”

(Brophy 2004, 3). She or he will need, however, to communicate suggestions for

sonicity to all key personnel such that the concept of the film as an AUDIO-visual

artwork permeates the cast, crew, editors, distributors and exhibitors like a meme. Film

theorists play a role, too, in nurturing this level of audio artistry by acknowledging and

congratulating its existence, and by identifying those few film-makers who qualify for

status as an “aural auteur” (to use the term coined by Brophy in describing Indian film

director Satyajit Ray [“Punk ambient” 2006, 16])4. Such ‘aural auteurs’5

need to be

identified as cinematic groundbreakers regarding Tamara Roger’s “last frontier” of film

audio (qtd. in Stokes 1995, 77).

Brophy bemoaned the “absent aural in film theory” (2008, 424) and, indeed, only

recently has the tentative suggestion been made that there exists an elite few directors

whose œuvre demonstrates a propensity to design films for sound, with Jay Beck and

Tony Grajeda proposing, as worthy subjects for future academic research, the likes of

Russian Aleksandr Sokurov, Mexican Carlos Reygados, Japanese Takeshi Kitano,

Taiwanese Tsai Ming-Liang and Brazilian Julio Bressane (2008, 17). Unfortunately, the

Beck and Grajeda text includes scholarly work from contributors who address the use of

sound in a director’s single work, and not her or his complete œuvre, thus falling short of

4 Brophy wrote that Ray’s work “simultaneously problematises the presumed literary criteria for authorship, and complicates the assumed musicological criteria for composer” (Brophy “Punk ambient” 2006, 16). 5 Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda coined the similar term “acoustic auteur” recently (2008, 13), but because of the additional technical nuances the word “acoustic” suggests (e.g. non-electronic musicianship), Brophy’s original phrase is preferred throughout this thesis.


6

a sustained aural auteur analysis of any of their subjects. Even more disconcerting is that

their list of “acoustic expressions of cultural identities that still need investigation” (ibid)

neglects to include any Australian cine-artist whatsoever.

Regardless, this thesis has anticipated Beck and Grajeda’s proposal (and unfortunate

elision of Australian film-makers) with regard to aural auteur analysis. It was decided

from the very start that to demonstrate that the hypothesised neglect of the potential for

aural auteur analysis exists in Australia too, a likely Antipodean subject needed to be

found. An important criterion in the selection of such a subject was that the film-maker

in question should not yet have been the focus of adequate academic enquiry. Hence this

thesis examines in detail the creative use of sound in the films written, directed and/or

produced by South Australian resident Rolf de Heer, who has been labelled an auteur by

critics for several years now, and who it is suspected devotes greater attention to sound

than most other major Australian film directors, but who has nevertheless received

relatively little scholarly attention (as yet no monograph or thesis devoted to his work

exists). This thesis attempts to answer the following key question: ‘Does his use of

sound make Rolf de Heer an ‘aural auteur’?’ As this question surfaces, others eddy into

being in its wake: ‘What is an auteur?’; ‘How is an auteur analysis best conducted?’;

and, finally, ‘What does de Heer attempt to say via his auteurial use of sound?’ or, as

Dudley Andrew might put it, ‘What does his use of sound tell us about de Heer’s

“submerged reef of values” (1993, 83)?’ This research thesis attempts to analyse these

questions in its consideration of both Rolf de Heer as aural auteur and the role sound

plays in his eclectic and impressive body of work.


7

1.2 Overall Objective of the Thesis.

In short, this research thesis was inspired by the great diversity in de Heer’s œuvre, the

absence of any major scholarly study of his body of work and the possibility an original

contribution to auteur theory could be made with consideration of the aural aspects of

his auteurism. The overall objective of this thesis is therefore an expansion of the

concept of the auteur and the methodology of auteur analysis to incorporate study of the

aural auteur’s signature, focussing on the varied and under-researched work of

Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer (already identified by some as an auteur).

1.3 Specific Aim of the Study.

The specific aim of the study is the addressing of the deficiency in the scholarly

literature on this overlooked yet distinguished Australian film-maker through the

publication of a collection of seven refereed papers. The published papers are ‘book-

ended’ in this thesis by a literature review and a unifying essay and the thesis also

includes, in the appendices, three published interviews by the author with de Heer and

two of his sound crew. This PhD by Published Papers is therefore presented in three

parts:

Part One. The research problem, subject, objectives/aims, methodologies and the

literature review.

Part Two. The seven refereed and published papers of the thesis.

Part Three. The unifying essay.

1.4 Account of Research Progress

Linking the Research Papers.

The QUT PhD Regulations state:

“14.1.1 The Queensland University of Technology permits the presentation of theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the format of published and/or submitted papers ... For the purpose of this Regulation, papers are defined as


8

journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and other forms of written scholarly works which are subject to a process of peer review similar to that of refereed journals. … 14.1.2 Papers submitted as a PhD thesis must be closely related in terms of subject matter and form a cohesive research narrative” (see http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation%20of%20PhD%20Theses).

There are seven refereed publications forming the core of this thesis. The thesis is structured around the relationships between these papers, forming a cohesive research narrative as illustrated in Figure 1.

A PAPER UTILISING GENRE ANALYSIS

AND SIGNALLING AN INTEREST IN THE AUTEURISM OF ROLF DE HEER

▼

TWO PAPERS UTILISING STANDARD AUTEUR ANALYSIS

▼

A PAPER ARGUING FOR THE METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATION

OF THE THESIS: AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS

▼

THREE PAPERS UTILISING AURAL AUTEUR ANALYSIS

Figure 1. The Structure of the Thesis.

Thus this research into the films of Rolf de Heer proceeds from genre analysis (a

theoretical approach considered by some to be antithetical to auteur analysis, but which

needs must be considered because, as Raphaëlle Moine noted, it is possible to talk of

“the genre of the ‘auteur film’” [2008, 97]), to standard auteur analysis and, finally, to

the innovative aural auteur analysis.

http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation%20of%20PhD%20Theses�

http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation%20of%20PhD%20Theses�


9

1.5 The Subject: Why Rolf de Heer?

Rolf de Heer has been awarded numerous accolades for his contributions to Australian

culture and arts, including the 2007 “Don Dunstan Award” by the Adelaide Film

Festival, the 2006 “South Australian of the Year” by the South Australian Government

and the 1998 “Chauvel Award” by the Brisbane International Film Festival, but little

attempt has been made at interpreting his life’s work as a unified body of specific films,

that is, as an auteur analysis. In consideration of this, the reasons for choosing de Heer

over any other Australian film-maker for an exploration of the potential for not just an

auteur analysis, but a specifically aural auteur analysis, are threefold.

Firstly, despite his success and his significance in the landscape of Australian film-

making, no major academic publication or thesis exists on de Heer and his work. The

literature is devoid of any text or video documentary, scholarly or otherwise, that might

be considered an auteur analysis of his entire œuvre, which to date consists of twelve

feature films. As he has recently won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival,

the Grand Prix (‘Impact of Music on Film’) at the Flanders International Film Festival

Ghent, Belgium, and six Australian Film Institute awards including ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best

Direction’ (with Peter Djiggir) and ‘Best Sound’ for the first Aboriginal Australian

language feature film Ten Canoes (2006), the undertaking of an auteur analysis that

attempts to explore his complete body of work is timely and will go some considerable

way towards remedying this gap in the literature.

Secondly, although he is a renowned collaborator, de Heer’s œuvre to date stamps him

as one of the most notable innovators in Australian cinema, and several critics have

already labelled him an auteur. David Stratton wrote: “Aussie auteur Rolf de Heer has

established himself as an uncompromising film-maker” (1998, paragraph 1); Jake

Wilson declared: “Rolf de Heer is one of the very few auteurs who regularly succeeds in

getting features financed in Australia” (“Looking both ways”, 2003, paragraph 5,

original emphasis); and Ali Sharp stated definitively: “de Heer’s presence is a victory for

auteurism” (2004, 34). Such comments certainly suggest a comprehensive auteur


10

analysis of his work is appropriate. Additionally, as de Heer is the writer/director and

oft-times editor and/or producer of his films,6

the usual arguments against a film’s

individual authorship, due to the necessarily collaborative nature of film-making, are

less relevant to his work than to that of some other studio aligned directors who have

little to no involvement in writing, editing and/or producing the finished cinema product.

Thirdly, while more main-stream than avant-garde, de Heer’s films frequently feature an

elevated presence of sound, at times raised to a level of dominance amongst the

numerous interactions informing the narrative. Several critics have added to this

researcher’s motivation to study the auteurism of de Heer with their writing about his

use of sound. Cat Hope comments that: “each of de Heer’s films merits a detailed

treatise on the way they feature innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production

stages, resulting in some of the most challenging and exciting cinema made in Australia

today” (2004, paragraph 15). Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca even invented a

new name for the cinema-goer at Bad Boy Bubby (1993) when they said “In de Heer’s

film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator” (2004, 78)

and I have argued elsewhere that Hickey-Moody and Iocca’s label “aurator” can also be

used for the person experiencing Ten Canoes (2006) (Starrs 2006, 18). Hence, in this

doctoral study particular attention is paid to interpreting the aural auteurial flourishes in

de Heer’s films as evidenced by his innovative use of sound.

6 The thesis will only concern itself with de Heer’s feature length fiction films that have received cinematic release. The documentary The Balanda and the Bark Canoes (Molly Reynolds, Tania Nehme and Rolf de Heer 2006) and the telemovie Thank You Jack (Rolf de Heer 1986) will not be analysed. The films for which de Heer has only been credited as producer (The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Richard Flanagan 1999] and Spank! [Ernie Clark 2001]) or script editor (Serenades [Mojgan Khadem 2002]) will likewise not be studied in the thesis, nor will the short films he worked on as a student at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in the early 1980s.


11

1.6 The Methodologies and

Research Plan for the Thesis.

The hypothesis of this thesis is multi-layered. It firstly proposes that auteur analysis is a

methodology that continues to neglect sound in deference to examination of the image

and that this methodology should be revised to incorporate the aural. It secondly

proposes that Rolf de Heer is an Australian auteur who has an aural signature that is

implemented at a very early stage in the film-making process and which can be detected

in his finished films. Finally, it proposes that this aural signature is unconsciously

imprinted in his films and that this signature reflects a Weltanschauung, or world-view,

in which the voices of marginalised, non-hyper-masculine people, or those one might

call ‘unlikely protagonists’, are fore-grounded.

In an attempt to evidence these speculations, the starting point for the research was the

interviewing of some of the key players in de Heer’s film-making practice (see

Appendix 12.3). Thus, the first research strategy of the thesis, apart from a

comprehensive and ongoing review of the literature (with its concomitant and requisite

viewing/hearing of the literature’s referenced films), was primary research in the most

fundamental sense: that being recorded, semi-structured interviews with Rolf de Heer;

his composer for ten of his twelve films, Graham Tardif; and the sound

recordist/designer for five of his twelve films, Jim Currie.7 These interviews attempted

to explore the opinions of the key personnel involved in the use and production of sound

in the films of Rolf de Heer and were subsequently published in reputable journals8

(but

not subjected to a process of refereeing or peer review).

The three interviews, whilst constituting valuable primary research, do not form the core

of this thesis (although they play an important role in its trajectory). Rather, the thesis

fundamentally consists of seven refereed and published (or accepted for publication) 7 Research ethics approval for the schedule of interviews was granted by the Queensland University of Technology on 24 October 2006 (application approval no. 0600000816 - see Appendix 12.4). 8 The interviews have been published (or accepted for publication) in Metro Magazine and RealTime+Onscreen (see Appendix 12.2).


12

papers which aim to serve as a sustained auteur analysis of de Heer’s works. In this

regard, the thesis is as concerned with researching the methodology of auteur analysis as

much as it is with researching de Heer’s auteurial use of sound.9

This interest stems

from the realization that the techniques of auteur analysis are not well documented, are

often misunderstood and sometimes taken for granted. Consisting of close textual

analysis of each of a film-maker’s films followed by consideration of her or his

complete œuvre, the standard strategy of auteur analysis is significantly employed in this

thesis. However, it certainly is not a well-detailed methodology. Andrew Tudor stated:

“To look at films as work of an auteur involves close textual analysis rather than brief

critical comment. Unfortunately, we are still not entirely sure of the language in which

the text is written” (1973, 131, original emphasis). Such uncertainty about the language

of texts is reflected in the uncertainties in advice on how to read such filmic texts. Nor is

the language of the aural well understood. Caryl Flinn noted: “The problem facing film

music scholars is how to talk concretely and specifically about the effects generated by a

signifying system that is so abstract”(1992, 7), and one can safely conclude that the

same absence of an accessible and functional syntax also exists for the discussion of film

sound.

The process of textual analysis, where a film is considered no less a text than a

collection of written words, was described by Deborah Thomas as the “reading” of

films. Thomas wrote of the benefits to be gained from textual analysis:

... such accounts invite those to whom they are offered to revisit the films and see for themselves, enriching their own experiences with new depth and bringing significant details to their attention in fresh and productive ways, while ultimately encouraging such viewers to make up their own minds as to how true to their own experiences of the film the readings may be, and how illuminating and important the issues that they raise (2001, 1-2).

Alan McKee wrote: “When we perform textual analysis on a text, we make an educated

guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of that text ... by 9 Indeed, in the initial stages of this doctoral research the author’s intention was to explore the methodology of auteur analysis through the production of a biographical video, or ‘biopic’, about Rolf de Heer. Could this particular medium, illustrated with videotaped interviews and excerpts from commercially released films, tell more about the auteurism of a director such as de Heer than a written paper? De Heer’s reluctance to be the subject of a film himself soon put paid to that idea and the research trajectory of a PhD by Published Papers was engaged with instead.


13

people who consume them” (2003, 1-2). While this is a simplistic account of the

methodology of textual analysis, it is one many theorists have come to rely on. Here

McKee, like Thomas, points to the centrality of individually subjective interpretation in

textual analysis, a characteristic which earns the frequent criticism of it being an overly

vague methodology with very little basis in empirical evidence. Certainly, several

studies embark upon textual analysis without much attempt by the author to justify or

explain the procedures involved, assuming that the treatment of the cultural artefact as a

text, and its subsequent subjective interpretation by the researcher, is a common

knowledge to be taken for granted. For example, Richard Middleton’s Reading Pop:

Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (2000) enters into no discussion as to

the meaning or methodology of its titular technique. Yet not all textual analysis is so

qualitative and methodologically arbitrary. Differentiation must be made between this

kind of interpretative textual analysis and the more quantitative techniques of content

analysis and reception studies.10 The latter’s content analysis is another textual approach

in which the frequency of screen events or data is counted and tabulated, diminishing the

subjectivity of the analysis somewhat. On the other hand, genre analysis and semiotics

are prime examples of the former kind of textual analysis, in that they seek to analyse

media texts as structured wholes with the aim of investigating latent, connotative

meanings as they exist for the individual researcher (although most genre analysts and

semioticians would probably still argue for wide-ranging significance of their findings).

Alternatively, reception (or audience) studies depend on the qualitative interpretations of

not a lone critic, but upon a collection of interviews and questionnaires conducted with

audiences. Such reception studies, whilst reverberating with the chosen audience’s

historically-significant ‘logic of the tribe’, are not the methodology of choice for this

thesis, given the size (and relative scarcity11

10 See, for example, Klaus Krippendorff and Mary Angela Bock (2009) for more on content analysis and Janet Staiger (2005) for more on reception studies.

) of de Heer’s œuvre. Other approaches to

textual analysis include the specific use of psychoanalytic and feminist theory, which are

particularly useful lenses through which one might view the films of Rolf de Heer as

demonstrated in this thesis (see Chapter 2.6). Regardless of the exact methodology used,

11 Rolf de Heer’s first film, Tail of a Tiger (1984), for example, is not available for purchase and is only held by a few Australian repositories in VHS format. They are understandably reluctant to lend the tape as it has not, to the author’s knowledge, been digitised for DVD distribution.


14

the textual analyst must resist the temptation to declare her or his interpretation to be the

only valid explanation of a text’s meaning. Most critics comply with Glen Creeber’s

advice: “rather than prescribing a rigid or fixed meaning to a text, contemporary textual

analysis tends to explore the playfulness and open-ended textures of textual meaning”

(2006, 34, original emphasis). The aim should be one of opening up the text to reveal

how it works rather than closing it down in an attempt to fix its singular ‘meaning’.

Perhaps it is germane to now note that the main concern of this thesis - the neglect of

sound in auteur analysis - is accompanied by a similar emphasis on the image in textual

analysis generally. In discussing (the fallacy of) authorial intention, McKee continued

his argument that, “a post-structuralist approach to meaning-making doesn’t accept that

any text has a single correct interpretation” (2003, 67). Yet textual analysis generally

suffers from a slavish dedication to prioritizing analysis conducted with the eyes and

tends to foreground these interpretations as correct. Hamid Naficy noted that “textual

analysis, or close reading of images, [has] for over two decades ... placed its emphasis

on the primacy of the text and of vision as arbiters of truth” (2001, 3000). Similarly,

prominent auteurist John Caughie wrote:

... the methods of decipherment or decoding through an investigation of the language and signification of mise-en-scène [i.e. everything visible within the frame, from camera angles to actor’s direction to lighting] provided the foundation for the textual analysis that secured for Film Studies a place of grudging respect in the humanities and the academy (2008, 414).

For Naficy and Caughie, the procedure of textual analysis has always been about

“decoding” vision and mise-en-scène “as arbiters of truth”. Similarly, auteur analysis, as

a technique involving textual analysis, makes McKee’s “educated guesses” as to the

most likely meaning of a film, and overwhelmingly does so based on interpretation of

the image alone, but with the defining knowledge that an individual text is a part of a

film-maker’s œuvre. In fact, it is this nominal categorization of films made according to

an assumption of their shared authorship that qualifies the textual analysis as auteur

analysis. It is from such a subjectively determined grouping that an exact procedure of

auteur analysis must somehow be gleaned, separated from the detritus of both


15

romanticism and structuralism, and then permitted to emerge as a bona fide technique of

textual analysis.

Achieving recognition as a legitimate research technique is not helped by the fact that

the procedures of auteur analysis methodology are somewhat indistinctly described in

the literature. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, however, in their outline of two

approaches to the methodology of textual analysis, pointed towards a position for auteur

analysis within textual analysis:

First, there are those approaches concerned to analyse the formal mechanisms by which a text produces a position or positions for reading, organizing its own consumption in the implied model or preferred reader ... the intra-textual determinations of reading (2002, 14).

Bennett and Woollacott went on to describe the second approach, in which:

... attention focuses on the extra-textual determinations of reading, particularly on the situationally determined frameworks of cultural and ideological reference which supply the grids of intelligibility through which different groups of readers read and interpret a given text (ibid).

While the “extra-textual” conduct of the auteur analyst and her or his peers is not to be

discounted, it is the “intra-textual” reading of a body of work that is particularly relevant

to the auteur analyst, as this unique “reader” attempts to locate meanings that recur

throughout the film-maker’s œuvre. Dugald Williamson, drawing on the work of Michel

Foucault, provides a useful template for such an attempt when he wrote of the “authorial

model of critical practice” (1989, 43) - which can be understood to be another name for

the model of auteur analysis - as having three main procedures. The first is fundamental:

“A basic procedure of authorial criticism is to use the author’s name as a means of

classifying texts” (ibid). The subsequent procedures are less unassailable: “A second

main procedure of authorial criticism is to treat the author as the origin of a work’s form

and meaning. ... A third and related tenet of authorial criticism is that the author

constitutes a principle of unity in writing” (ibid). According to this definition, the author,

or auteur, serves as origin and unifier of the text’s meaning. It must be noted, however,

that Williamson makes no mention of ‘conscious intent’, fallacious or otherwise, and the

possibility that a meaning may be unintended or unconsciously imprinted in a film forms


16

the basis for much conjecture in film and literary studies. Williamson defended his

second and third procedures of auteur analysis with the following comment:

One usually defines the work of an author by demonstrating a certain continuity or, quite possibly, significant discontinuity, between the parts of the œuvre. This authorial unity and significance does not inhere in the texts themselves, however, but is constructed through critical definition and interpretation. It emerges within a particular system of reading and writing about texts (ibid).

Thus, only with application of the “particular system” of auteur analysis by a diligent

critic can the authorial signature be elucidated. Finally, Williamson made some more

concrete suggestions for the process of auteur analysis:

In authorial criticism, one guarantees the unity of an individual’s work by carrying out a number of activities: by operating comparisons, selecting certain traits (themes, events, characters) as relevant, by excluding discursive elements that are not easily aligned with the image of a single source and so on (cf. Foucault, 1977, 128) (46).

The “selecting [of] certain traits” as part of the methodology recalls McKee’s advice

regarding “educated guesses”: auteur analysis is a fundamentally subjective

methodology that relies on the analyst’s personal judgments to select “similarities and

patterns of aesthetic significance” (44) or, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith put it, “the purpose

of criticism becomes therefore to uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subject and

treatment a structural hard core of basic and often recondite motifs” (1967, 10). While a

film-maker may frustratingly work in a range of various genres, these diversities in

subject matter are not the concern of auteur analysis; rather the hidden and abstruse

“motifs” or themes that can be detected across that film-maker’s body of work are of

interest.

In addition to these somewhat vague and esoteric words of advice on the methodology

of auteur analysis, Laura Mulvey has made a useful suggestion for the budding auteurist

researcher. Although further cementing the neglect of sound in much filmic textual

analysis with comments such as “meaning could be generated from the cinematic image

itself” (2005, 229), Mulvey also offered some practical advice on the conducting of a

textual analysis, when she noted how “the critical practice of close reading has greatly

enhanced understanding of ‘auteur’ cinema” (241). Critical to such a “close reading” of


17

filmic texts, Mulvey suggested, is the use of VHS tapes, rather than celluloid prints

attended to in the cinema, which bring with them the potential for: “repetition and return

[permitting] the chance insights and unexpected encounters that come with endless

repetition” (230). The procedure of repeated rewinding of tapes (or, one assumes,

DVDs) is rarely possible (or affordable) when a film is watched and heard in the

commercial Cineplex. This simple advice for the conduct of textual analysis helpfully

contributes to an understanding of the technique of “close reading” which she and other

auteur theorists speak of, and prompts the suggestion of an equally simple procedural

technique for aural auteur analysis: the reception of films with just the soundtrack

playing minus the vision. Such a technique has been labelled “masking” by Michel

Chion (1994, 187-8) and his preferred methodology involves playing a chosen sequence

of film (that is, videotape or DVD) several times but in vastly different ways. The first

screening attended to is the usual combination of audio with visual, the second is with

sound muted and the third is with image removed (i.e. masked). Freed from the

authoritarian regime of the visuals, this enlightening approach of the third technique

recommended by Chion has been the fundamental technique with which the films of

Rolf de Heer have been read in the preliminary activity of the research for this thesis.

Thus the procedures of repetitive replay and the hiding of the image when reading a

film-maker’s corpus are the key techniques of this thesis’ methodological approach to

aural auteur analysis. Of course, such a rarely-used methodology conducted across a

substantial œuvre such as de Heer’s results in a very close but time-consuming reading

and this fact may discourage critics from privileging aural analysis. However, this

researcher is unaware of any theorist who has specified an alternative methodology as

exact as this for aural auteur analysis and this uncomplicated combination of Mulvey’s

“repetition and return” and Chion’s “masking” represents, in itself, the beginnings of a

novel, structured methodology that enables the privileging of the reception of an

auteur’s aural signature.

To summarise so far, the methodological procedures of this thesis may be seen as a

heuristic journey: from interviews with the film-makers to aurally privileged readings of

the films, to the writing up of several aural auteur analyses of the work of Rolf de Heer.


18

This collection of seven papers - each refereed and published (or accepted for

publication) in reputable academic journals and/or conference proceedings - represented

a second journey of investigation which posed the question as to whether these

submissions would duly succeed or fail in the ‘real’ world of international publishing.12

The first refereed published paper appeared in the glossy Australian film, television,

radio and multimedia journal Metro Magazine in 2007 and was entitled “The Tracker

and The Proposition: Two westerns that weren’t?” It is a standard genre analysis of one

of de Heer’s best known films, The Tracker (2002) and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition

(2005). Significantly, this paper signals an interest in the auteurism of de Heer, an

interest pursued in all the subsequent articles. Although this article focuses on the anti-

western genre of film-making in Australia, it serves as an appropriate place for

beginning the journey of this thesis by published papers, since genre analysis and auteur

analysis are approaches to film study that are often anecdotally said to exist in uneasy

opposition within the academic departments of film scholarship (Dix 2008, 145).13

It is

also an appropriate starting point for consideration of, as Raphaëlle Moine put it, the

“the genre of ‘auteur film’” (2008, 97), for the thesis was intent on explicating the

unifying features of the ‘genre’ of films one might call ‘de Heer’. While this first paper

does not address de Heer’s use of sound in detail, it retains a place in the thesis due to its

value in utilising a textual analysis methodology with which to compare the traditional

auteur analyses that follow, thus contributing to a comprehensive account of de Heer as

auteur.

The subsequent two refereed papers14 each consist of standard15

12 Success or failure being determined by the recommendations of anonymous referees and the author’s attendance to their required revisions.

auteur analysis. The

first is entitled “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and

13 Genre analysis began to overtake auteur analysis as the leading form of film criticism in the 1970s and 80s (Dix 2008, 145) but this preference seems to be undergoing a reversal recently, if the abundance of new texts on auteurism is any indication (see the introduction to the Literature Review in Chapter 2 of this thesis). 14 A third refereed paper was almost included in this standard auteur analysis section, entitled “‘If we stretch our imaginations’: The monstrous-feminine mother in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project (2003)”, and which was published in Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies in 2008. While this article identifies a core component of de Heer’s “submerged reef of values” (Andrew 1993, 83), that being his belief in the primacy of good child-rearing for the betterment of humanity, it is really more about the contention that so-called Grand Theory is not the only way to interpret film: psychoanalytic theory is


19

Dr. Plonk (2007)” and was published online in Forum: The University of Edinburgh

Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts in 2007. The second is entitled “Enabling

the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song” and was published online in M/C: A

Journal of Media and Culture in 2008. Significantly, while analysis of de Heer’s use of

sound does not feature prominently in these two papers, they do, like the preceding

genre analysis paper, constitute both a point of comparison and departure for the final

three papers of the thesis which emphatically use aural auteur analysis. They also draw

conclusions as to de Heer’s “submerged reef of values” (Andrew 1993, 83), such as his

concern for the vulnerable and/or marginalised populations of the world.

The first of these two standard auteur analyses concludes that de Heer believes those

marginalised, controlled and often unheeded members of the world community, women

and environmentalists, have opinions to be voiced which could well save the planet from

ecological Armageddon. This paper, entitled “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf

de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, makes the point that it is not “eco-

heroes” (Starrs, “Eco-warnings”, 2007, paragraph 2) that will avert the coming eco-

apocalypse, but ordinary people who make ordinary changes to their lives. In each of the

two titular films, de Heer almost obsessively focuses on his adopted Australia, and

foreshadows a comment elicited by Judith Hatton in a recent interview: “JH: It’s not just

a bit of fun. You gently comment on the way our country is run. RDH: I can’t help

myself. (laughing)” (2008, paragraphs 9 and 10). Although de Heer’s commitment is to

a better world, he starts his campaign by giving voice to those oppressed people in his

own Australian backyard, and he does so by featuring two non-Hollywood protagonists;

an extra-terrestrial alien in the form of a young woman (Epsilon) and an eccentric

scientist (Dr. Plonk).

The second paper of this section concludes the duo of standard auteur analyses, and is

entitled “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song”. This film is also

instantly recognizable for its Australian milieu and emphasises de Heer’s discounted (in favour of evolutionary film theory) as an explanation for the horror of the egregious parents in Bad Boy Bubby and Alexandra’s Project. Nevertheless, this paper concludes with brief recognition of de Heer’s auteurial depiction of the perversity of Bubby’s mother, Flo, and Emma and Sam’s mother, Alexandra. 15 That is, non-aural auteur analysis.


20

Weltanschauung in which non-hyper-masculine protagonists and their positive outcomes

are fore-grounded. Heather Rose, a severely disabled young woman, triumphs over her

mean-spirited, controlling carer to win the love of a sensitive and able-bodied man. This

paper also explores de Heer’s active denial of sole authorship as he attributes the film to

its writer and star, Rose. Such modest rejection of primary authorship is a trait rarely

seen among mainstream film-makers who often seem to cultivate auteur status, and

speaks volumes about de Heer’s generous, caring and non-egotistical personality.

The third category of the collection of refereed papers, consisting solely of the fourth

publication of the thesis, is entitled “Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie

aural auteur”. It deserves a section of its own since it argues the need for a new, revised

conceptual framework for auteur analysis that combines existing scholarly writing on

the traditional procedures for auteur analysis with the innovative study of a film-maker’s

auteurial use of sound, that is, an aural auteur analysis. First presented at the Indian

Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference, 22-24 January 2008

in Kolkata, India and accepted for refereed publication in subsequent conference

proceedings in 2009,16

a revised version of this paper is presently also undergoing

refereeing for publication in Metro Magazine. This article represents the point at which

the thesis turns away from traditional or standard auteur analysis and attempts to break

new ground in favour of aural auteur analysis. It also introduces the notion of a

particularly Australian film-making auteurist perspective, as exemplified by the

signature Weltanschauung of de Heer.

The final three refereed papers are specifically and exclusively (to the extent it is

possible, given the inevitable interaction between sound and image) ‘aural’ auteur

analyses, each dedicated to searching for a sonic signature in de Heer’s films and

critically drawing upon Bruce Johnson and Gaye Poole’s methodology in their brief

study of Peter Weir’s use of sound, in that they attempt to discover the “acoustic binaries

that sketch thematic oppositions” (1998, 133) in de Heer’s filmic œuvre. This section

consists of a trio of aural auteur analysis papers which ask the question “What does de

16 See the letter of acceptance in Appendix 12.1.


21

Heer attempt to say via his use of sound?” and draw the conclusion that de Heer’s use of

sound reveals an authorial signature interest in foregrounding the voices of non-hyper-

masculine protagonists.

The first paper of this last category locates de Heer’s foregrounding of a feminist project

in his film-making with analysis of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000).

Particular attention is paid to de Heer’s use of a female voice-over narrator and his

reworking of the original hyper-masculine script. Entitled “’An avowal of male lack’:

Sound in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories”, it was refereed and published in Metro

Magazine in 2008. The second paper highlights de Heer’s manipulation of post-

production audio to align audiences with his unlikely, non-hyper-masculine, child-like

protagonists via the aural point of view. Entitled “The aural point of view in the early

films of Rolf de Heer”, it has been accepted for refereed publication in the Routledge

journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video in 2010.17 The third paper is entitled

“Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer” and has been accepted for

refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the CHOTRO Indigenous

Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January 2008, in Delhi, India.18

It

has also been revised and submitted for refereed publication in Cinema Journal. This

final paper identifies de Heer’s interest in privileging the voices and eco-spirituality of

Aboriginal Australians in the films The Tracker, Ten Canoes and Dr. Plonk. It

represents a fitting conclusion to Part Two as it is a prime example of this thesis’ overall

claim that de Heer’s aurally imprinted signature worldview is one in which the voices of

marginalised people are fore-grounded, rather than those of the hyper-masculine,

exploitative, controlling protagonists seen so often in Hollywood cinema.

Upon contemplation of these seven papers, the reader may well conclude that auteur

analysis is just one of several methodologies grouped under the aegis of textual analysis,

and as such understandably - even deservedly - draws the criticism that it is overly

subjective, personalised and relativist. For this reason, the auteur analyst must be alert to

17 See the letter of acceptance in Appendix 12.1. 18 See the letter of acceptance in Appendix 12.1.


22

the possibility that her or his interpretations may be delivered, as Joke Hermes might call

them, in the style of an “ecclesiastical-type authority, laid down in paternalist missives

akin to the encyclical letter” (2005, 92). Glen Creeber acknowledges, “This is one of the

greatest problems with textual analysis, its apparent willingness to predetermine and

categorise all meaning for all viewers [sic]” (2006, 43, original emphasis). Nevertheless,

the methodology of this thesis is not inappropriate, nor is it without worth, for as

Creeber also stated:

... if a text and its reader can produce so many meanings why bother carrying out textual analysis at all? However, post-structuralism would argue that if all meaning is interpretative then textual analysis is, at least, honest, transparent and realistic about what it does and what it can achieve (38, my emphasis).

The existence of the auteur in the contemporary commerce and landscape of Australian

film-making cannot realistically be denied and must be accepted, no matter how

grudgingly that acceptance may be made by opponents to auteurism in general (see

Chapter 2.2 of this thesis). However, at the heart of the research plan for this exegesis

involving this author’s interpretative aural auteur analysis, as presented in the published

papers, is the sincere desire that at the very least they will be seen as “honest, transparent

and realistic”.


23

CHAPTER 2.

The Literature and

Contextual Review.

“Auteur is a term that dates back to the 1920s, in the theoretical writings

of French film critics and directors of the silent era”

(Hayward 1992, 12).


24

2.1 Preamble to the Literature and Contextual Review.

In the foreword to the published screenplay of his cult hit Bad Boy Bubby (1993), Rolf

de Heer made a hesitant admission:

‘Where did that come from?’ This is a question I am often asked, either about parts of Bad Boy Bubby or about the whole of it - I usually answer with an ‘I don’t know’. The answer for the whole film is too long and complicated, and as for the individual parts, I often genuinely don’t know (1997, 7, original emphasis).

De Heer himself is unable to locate, it seems, the origin of the ‘de Heer’ signature, hence

the identification of this film-maker as an auteur may well be heuristic: such a

nomination generates interest in investigating further the films he has authored that one

may not have viewed and heard in a quest to understand the meaning/s of his auteurial

imprint. Indeed, at the commencement of this research study, the author had witnessed

just five de Heer films: Dingo (1991) - a jazz film set in the Outback; Bad Boy Bubby

(1993) - a weird anti-religion horror film; The Tracker (2002) - an anti-western;

Alexandra’s Project (2003) - a feminist psycho-thriller; and Ten Canoes (2006) - an

Aboriginal Australian dreamtime fable. This list represents less than half of Rolf de

Heer’s body of work, but what a range of style and genre! Such a diversity that the

author could not help but wonder, theoretically, if anything connected de Heer’s

disparate oeuvre of twelve feature films, a questioning that led logically to a fascination

with auteur theory in an attempt to discover the origin and meaning of the ideas in de

Heer’s films. Alternatively, the analysis might help to explain the “long and

complicated” process of how his ideas come to be in his films, if he genuinely does not

know from where they originate. Certainly, the signature imprints of a film-maker

visible (or audible) in her or his films detected by auteur analysis may be present

without her or his conscious desire. These signature ideas, themes, or stylistic forms may

be produced and reproduced in the other films of her or his œuvre, in such a way that the

film-maker’s underlying pre-occupations may be recognised, surmised and perhaps even

celebrated. An analysis of such signatures can result in a richer understanding of the

film-maker’s “world view” (Caughie 1981, 10), “submerged reef of values” (Andrew


25

1993, 83) or “personal vision” (Polan “Auteur desire” 2001, paragraph 2)19

and may

even result in that film-maker earning the esteemed mantle of ‘auteur’.

But what is an auteur? How did the term originate? What are the criticisms of

‘auteurism’? Why is sound of little apparent interest to auteurists? Although the

literature on the subject of auteurism dates back more than half a century, and despite

the belief by some that: “auteur theory had fallen from grace in the academy as a

hopelessly romantic and old-fashioned way of looking at texts” (Thompson 1997, 246),

these questions are still being asked by film scholars. Bruce Kawin went so far as to say:

“It appears, for one thing, to be the only debate ever to affect the film industry” (2008,

193). The ongoing fascination with the subject is evidenced, for instance, by the

dedication of entire issues of the film journals Screening the Past (no. 12, 2001), The

Velvet Light Trap (vol. 57, no. 1-2, 2006), and Film-Philosophy (vol. 10, no. 1, 2006) to

the topic of auteurism; and the publication of three recent book-length collections of

essays on cinema authorship (Wexman 2003; Gerstner and Staiger 2003; and Grant

2008). Well-known film theorist Claudia Gorbman also made a useful contribution of

relevance to this thesis when she lately recognised the music-loving director, such as

Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Luc Godard or Stanley Kubrick, with the distinction of a new

label, that of the “mélomane” (2007, 149). With these diverse writings, debate on the

subject of auteurism has been revitalised if not literally resuscitated, and this thesis

intends to add to the ongoing debates by undertaking a detailed auteur analysis of Rolf

de Heer’s films, culminating in a collection of papers emphasising his use of sound.

Before that contribution could be achieved, however, an effective understanding of the

salient steps in auteurism’s birth, growth, decline and eventual renaissance in the course

of the last fifty-plus years had to be arrived at.

19 Once again, as witnessed by the ubiquity of the term “personal vision”, the hegemony of the image in film criticism makes itself apparent.


26

2.2 The History and Development of Auteurism.

The notion of an artwork having an individual author responsible for its inception has

not always been accepted in western societies. For centuries it was God who was seen as

the locus of an artist’s creativity - not any mere human - and it is only since the

Renaissance that the individual artist’s name has been associated with her or his artistic

creation. In the early years of silent cinema the writer, not necessarily the director, was

accorded auteur status. Susan Hayward has noted that:

Auteur is a term that dates back to the 1920s, in the theoretical writings of French film critics and directors of the silent era. At that time, the debate centred on the auteur (author of script and film-maker as one and the same) versus the scenario-led film (scripts commissioned from authors or scriptwriters) - a distinction that fed into the original high-art/low-art debate (1996, 12, original emphasis).

Nonetheless, as the major studios grew in strength, authorship of films began to be

associated with their stabled stars who were the main foci of marketing campaigns. It is

only since the late 1940s, however, that cinema has acquired the concept of an auteur

director, this being the time when a rift between notions of commercial cinema and art

cinema began to be constructed by French film journalists.

In 1948, the “debate” (as Hayward called it), became earnest, when French film-maker,

left-wing intellectual and critic Alexandre Astruc devised the metaphor of the caméra-

stylo. By this he meant that the film camera could potentially be wielded as a novelist or

poet might wield her or his pen, becoming “a means of writing just as flexible and subtle

as written language” (1968, 18). Astruc’s article, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-

garde: la caméra-stylo” (Graham 1968), contained the first cogent suggestion that film

could be read as a text, and that a good film does not come about from the toil of a

production crew but rather, from the creative and intellectual force of the director and

her or his leadership. Before Astruc, it was generally believed that the monolithic nature

of studio film-making meant a solitary authorial voice could not make itself seen or

heard in a film. Film criticism, predominately sociological, assumed a cinematic work

could do little more than reflect the ideology of capitalism, being, in itself, a commodity

or a product of capitalist ideology. For some, this meant film could not be perceived as


27

art at all. Where artistic value was at all recognised in film, it was usually a case of a so-

called ‘quality’ production that dealt with a serious social issue. The work of reviewers

saw films “less often aesthetically evaluated than topically synopsized” (Sarris 1996,

15), but from the 1950s on there became evident a kind of art cinema, in which a

director’s voice sometimes intruded upon the capitalist ideal to the extent of disrupting

the verisimilitude of traditional narrative.

In 1951 Andre Bazin co-founded Des Cahiers du Cinéma, an influential film journal still

in the business of publishing film analysis today, and which is renowned for keeping

film studies in “a prolonged stage of romantic adolescence” (Schatz 2006, 91) due to its

writer’s indulgent praise of the film-makers they revere. Bazin is often regarded as the

father of auteurism due to his recognition and appreciation of the authorial style and

Zeitgeist of film-makers such as Charlie Chaplin and Jean Renoir, and his opposition to

the nearly theory-free political commitment of Positif and other French journals. A time

of Cold War tension, anti-Stalinism and left-wing political upheaval, the 1950s in France

was characterised by much political debate, but it was left to one of the more polemical

critics at Cahiers, François Truffaut, to actually coin the controversial phrase La

politique des auteurs in his article, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma Française”

(Truffaut 1954). He used this often misunderstood label in collaboration with his

colleagues at Cahiers to effectively apotheosise Hollywood directors such as Howard

Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, whose work had been denied them during the

war due to the occupation and restriction by Axis forces on American culture.20

20 At this point it is relevant to note that the Hollywood films the French critics were suddenly exposed to were neither dubbed nor sub-titled, which meant their appreciation was primarily based on a visual experience, a possible factor in their neglect of the role of auteurial sound.

Despite

knowing that American directors were working within the repressive studio machinery

of the Hollywood system and that the types of films made and their scripts were often

decided for them, Truffaut believed that even directors under the control of the major

studios could nonetheless achieve a personal style in their work through their

preoccupations with the themes they emphasised, the visual mise-en-scène they crafted

and the formal styles they employed. Marilyn Fabe noted that Truffaut praised such


28

directors: “for making visually innovative films from their own stories. These directors

were true auteurs” (2004, 122, my emphasis). Nevertheless, the reality was that most

Hollywood directors had little artistic control and Robert B. Ray wrote that “In some

ways, in fact, the MGM system converted all of its directors into Allen Smithee” (2001,

55), invoking the Director’s Guild of America sanctioned pseudonym used by film-

makers wishing to distance themselves from work in which their creativity had been

curtailed. Truffaut also criticised the psychologically realistic French films of Claude

Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, Rene Clement and others, because their ‘quality’ films

were more ‘writerly’ than ‘directorly’. Indeed, Craig Saper summarised the prevailing

Cahiers attitude with the comment, “Using the French word for ‘author’ was meant as

an ironic attack on those critics who wanted to privilege the screenwriter’s literary skills

over the superficial stylistic panache of a film’s director” (2001, 31-2). This “ironic

attack” favoured those directors with visual flair but also has had long lasting

repercussions in the reception of the term auteur and the ongoing understanding

amongst non-French speakers that it refers to the primacy of the screen image in film-

making artistry. Thus, the polemical impetus of La politique des auteurs immediately

assumed specific and precise meanings, positioning the visuals at the fore. It also called

for the adoption of a strong stance in favour of some directors and against others,

‘romanticising’ and elevating the stature of French film-makers Jean Renoir, Robert

Bresson, and Jean Cocteau, and of American directors D. W. Griffiths, Howard Hawks,

John Ford, and British-born Hitchcock.

The beginning of the New Wave of French cinema, or Nouvelle Vague, was to some

extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying their theory to the real world by

directing their own films, in their own visually flamboyant styles. Unsettling techniques

such as shots that go beyond the usual 180º axis,21

21 The 180° rule - also known as ‘crossing the line’ - is an important film-making maxim which holds that two actors in a scene should always appear to maintain the same left/right relation to the other. When the imagined axis between the two is ignored, audiences can become confused, believing the actors have changed positions on the set. A prime example is the use of the deliberately disorienting technique in the Australian film Kiss or Kill (Bill Bennett 1997).

jump cuts and rapid scene changes

exemplified the work of directors such as Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc

Godard. These visual trademarks were employed to not just mesmerise the audience


29

with illusory imagery and elaborate narrative, but to deliberately exceed the common

expectations of cinema-goers. Thus, they respected Hollywood directors such as

Nicholas Ray who, according to Diana Holmes, “was less well received at home than in

France: those very qualities of introspection and ‘poetic’ experimentation with colour,

lighting and framing that made him an ‘auteur’ for Cahiers were often seen in the United

States as pretentious” (2007, 161). In French film-making, visual ‘pretension’ was to be

applauded as artistic self-expression by a creative auteurial director.

However, all was not peaceful in the Cahiers coterie, as André Bazin resisted the shift

towards romantically recognizing the director as the sole source and organiser of

meaning in a film, as though the individual film artist was some kind of impossibly

gifted elite. He criticised auteur theory in a 1957 issue of Cahiers (Bazin 1985),

preferring a sociological approach to film criticism that accounted for the historical

moment of production and the undeniable influence of the forces of society. Bazin

believed that the film-maker should be self-effacing and act as a passive recorder of the

real world rather than an authorial manipulator of its appearance. Cinematic language

should be transparent, films should act as windows on the world and individual style

should not affect the mise-en-scène, rather the inner meaning should be permitted to

shine through unassisted, allowing the film-goer to come to her or his own conclusions

without authorial manipulation. This position prompted other Cahiers writers to

postulate a distinction between auteurs and metteurs-en-scène. The latter, which John

Caughie defined as “a director without a consistent signature” (2008, 412), were deemed

inferior to the former because the metteur-en-scène director’s work lacks the inspiration

and personal expression of creativity necessary to constitute a unique and substantial

world-view. With such a distinction, the Cahiers critics controversially separated

Hollywood directors such as Hitchcock into the former category and John Huston into

the latter.

The French idea of the auteur gained momentum in America in the 1960s through the

writings of Andrew Sarris (the editor of the English issue of Cahiers du Cinéma) in the

journals Film Culture and Movie, and this popularity of “auteur theory” (as he translated


30

the phrase La politique des auteurs), led to his widely read canon of great directors. In

The American Cinema (1968) Sarris set up a system whereby directors were graded

according to how far their personal world-views were able to transcend the hierarchical

film-making systems under which they toiled. With that, he established a pantheon of

significant directors whose names alone were considered a criterion of greatness, in this

polemical book still today disparaged as “a veritable mania of evaluative categorisation

… idle diversion [rather] than a task for disciplined film scholarship” (Dix 2008, 139).

Nevertheless, the widely quoted Sarris stated that there were three premises of auteurism

which could be equated with “circles”: an outer circle comprising “technical competence

of the director as a criterion of value” (2000, 132), a middle circle comprising “personal

style” with the premise that “the distinguishable personality of a director is a criterion of

value” (ibid); and an inner circle comprising “interior meaning”, which he attempted to

explain as being “… extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and

his material. This conception of interior meaning comes close to what Astruc defines as

mise-en-scène, but not quite” (ibid). Sarris’ difficulty with defining the term ‘mise-en-

scène’ was further evidenced by his next few lines:

Dare I come out and say what I think it to be is an élan of the soul? Lest I seem unduly mystical, let me hasten to add that all I mean by ‘soul’ is that intangible difference between one personality and another, all things being equal (2000, 133).

The concept of mise-en-scène is, thanks to Sarris’ woolly writing, somewhat indistinct

as he attempted to give it a numinous meaning related to the emotional tone of the

cinematic production. Regardless of the slipperiness of this term, it is important to note

the persistently non-aural nature of its definition: Sarris compared mise-en-scène to the

“vision of a world the director projects” (ibid). Sarris later again attempted to elaborate

on its meaning:

The art of the cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scène. … The whole point of a meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement (1996, 36, original emphasis).

In other words, Sarris is referring to the signature a director leaves on her or his films -

the “personal statement” - and the “mystical” possibility a director is unintentionally


31

leaving it. With auteurism, the term mise-en-scène became closely associated with

directorial techniques such as the arrangement of visual components within the frame,

the position, angle and motion of the camera, as well as the movement of actors. The

director’s contribution to the film’s sound, if indeed there was any, was largely ignored.

In his classic text Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, first published in 1968, which

Robin Wood describes as “probably the most influential book on film in English of the

last decade” (2006, 233), Peter Wollen responded to Sarris’ advancement of La politique

des auteurs, when he offered the first cogent explanation for the process whereby a

director’s signature was ‘mystically’ left on a film. He wrote in his 1972 revision:

… it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unintended meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the individual involved. ... [Auteur analysis] consists of tracing a structure (not a message) within the work, which can then post factum be assigned to an individual, the director, on empirical grounds (1972, 167-8).

In some ways, this concept of a film’s ‘internal’ meaning - existing outside of any

external evidence, including even an authorial director’s own understanding of its

meaning - relates to Monroe C. Beardsley and William K. Wimsatt’s “intentional

fallacy” (1954), which asserts there is no such thing as an unmediated communication

between author and reader. Whatever intention the author may have had remains

irrelevant to its actual reception. Hence, the unconscious intent is no less valid than the

attributed author’s overtly stated intent, even if that nominal author protests at the auteur

analyst’s interpretation of that unconscious intent.

Wollen revisited his notion of the unconsciously imprinted signature, in the wake of

structuralism, in his 1998 edition, as follows:

The director does not subordinate himself [sic] to another author; his source is only a pre-text which provides catalysts, scenes which fuse with his own preoccupations to produce a radically new work. Thus the manifest process of performance, the treatment of a subject, conceals the latent production of a quite new text, the production of the director as an auteur (1998, 76).

From this perspective, therefore, these unconscious signatures may be traced a posteriori

within the film and may be named antonomastically, for example, ‘Ford’, ‘Hitchcock’,


32

or, as may even result from this thesis, ‘de Heer’. These terms are more than simply

metonymic, however, for they indicate the important discovery of a director’s

unconsciously imprinted signature. Wollen further elaborated upon this concept, taking

up where Sarris left off in describing the mysteriously imprinted mise-en-scène of an

auteur:

... it is possible to decipher, not a coherent message or world-view, but a structure which underlies the film and shapes it, gives it a certain pattern of energy cathexis. It is this structure which auteur analysis disengages from the film (1998, 115).

This delineation between a “world-view” and a “structure” might be misleading to some,

but Wollen was not saying here that there is no message or world-view in an auteurist

signature. Rather, he was suggesting that it is not necessarily “coherent”. In other words,

it is to be found there, in the structure of the film, but it may require a close examination,

applied to all the films in that particular film-maker’s œuvre. Wollen went on to position

this structured world-view or message with regard to other forms of creativity:

There can be no doubt that the presence of a structure in the text can often be connected with the presence of a director on the set, but the situation in the cinema, where the director’s primary task is often one of co-ordination and rationalization, is very different from that in other arts, where there is a much more direct relationship between artist and work. It is in this sense that it is possible to speak of a film auteur as an unconscious catalyst (ibid).

Although Wollen’s two ideas of the authorial director as an unconscious producer of

meaning and of the authorial director as catalyst in the production of meaning may

appear similar, the difference formed sufficient impetus for rewritings of his monograph.

The transition from the first text of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1972) as a pre-

structuralist notion of the author as the creator of meaning to his third text (1998) in

which the post-structuralist notion of the author figures as a construct of the reader, was

very significant in the theoretical milieu surrounding Roland Barthes’ 1967 publication

of the “Death of the author” (the English translation was published in 1977). This

seminal essay planted a seed of contention where any authorial status was being applied

to a text or film, claiming that it is only a convenient tool for critical analysis which

operates to freeze one of numerous meanings, whilst bearing little relation to the actual

function of the text. Barthes wrote: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that


33

text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (1977, 147). According to

this view, the multivariate, intersecting cultural forces that inform a film and contribute

to the practice of reading a film are the true points of interest in understanding the

workings of cinema in the society in which it is situated. Also in France, Michel

Foucault asked “What is an author?” (translated in 1977) and his and Barthes’s works

were seen as the culmination of a mode of literary criticism in which writing was

understood to be de-individualised and subject-less, representing an intriguing chiasmus

with the film theorists of Cahiers, many of whom saw film as a subjective and

personalised text, narrated, as it were, by the auteur director. This level of debate and

conflict was, in many ways, typical of the intellectual environment of Paris in the late

60s and when the first English versions of Foucault and Barthes’s work began appearing

a decade later, the mood in the UK and America was definitely leaning away from

auteurism. Despite the highly-influential, ongoing nature of Foucault and Barthes’ ideas,

however, the notion of a film having a distinctive author persists. Auteurism survives

and prospers today as an important and legitimate mainstay of film analysis.

Surprisingly, considering the plethora of discussion about the relative merits and

shortcomings of auteur theory, little has been written about the methodology of actually

conducting an auteur analysis. In his 1967 book-length study of the films of Italian neo-

realist film-maker Luchino Visconti, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith wrote of a first standard

almost identical to that of Dugald Williamson’s: “As a principle of method the theory

requires the critic to recognise one basic fact, which is that the author exists, and to

organise the analysis of his [sic] work round that fact” (Nowell-Smith 1967, 9).

However, Nowell-Smith acknowledges that the defining characteristics of the nominal

author’s presence are not always readily apparent, and hence,

The purpose of criticism becomes therefore to uncover behind the superficial contrast of subject and treatment a structural hard core of basic and often recondite motifs. The pattern formed by these motifs, which may be stylistic or thematic, is what gives an author’s work its particular structure, both defining it internally and distinguishing one body of work from another (1967, 10).

Wollen later added to Nowell-Smith’s advice to seek a “pattern” with the following:


34

Perhaps it would be true to say that it is the lesser auteurs who can be defined as Nowell-Smith put it, by a core of basic motifs which remain constant, without variation. The great directors must be defined in terms of shifting relations in their singularity as well as their uniformity (1998, 70).

According to this view, these “shifting relations” will be discovered after examination of

a film-maker’s entire œuvre. Wollen here revisits the concept of a body of work seeming

to aspire to be that one ‘perfect’ film:

Renoir once remarked that a director spends his [sic] whole life making one film; this film, which it is the task of the critic to construct, consists not only of the typical features of its variants, which are merely its redundancies, but of the principle of variation which governs it, that is its esoteric structure, which can only manifest itself or ‘seep to the surface’, in Levi-Strauss’s phrase, ‘through the repetition process’ (ibid).

Hence, according to Wollen, the motifs that characterise this fabulous, unrealised “one

film” may more typically be found expressed in different films in a film-maker’s œuvre,

as recurrent tropes and themes. Richard Maltby wrote that the antinomies of an auteurial

preoccupation also reveal social meaning pertaining to the director’s culture: “The

recurrent thematic consistencies or binary oppositions from which this myth could be

distilled were usually attached both to the unconscious preoccupations of the director,

and to those of the wider group for which she [sic] was taken to speak” (2003, 505).

Thus, the researcher who looks for evidence of auteurism can attempt to “distil” the less

obvious thematic patterns, antinomies or motifs, which may vary from work to work, in

the director’s overall body of films. This is an underlying principle of the

methodological approach undertaken in this thesis.

Less problematic to many theorists in film studies was the ‘competing’ methodology of

genre analysis, an approach in which the identity and function of the alleged author

became irrelevant. Thus, with the post-structuralist de-emphasis on authorship, the early

1970s saw genre analysis begin to be seriously adopted as a critical discipline in

opposition to auteur theory, as the aftermath of France’s May 1968 political and

intellectual uprisings combined with the enabling influence of agitative, post-

structuralist French theorists to lessen the position of auteurism in the academy.22

22 Although there had been the seminal 1940s works by Robert Warshow (“The Gangster as Tragic Hero” and

One


35

inherent problem with this interpretative approach, however, is what Rick Altman called

“genrification” (1999, 65), whereby well-known genre films such as the horror or the

western23

evolve and change until previously accepted genre boundaries are blurred and

near-meaningless.

Thus, towards the end of the century, auteurism seemed to make a comeback in the face

of the seemingly less unassailable genre studies with Wollen proclaiming, “I am still an

auteurist” (159). Fortunately for him, many other theorists were willing by then to

concede that the two ‘death-knells’ to auteurism delivered by Barthes and Foucault,

were, in fact, mere glancing blows that served, ultimately, to simply redirect critical

attention for a while. In 1995, the journals Film Criticism and Film History each ran

entire issues devoted to auteurism. The heady days of the 1950s aesthetic of romantic

adulation of directors became known as first-wave auteurism with the current, second

wave taking on a more commercial tone. The notion of the film director struggling

against the stultifying pressures of studio heads to present an artistic world vision

seemed to morph into a new meaning. Pam Cook wrote, with a barely discernible tone of

cynicism, of the late 1990s appropriation of auteurism by Hollywood:

It is as if a romantic, literary notion of the author has been succeeded by a designer notion of the author: the author is now depicted as an irrepressible individuality appreciated and paid for by her or his ability to contribute to product differentiation, a process whose results are then redescribed by the film publicity-marketing system in terms of the conventional romantic notions of the author. This is convenient for business and promotional purposes (cf. Spielberg – Scorsese) as the author shifts between two statuses: exemplary individual and brand name/corporate logo (1999, 313).

Unlike the days in which Alfred Hitchcock’s appropriation of the role of auteur was met

with disdain for “reduc[ing] the writers, the designers, the photographers, the composers,

and the actors to little other than elves in the master carpenter’s workshop” (Spoto 1983,

“Movie Chronicle: The Westerner” which dealt mainly with the two genres’ capacity for mythologizing history [reprinted in Warshow 1962]), the concept of the auteur hardly figured in these articles. Hence, it should be emphasised that although the rise of post-structuralism was certainly removed from auteurist concerns, there was no covert project for opposing the concept of the auteur for the sake of ‘shoring up’ genre studies. Nevertheless, genre analysis began to overtake auteur analysis as the leading form of film criticism in academia in the 1970s and 80s (Dix 2008, 145), although many film scholars were to occupy themselves with audience studies as the 80s and 90s advanced. 23 See the first paper of this thesis for discussion on the genrification of the Australian anti-western, as epitomised by The Tracker (Rolf de Heer 2002).


36

495), the commercial benefits of auteurism began to influence Hollywood’s movers and

shakers. In a 2004 issue of Cinema Journal Derek Nystrom further argued for a new

meaning of auteur; “we can understand auteurism to be a kind of professional-

managerial class strategy” (19). Referring to Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s definition of

the professional-managerial class (PMC) as “consisting of salaried menial workers who

do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of

labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist

class relations” (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979, 12), Nystrom claimed the PMC also

organises and supervises the workers in the best interests of film capitalism, as the

Ehrenreichs had further explained:

Indeed, the reason Roger Corman and American International Pictures (AIP) were so influential in helping many New Hollywood film-makers (such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese) get their start is because neither Corman’s nor AIP’s films had ‘orthodox’ union contracts and could therefore employ workers without union cards, often at extremely low pay and under exploitative working conditions (20).

In other words, the rise of these commercially successful “New Hollywood” auteurs was

achieved through the exploitative diminishment, within the film industry, of labour’s

power. This aspect of auteurism is related to one of its most frequent criticisms, in that

the second wave is an overtly commercial construct and such animadversion is

addressed further in the next section of this literature review. Meanwhile, the journals

The Velvet Light Trap and Film-Philosophy in 2006 have sustained auteurism as the

subject of academic interest with the former journal’s edition notable for its re-

examinations of studio authorship, auteurism in documentary film-making and case

studies of individual auteurs such as Orson Welles, George Romero and David Mamet.

Film-Philosophy addressed auteurs Chris Marker, Patrice Leconte, Jean-Luc Godard and

Terrence Malick. Cook released the third edition of her in-depth text on film theory, The

Cinema Book, in 2007, and of its 610 pages, 98 are devoted to the subject of film

authorship, suggesting a revitalisation of auteurism in academic pedagogy. Despite the

continued discussion of auteurism, however, many theorists’ understanding remains

shaped most significantly by the work of Peter Wollen (particularly his pre-structuralist

emphasis on the director as unconscious catalyst of a detectable signature in her or his


37

films), as the progenitor of much of this increasingly sophisticated and re-energised

attention to the topic.

And what of the auteur of the future? In the Internet age, still in its infancy when Wollen

released his third edition of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, we now see auteurs

bypassing the high costs of marketing and distribution completely as they post their

videotaped films on YouTube and elsewhere online. In the early 21st century, there is an

expectation that with the ready availability of low-cost, high definition video cameras

and cheap editing software, more and more auteur ‘films’ will be produced. These ultra

low cost videos may well reflect an individual director’s unique ideas and world-views

and hybridise genres beyond recognition, freed as they are from the commercial

restraints of monolithic studios and profit-driven producers as a new age of

democratisation of the film industry commences, writ small on the mobile telephone’s

screen. With an explosion in numbers of these Internet auteurs imminent, the criticism

that the collaborative nature of film-making precludes the possibility of a single film

author may become increasingly irrelevant as more and more film-makers begin to

control every aspect of the film. The YouTube auteurs of the future may well do

everything themselves, rendering irrelevant the historical progression from romantic

auteurism to post-structuralist denial of the author to New Hollywood commercialisation

of the auteur. Nevertheless, an understanding of the criticisms of traditional auteurism

remains helpful - especially as the subject of this thesis, Rolf de Heer, appears to be

resolutely committed to making cinema in 35 mm celluloid - and it is to the arena of the

critiques of classic auteurism the next section of the thesis’ literature review will now

turn.


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2.3 Criticisms of Auteurism.

Despite numerous attempts to dismiss auteurism, including James Naremore’s

comments that it is “surely dead [and] never really a theory” (1990, 20, 21) and general

disquiet around its whimsical subjectivity and lack of rigour, the desire to treat a

collection of films by the same director as representative of an artist’s Weltanschauung

remains intriguing to many film-goers and critics alike. Paul Watson described the allure

of auteurism as a “theoretical peccadillo, the seemingly irresistible urge to scratch the

author-itch” (2007, 93). Nevertheless, there are valid censures and at least five main

critiques are levelled against auteurism. Many are related to that indeterminate historical

moment when Bazin’s liberal-humanist theory and the iconoclastic auteurism of the

Cahiers cohort were radically overtaken by leftist critiques of mainstream cinema’s

‘apparatus’.

2.3 a) The Collaborative Nature of Filmmaking.

Critics of auteur theory perhaps rightfully claim that it fails fully to account for the

collaborative nature of filmmaking. Although some film-makers, such as de Heer, are

the writer, director and producer of their films - and therefore less susceptible to this

criticism - they still must necessarily call upon the skills of others. Wollen’s 1968

conception of the auteur in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema is certainly vulnerable to

this first criticism. He wrote of the contributions to the film-making process additional to

those of the director:

... sometimes these separate texts - those of the cameraman or the actors -may force themselves into prominence so that the film becomes an indecipherable palimpsest. This does not mean, of course, that it ceases to exist or to sway us or please us or intrigue us; it simply means that it is inaccessible to criticism. We can merely record our momentary and subjective impressions (1968, 71).

Wollen seems to suggest here that auteur theory, as it relates to the authorial director, is

the only workable means for film criticism. But as was mentioned by Spoto in his work

on Hitchcock, an auteurist vanity can have dire consequences in the - by necessity -

collaborative field of film-making. What is ‘Hitchcock’ without the musical


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compositions of Bernard Herrmann? What is ‘Welles’ without the cinematography of

Gregg Toland? Perhaps one should also ask: ‘What is ‘Rolf de Heer’ without the

compositions of Graham Tardif or the sound design of Jim Currie?’ On the other hand,

Orson Welles declared “Theatre is a collective experience; cinema is the work of one

single person” (qtd in Kael 2002, 12), and of Toland Welles said: “I had a great

advantage not only in the real genius of my cameraman but in the fact that he, like all

men who are masters of a craft, told me at the outset that there was nothing about

camerawork that any intelligent being couldn’t learn in half a day. And he was right”

(53). Such hubris, which prompted Citizen Kane (1941) writer Herman Mankiewicz to

comment bitterly on Welles, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God” (54), would

appear, from the research of this thesis, to be commendably lacking in the collaborations

of de Heer.

2.3 b) Not ‘Author’ but ‘Scriptor’.

Fierce critiques of concepts of the meta-textual author also serve as arguments against

the acceptance of what Julia Kristeva called a “transcendental signifier” (1980, 13). In

the latter part of the 20th century the notion of the author sustained what many believed

at the time to be its ‘death knell’ as post-structuralist thinking argued that meaning is

only constituted by the reader and not determined by the author. In place of the ‘dead’

author, Barthes suggests the “scriptor”, who is always and already immersed in

language: “In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the

text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the

subject with the book as predicate” (1977, 145). Michel Foucault further explained how

the author is culturally embedded:

The ‘author function’ is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy (1977, 130-1).


40

Like Barthes, Foucault suggested a less stable, more complex subject, which is

integrated with and produced by fluid and interacting discursive institutions and

processes. Julia Kristeva also theorised an unstable subject as author, the “subject-in-

process” (1980, 13). In other words, the notion of a single identity possessing, due to the

attribution of the title of author, a key to any final meaning or signified, is challenged by

writers such as Barthes, Foucault and Kristeva. A film, indeed any text, is little more

than a kind of cultural putty for an audience to decode as they wish; shaping its

malleable form until it fits with whatever interpretation suits the film-goer and her or his

social milieu. From this perspective, there is never any ‘truly totalised meaning’ and

therefore, no ‘truly totalised author’ for any given text. Although such a critique might,

at first glance, sit uneasily with notions of the film auteur, it can actually be perceived as

helpful, in that it claims that any reading of a text/film must be considered valid, even if

it is entirely at odds with the designated auteur’s stated intention. A reading that is

attributed to the unconscious imprinting by a film director remains a legitimate one

amongst many.

2.3 c) The Auteur Label as Marketing Tool.

Another criticism of auteurism is that it may deteriorate into a shallow commercial

enterprise, intent solely on financially capitalising on the name of a director. According

to Sarris, auteur theory leads audiences to believe that a bad John Ford is better than a

good Henry King (to use his example) or, as he put it: “the worst film of a great director

may be more interesting though less successful than the best film of a fair to middling

director” (1996, 17). If a director is an auteur then there must be something of value

even in her or his least accomplished films, for indeed, as an auteur, s/he must be

incapable of making a bad film. While such logic is patently flawed, the auteur figures

prominently in the hyperbolic spectacles of contemporary film marketing and publicity.

Timothy Corrigan summarised the growing importance of the director as a “commercial

strategy for organizing audience reception” (1991, 103). One outcome of this kind of

commerce of authorship is that auteurs are fabricated much faster: for example, Quentin

Tarentino was declared an auteur by the media after only one film.


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2.3 d) The Masculinity of Auteurism.

There is also much opposition to the phallocentricity of auteurism. Most directors

identified as auteurs are heterosexual, white males and one must acknowledge the

criticism these privileged positions attract. Kaja Silverman noted in 1988 that the auteur

often serves as a site where “male lack is disavowed” (1988, 188). Typically,

mainstream cinema is “engendered through a complex system of displacements which

locate the male voice at the point of apparent textual origin” (45). The male auteur is

complicit with the ideological project of the dominant cinema of our time, perpetuating a

controlling male subject and a pervasive male gaze. Silverman argued:

In his most exemplary guise, classic cinema’s male subject sees without being seen, and speaks from an inaccessible vantage point … It is thus through an endless series of trompes l’oeil that classic cinema’s male viewing subject sustains what is a fundamentally impossible identification with authoritative vision, speech and hearing (51-54, original emphasis).

Silverman was to later elaborate in Male Subjectivity at the Margins the psychoanalytic-

based notion that there is an illusory idea of classical male subjectivity that abides by a

phallic standard “predicated on the denial of castration, alterity, and specularity” (1992,

3). In other words, male auteurs make films that objectify and repress the feminine for

the benefit of male spectatorship. Resisting the industrial and commercial restraints

inherent in big budget film production, the auteur will endow the film with meaning

through the force of his authority, independence and autonomy - his traditionally

masculine traits. Diana Holmes traces this maleness to the French cinephiles who begat

auteurism, stating “Cahiers criticism was a discourse that assumed its era’s male-for-

universal perspective on the world … an unconscious androcentrism and ‘othering’ of

women” (2007, 169).

Despite the collaborative milieu of their working environment, non-female auteurs such

as Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and John Ford were able to triumph as the unified

enunciating subject, and anecdotes abound testifying to the ‘alpha maleness’ of such

individuals. When he proclaimed the advent of “the age of the auteurs”, Jacques Rivette

commended those masculine auteurs who had “a virile anger” (1981, 41). Pauline Kael


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criticised Sarris for being “enthralled with [his] narcissistic male fantasies” that

auteurists such as he staged within “the small range of experience of their boyhood and

adolescence” (1963, 26). Carrie Tarr has noted that “the concept of the auteur, if

ostensibly ungendered, remains resolutely masculine” (1999, 3). One female film-maker,

Sally Potter, has been labelled not auteur, but rather “auteure” (Columpar 2003, 108), in

recognition of the maleness of the first term.

Rolf de Heer, on the other hand, has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical

filmmaker” (Davis 2006) and has developed a reputation for gently evincing and

amplifying the voice of the disadvantaged, the marginalised, the ‘Other’. As Adrian

Martin has pointed out, de Heer tends to identify with “the figure of the naive visionary”

(2000, 30), someone who is isolated or alienated from mainstream society, and in

several of his films this otherwise unheard voice is female. For instance, the ecologically

moralistic Epsilon (1995) tells the story of an extra-terrestrial with a vastly superior

intellect, housed in the body of a beautiful woman, who harangues a ‘macho’ man about

the environmental plunder of the Earth by humans, all presented in the grandmotherly

tones of a female voice-over narrator. As a protest against her warring mother and

father, the little girl in The Quiet Room (1996) becomes mute, with her feelings voiced

by a stream-of-consciousness voice-over. In Dance Me To My Song (1997) the audience

is exposed throughout to the sound of the laboured breathing of a woman with severe

cerebral palsy who expresses herself through a computerised voice-box and eventually

finds the love that constantly evades her able-bodied, loud-mouthed but emotionally-

stunted carer. Alexandra’s Project (2003) features an alienated wife who finds a voice

via her video recorder and asserts herself from her emotionally isolating, domineering

husband. Likewise with his film The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, de Heer positions

the film-goer via an identifying stance with the feminine: a female voice-over narrates

the story. Such examples suggest that if de Heer is an auteur, he is not one in the

traditional mould of a male egotist objectifying and repressing the feminine for the

benefit of a male audience.


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2.3 e) The Dominance of the Visual in Auteurism.

The final criticism of auteurism the thesis will concern itself with is the fundamental

problem it addresses: that there is an emphasis on the visual mise-en-scène over sound

and a related insufficiency in the methodology of auteur analysis. Philip Brophy noted

the absence of any theoretical conception of auteur sound:

While the notion of mise-en-scène at its most rudimentary spotlights theater [sic] direction as the core vein of ‘director cinema’, auteur sound, for the bulk of the 20th century, conforms to the European notion of direct sound: visuals are directed, while sounds are simply direct. Theorists have long smothered the ontological investigation of so-called direct sound with poor metaphorical assignations of truth and honesty (Brophy “Bring the noise” 2006, 16).

Practitioners, too, have often avoided overstepping the limits of what they perceive

audiences will accept as realistic (i.e. “truth and honesty”), when it comes to sound. This

despite the widespread knowledge that sound works very effectively on the film-goer.

Perhaps because Cahiers critics watched un-dubbed and un-subtitled Hollywood films

previously denied them in occupied France, the auteurial imprint has, since its inception,

been sought on a visual level only.

Be it an examination of the auteur’s image or sound, little has been written on how best

to conduct an auteur analysis or the preferred methodology for a thorough auteur

analysis of a ‘suspected’ auteur’s body of work. Wollen described conducting a

structural analysis in which there is searching for a core of repeated motifs, which are

frequently expressed as thematic opposites, or antinomies. Building on the work of

Vladimir Propp on Russian fairy-tales, Wollen in 1968 first advocated reducing a film to

antinomic pairs. Within the films of John Ford, Wollen identified the following sets of

pairings:

... the most relevant are garden versus wilderness, plough-share versus saber, settler versus nomad, European versus Indian, civilized versus savage, book versus gun, married versus unmarried, East versus West. ... The master antinomy in Ford’s films is that between the wilderness and the garden. ... crystallised in a number of striking images. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, for instance, contains the image of the cactus rose, which encapsulates the antinomy between desert and garden which pervades the whole film (1998, 66).


44

Such antinomies are seemingly dominated by visual motifs, exemplified by Ford’s

cactus rose. Wollen was still advocating an auteur analysis which seeks pairs of

opposites in 2003 when he found in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz 1942) the “idealism-

cynicism double” (cited in Gerstner and Staiger 2003, 66). Despite the significance of

sound to this particular film (what is Casablanca without the song “As time goes by”?),

Wollen steadfastly refused to consider the aural in his auteur analysis, stating:

“[Auteurs] succeed not just because of their pivotal position in the production process,

but because they fight, as Curtiz did, to exercise control over script changes, casting

decisions, set design, editing, and even camera positions and shots” (1998, 70). Gilles

Deleuze, too, in the beginning of his authorship study, privileged the image over sound

in film: “The great directors of the cinema ... think with movement-images and time-

images instead of concepts” (1996, xiv). Such an attitude that over-values image in

auteurism reached its conceptual zenith with Roger Horrocks’ declaration regarding the

“direct film” work of Len Lye (in which he created film without a camera, painting or

scratching directly onto the celluloid): “Direct animation can be regarded as the only

form of filmmaking that literally fits the auteur theory as the touch of the artist is

physically present in each frame, with a recognizable sense of signature” (cited in

Gerstner and Staiger 2003, 176, original emphasis). Horrocks does redeem himself

slightly with the concession, “A critic seeking to claim Lye as an auteur can also cite the

distinctive rhythmic vitality of his work (in the syncopated way it combines images with

music)” (ibid), but the emphasis on auteurial image over auteurial sound is

unmistakable.

An exception to this rule, however, is the brief study of Peter Weir’s films by Bruce

Johnson and Gaye Poole, who conduct the closest thing to the only Australian aural

auteur analysis this researcher is aware of (although they limit their study to film music

only). While not addressing his entire œuvre, their examination of part of Weir’s work

reveals certain antinomies, or, as Johnson and Poole call them, ‘polarities’. In Picnic at

Hanging Rock (1975), they identify the following sound-based polarities of:

... the organic timeless sounds of birds, wind and insects set against the ‘little fidget wheels’ of clocks and chimes in muted Edwardian interiors invoke the nature/culture polarity. The use of rhythm-based as opposed to tonally-based


45

music helps to activate oppositions between abandonment and restraint: drums versus harmony, rock versus Mozart (1998, 129).

A similar binary opposition was found in Gallipoli (1981): “Weir again constructs

acoustic binaries that sketch thematic oppositions such as exotic/familiar (Muezzin chant

followed by a coo-ee), civilised order/violence (an opera record on the battlefield)”

(133). In foregrounding the importance of sound in their research, Johnson and Poole

signal a change that this thesis aims to rework and advance: a re-appropriation of auteur

theory from a position in which the image is considered the primary vehicle for the

authorial director’s imprint upon the film, to a position in which the director’s imprint on

the soundtrack is considered in auteurist terms. However, whilst they acknowledge

Wollen’s emphasis on the director’s unconscious preoccupations, Johnson and Poole did

little to determine if Weir is aware of his preoccupations. The question was never put to

him. Poole almost managed to elucidate an opinion from Greg Bell, sound effects

editor/supervisor on The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975),

The Last Wave (1977) and Gallipoli (1981), when she asked:

In terms of the sound and music do you think you could call Peter an auteur? Bell: Auteur, absolutely. Peter gets the best people to do the jobs but it all flows from Peter. It’s Peter’s mind that’s driving everything (128).

If Poole had clarified Bell’s meaning in the last sentence or put the question to Weir

himself an opinion could have been formed about whether Weir’s pre-occupations were

unconscious or not. From the very start of this thesis, it was intended that this auteur

analysis would not be plagued by ‘if onlys’. De Heer and his collaborators on sound

have been interviewed in an attempt to gather primary research material, in order to

construct an understanding of de Heer as a potential aural auteur and explore the

possibility that he is unaware of a preoccupation with sound (see Chapter 2.7). This is

not, however, to be an attempt to locate de Heer’s intention/s but rather, his absence of

conscious intention, notwithstanding Paisley Livingstone’s reductionist contention that

“authorship does entail that the expressive utterance is an intentional action” (2005,

301). Of course, be they unconscious or intended, auteurial signatures have been found

in the work of other Australian film-makers, and it is in this direction the literature

review now heads.


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2.4 Auteur Analyses of

Australian Film-makers.

In the process of manoeuvring into a position from which a thorough auteur analysis

may be conducted on the work of de Heer, it may well be beneficial for the researcher to

be familiar with similar work completed on his peers. In addition to the chapter by

Johnson and Poole, several book length auteur analyses have been conducted on well-

known Australian film-makers. However, none addresses the methodology of auteur

analysis in any detail nor considers the aural component of an auteur’s work in any

depth. Indeed, the work of Johnson and Poole on Weir is starkly contrasted by a book

length auteur analysis by Jonathan Rayner (2003) which barely mentions sound in

Weir’s films at all. Rayner made the un-interrogated observation “... nearly all [Weir’s

films of the 1970s] quot[e] from classical music” (8) and in his extended study of Picnic

at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir 1975), Rayner only hinted at an aural auteurism whilst

detailing Weir’s visual mise-en-scène:

Picnic earned praise for its period recreation, and it helped to establish some of the elements of Weir’s style and vision: the amalgamation of the normal and the abnormal; collisions between society and individuals, and between societies and external forces; visual hallmarks of bleached, pale lighting, soft-focused nostalgic haze, and meticulous art direction; reinforcing or undermining the image with conspicuous or incongruous sound (59).

Nevertheless, despite his giving just an inkling of information regarding Weir’s

“conspicuous or incongruous sound”, a worthy and thorough auteur analysis regarding

the non-aural aspects of his subject’s work is conducted. Rayner also significantly

stressed his novel perception of Weir’s fusion of European auteurism with Hollywood

genre revisionism:

Weir’s œuvre exhibits a stylistic unity in which European and American concepts of auteurism converge. His career is marked by a European brand of art-film auteurism, based on personal writing and visual expression, in Australia, and by an American brand of auteurism, based on genre revision, in Hollywood (12).

This distinction between an Australian brand of auteurism, characterised by European-

styled “personal writing and visual expression”, as compared to the less obvious


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auteurial signature evident in the cautious “genre revision” of American film-makers, is

developed further in the fourth paper of this thesis, entitled “Revising the metaphor: Rolf

de Heer as Aussie aural auteur.” Rayner explains Weir’s Australian auteurist signature

in Picnic at Hanging Rock: “Weir’s signature as identified in his first feature films (a

predisposition to mysticism, open-endedness and significantly detailed mise-en-scene)

gave him an art-film reputation in keeping with the aspirations of the Australian national

cinema” (20). This detection of a unique transition from a so-called European brand of

auteurism, based on “personal writing” to an American brand, based on “genre

revision”, begs further examination. Indeed, I suggest in my paper that there is a

distinctively Australian form of auteurism, cultivated in a uniquely Antipodean film-

making milieu, as encouraged by governments interested in developing a National

Cinema, and swayed stylistically by European influences, that sees Australian auteurs

such as de Heer combine the personal and writerly auteurism of Europe with the genre

revision tendencies of American auteurs.

Despite Rayner’s interesting suggestion regarding nationality and auteurism, however, it

must be noted that Rayner persists in an emphasis on the visual mise-en-scène with scant

attention paid to the aural auteurist signature of Weir. In his concluding comments,

Rayner again makes a passing reference to sound, whereas his interpretation of Weir’s

combination of supposed American and European auteur styles is fore-grounded:

While his films remain grounded within genre narrative structures and expectations, their execution (in divergence from convention, the frustration of expectation, and characteristic stylistic expression) connects them strongly with the European art-film tradition and its emphasis upon auteurist structures of meaning interpretable on innumerable individual bases ... These abiding themes are manifested in recurrent, recognizable stylistic features (the foregrounding and juxtaposition of soundtrack music, constriction of vision within the frame, and emphasis on the imagery of still photography and other visual art) (259-60, my emphasis).

Although overshadowed by his emphasis on image-based auteur analysis, this brief

mention of Weir’s use of sound is, nevertheless, encouraging to critics wishing to

consider the aural in the work of this pre-eminent Australian film-maker.


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While Rayner’s auteur analysis can be usefully compared to the much shorter study by

Johnson and Poole, another Antipodean film-maker, Jane Campion, the director of

critically acclaimed films such as The Piano (1993) and Sweetie (1989), has been the

subject of two very different book-length auteur analyses. The most recent, by Kathleen

McHugh, elides any reference to auteur theory altogether, yet is still relevant to this

thesis as it examines briefly Campion’s use of what David Bordwell and Kristin

Thompson call “Internal diegetic sound [, which] is that which comes from inside the

mind of a character; it is subjective and can’t be heard by other characters” (2008,

284),24

They do so through a sophisticated and sustained use of voiceover narration in conjunction with an emphasis on filmic sound honed and focused by a complete absence of dialogue. ... The alarm that we hear is therefore coded as internal diegetic sound - it too is in his head, an experience that the spectator shares with him but that the other character’s in Lindsay’s world cannot (2007, 32, 34).

in Passionless Moments (1983). Several of this film’s scenes explore, through

sound, the internal psychology of the on-screen characters such as the young boy

Lindsay (James Pride):

Here, McHugh acknowledges what I would identify as an authorial signature in

Campion’s surreal and perceptually confusing treatment of melodrama, aurally depicting

a protagonist’s “memories, fantasies, wishes, regrets, thoughts, and mental speculations”

(33). Inexplicably, however, McHugh does not identify this as an auteurial flourish, or

to recognise Campion’s occasional use of sound to strengthen this signature:

The visual field of her films is often distorted by tight or eccentric framings, wide-angle lenses, persistent shadows, and other techniques that distort or limit or confuse our perspective on the action. These surreal framings visualize character affect and transform it into spectator’s perceptual disorientation within the diegesis overall (50, my emphasis).

Sound is important in Campion’s work but rather than returning to the briefly mentioned

aural point of view in Passionless Moments, McHugh links Campion’s mise-en-scène

with her selection of music:

In another remotivation of melodramatic convention, Campion frequently constructs her soundtracks from compelling songs that do not accompany the visuals to which they are applied so much as comment ironically on them. She

24 Or what I will come to refer to as an aural point of view in the sixth published paper of the thesis, entitled “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”.


49

selects songs from various genres (gospel, pop, bebop, traditional) that cannot be fully appropriated to the dramatic situation to which they are applied because of significant temporal, geographical, cultural or religious disjunctions between the two (ibid).

Here McHugh noted a tendency for a similar aural auteurial signature to that identified

by Rayner as “conspicuous or incongruous sound” in the work of Weir, but also like

Rayner, neglected to consider it in detail as such. Although not directly identifying her

work as an auteur analysis, McHugh immediately invites this description by referring to

Harriet Margolis’ inclusion of Campion’s name in Sarris’ “pantheon of great directors”

(1). Nevertheless, McHugh surreptitiously slipped in the notion of Campion as auteur,

attempting to contextualise Campion’s work with that of artists (Mexican) Kahlo and

(German) Beuys:

Though much ink will later be spilled concerning Campion’s identity as either a New Zealand or Australian filmmaker, such a focus linking the auteur with the nation misses a larger point - the participation of the artist within a global political, social, and aesthetic milieu that includes Mexico and Germany (9, my emphasis).

Later, McHugh further avoids positioning her own work as an auteur analysis when she

bemoaned “the endless critiques of auteur theory, some of which have cited the example

of Jane Campion” (17). McHugh’s work thus disregards any theoretical basis for her

singling out Campion from her collaborations with other film artists and also to account

for the role of sound in Campion’s attempts to re-motivate melodrama.

Dana Polan, on the other hand, addressed sound in the work of Campion in his 2001

auteur analysis from the very outset. Noting a shift from the “military aggressiveness”

of television’s The Iron Chef's music to the softer music of Campion’s The Piano when

a female contestant appears, Polan asserted:

[The Piano’s] soundtrack is assumed to easily, automatically, inevitably and logically connote the realm of the feminine personal, a space of romance sparked and thwarted, a site in which emotional life asserts its irreducible importance even against the demands of a masculinised and professionalised world. ... a veritable fixed signifier of affect, emotion and inner value - all associated intimately with the particularity of being a woman (Jane Campion, 2001, 2).


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Like McHugh’s reluctance to call her book an auteur analysis, Polan stated early in his

work an intent to resist an auteur analysis of Campion, noting of The Piano,

This film divides the career of its director. As a consequence, a traditional authorial analysis which would look at thematic continuities and artistic refinements in the unfolding of an overall aesthetic project crashes up against discontinuity, against the fragmentation of an œuvre (7).

For Polan, an auteur analysis within the usual strictures of the theory is inappropriate for

Campion’s œuvre, seemingly unaware of Williamson’s advice that “One usually defines

the work of an author by demonstrating a certain continuity or, quite possibly,

significant discontinuity, between the parts of the œuvre” (1989, 43). Furthermore, apart

from the initial interest in the femininity of The Piano’s music, sound is also not of

much concern for Polan, even in the example of Passionless Moments, and both sound

and music are left entirely un-indexed in his monograph. Apparently, for both McHugh

and Polan, aural auteur analysis is not a methodology worthy of sustained attention or

even acknowledgement in their studies of the films of Jane Campion.

Finally, the Australian film-maker Gillian Armstrong is also the subject of two quite

disparate auteur analyses. The director of My Brilliant Career (1979), High Tide (1987),

The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992) and Charlotte Gray (2001), Armstrong is the subject

of Felicity Collins’ book-length auteur analysis. Once again, we witness an auteur

analysis that accepts blithely an assumption that the term ‘auteur’ is unambiguous,

unproblematic and well-understood, to the extent no discussion of its meaning is

required - not even to contextualise the book’s methodology. Collins does make a brief

explanation of her auteur analysis intent: “One of the purposes of this monograph is to

look at each film on its own terms, as well as to look for overall patterns which shape the

films into a body of work attributable to an auteur, or at least to a singular sense of

cinema” (10, original emphasis), but her methodology is not explained in detail. Other

writers such as Mary G. Hurd, in her short book section on Armstrong in Women

Directors and Their Films (2007), make no mention of auteurism whatsoever. Neither

Collins’ or Hurd’s works address their subject’s use of sound in what has become the

commonplace disavowal in Australian analyses of the aural auteur.


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2.5 Towards An

Auteur Analysis of Rolf de Heer.

The films of Rolf de Heer have not received extensive academic attention and no auteur

analysis of his œuvre has been attempted. While reviews and interviews have appeared

frequently, little scholarly analysis of his body of work has occurred relative to the

number of films he has released and the positive receptions they have received by

festival judges and the public. There have been several journal articles published: Keane

(1995), Caputo (2002), Capp (2003), Wilson (2003), Gillard (2004), Hope (2004),

Hickey-Moody and Iocca (2004), Oster (2005) and Starrs (2006) are the authors whose

work constitute the bulk of academic attention to de Heer’s œuvre and these have

addressed varying elements of his film-making. The quarterly Australian journal of film

and television, Metro Magazine, and the Australian online film journal, Senses of

Cinema, have dominated the literature with regard to de Heer and both have suggested

avenues for further investigation, but monographs still appear that pay his work little or

no attention. Several texts on Australian film elide de Heer’s output altogether. Saskia

Vanderbent’s Australian Film (2006), for instance, makes no mention of him at all.

Indeed, de Heer himself has not furthered his auteurial status, preferring not to

contribute to any DVD extras such as ‘Director’s Cuts’ or ‘Director’s Commentaries’ on

his Vertigo Productions’ digitisations of individual films. Andrew Dix sees the

commonplace Director’s Cut as “represent[ing] a consolidation of auteurism, not only

mediating the relation between spectator and film but tending to inflect spectator

interpretation in the author’s preferred terms” (2008, 151). Cementing the perception of

himself as a non-egotistical director de Heer has, in interview and in practice, effectively

distanced the concept of ‘de Heer as auteur’ from the reception of his work.25

Hence, this thesis will serve to consolidate the scattered threads of inquiry de Heer’s

films have stimulated, and contribute to a comprehensive body of knowledge on his

25 As he did with the credits in Dance Me To My Song (1997) when he ensured that the film begins with the title “A film by Heather Rose” (see the third paper of this thesis entitled “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song”).


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work. The auteur analysis of Rolf de Heer’s films is structured from the general to the

specific (at least as far as this approach is accepted by the editors of journals to which

papers are/were submitted), attempting to address each film in chronological order and

seeking out in the analysis of his use of sound, the structural presences/absences and the

acoustic binaries within, that characterise his œuvre. This collection of published

refereed papers will form a considerable original contribution to the body of knowledge

on Rolf de Heer and to auteur theory in general and to the role of sound in auteur theory

in particular. Before that commences, however, an understanding of the conceptual basis

for de Heer’s employment of sound to inscribe his Weltanschauung must be achieved, as

viewed through the lenses of psychoanalytic and feminist theory.


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2.6 Psychoanalytic Film Sound Theory and

the Aural Construction of Subjectivity.

One may note - with warranted suspicion, perhaps - that the influence of so-called Grand

Theory in academia which saw the (temporary) disintegration of the figure of the author

in the late 60s and 70s, occurred at the same time feminism began to evaluate a

previously neglected tradition of (and potential for) female authorship in literary and

film studies. Recognition of feminist ‘ruptures’ in the work of Dorothy Arzner (see

Ramanathan 2006 or Mayne 2008), for example, set in place new directions of research

and feminist film theorists have found much in psychoanalytic film theory of relevance.

In 1975 Laura Mulvey triggered a long (and ongoing) enterprise to describe the

gendered gaze of the scopophilic film-goer when her paper “Visual pleasure and

narrative cinema” first appeared in the British journal Screen. Her theory of

spectatorship proposed that the cinematic apparatus of Hollywood constructs a

patriarchal subjectivity whereby the audience is encouraged to identify with an active,

controlling male protagonist, thus voyeuristically reducing female characters to passive

objects of desire. The male gaze is the dominant position constructed by Hollywood for

the audience,26

eroticizing the female character as an object, in contrast to non-

mainstream cinema such as de Heer’s in which females (or other non-dominant, non-

hyper-masculine identities) are usually the featured agents of narrativity. Mulvey hints at

the possibility, with feminist intervention, that the female character can be the maker and

not simply the bearer of meaning.

Indeed, it must not be assumed that only female directors such as Arzner can be

feminists. Although Rolf de Heer is a white, male, heterosexual writer/director, the key

to understanding his characteristic use of sound nevertheless lies in a feminist and

psychoanalytical reading of what Melissa Iocca and Anna Hickey-Moody call his “aural

26 Consider here the work of Alfred Hitchcock and his use of blonde female victims (see Walker 2005).


54

construction of subjectivity” (2005, 122), particularly regarding such unlikely

protagonists as the 35 year old man-child in Bad Boy Bubby (1993), the extra-terrestrial

alien occupying the body of a young woman in Epsilon (1995) or the mute little girl in

The Quiet Room (1996). While they confine their study to his cult hit Bad Boy Bubby,

Iocca and Hickey-Moody note de Heer’s use of binaural sound recording to create a

“pre-Oedipal soundscape” and the music choices he makes as contributing to “a marked

move away from insipid approaches to film soundtracks” (ibid) which can be interpreted

as an attempt to nullify the patriarchal male voice of Hollywood (this argument is

pursued in the sixth paper of the thesis entitled “The aural point of view in the early

films of Rolf de Heer”). Thus, the theorization of subjectivity, identity and sound the

thesis draws upon, in its analysis of de Heer’s aural construction of non-hyper-masculine

and therefore unlikely agents of narrative, is significantly grounded in psychoanalytic

and feminist scholarship. While there is often a male voice, complicit with a male gaze,

functioning on an unconscious level to construct subjectivity in much of the so-called

“insipid” soundtracks of mainstream Hollywood cinema, de Heer at times encourages

the audience to identify with innocent, vulnerable, child-like or non-hyper-masculine

subjects. In contrast to Hollywood’s traditionally controlling male auteurs, he coaxes the

audience, through innovative, signature-like aurality, to align their sympathies with less

‘macho’ heroes. This assertion hints at the conceptual framework underpinning the

thesis: that de Heer’s world-view, itself an unconsciously imprinted auteurial signature

as Wollen would suggest, serves to position the audience on the side of the unlikely

protagonists favoured by such a world-view. A probable example of what Philip Brophy

calls an “aural auteur”, de Heer writes, directs and post-produces his films utilizing not

only the full potential of the visual mise-en-scène, but also the processes of the acoustic

unconscious, possibly aware of the gendered tendencies of mainstream cinema.

Mulvey is not the only feminist film critic to criticise the phallocentricity of Hollywood.

Noting “Hollywood’s tendency to recycle music” in her study Strains of Utopia, (1992,

3), Caryl Flinn argues that genre films (especially melodramas and film noirs) keep alive

an otherwise dull connection between film music and romantic, nostalgic notions of

utopia and restricted gender roles. She stated, “Music extends an impression of


55

perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect, unintegrated world. This is the

utopian function I believe has been assigned to music in general and to film music of the

1930s and 1940s in particular” (1992, 9). These “remote, impossibly lost utopias” (10)

involve masculine, heroic agents of narrative and the female objects of their (and the

positioned audience’s) desire, and characterise the classical Hollywood film scores

idealised in Hollywood’s major studio years. They are, perhaps, the kind of film scores

that Iocca and Hickey-Moody describe as “insipid”, in comparison with the imaginative

and stimulating aural soundscapes created by de Heer in constructing his alternative

world-view.

This subject positioning of such alternative cinema may be uncomfortable for audiences

accustomed to the usual dominant gendered stance, as Anahid Kassabian suggested:

Obviously, removing a heterosexual masculine look does not remove masculine subjectivity from the circuits of desire in a film. But the kind of familiar visual erotic pleasure produced by looking at a female body through identification with a male character is interrupted when the looking and desiring character is a female one (Hearing Film, 2001, 86).

Tania Modleski, in her analysis of the ambiguous attitudes to women in some of

Hitchcock’s films, described the male gaze in terms of a “patriarchal unconscious”

(1990, 58). Such structuralist models of psychic identification are based largely on the

psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, and include the work of Kathryn Kalinak, who in

her 1982 article “The fallen woman and the virtuous wife”, identified the only two roles

the male gaze of Hollywood permits women characters to depict, these being the least

troublesome objects for the male gaze. It seems the male gaze is bifocal; audiences are

encouraged to see only whores or goddesses when women are on screen.

The case for an auditory correlate of the ubiquitous male gaze is less clear. Maggie

Humm acknowledged that “feminists rarely trace the ways in which women in

mainstream films often lack independent vocal energies as well as independent images”

(1997, 40), although two years later Elizabeth Weis argued that overheard conversation

is “an aural analogue of voyeurism” and that there is an “erotics of cinematic


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eavesdropping” (1999, 79). Recently, Robert Ryder suggested that in Walter Benjamin’s

1938 work on the optical unconscious there lurks a latent theory of the “acoustical

unconscious”:

Just as Benjamin’s acoustical déjà vu involves an echo stepping into the light of consciousness out from the darkness of a life seemingly passed by, the ‘other’ nature of the camera involves a similar process whereby a space interwoven with the unconscious ‘steps into’ a space interwoven with consciousness (2007, 141).

This unconscious aural mechanism permits greater identification with Hollywood’s

typically hyper-masculine agents of narrative who, although insensitive and aggressive,

are valorised by the Hollywood apparatus as powerful and superior. In the late 1980s,

seminal work such as Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror (1988) explored the tropes

of masculinity in crisis and the disruption of spectator pleasure, suggesting film music

takes the audience back to a pre-linguistic moment, when, surrounded by the mother’s

voice, they soak in an acoustic bath of affect, or what Mary Ann Doane called a

“sonorous envelope” (1985, 170). Silverman further suggested this pre-Oedipal fantasy

is constructed retroactively by the individual and although it is therefore a Lacanian

méconnaisance, or misrecognition, it nevertheless functions powerfully. Silverman

argued:

The female subject’s involuntary alignment with the various losses which haunt cinema, from the foreclosed real to the invisible agency of enunciation, makes possible the male subject’s identification with the symbolic father, and his imaginary alignment with creative vision, speech and hearing. Indeed, not only is woman made to assume male lack as her own, but her obligatory receptivity to the male gaze is what establishes its superiority, just as her obedience to the male voice is what ‘proves’ its power (1988, 32).

The docile screen female acquiesces to the auditory equivalent of the male gaze,

obsequiously obeying his every enunciation. As previously mentioned in the section on

criticisms of auteurism, Silverman contends that the auteur often serves as a site where

“male lack is disavowed” (188) and that typically, mainstream cinema is “engendered

through a complex system of displacements which locate the male voice at the point of

apparent textual origin” (45). The female character is written and performed with a

“receptivity” to the male voice (310) which is therefore complicit with the controlling

male gaze of mainstream, commercial Hollywood cinema. Silverman later affirmed in


57

her paper “Dis-embodying the female voice” that Hollywood crafts women so they are

“associated with unreliable, thwarted or acquiescent speech” (1990, 310). Not only is the

male voice powerful and superior, but the female voice is also either compliant or

erroneous. In those relatively rare films in which a non-hyper-masculine character

becomes the narrative agent, the audience’s construction of subjectivity is neither

automatic nor accustomed; rather, the audience must be coaxed into identification with

the unlikely subject.

Certainly, the film-maker’s choice of music is important in encouraging the typical

patriarchal subjectivity. Geetha Ramanathan argued that “certain types of music itself is

associated with dangerous female sexuality whereby visual expressions of female

sexuality are signalled and developed through the score, the soundtrack conspiring with

the visual apparatus in the representation of women” (2006, 109). Musical clichés serve

to fill the cinematic space with male desire, at the expense of the female character’s

independence and narrative agency. Anahid Kassabian argued more generally that such

coaxing works because film music “conditions identification processes, the encounters

between film texts and film-goer’s psyches” (Hearing Film, 2001, 1). Kassabian

identified two kinds of soundtrack music, differentiated according to whether they are

compiled or original scores. This delineation is significant because film music with

original, composed scores condition “assimilating identifications [… which are]

structured to draw perceivers into socially and historically unfamiliar positions [… and]

they encourage unlikely identifications” (2, original emphasis). Compiled scores, on the

other hand, “bring the immediate threat of history [… in that] perceivers bring external

associations with the songs into their engagements with the film [ … and offer]

affiliating identifications” (3, original emphasis). According to Kassabian, classical

Hollywood film scores produce audiences who are “quite tightly tracked into

identification with a single subject position - usually one that does not challenge

dominant ideologies” (“Listening for identifications”, 2001, 170). Lacking the resources

of a dedicated music supervisor or the cross-promotional power of modern media

conglomerates, and constrained by budgetary concerns, nearly all of de Heer’s films


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have composed scores producing “assimilating identifications”: they coax the film-goer

into identifying with his unlikely subjects.

Kassabian’s reference to the film-goer’s psyche again recalls psychoanalytic film theory,

that one rare area of academe that has given due attention to film music. Because of the

generally accepted view that film music ‘works’ when it is inaudible, that is, not

consciously perceived by the audience member, the affect of film music sits comfortably

with psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity. In her landmark book, Unheard Melodies

(1987), Claudia Gorbman sets out the reasons ‘unheard’ film music works, although she

conceded: “… of course, music can always be heard. However ... a set of conventional

practices has evolved which result in the spectator not normally hearing it or attending to

it consciously” (1987, 76). Gorbman put forward seven principles by which film music

operates inaudibly, including the necessity for the invisibility of the technical apparatus

responsible for non-diegetic music (i.e. that music not produced within the world

depicted in the frame or implied frame) and the necessity that the film’s music is not

meant to be consciously heard and should be subordinate to dialogue and visuals (73-

78). These two key principles serve to help maintain unquestioning acceptance of the

illusion of the superior male voice. Moreover, Gorbman cited composer Max Steiner

who stated that sound producers prior to 1932 believed non-diegetic background music

unacceptable, as audiences would be perplexed by the question of where the music was

coming from (1987, 54). The so-called inaudibility of film music was a pragmatic

guideline, if not an expectation, from the very start, and the 1920s author of numerous

silent film music scores, Erno Rapée, felt that if the audience came out of the cinema

almost unaware of the musical accompaniment to the film, the musical director had done

her or his job well (cited in Lack 1997, 34). Certainly, Gorbman needed no convincing

that film music creates meaning via a mechanism of which the audience remains

unaware. By re-imagining the score to the bicycling scene in Jules et Jim (François

Truffaut 1962) she convincingly demonstrated how the meaning of the scene changes

with differing soundtracks. Thus, transposing the score to a minor key would make the

scene sadder, an increase in tempo would make the scene more optimistic, and addition

of tubas would make the scene comical (1987, 16-17). According to Gorbman, this


59

example of “commutation” in a film’s music is significant because it shows how

“narrative film music ‘anchors’ the image in meaning” (84).

Jeff Smith related the ‘inaudibility’ theories of Gorbman to psychoanalytical “suture

theory” of the 1970s and 80s in which theorists such as Raymond Bellour, Daniel

Dayan, Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, Christian Metz and Jean-Pierre Oudart shared a

unifying interest in how the classical realist film removed all evidence of its cinematic

construction (such as camera movement, framing, editing etc.) and established a position

for the spectator which bound him or her into the fiction. By masking the mechanics of

film-making, this suturing produces a seamless text with much less visible discourse

construction. Such ‘suturing’ would also encourage an audience’s compliance with the

male gaze and voice. Furthermore, because of its so-called inaudibility and abstraction,

film music is also especially effective at binding the audience member into the fictive

world of a film. Smith stated that, according to proponents of psychoanalytic inquiry,

film music:

... stakes a special claim on the spectator’s psyche by returning the subject to a preoedipal, pre-linguistic state, and restaging the primordial childhood experience of maternal loss. Film music skulks guerrilla-like in the perceptual background, attacking the subject’s resistance to being absorbed in the diegesis and warding off potential censorship by the subject’s preconscious (1996, 233).

According to this view, film music is utilitarian and encourages the subject to be

“absorbed in the diegesis” and, therefore, less critical or wary. It also fends off two

threatening displeasures. Firstly, there is the “terror of uncertain signs” as Roland

Barthes has called the apparently meaningless image (1977, 32-51). Film music uses its

culturally encoded connotations to harness the visual signifier otherwise threatens to

confuse the spectator and effectively yokes the diegetic information to a meaning. The

second displeasure Barthes claimed film music protects the film-goer from is the

awareness of the mechanics of film-making. “Inaudible” music, as previously

mentioned, results in smoothing or suturing of the gaps, the masking of the spatial and

temporal discontinuities inherent in the technology of cinema, thus aiding the seamless

process of patriarchal identification.


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Of course, such psychoanalytically-based theorising as to the ontology of film sound is

not without its detractors. For all these processes to work on an unconscious level, the

music is at best unobtrusive; however Smith argued that film music must be heard at

least on some level for it to support the narrative: “Far from being ‘inaudible’, film

music has frequently been both noticeable and memorable, often because of the various

demands placed upon it to function in ancillary markets” (1996, 230). Why would the

sale of soundtracks be such a lucrative aspect of film marketing, Smith asked, if film-

goers are not attending to the film’s music? He contended:

[If Gorbman] is right in claiming that ‘noticeable’ music reminds the viewer of cinema’s materiality and thereby weakens the subject-effect, we must then conclude that the spectator is constantly slipping in and out of the very subject position that the text has constructed for him [sic], incessantly moving between identification and cognition, pleasure and unpleasure, belief and disbelief, rapture and distance (1996, 237).

Certainly, the positioning of subject and audience undergoes constant negotiation,

although, as occurs in numerous de Heer’s films, when subjectivity is constructed early

in the film’s narrative, the audience member generally remains loyal. As shown in the

fifth paper of the thesis, “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”,

sound can be used to coax the audience to identify with his unlikely protagonists,

especially if used early in the film’s story.27

A narrative arc, in which the concerns of the

first subject identified with are resolved, is sought by the traditionally meaning-seeking,

closure-loving audience, and the enigmas and paradoxes thrown up by the film’s

narrative in the name of conflict are generally resolved in favour of the first identified

protagonist. When, as in the case of several of de Heer’s early films, the protagonist is

not a typical Hollywood action hero, the aural point of view can be used early in the

story to successfully align an audience with a less obvious hero/heroine.

27 A prime example is that of Orville in Tail of a Tiger (1984), who ‘hears’ - along with the audience - an electronic whirr when he spins tin lids like aeroplanes within the first few minutes of the film (Starrs 2010, 4). Another example occurs in the opening minutes of Dingo (1991) in which the pre-pubescent John ‘Dingo’ Anderson ‘hears’ music in the noise of an approaching jet, carrying, as it happens his jazz idol-to-be, Billy Cross (played by the legendary trumpeter Miles Davis in his only ever film role). It must be noted that the original script by Marc Rosenberg does not suggest that the music Dingo apparently hears should be heard by the audience, let alone before the jet itself is even heard or seen (see Rosenberg 1992, 3). This aural point of view oriented inclusion of the audience into the headspace of the young Dingo is entirely de Heer’s invention.


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Additionally, Smith criticised psychoanalytic film sound theories because of “the

question of intermittence” (237). If the soundtrack binds the spectator into the fiction,

why does she or he remain bound in those films where the film music is not constant?

Again, it is arguable that the audience’s identification is also intermittent and the

construction of subjectivity is a changing process involving constant negotiation and re-

negotiation. Nevertheless, this is a concern that needs to be acknowledged; film sound

should not be considered the exclusive domain of the acoustic unconscious.

Another disputative voice regarding psychoanalytic cinesonic theory is that of Rick

Altman, who criticised not only Theodore Adorno and Hanns Eisler’s landmark 1948

text, Composing for the Films, for “attribut[ing] to hearing a pre-capitalistic nature,

being more direct and more closely connected with the unconscious” (1992, 38), but also

decried the work of Doane, Silverman, Chion, Gorbman et al. According to Altman, the

“similar danger that lurks” in these theories is that they are “apparently predictive of

sound’s role in any situation whatsoever” (38-9). Certainly, film sound is a complex

phenomenon that operates differently in various situations and psychoanalytic theory is

just one valid approach to explaining it.

Human speech, on the other hand, is a part of film sound that can be theorised about

very confidently. Dialogue is one component of the soundtrack to which the audience is

constantly alert; it is rarely “unheard”. Michel Chion asserted in The Voice in Cinema

(1999), following on from his earlier work Audio-vision: Sound on Screen (1994), that

when we hear any human voice in the cinema: “the ear is inevitably carried toward it,

picking it out, and structuring the experience of the whole around it” (1999, 5).

Furthermore, in film sound recording and in post-production, the voice and the

intelligibility of dialogue are privileged over all other sounds: what Chion calls

“vococentrism” (6). Thus, one technique common to many Hollywood films of the so-

called Golden Age of studio production, the use of a voice-over narrator, serves to

position the audience in predictable, conventional ways. This is because, as Joan Copjec

stated, voice-over narration “definitively links the hero to speech” (1993, 183). This is a


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conventional sound form de Heer occasionally resorts to in an œuvre otherwise

characterised by a largely unconventional use of sound. It must be noted, however, that

his voice-overs are delivered, in contrast to most Hollywood productions, by female

protagonists, as in Epsilon (1995), The Quiet Room (1996) and The Old Man Who Read

Love Stories (2000), and not the male “hero” Copjec implies is the usual source of such

omniscient narration. The voice-over narrator, although never unheard, frequently

presents a point of view of the events unfolding on the screen that is, like the word of

God, ubiquitous, all-seeing and infallible, and although the audience attends to this most

obvious enunciation from the film-maker, there still exists an unconscious affect of

identification. The audience identifies with the voice-over narrating subject because of

its implicit authority.

Undoubtedly, the soundtrack is extremely influential in terms of any film’s emotional

impact. Arguably it can be more influential than the visual image. As director and

composer Mike Figgis claimed:

People say, ‘Why do you want to shoot on 16mm?’ I’d be happy to shoot it on High 8 and blow it up. I think the shittier it looks, or the more abstract you can make the image, by whatever means, the more chance you’re going to have of saying something that will hit the unconscious rather than the front of the head. … As long as you have enough money to make sure that the soundtrack sounds like a film, because that’s the one thing people do expect (2003, 6).

Figgis identified the way sound can unconsciously trigger emotional states, and director

David Lynch - whose work has been described as producing a “kind of aural uncanny”

(Dix 2008, 154) - would seem to agree: “Sound is 50 per cent of a film. In some scenes

it’s almost 100 per cent. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion to a film” (Lynch

2003, 52). Likewise, Rolf de Heer acknowledged: “Sound is, from my point of view,

60% of the emotional content of a film” (qtd. in Starrs 2007, 18). But this comment

reveals more than just agreement with Lynch; the “point of view” de Heer speaks of is,

in most of his films, that of an unlikely protagonist whose position the audience is

encouraged to identify with on an unconscious level. As Iocca and Hickey-Moody

argue, de Heer’s uses of sound in Bad Boy Bubby deviate from Chion’s

“vococentricism” and “make conscious the pedestrian sounds of the everyday,


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challenging Claudia Gorbman’s [1987] assertion that ‘the volume, mood and rhythm of

the sound track must be subordinate to the dramatic and emotional dictates of the film

narrative’” (124-5). More recently, however, Gorbman noted that with the digital

revolution in music, auteurist directors are able to employ sound in ways previously

unimagined:

The strictures and underlying aesthetic of the classical rules of song music simply no longer hold. Melodies are no longer unheard, song lyrics are perceived to add rather than detract from audio-viewing, and the sky’s the limit with respect to the possible relations between music and image and story (2007, 151).

Gorbman also seems to acknowledge the potential for Brophy’s “aural auteur”, writing:

the ‘auteur director’ has placed a premium on asserting control of the texture, rhythm, and tonality of her or his work, and of the social identifications made available through music choices … The auteur can write in cinema, using sound as well as the camera (2007, 156).

Directors such as de Heer are no longer pressured by the economics or conventions of

Hollywood to restrict their work to the production of “insipid” soundtracks in which the

male voice complies with the male gaze or in which the music strives to be unheard. The

film soundtracks produced by Rolf de Heer are rich with meaning and psychoanalytic

affect. This questioning about the unconscious workings of sound prompt questions

about the unconscious of the director who uses them. The next section of this thesis will

summarise the collaborative nature of de Heer’s film-sound production, as explored in

the interviews, and will go some way towards determining if this sonic richness results

from unconscious preoccupation/s.


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2.7 Collaborations in Context:

The Interviews with Rolf de Heer, Graham Tardif and

Jim Currie.

After consideration of the literary and social context of auteurism, its history, criticisms,

the related psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives and auteur analyses of a number of

other Australian film-makers, it is important to recognise the collaborative context in

which de Heer personally operates. Most of the music in his twelve feature film

soundtracks has been composed by Graham Tardif while five of the most recent de Heer

films have had sound designed and recorded by Jim Currie, and one might expect these

two technicians to figure significantly in any contextual consideration of de Heer as an

aural auteur. As has already been flagged in the discussion of Johnson and Poole’s aural

auteur analysis of some of the films of Peter Weir, this thesis was not going to neglect to

interview those key people responsible for the production of sound in the films of Rolf

de Heer. Poole asks Greg Bell, sound supervisor on several of Weir’s films,

In terms of the sound and music do you think you could call Peter an auteur? Bell: Auteur, absolutely. Peter gets the best people to do the jobs but it all flows from Peter. It’s Peter’s mind that’s driving everything (1998, 128).

But Poole does not put the question to Weir himself, nor does she explore the possibility

it is an unconscious preoccupation, as Wollen might suggest. In an attempt at not

committing the same oversight, this thesis had the goal of conducting semi-structured,

open-ended interviews with de Heer, Tardif and Currie.

Although difficult to co-ordinate, the interviews were quite productive and all three have

since been published.28

28 The Tardif interview has not been published in its entirety, rather, it is in the form of a short paper, as per the requirements of the editors of the journal RealTime+Onscreen (see Appendix 12.2.2).

Mixing a few musical metaphors, one can conclude from these

interviews that de Heer, Currie and Tardif collaboratively improvise their roles in the

usually separate and rigidly distinct phases of pre-production, shooting and post-

production as ideas reverberate between the members of the trio like riffs played by

performers in a well-oiled jazz ensemble. Indeed, one wonders what might have


65

eventuated if a group interview could have been organised with these three practitioners:

would evidence of an unconscious level of communication, evolved over years of

fruitful teamwork, surface to surprise this interviewer? Would the syntax of a hitherto

unknown language make itself heard? Would a verbal shorthand, a sign system known

only to them, struggle to make itself understood? Unfortunately, these possibilities

remain mere speculation. The difficulties in pinning each down to a mutually acceptable

time and place for something as apparently insignificant as a PhD student’s focus group

and interview were insurmountable. As it was, Tardif’s interview occurred more than a

year after the initial emailed request. Geographical constraints were considerable as this

interviewer lives thousands of kilometres away from the homes and workplaces of each

of the subjects. Although all three are Australian, Tardif lives and works in Thailand, the

home of his wife and the workplace of his full-time employer, World Vision

International. The interview with him eventually had to be conducted over the telephone.

Jim Currie lives on acreage in rural South Australia and does not have a permanent

workplace, being a freelance sound recordist for various film and TV productions. An

interview was secured with him on one of the few rare days he was in Adelaide

(attending the 2007 Adelaide International Film Festival). Only de Heer was at the time

stable in lifestyle enough for interviews to be guaranteed to take place at relatively short

notice; his studio is based in Hendon, a suburb in Adelaide, South Australia, and is near

the home of his partner and children. Nevertheless, his time is often short with numerous

journalists also pressing to interview him. It was eventually conducted at 7 am at the

Adelaide airport as he waited for his flight to Melbourne to rehearse The Stiletto Sisters’

performance of the score to Dr. Plonk. That was the only window of opportunity that

presented itself during the seven days the interviewer was in Adelaide for that city’s

2007 International Film Festival, which culminated in the premiere of Dr. Plonk on

closing night, receiving rapturous applause from de Heer’s hometown crowd. Despite

the logistical difficulties, however, an interview with each of these people was

eventually secured and conducted, with the results being duly published (although not

refereed, and therefore not formally submitted for examination as part of the thesis). The

details of the resulting publication of the interviews29

29 See Appendix 12.2 for the published versions of the interviews.

are as follows:


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Starrs, D. Bruno. “The sounds of silence: An interview with Rolf de Heer”, Metro

Magazine, Melbourne: Australian Teachers of Media, no. 152, 2007, 18-21.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Graham Tardif and the aural auteur”, RealTime +Onscreen, Sydney:

Open City, no. 85, 2008, 27.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “De Heer de Sound: Jim Currie on designing sound for Rolf de Heer”,

Metro Magazine, Melbourne: Australian Teachers of Media, no. 161, 2009

(forthcoming).

The semi-structured nature of the interviews meant that the questions posed were not

exactly the same for all three subjects. The aim was to follow a particular programme of

questioning, as evidenced by the following documents:

Questions for Rolf de Heer;

1. With Dr. Plonk you’ve made a silent film. Do you think audiences don’t care about sound? Why have you made a silent film? 2. You’re rehearsing a live band, The Stiletto Sisters, to perform Graham Tardif’s soundtrack at the premiere of Dr. Plonk. Is there going to be much difference for the audience seeing this compared to when it’s screened in ordinary cinemas? 3. In Bad Boy Bubby you used thirty-two cinematographers but only one sound designer, Jim Currie, and one composer, Graham Tardif. Why was that? 4. How do you feel about academics Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocco suggesting in Metro Magazine the label “aurator” be used for the person who experiences your films? 5. How do you hold onto your personal vision for a film when collaborating with other artists? 6. What do you think an auteur is and are you one? 7. Do you think your films give a voice to marginalised people, those whom might otherwise not be heard, for example, women, children, Aboriginal Australians? 8. Are you conscious, while you are making them, of any imprint or signature you leave on your films that indicates a preoccupation with the non-masculine voice?


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9. Who do you think this has had an influence on you as a film-maker? 10. What’s next for Rolf de Heer?

Questions for Jim Currie and Graham Tardif;

1. What do you think is Rolf de Heer’s ideological stance in his films? 2. With Dr. Plonk he’s made a silent film. Do you think Rolf de Heer doesn’t care about sound? 3. In Bad Boy Bubby Rolf de Heer used thirty-two cinematographers, but only one sound designer; Jim Currie, and only one composer; Graham Tardif. Why do you think he was prepared to experiment with the vision and not the sound? 4. How do you feel about academics Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocco suggesting in Metro Magazine the label “aurator” be used for the person who experiences Rolf de Heer’s films? 5. Do you think Rolf de Heer has a preoccupation with giving a voice to marginalised people, those whom might otherwise not be heard? 6. Is he a macho kind of director? 7. Why do you think de Heer doesn’t make action films? 8. What do you think an auteur is and is Rolf de Heer one? 9. Is he an ‘aural’ auteur?

One interesting outcome from the interviews related to the question ‘Is Rolf de Heer an

auteur?’ De Heer’s own response was diplomatic but evasive: “Oh, look, I don’t go in

much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. It’s for other people to make

those sorts of calls on it” (Starrs “Sounds of silence” 2007, 20), whereas both Tardif and

Currie were strongly in the affirmative. When asked if his “recurring theme” of giving a

“voice to marginalised people” is unconsciously expressed, de Heer’s answer is

unexpectedly enthusiastic: “Yes. I’m sure. I’m sure there are degrees of unconscious

[expression]” (ibid). De Heer then elucidates his auteurial “submerged reef of values”

(Andrew 1993, 83) when he concludes, “what I try to do is make films that don’t reduce

people as human beings” (Starrs “Sounds of silence” 2007, 21). As just mentioned, both

Tardif and Currie were adamant that de Heer is an auteur, and specifically an ‘aural’


68

auteur. Tardif stated, “With his combination of the sound and the music, he is an aural

auteur” (Starrs “Graham Tardif”, 2008, 27) and Currie concurred: “I think that’s quite a

justifiable term to use with Rolf, yeah.” (Starrs “De Heer de sound”, 2009, forthcoming).

From these interviews one can draw the conclusion that de Heer does not consider

himself to be an auteur, whereas his collaborators think he is and have no trouble

understanding why this thesis should consider him an aural auteur. Furthermore, it can

be cautiously concluded that the de Heer signature is, indeed, unconsciously imprinted.

The above questions were only a guide to each interview; what actually happened is that

unanticipated directions were explored with different questions as the opportunities

arose and some questions were (unfortunately) overlooked completely. Nevertheless, the

main questions: ‘Is Rolf an aural auteur?’ and ‘To what extent is his auteurism an

unconscious mechanism?’ were successfully addressed. Answers to the questions posed

in each interview were assumed to be honest, independent and ungroomed responses.

The interviews were conducted with a style of “‘interested listening’ [that] rewards the

respondent’s participation but does not evaluate [their] responses” (Fontana and Frey

2005, 702). Nevertheless, and despite all efforts to remain impartial, one must concede

that this researcher was not an entirely a passive, detached participant in these interviews

and, as Andrea Fontana and James Frey stated, “[The interview] is a contextually bound

and mutually created story” (2005, 696). Regardless, it can be assumed the responses

were genuine and that they support the argument of this thesis that de Heer

unconsciously imprints a sonic signature in his films. This primary research constitutes

the final contextual consideration underpinning the refereed and published papers of the

thesis. However, as Klaus Jensen noted, “the disambiguation of interview discourses (or

the conclusion that an ambiguity is unresolvable) is the outcome of data analysis and

will remain an inference” (2002, 240). The only way to circumvent this potential

“ambiguity” is to weigh responses with textual and cinematic evidence, and that it is the

task of the published papers of the thesis, as can be seen in the next section of the thesis,

Part Two.

PART TWO.

The Seven Refereed and

Published Papers

of the Thesis.

Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Two.

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CHAPTER 3.

A Paper Utilising

Genre Analysis and Signalling

an Interest in the Auteurism of

Rolf de Heer.


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3. Preamble to the First Refereed and

Published Paper of the Thesis.

Robin Wood described auteur and genre theory as “disparate approaches” (2003, 61).

After all, auteurs do not usually produce “anonymous genre fodder” (Watson 2007, 98)

and “the emergence of genre criticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s is usually

understood as either a development, qualification, corrective or outright rejection of

auteurism” (110). Thus it was useful to commence the refereed writing of this thesis

with a genre analysis of one of de Heer’s films.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that weren’t?”

Metro Magazine (ISSN: 0312-2654), Melbourne: Australian Teachers of Media, no.

153, 2007, pp. 166-172.

Brief Abstract. This paper addresses the following question: does the presence of

Aboriginal Australians, like the presence of Native American Indians in Hollywood

westerns, serve to include The Tracker (Rolf de Heer 2002) and The Proposition (John

Hillcoat 2005) in the western genre? The conclusion it draws is that the Aboriginal

Australian, particularly when played by David Gulpilil - the cinematic face of proud

Aboriginality - can be understood as an important cipher enabling the categorisation of

films such as these as Australian anti-westerns. Like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956),

both can be seen, in the words of Brian McFarlane, as “meditations on racism”. But like

an anti-John Wayne, Gulpilil’s presence signifies righteous Indigenous resistance to

white injustice, and both de Heer and Hillcoat use him effectively as they paint pictures

of an outback in which Aboriginal Australians alone belong. The article thus relates

Ford’s auteurial ‘European/Indian’ antinomy, as identified by Wollen, to de Heer’s

‘European/Aboriginal Australian’ antinomy thereby departing from a metteurs-en-scène

depiction of a Hollywood western, and in doing so flags the auteur analyses of de Heer

to follow in the subsequent six papers of the thesis.

Length: 5303 words.


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halla

This article is not available here. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available from QUT Library or copy the link below to the author's ePrint: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/6414


79

CHAPTER 4.

The First of Two Papers

Utilising

Standard Auteur Analysis.


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4. Preamble to the Second Refereed and


The second and third published papers of the thesis are auteur analyses, but they do not

yet employ the thesis’ novel methodology of ‘aural’ auteur analysis. Although there was

plenty of Mulvey’s “repetition and return” (2005, 230) there was none of Chion’s

“masking” (1994, 187-8) in the methodology used while studying these cinematic texts.

Rather, they are standard versions of textual analysis of a selection of films chosen

because they are considered to be the work of a single author, this being the criterion

that instantly qualifies them as auteur analyses.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon

(1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007).” Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate

Journal of Culture and the Arts (ISSN: 1749-9771 - online), UK: University of

Edinburgh, no. 5, 2007. http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/starrs.html

Brief Abstract. The possibility is considered that de Heer has followed Epsilon (1995)

with another filmic eco-warning, Dr. Plonk (2007), in which his auteurist world view

regarding respect for the environment can be detected. In the first of these two eco-

politically correct films there is excessive voice-over narration from a sanctimonious

grandmother and hectoring monologue from an extra-terrestrial angel-like antagonist to

persuade a messianic hero-figure to save the world. In contrast, it is argued that de Heer

has subsequently made a silent film in which the messianic saviour fails: the eponymous

Dr. Plonk is imprisoned and makes a subtle, unspoken plea to the audience to get out

from in front of their television sets and save the world from ecological apocalypse

themselves instead of engaging in unhelpful eco-hero worship.

Length: 5701 words.

http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/starrs.html�


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“Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer's Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”

D. Bruno Starrs (Queensland University of Technology).

While a culture of celebrity candidacy threatens to turn the election race for the office of

the leader of the free world, the US presidency, into performance (low) art; while the

travesties of religious fundamental extremists promote more internecine hatred; and

while wars are fought over control of the Earth’s finite fossil fuel resources,

contemporary cinema audiences, like the rest of the community, are offered few reasons

to be optimistic. Movie makers seem to frequently delight in depicting our irredeemable

present and apparently bleak future. Wheeler Winston Dixon argues: “The cinema of the

21st century makes our most violent dreams of self-destruction simultaneously mundane

yet instantly attainable” (Dixon 132), as there are now a multitude of different ways for

humanity to enact the nightmare of self-extinction. In addition to the usual trepidation

regarding nuclear apocalypse, recent years have seen an increase in fears of global

cataclysm due to climate change resulting from the Greenhouse Effect. Disturbing

visions of world-wide rising sea-levels as the polar ice caps melt and wild weather

events destroying whole communities now suggest a man-made disaster resulting not

from a decision to carelessly detonate a nuclear bomb, but the accumulated effects of

decades of irresponsible behavior by individual consumers and big business alike. But

such an outcome is considered by many in the general community to be more

preventable than a deranged individual’s decision to press the doomsday button, and

viewers of Al Gore’s eco-political campaign in An Inconvenient Truth (Davis

Guggenheim 2006) are easily rallied to the ecological cause by this eco-warning: it is a

cautionary film which both frightens and encourages useful individual action.


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Another film-maker who has contributed to the genre of the eco-warning film is

Australian writer, director and sometime producer Rolf de Heer. Released twelve years

apart, de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007) reflect two very different

approaches to ecological agenda in film. The former uses relentless harangues from both

an extraterrestrial antagonist and a grandmotherly narrator to bully the audience into

acceptance of the threat their lifestyles present to the future of the planet and humanity,

whereas the latter uses slapstick comedy and references to the apocalypse so

unremarkable they may even pass unnoticed by an audience engrossed in the physical

humor. Although in an interview he dismisses his latest work as “an aberration, in a

way, in that it’s a bit of froth” (Starrs 20), it is evident upon analysis that de Heer has not

stopped making films with a social conscience, rather he has simply disguised his usual

message in a packaging of light comedy. The plot remains essentially the same as his

previous filmic eco-warning: an enlightened male individual - or ‘eco-hero’ - struggles

to convince the world of its impending ecological doom. Mark J. Lacy describes with

disappointment the apparently eco-politically correct, counter-capitalist cultural movies

such as Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993) and The Lost World (Steven Spielberg

1997) as contributing to an unhelpful eco-mythology in which:

... dynamic individuals confront the dangers of ‘risk society’ and restore order and security (maintaining their status as escapist myths) [... and] reinforce the (neo)liberal political imaginary (where the ingenuity of the individual can overcome structures of instrumental rationality), limiting alternative ways of articulating the ‘political’ (Lacy 636).

As Marxists claim religion functions as an opiate of the masses, preventing action by the

proletariat, likewise some eco-warning films discourage individual action and uprising.

This paper considers if de Heer’s ongoing ecological concern, in failing to offer either

religious guidance or secular direction and unhelpfully gestating hope for an heroic

‘dynamic individual’ to save us all as we sleep, also disappoints by perpetuating the eco-

mythology Lacy despairs of. If this is the case, then although Epsilon and Dr. Plonk may

not be instantly recognizable as genre films, they both represent textbook examples of

what Judith Hess Wright argues is the mainstream genre film functioning politically to

support the maintenance of the social status quo by offering “absurd solutions to


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economic and social conflict” (Wright 42), instead of encouraging individuals to take

individual responsibility for preventing the end of the world. This paper also considers if

television, regarded by many to be a soporific enemy of action and solely concerned

with promoting consumerism, has the potential to effectively carry the message of eco-

warning.

The religious notion of the Apocalypse as suggested by the Book of Revelation is one

that suggests world-wide destruction, Edenic renewal and the unveiling of God, for a

select few, amidst a glorious utopia. Prophets of the Judeo-Christian faiths make the

teleological prediction of a new era of salvation for the pious, and the literature of

western culture frequently drew on such eschatology for its end-of-times narratives in

the apocalyptic discourse of the centuries following the exile down to the end of the

Middle Ages. In contemporary culture, however, the cinema has overtaken church

writings in terms of audience reach. The first film explicitly concerned with the

aftermath of global man-made apocalypse was the British-made Things To Come

(William Cameron Menzies 1936), the screen version of H.G. Wells’ 1933 novel The

Shape of Things To Come, which predicts the Second World War and the devastation

caused by air-borne bombing raids. Then Hollywood began exploiting the genre with

Five (Arch Oboler 1951), which, in its story of the survivors of nuclear war struggling to

survive in a hostile radiation-ravaged environment, established the thematic conventions

for later films of this genre, including the romantic plot device of the new Adam and Eve

who must repopulate the Earth. Frequently expressed is a curiously reassuring sentiment

of joy and optimism regarding a world cleansed of the corrupt old order by the re-

invigorating apocalypse. The less optimistic Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner

1968) was soon followed by other dystopic movies such as Silent Running (Douglas

Trumball 1972) and Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer 1973), and each stressed growing

concerns in Western society about the future of the world given the alarming rates of

over-population, despoliation of nature, nuclear arms proliferation and depletion of

resources. Many earlier films had been primarily concerned with apocalypse caused by

alien invasion, as H. Bruce Franklin points out: “Whereas the alien and monster films of

the fifties showed our worthy civilization menaced by external powers, these movies


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[futuristic films since 1970] typically project our awful future as a development, often

inevitable, of forces already at work within our civilization” (Franklin 48-9).

Exemplified by Mad Max (George Miller 1979), in which the world is desert and petrol

is still valued as a scarce resource for the filthy habit of driving fast cars, and Twelve

Monkeys (Terry Gilliam 1996), in which out-of-control eco-warriors try to wipe out

destructive humanity with the aid of time travel, Toni Perrine notes that, far from

glorifying eco-heroes, “Most postnuclear films depict a dystopic future of

neobarbarianism” (Perrine 21). Less concerned with the natural environment, other

secular doomsayers predict an Orwellian nightmare of maximum social efficiency and

minimal individual freedom as a result of over-exploitation of late capitalist production

techniques or ultra-utilitarian governments, as illustrated by Gattaca (Andrew Niccol

1997). Many films allude to the biblical Revelation with James Cameron’s Terminator

II: Judgment Day (1991) foregrounding the concept in the film’s title.

Although he avoids any overt reference to religion, ‘The Man’ (played by Syd Brisbane)

in de Heer’s 95 minute film Epsilon (1995), enlightened by the revelations of a sexy

female alien (Ulli Birve), serves as a messianic savior-hero as at the end of the film’s

narrative he devotes his life to warning the rest of humanity of its impending doom. In

this, his fifth feature film, De Heer indirectly resorts to a postmodern retelling of the

Judeo-Christian vision with his mythopoeic construction offering a sense of hope for the

audience, despite the absence of any actual imaging of the ecological disaster to come.

The feel of mythology is furthered by the absence of personal names, as Albert Moran

and Errol Vieth summarise: “De Heer removes specificity and particular identity from

the characters, as in The Tracker (2002), generalizing the characters by not naming them

(‘She’, ‘The Man’, ‘Grandmother’)” (Moran and Vieth 137). The meta-narrative of post-

modernism may be reduced to several tenets, one of which suggests that a future social

order beyond capitalism is conceivable - and indeed, preferable - if the concomitant

product of capitalistic drive, unfettered environmental exploitation resulting in

cataclysmic obliteration of not just humankind but the entire Earth, is not ceased. Such a

postmodern alternative seems to interest de Heer, but rather than the idea, proposed by

classicists, that this environmental decline is predetermined and inevitable, de Heer’s


85

counter-hegemonic discourse seems at least superficially optimistic that change can be

wrought. If the warning is heeded, a turnaround in the direction of ecological

degradation may be achieved by the action of certain venerable individuals. De Heer’s

cautionary sub-text in Epsilon is not a nihilistic acceptance that humanity’s immorality

will result in a divine retribution, but rather that greed and ignorance can be countered

by a singular male hero’s application of rational knowledge, forethought, and his life’s

work to the task.

The Man’s role of travelling eco-hero for the planet in Epsilon is foreshadowed by the

grandmother (Alethea McGrath) narrating the story at the film’s start, retelling her

encounter with the Earth’s savior to two small children around a campfire as one might

imagine the tales of legendary heroes and their deeds have been passed down from

generation to generation for millennia, and we frequently hear her voice-over continuing

to narrate throughout the film. Certainly, The Man is constructed in accordance with

Joseph Campbell’s definition of the master-narrative’s hero: “The standard path of the

mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the

rites of passage: separation-initiation-return” (Campbell 30). We first discover him

camping alone, under the stars, in a remote outback Australian location. For the bulk of

the film the beautiful but hectoring alien blasts the simple earthling with pro-Green

rhetoric about the way the world’s ecology is being destroyed by unthinking people:

“Having the Earth mentality is the one thing that is truly unforgivable in the rest of the

Universe”, she self-righteously declares. Since this spacewoman is able to zap herself

and her bewildered witness anywhere instantly, she takes him first to see the smog and

pollution of an unidentified Australian city, then to the outskirts of Las Vegas - where he

disappears for the night to play the casinos - and then to a landscape denuded of trees, all

the time offering up scathing annotations about the stupidity of humanity. This is his

initiation into the role of eco-hero. Finally, he returns to human civilization to serve his

monomythic purpose. The metaphorical dragon to be vanquished and slain by The Man

is the monster of ecological ignorance and his muse was the beautiful alien who

stumbled, naked and lost, into his surveyor’s camp. Utilizing long takes obeying the

primacy of the extended and seemingly un-mediated shot and featuring spectacular time-


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controlled vision of stars and clouds in the un-still sky, de Heer’s camera suggests the

enlightening - possibly even therapeutic - potential for contemporary environmental

cinema. The mere act of displaying such sublime landscapes and awe-inspiring imagery

of nature may serve a conservationist function by changing the spectator’s consciousness

about the environment: Temporarily removed from her or his concrete and glass

existence and transported to climes of unsullied and uncorrupted natural beauty, the

audience is reminded of its own role as polluter. But what does this film suggest is the

practical means the audience member should adopt to avert such eco-cide? Nothing

more than patiently waiting for an unencumbered figure of performative masculinity to

receive enlightenment from a female alien, like an angel delivering the Annunciation,

before commencing his wandering odyssey of ecological evangelism through which he

single-handedly saves the world.

Similarly, de Heer’s latest feature film may be interpreted as failing to give useful advice

on the means by which ordinary members of the audience can rectify the situation of

impending ecological apocalypse. Indeed, the 84 minute black and white silent film Dr.

Plonk (2007) is even less optimistic than Epsilon: the ecological evangeliser that is the

eponymous, time-travelling protagonist is mistaken for a terrorist by our twenty-first

century contemporaries and locked up, never to be released, his warning to the law-

makers of a century ago unheard and unheeded. As Tom Redwood understated, “Dr

Plonk takes on a rather substantial subject for a slapstick comedy: it is a film about the

end of the world” (Redwood 14). In 1907, a seemingly rational scientist and inventor,

Dr. Plonk (Nigel Lunghi, a street performer also known as ‘Mr. Spin’), is married to a

caring woman (Magda Szubanski) with a faithful man-servant (Paul Blackwell) in a

well-appointed Adelaide mansion. The good doctor calculates that the world will end in

101 years, but his warnings are ignored by the Prime Minister of the day so he invents a

time machine and travels to the future, intent on bringing back incontrovertible proof.

What he discovers in 2007 is a polluted, over-industrialised world in which ordinary folk

sit side by side in their comfortable living rooms, mesmerised by wide-screen television,

as outside the eve of the apocalypse apparently approaches. But the exact nature of the

catastrophe remains unclear: it is neither expressed nor explained by de Heer. It is not


87

God’s destruction of the universe and salvation of the morally just that is presented as

the eschatological rationale behind the forthcoming apocalypse. Nor is there an

Armageddon-like nuclear conflagration to be feared. Attempting to return to the year of

1907 with a TV set (which is what we can only surmise he believes to be the culprit, as

the film’s narrative is restricted to a handful of intertitles), Dr. Plonk is mistakenly

imprisoned after much Keystone Kops styled hi-jinks. Will our enlightened male savior

escape his Kafkaesque prison and succeed in his mission of ecological warning? Like

The Man in Epsilon, who is doomed to wander the Earth alone as he preaches eco-

awareness, Dr. Plonk is an essentially tragic figure and unfortunately, De Heer's

narrative here peters out. The end of the world - as vaguely portrayed as it is in Dr.

Plonk - is a fate that seems sealed.

Of course, mainstream cinema is rarely utilised as a site for detailing an ecological

manifesto. Indeed, Judith Hess Wright argues that genre film serves to maintain the

status quo because westerns, science fictions (particularly those featuring threatening

aliens), horror and gangster films:

... produce satisfaction rather than action, pity and fear rather than revolt. They serve the interests of the ruling class by assisting in the maintenance of the status quo, and they throw a sop to oppressed groups who, because they are unorganized and therefore afraid to act, eagerly accept the genre film’s absurd solutions to economic and social conflicts. [...] Genre films address these conflicts and solve them in a simplistic and reactionary way (Wright 42).

According to Wright, Hollywood’s genre films discourage audiences from rebelling

against social change and they do this by neglecting to deal with the social or political

problems of the immediate present, preferring to set their dramas in the past (as with

westerns) or future (as with science fiction). The social revolution demanded by our

warming planet involves large numbers of people eschewing conspicuous, wasteful

consumption and reducing their individual ‘carbon footprint’. It is the place of

documentary films such as the Academy Award winning An Inconvenient Truth to

outline rational, productive steps to take to avert eco-disaster now: steps such as

implementing taxes on carbon emissions. Narrative films such as de Heer’s should be, as

he asserts himself, no more than a superficial “bit of froth”, but one must question if in


88

the distant wake of his unproductive Epsilon, his apparently equally unhelpful twelfth

feature film, Dr. Plonk, really is an “aberration”, since both portray a disobliging eco-

political myth in which a messianic eco-hero sets about saving the world, while we

audiences sit back and watch.

But perhaps this is de Heer’s guileful project? Whereas his message in Epsilon was loud

and clear thanks to relentless diatribe from the alien and too frequent voice-over

narration from the sanctimonious grandmother, Dr. Plonk, with its complete absence of

narration, may be a far subtler attempt to educate the audience. There are no voices to be

heard at all in de Heer’s latest film and although his decision to make a black-and-white

silent film has been attributed to his discovery of unused film stock deteriorating in his

refrigerator at home, it is just as likely the writer/director was responding to the box-

office failure of Epsilon, with its excessive voices. Narrative authority is rendered

virtually unquestionable by the voice-over, as Sarah Kozloff says: “The voice-over

couches a film as a conscious, deliberate communication” (Kozloff 139). Michel Chion

tells us that the human voice and the intelligibility of dialogue are fore-grounded in film

recording and post-production: “In stating that sound in the cinema is primarily

vococentric, I mean that it almost always privileges the voice, highlighting and setting

the latter off from other sounds” (Chion 5). But superior to all diegetic voices in the

cinema is the voice-over of the invisible narrator. He or she commands respect, exudes

authority and her or his utterances are usually vital to the audience understanding the

film. Too much voice over, however, as beginning scriptwriters are told, is something to

be avoided. Robert McKee, author of Story (1997), is played by Brian Cox delivering a

seminar to students in the film Adaptation (Spike Jonze 2002) in which he says: “And

God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends, God help you. It’s flaccid,

sloppy writing. Any idiot can write voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a

character.” Rather than court accusations of “flaccid writing”, de Heer may have decided

to take the opposite approach to message delivery in Dr. Plonk. Claiming that: “Sound

is, from my point of view, 60% of the emotional content of a film” (Starrs 18), de Heer

seems to have learnt a great deal from the box office failure of Epsilon and concluded


89

that if his ecological message of warning could not be delivered by ‘shouting’, perhaps

the desired result could be achieved by ‘whispering’.

In Dr. Plonk, his second attempt at a didactic eco-warning on film, De Heer has also

avoided a Manichean depiction of cinema’s usual eco-villains such as those David

Ingram argues the ‘film vert’ is characterised by: “The second recurrent villain in the

environmental movie [after the white hunter] is the representative of big business: the

property developer, oil tycoon or nuclear plant manager” (Ingram 3). This absence of an

obvious scapegoat may lead to a guilty conclusion: the villain is ourselves. The people

of Dr. Plonk’s future (that is, the citizens of 2007) are shown sitting idle, watching

widescreen TV as the world turns around them. Rather than sitting back and applauding

as a messianic saviour figure averts apocalypse, de Heer may be subtly suggesting we

get out from in front of the television and take action ourselves. He certainly does not

hesitate to condemn television in interview, stating: “If I could do one thing to improve

all of humanity it would be to get rid of television. It has had such a negative social

effect in every society that it’s been introduced to ... it’s allowed society to get as

consumerist as it is” (Starrs 21). This statement may be interpreted as authoritarian and

dismissive to the so-called masses. Certainly, de Heer’s powerful animadversion smacks

of the long-standing Marxist tradition that holds that mass culture and media such as

television deceptively lull the population into thinking they’re content with our

fundamentally unequal society, while advertising actively creates consumer desires

which audiences come to perceive as ‘needs’. Such a stance sits easily with Wright’s

view of the genre film serving to support the status quo but it is not just class stasis that

is encouraged, but the refusal of a different future too. As the box in the corner of the

living-room that is always on, television serves to deaden the population to new ideas

through their repetition, thus consolidating the present culture of simultaneous

resignation and disavowal that seems to characterise many people’s attitudes to an

impending ecological or nuclear apocalypse. The once-new abstraction of man-made

apocalypse has been staged and re-staged so many times on the small screen, run and re-

run as the disaster movie of the week or the nightly shock-horror news bulletin, that we

have become numb to its threat and inured to its imminence. Life in our TV culture is a


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constant post-apocalyptic state in which the end of the world is only a metaphor. Like

the horrifying symbol of the mushroom cloud appropriated by music videos or computer

games, both the nuclear and greenhouse gas caused apocalypse have been diminished to

the status of fable. A global zeitgeist of fear, unfocused and unresolved, has morphed

into ennui. As to life after the apocalypse - that uninviting tableau is itself un-screenable

if TV’s advertising revenue is to continue. Television has an insatiable appetite for the

visual image, but a post-apocalypse world is entirely theoretical, and, if it includes an

absence of humanity, it is virtually invisible: there is nothing to watch in the post-

apocalypse wasteland. As Paul Boyer wryly observes, “Perhaps the only adequate

television treatment of nuclear war would be two hours of a totally blank screen in prime

time. But who would sponsor it?” (Boyer 362). The addition of commercials,

intersecting a message of eco-warning like blows to the cranium, serves to dilute the

apocalyptic threat even further. This dependence upon what television producers deem

fit for our digestion, so frequently determined by advertising interests, is what de Heer

may be so belligerent about and why he apparently believes the micro-environment of

the darkened cinema remains a site where his eco-warnings to humanity may still be

heeded.

As well as being guilty of promoting rampant consumerism, television has been widely

criticised for reducing viewer’s social capital, by which Robert D. Putnam means the

... features of social life - networks, norms, and trust - that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives [...] TV viewing is strongly and negatively related to social trust and group membership [... and] other indicators of civic engagement, including social trust and voting turnout (Putnam 1996).

The privatization of leisure time that solitary TV viewing seems to result in means

people are less likely to engage in their community and less likely to participate in

ecologically sound group activities such as recycling drives, environmental clean-up

days or supporting election campaigns for politicians with positive ecological agendas.

Like de Heer’s TV audiences depicted in Dr. Plonk’s future, people with low social

capital sit immersed in their widescreen television while the apocalypse descends around

them. But as Steven Maras hints, Putnam’s theory is becoming outdated as television


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viewing becomes interactive: “Indeed, it is possible that Putnam’s lack of generosity

towards television masks a different issue to do with the changing nature of cultural

engagement and participation, and how it happens” (Maras 106). With the rapid growth

of the adaptation of free to air television to incorporate mobile telephone and other

interactive content, Putnam’s theory loses currency; television viewers are engaging

more in social networks. Increases in bandwidth have seen new media technologies

proliferate and streaming digital video, both professionally produced and user-generated,

is a familiar medium for the person Christina Spurgeon and Gerard Goggin call the

“consumer-citizen” (Spurgeon and Goggin 319), noting that “Both the solitary broadcast

[television] audience member and the mobile communications [phone] consumer no

longer make sense” (318). Spurgeon and Goggin foreshadow a not-too-distant future in

which business interests shape entirely new areas of interactive retro-fitting of what used

to be called televisual entertainment: “Scalable, consumer-citizen customization media

and communications, for example selecting a unique combination of mobile handset,

ringtone and wallpaper and then using this device to participate in deciding the outcome

of a talent quest, is only the beginning of this trajectory” (326). These “New Circuits of

Culture” (ibid.) may offer alternatives to the closed culture of television in which the

marketers of advertising dictate content, alternatives in which consumer-citizens

exercise greater civic participation. This realization leads me to wonder if de Heer’s

disdain for the medium of television is closing off potential reception of his eco-

warnings by consumers whom are not only technologically enabled but actively inclined

to institute personal change? Spurgeon and Goggin’s consumer-citizen may not only be

the potential audience for eco-warning, he or she may also participate in on-line

statistical evaluation of community opinions. Compared to the effort involved in

attending a polling booth in person, the consumer-citizen may some day participate in

the relatively undemanding process of voting via their mobile telephone. Short Message

Service (SMS) has been responsible for voter turnout in the multi-millions for popular

contests such as Chinese TV’s Super Girl’s Voice (chaoji nusheng) (see Jakes 2005).

Last year Taylor Hicks won the final of American Idol in an election that nearly 64

million people voted in - more than voted in the 2004 US presidential elections - and this

year Australian politicians began posting their campaign videos on YouTube (see Meikle


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2007). Increasingly, the electronic device that is always on is not the TV set but the

interactive multi-media device that in reductive terms is known as the mobile or cell

telephone, and unlike the inhibition of civic engagement the traditionally private mode

of television viewing promotes, the interactive technologies can result in increased civic

engagement, by which interacting audiences develop stronger senses of interpersonal

trust, reciprocity and teamwork in their pursuit of communal objectives. With the

astounding growth in and acceptance of such technology it is not such an inconceivable

prediction that governmental election votes may someday be cast by citizens using their

mobile phone or its technologically advanced equivalent in a simultaneously virtual and

actual environment they have become engaged in by the audiovisual content streamed to

them on their self-same hand-held multimedia device. In China, the country Spurgeon

and Goggin call “the world's largest consumer market for mobile handsets and services,

with more than 350 million mobile subscribers” (321), the authoritarian Communist

Party is justifiably concerned at the ability for mobile phone led revolt by political

dissidents: interactive technology has the potential to overthrow governments. Others

have recognised the potential for a paradigm shift in the way politics works: Axel Bruns

speaks of increasingly more active “produsers” of democracy, i.e. individuals who,

empowered by the new media to simultaneously consume, use, produce and create new

content in a knowledge economy, turn their technology towards politics:

... a shift towards produsage may revive democratic processes by leveling the roles and turning citizens into active produsers of democracy again. The beginnings of this shift may already be visible in the increasing role of blogs and citizen journalism in recent elections in the U.S. and elsewhere ... (Bruns 7).

Curiously, de Heer's limn of the woeful present in Dr. Plonk is devoid of any cyber-age

digital technology despite the likelihood that the online consumer-citizen may be just the

audience de Heer should be seeking for his eco-warnings.

The world’s most famous eco-politician, although not presently running for office, is Al

Gore. His slide show has been presented to corporate audiences everywhere and his

filmic eco-warning has had great impact. But, as Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann

contend, An Inconvenient Truth utilises the rhetorical strategy of environmental


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nostalgia, and “mainly succeeds not because of its predictions but because of the eco-

memories it evokes” (Murray and Heumann 2007). The film suggests “... we can go

‘home’ to a world more like that of the 1970s by making a few changes, not by giving

up our lives [... Gore] serves as a personal example and a conveyor of hope” (ibid).

While his rhetoric may be derided as a crudely over-determined signification of a

romantic Earthly perfection, his eco-warning - regardless of its methodology - succeeds

in motivating audiences to change their lifestyles. Perhaps, if Gore had gained the US

presidency back in 2000, he could have been the messianic individual male who single-

handedly saves the world, but instead, the former vice-president campaigns for people to

make small lifestyle changes by reminding them of a not-too-distant utopic past. Nor is

de Heer necessarily interested in the role of messiah. But although his impassioned

railing against the idiot box might alienate some constituents, his interest in improving

humanity is fore-grounded by his comments such as the above regarding TV and while

he has never indicated any such proclivity, I wonder if the man who was awarded the

title of South Australian of the Year in 2006 has considered a post-cinema career on the

hustings? Celebrity candidates have frequently parlayed their idolatry for votes, usually

drawing upon constituent’s recognition of their achievements in the popular world of

movies or sport. Were de Heer to run for office, canny voters might be reminded of his

recent cinematic effort to improve humanity in which, like Gore and Guggenheim's An

Inconvenient Truth, the taking of individual responsibility is indirectly promoted, in lieu

of maintaining the status quo by proffering Wright’s “absurd solutions” involving

Lacy’s heroic “dynamic individuals”. At first glance his two eco-warning films both

seem to be further examples of Lacy’s unhelpful eco-mythology, a “(neo)liberal political

imaginary” in which a messianic male figure stands up and saves the world in blithe

disregard for the more realistic difference to be made by individuals everywhere

changing their lifestyles. But de Heer’s second film shows that even a man with wealth

and education enough to build a time machine cannot save the world alone. Rather than

perpetuating a cultural anxiety regarding apocalypse due to untrammeled technology as

the science fiction films of the twentieth century did or an inevitable consummation of

humanity’s greed as the dystopic visions of Toni Perrine’s neo-barbarianism depict, de

Heer has struck a subtle blow against fatalistic apathy. Adopting a quieter approach than


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the admirable Al Gore’s plan for a “mass persuasion campaign” (Raju 2007), de Heer

makes no stump speeches for he is interested in gently encouraging his audiences

themselves taking responsibility for averting the apocalypse. Demonstrating the

communication skills of a consummate eco-politician himself, de Heer’s last shot in his

latest film is of the would-be messianic savior, alone and impotent. His avatar, Dr.

Plonk, is shown gripping his prison bars as he stares directly at the camera, not shouting

but silently pleading with his eyes to we, the audience, to mobilise ourselves and do

something, be it recycle waste, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or even take an interest

in eco-politics. Time will tell if my prediction of government elections being determined

by online voting eventuates or if we are all wiped out beforehand by global apocalypse.

Hopefully, if and when Dr. Plonk is eventually broadcast on the ubiquitous small screen

de Heer so despises, the new culture of interactive television consumption via the mobile

multimedia telephone will result in audiences heeding his subtle eco-warning, changing

their lifestyles and voting for an eco-politician, rather than engaging in unhelpful eco-

hero worship.

Works Cited.

Bruns, Axel. “Produsage: Towards a broader framework for user-led content creation.” In Proceedings Creativity & Cognition 6, Washington, DC, 2007. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00006623/01/6623.pdf

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. NY: Pantheon, 1985.

Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.

Franklin, H. Bruce. “Future imperfect.” American Film. 8 (1983): 46-9, 75-6.

Ingram, David. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter Press, 2004.

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00006623/01/6623.pdf�


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Jakes, Susan. “Li Yuchun: Loved for being herself.” Time Asia, 3 October 2005. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://www.time.com/time/asia/2005/heroes/li_yuchun.html

Kozloff, Sarah. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. California: University of California Press, 1988.

Lacy, Mark J. “Cinema and ecopolitics: Existence in the Jurassic Park.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30.3 (2001): 635-45.

Maras, Steven. “Social capital theory, television, and participation.” Continuum, 20.1 (2006): 87-109.

Meikle, Graham. “20th Century politics meets 21st Century media.” ABC News Online, 12 February 2007. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://www.abc.net.au/news/opinion/items/200702/s1844193.htm

Moran, Albert and Vieth, Errol. Film in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Murray, Robin and Heumann, Joseph. “Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and its skeptics: a case of environmental nostalgia.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 49, 2007. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/inconvenTruth/index.html

Perrine, Toni. Film and the Nuclear Age: Representing Cultural Anxiety. NY and London: Garland, 1998.

Putnam, Robert D. “The strange disappearance of civic America.” The American Prospect, 7.24, 1996. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/assoc/strange.html

Raju, Manu. “Gore’s global warming plan goes far beyond anything Capitol Hill envisions.” CQ Today, 2007. Accessed 5 August 2007. http://public.cq.com/docs/cqt/news110-000002475002.html

Redwood, Tom. “Silence is a virtue: Dr. Plonk and Passio.” Metro, 152 (2007): 14-17.

Spurgeon, Christina and Goggin, Gerald. “Mobiles into media: Premium rate SMS and the adaptation of television to interactive communication cultures.” Continuum, 21.2 (2007): 317-329.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “The sounds of silence: an interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro, 152 (2007): 18-21.

Wright, Judith Hess. “Genre films and the status quo.” Film Genre Reader III, Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: Texas University Press, 2003.

http://www.time.com/time/asia/2005/heroes/li_yuchun.html�

http://www.abc.net.au/news/opinion/items/200702/s1844193.htm�

http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/inconvenTruth/index.html�

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/assoc/strange.html�

http://public.cq.com/docs/cqt/news110-000002475002.html�


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Films Cited.

Adaptation (2002), dir. Spike Jonze.

An Inconvenient Truth (2005), dir. David Guggenheim.

Dr. Plonk (2007), dir. Rolf de Heer.

Epsilon (1995), dir. Rolf de Heer.

Five (1951), dir. Arch Obeler.

Gattaca (1997), dir. Andrew Niccol.

Jurassic Park (1993), dir. Steven Spielberg.

Mad Max (1979), dir. George Miller.

Planet of the Apes (1968), dir. Franklin J. Schaffner.

Silent Running (1972), dir. Douglas Trumball.

Soylent Green (1973), dir. Richard Fleischer.

Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991), dir. James Cameron.

The Lost World (1997), dir. Steven Spielberg.

The Tracker (2002), dir. Rolf de Heer.

Things To Come (1936), dir. William Cameron Menzies.

Twelve Monkeys (1996), dir. Terry Gilliam.


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CHAPTER 5.

The Second of Two Papers

Utilising Standard

Auteur Analysis.


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5. Preamble to the Third Refereed and


This paper, published online in M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, is a substantially

reworked version of a conference paper entitled “Dance Me To My Song (Rolf de Heer

1997): The story of a disabled dancer” presented at the Scopic Bodies Dance Studies

Research Seminar Series, University of Auckland, 13th August 2007 and accepted for

refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me To My Song,” M/C: A

Journal of Media and Culture (ISSN: 1441-2616 - online), vol. 11, no. 3, July 2008.

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/49

Brief Abstract. This paper asserts that in Dance me To My Song, Julia (played by

Heather Rose, a woman with cerebral palsy who also co-wrote the film) is not held up as

an object of pity, rather is a fully embodied character, thus defying the “normality

drama” (Darke 1998) of disability which aims to “reinforce the able-bodied audience’s

self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other”. Director de

Heer seems to be giving credit for authorship to Rose where credit is due, for as a result

of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is

a rare exception to the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown

triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied

rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than her carer, the ‘normal’ Madelaine.

Secondly, in her gaining the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown

triumphing in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. As with de Heer’s other

films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates an auteurial desire

not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower her/him.

Length: 4267 words.

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M/C Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2008) - 'able' D. Bruno Starrs

Enabling the Auteurial Voice in Dance Me to My Song

Despite numerous critics describing him as an auteur (i.e. a film-maker who ‘does’ everything and fulfils every production role [Bordwell and Thompson 37] and/or with a signature “world-view” detectable in his/her work [Caughie 10]), Rolf de Heer appears to have declined primary authorship of Dance Me to My Song (1997), his seventh in an oeuvre of twelve feature films. Indeed, the opening credits do not mention his name at all: it is only with the closing credits that the audience learns de Heer has directed the film. Rather, as the film commences, the viewer is informed by the titles that it is “A film by Heather Rose”, thus suggesting that the work is her singular creation. Direct and uncompromising, with its unflattering shots of the lead actor and writer (Heather Rose Slattery, a young woman born with cerebral palsy), the film may be read as a courageous self-portrait which finds the grace, humanity and humour trapped inside Rose’s twisted body. Alternatively, it may be read as yet another example of de Heer’s signature interest in foregrounding a world view which gives voice to marginalized characters such as the disabled or the disadvantaged. For example, the developmentally retarded eponyme of Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is eventually able to make art as a singer in a band and succeeds in creating a happy family with a wife and two kids. The ‘mute’ girl in The Quiet Room (1996) makes herself heard by her squabbling parents through her persistent activism. In Ten Canoes (2006) the Indigenous Australians cast themselves according to kinship ties, not according to the director’s choosing, and tell their story in their own uncolonized language. A cursory glance at the films of Rolf de Heer suggests he is overtly interested in conveying to the audience the often overlooked agency of his unlikely protagonists.

In the ultra-competitive world of professional film-making it is rare to see primary authorship ceded by a director so generously. However, the allocation of authorship to a member of a marginalized population re-invigorates questions prompted by Andy Medhurst regarding a film’s “authorship test” (198) and its relationship to a subaltern community wherein he writes that “a biographical approach has more political justification if the project being undertaken is one concerned with the cultural history of a marginalized group” (202-3). Just as films by gay

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authors about gay characters may have greater credibility, as Medhurst posits, one might wonder would a film by a person with a disability about a character with the same disability be better received? Enabling authorship by an unknown, crippled woman such as Rose rather than a famous, able-bodied male such as de Heer may be cynically regarded as good (show) business in that it is politically correct. This essay therefore asks if the appellation “A film by Heather Rose” is appropriate for Dance Me to My Song. Whose agency in telling the story (or ‘doing’ the film-making), the able bodied Rolf de Heer or the disabled Heather Rose, is reflected in this cinematic production? In other words, whose voice is enabled when an audience receives this film? In attempting to answer these questions it is inevitable that Paul Darke’s concept of the “normality drama” (181) is referred to and questioned, as I argue that Dance Me to My Song makes groundbreaking departures from the conventions of the typical disability narrative.

Heather Rose as Auteur Rose plays the film’s heroine, Julia, who like herself has cerebral palsy, a group of non-progressive, chronic disorders resulting from changes produced in the brain during the prenatal stages of life. Although severely affected physically, Rose suffered no intellectual impairment and had acted in Rolf de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby five years before, a confidence-building experience that grew into an ongoing fascination with the filmmaking process. Subsequently, working with co-writer Frederick Stahl, she devised the scenario for this film, writing the lead role for herself and then proactively bringing it to de Heer’s attention. Rose wrote of de Heer’s deliberate lack of involvement in the script-writing process: “Rolf didn’t even want to read what we’d done so far, saying he didn’t want to interfere with our process” (de Heer, “Production Notes”).

In 2002, aged 36, Rose died and Stahl reports in her obituary an excerpt from her diary:

People see me as a person who has to be controlled. But let me tell you something, people. I am not! And I am going to make something real special of my life! I am going to go out there and grab life with both hands!!! I am going to make the most sexy and honest film about disability that has ever been made!! (Stahl, “Standing Room Only”)

This proclamation of her ability and ambition in screen-writing is indicative of Rose’s desire to do. In a guest lecture Rose gave further insights into the active intent in writing Dance Me to My Song:

I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world …


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The message I wanted to convey to an audience was “As people with disabilities, we have the same feelings and desires as others”. (Rose, “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation”)

Rose went on to explain her strategy for winning over director de Heer: “Rolf was not sure about committing to the movie; I had to pester him really. I decided to invite him to my birthday party. It took a few drinks, but I got him to agree to be the director” (ibid) and with this revelation of her tactical approach her film-making agency is further evidenced.

Rose’s proactive innovation is not just evident in her successfully approaching de Heer. Her screenplay serves as a radical exception to films featuring disabled persons, which, according to Paul Darke in 1998, typically involve the disabled protagonist struggling to triumph over the limitations imposed by their disability in their ‘admirable’ attempts to normalize. Such normality dramas are usually characterized by two generic themes:

first, that the state of abnormality is nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization – as represented in the film by the other characters – is unquestionably right owing to its axiomatic supremacy. (187)

Darke argues that the so-called normality drama is “unambiguously a negation of ascribing any real social or individual value to the impaired or abnormal” (196), and that such dramas function to reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other. Able-bodied characters are typically portrayed positively in the normality drama: “A normality as represented in the decency and support of those characters who exist around, and for, the impaired central character. Thus many of the disabled characters in such narratives are bitter, frustrated and unfulfilled and either antisocial or asocial” (193). Darke then identifies The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) as archetypal films of this genre.

Even in films in which seemingly positive images of the disabled are featured, the protagonist is still to be regarded as the abnormal Other, because

in comparison to the other characters within that narrative the impaired character is still a comparatively second-class citizen in the world of the film. My Left Foot is, as always, a prime example: Christy Brown may well be a writer, relatively wealthy and happy, but he is not seen as sexual in any way (194).

However, Dance Me to My Song defies such generic restrictions: Julia’s temperament is upbeat and cheerful and her disability, rather than appearing tragic, is made to look healthy, not “second class”, in comparison


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with her physically attractive, able-bodied but deeply unhappy carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy). Within the first few minutes of the film we see Madelaine dissatisfied as she stands, inspecting her healthy, toned and naked body in the bathroom mirror, contrasted with vision of Julia’s twisted form, prostrate, pale and naked on the bed. Yet, in due course, it is the able-bodied girl who is shown to be insecure and lacking in character. Madelaine steals Julia’s money and calls her “spastic”. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Madelaine perversely positions Julia in her wheelchair to force her to watch as she has perfunctory sex with her latest boyfriend. Madelaine even masquerades as Julia, commandeering her voice synthesizer to give a fraudulently positive account of her on-the-job performance to the employment agency she works for. Madelaine’s “axiomatic supremacy” is thoroughly undermined and in the most striking contrast to the typical normality drama, Julia is unashamedly sexual: she is no Christy Brown.

The affective juxtaposition of these two different personalities stems from the internal nature of Madelaine’s problems compared to the external nature of Julia’s problems. Madelaine has an emotional disability rather than a physical disability and several scenes in the film show her reduced to helpless tears. Then one day when Madelaine has left her to her own devices, Julia defiantly wheels herself outside and bumps into - almost literally - handsome, able-bodied Eddie (John Brumpton). Cheerfully determined, Julia wins him over and a lasting friendship is formed. Having seen the joy that sex brings to Madelaine, Julia also wants carnal fulfilment so she telephones Eddie and arranges a date. When Eddie arrives, he reads the text on her voice machine’s screen containing the title line to the film ‘Dance me to my song’ and they share a tender moment. Eddie’s gentleness as he dances Julia to her song (“Kizugu” written by Bernard Huber and John Laidler, as performed by Okapi Guitars) is simultaneously contrasted with the near-date-rapes Madelaine endures in her casual relationships.

The conflict between Madeline and Julia is such that it prompts Albert Moran and Errol Vieth to categorize the film as “women’s melodrama”:

Dance Me to My Song clearly belongs to the genre of the romance. However, it is also important to recognize it under the mantle of the women’s melodrama … because it has to do with a woman’s feelings and suffering, not so much because of the flow of circumstance but rather because of the wickedness and malevolence of another woman who is her enemy and rival. (198-9)

Melodrama is a genre that frequently resorts to depicting disability in which a person condemned by society as disabled struggles to succeed in love: some prime examples include An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957) involving a paraplegic woman, and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which a strong-spirited but mute woman achieves love. The more conventional Hollywood romances typically involve attractive, able-bodied characters.


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In Dance Me to My Song the melodramatic conflict between the two remarkably different women at first seems dominated by Madelaine, who states: “I know I’m good looking, good in bed ... better off than you, you poor thing” in a stream-of-consciousness delivery in which Julia is constructed as listener rather than converser. Julia is further reduced to the status of sub-human as Madelaine says: “I wish you could eat like a normal person instead of a bloody animal” and her erstwhile boyfriend Trevor says: “She looks like a fuckin’ insect.” Even the benevolent Eddie says: “I don’t like leaving you alone but I guess you’re used to it.” To this the defiant Julia replies; “Please don’t talk about me in front of me like I’m an animal or not there at all.” Eddie is suitably chastised and when he treats her to an over-priced ice-cream the shop assistant says “Poor little thing … She’ll enjoy this, won’t she?” Julia smiles, types the words “Fuck me!”, and promptly drops the ice-cream on the floor. Eddie laughs supportively. “I’ll just get her another one,” says the flustered shop assistant, “and then get her out of here, please!” With striking eloquence, Julia wheels herself out of the shop, her voice machine announcing “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”, as she departs exultantly. With this bold statement of independence and defiance in the face of patronising condescension, the audience sees Rose’s burgeoning strength of character and agency reflected in the onscreen character she has created. Dance Me to My Song and the films mentioned above are, however, rare exceptions in the many that dare represent disability on the screen at all, compliant as the majority are with Darke’s expectations of the normality drama.

Significantly, the usual medical-model nexus in many normality films is ignored in Rose’s screenplay: no medication, hospitals or white laboratory coats are to be seen in Julia’s world. Finally, as I have described elsewhere, Julia is shown joyfully dancing in her wheelchair with Eddie while Madelaine proves her physical inferiority with a ‘dance’ of frustration around her broken-down car (see Starrs, "Dance"). In Rose’s authorial vision, audience’s expectations of yet another film of the normality drama genre are subverted as the disabled protagonist proves superior to her ‘normal’ adversary in their melodramatic rivalry for the sexual favours of an able-bodied love-interest.

Rolf de Heer as Auteur De Heer does not like to dwell on the topic of auteurism: in an interview in 2007 he somewhat impatiently states:

I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. … Look, I write the damn things, and direct them, and I don’t completely produce them anymore – there are other people. If that makes me an auteur in other people’s terminologies, then fine. (Starrs, "Sounds" 20)


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De Heer has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis “Working together”) which is possibly why he handed ownership of this film to Rose. Of the writer/actor who plied him with drink so he would agree to back her script, de Heer states:

It is impossible to overstate the courage of the performance that you see on the screen. … Heather somehow found the means to respond on cue, to maintain the concentration, to move in the desired direction, all the myriad of acting fundamentals that we take for granted as normal things to do in our normal lives. (“Production Notes”)

De Heer’s willingness to shift authorship from director to writer/actor is representative of this film’s groundbreaking promotion of the potential for agency within disability. Rather than being passive and suffering, Rose is able to ‘do.’ As the lead actor she is central to the narrative. As the principle writer she is central to the film’s production. And she does both.

But in conflict with this auteurial intent is the temptation to describe Dance Me to My Song as an autobiographical documentary, since it is Rose herself, with her unique and obvious physical handicap, playing the film’s heroine, Julia. In interview, however, De Heer apparently disagrees with this interpretation:

Rolf de Heer is quick to point out, though, that the film is not a biography. “Not at all; only in the sense that writers use material from their own lives. Madelaine is merely the collection of the worst qualities of the worst carers Heather’s ever had.” Dance Me to My Song could be seen as a dramatised documentary, since it is Rose herself playing Julia, and her physical or surface life is so intense and she is so obviously handicapped. While he understands that response, de Heer draws a comparison with the first films that used black actors instead of white actors in blackface. “I don’t know how it felt emotionally to an audience, I wasn’t there, but I think that is the equivalent”. (Urban)

An example of an actor wearing “black-face” to portray a cerebral palsy victim might well be Gus Trikonis’s 1980 film Touched By Love. In this, the disabled girl is unconvincingly played by the pretty, able-bodied actress Diane Lane. The true nature of the character’s disability is hidden and cosmeticized to Hollywood expectations. Compared to that inauthentic film, Rose’s screenwriting and performance in Dance Me to My Song is a self-penned fiction couched in unmediated reality and certainly warrants authorial recognition.

Despite his unselfish credit-giving, de Heer’s direction of this remarkable film is nevertheless detectable. His auteur signature is especially evident in his technological employment of sound as I have argued elsewhere (see


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Starrs, "Awoval"). The first distinctly de Heer influence is the use of a binaural recording device - similar to that used in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - to convey to the audience the laboured nature of Julia’s breathing and to subjectively align the audience with her point of view. This apparatus provides a disturbing sound bed that is part wheezing, part grunting. There is no escaping Julia’s physically unusual life, from her reliance on others for food, toilet and showering, to the half-strangled sounds emanating from her ineffectual larynx. But de Heer insists that Julia does speak, like Stephen Hawkings, via her Epson RealVoice computerized voice synthesizer, and thus Julia manages to retain her dignity. De Heer has her play this machine like a musical instrument, its neatly modulated feminine tones immediately prompting empathy.

Rose Capp notes de Heer’s preoccupation with finding a voice for those minority groups within the population who struggle to be heard, stating:

de Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication (21).

Certainly, the importance to Julia of her only means of communication, her voice synthesizer, is stressed by de Heer throughout the film. Everybody around her has, to varying degrees, problems in hearing correctly or understanding both what and how Julia communicates with her alien mode of conversing, and she is frequently asked to repeat herself. Even the well-meaning Eddie says: “I don’t know what the machine is trying to say”. But it is ultimately via her voice synthesizer that Julia expresses her indomitable character. When first she meets Eddie, she types: “Please put my voice machine on my chair, STUPID.” She proudly declares ownership of a condom found in the bathroom with “It’s mine!” The callous Madelaine soon realizes Julia’s strength is in her voice machine and withholds access to the device as punishment for if she takes it away then Julia is less demanding for the self-centred carer. Indeed, the film which starts off portraying the physical superiority of Madelaine soon shows us that the carer’s life, for all her able-bodied, free-love ways, is far more miserable than Julia’s. As de Heer has done in many of his other films, a voice has been given to those who might otherwise not be heard through significant decision making in direction. In Rose’s case, this is achieved most obviously via her electric voice synthesizer.

I have also suggested elsewhere (see Starrs, "Dance") that de Heer has helped find a second voice for Rose via the language of dance, and in doing so has expanded the audience’s understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per Mike Oliver’s social model of disability, rather than the more usual medical model of disability. Empowered by her act of courage with


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Eddie, Julia sacks her uncaring ‘carer’ and the film ends optimistically with Julia and her new man dancing on the front porch. By picturing the couple in long shot and from above, Julia’s joyous dance of triumph is depicted as ordinary, normal and not deserving of close examination. This happy ending is intercut with a shot of Madeline and her broken down car, performing her own frustrated dance and this further emphasizes that she was unable to ‘dance’ (i.e. communicate and compete) with Julia. The disabled performer such as Rose, whether deliberately appropriating a role or passively accepting it, usually struggles to placate two contrasting realities: (s)he is at once invisible in the public world of interhuman relations and simultaneously hyper-visible due to physical Otherness and subsequent instantaneous typecasting. But by the end of Dance Me to My Song, Rose and de Heer have subverted this notion of the disabled performer grappling with the dual roles of invisible victim and hyper-visible victim by depicting Julia as socially and physically adept. She ‘wins the guy’ and dances her victory as de Heer’s inspirational camera looks down at her success like an omniscient and pleased god. Film academic Vivian Sobchack writes of the phenomenology of dance choreography for the disabled and her own experience of waltzing with the maker of her prosthetic leg, Steve, with the comment: “for the moment I did displace focus on my bodily immanence to the transcendent ensemble of our movement and I really began to waltz” (65). It is easy to imagine Rose’s own, similar feeling of bodily transcendence in the closing shot of Dance Me to My Song as she shows she can ‘dance’ better than her able-bodied rival, content as she is with her self-identity.

Conclusion: Validation of the Auteurial Other

Rolf de Heer was a well-known film-maker by the time he directed Dance Me to My Song. His films Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996) had both screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. He was rapidly developing a reputation for non-mainstream representations of marginalized, subaltern populations, a cinematic trajectory that was to be further consolidated by later films privileging the voice of Indigenous Peoples in The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the latter winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes. His films often feature unlikely protagonists or as Liz Ferrier writes, are “characterized by vulnerable bodies … feminized … none of whom embody hegemonic masculinity” (65): they are the opposite of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, controlling heroes. With a nascent politically correct worldview proving popular, de Heer may have considered the assigning of authorship to Rose a marketable idea, her being representative of a marginalized group, which as Andy Medhurst might argue, may be more politically justifiable, as it apparently is with films of gay authorship. However, it must be emphasized that there is no evidence that de Heer’s reticence about claiming authorship of Dance Me to My Song is motivated by pecuniary interests, nor does he seem to have been trying to distance himself from the project through embarrassment or dissatisfaction with the film or its relatively unknown writer/actor. Rather, he


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seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success.

Firstly, it is a rare exception to the disability film genre defined by Paul Darke as the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. Despite being an unpublished and unknown author, the label “A film by Heather Rose” is, I believe, a deserved coup for the woman who set out to make “the most sexy and honest film about disability ever made”. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalized peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her. He both acknowledges their authorial voices and credits them as essential beings, and in enabling such subaltern populations to be heard, willingly cedes his privileged position as a successful, white, male, able-bodied film-maker. In the credits of this film he seems to be saying ‘I may be an auteur, but Heather Rose is a no less able auteur’.

References

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

Capp, Rose. “Alexandra and the de Heer Project.” RealTime + Onscreen 56 (Aug.-Sep. 2003): 21. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue56/7153›.

Caughie, John. “Introduction”. Theories of Authorship. Ed. John Caughie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 9-16.

Darke, Paul. “Cinematic Representations of Disability.” The Disability Reader. Ed. Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Cassell, 1988. 181-198.

Davis, Therese. “Working Together: Two Cultures, One Film, Many Canoes.” Senses of Cinema 2006. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/ten-canoes.html›.

De Heer, Rolf. “Production Notes.” Vertigo Productions. Undated. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=10&display=notes›.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue56/7153�

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/ten-canoes.html�

http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=10&display=notes�



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Ferrier, Liz. “Vulnerable Bodies: Creative Disabilities in Contemporary Australian Film.” Australian Cinema in the 1990s. Ed. Ian Craven. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co., 2001. 57-78.

Medhurst, Andy. “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship.” Screen 32.2 (1991): 197-208.

Moran, Albert, and Errol Vieth. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Oliver, Mike. Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983.

Rose Slattery, Heather. “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation.” Words+ n.d. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm›.

Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).” Topoi 24.1 (2005): 55-66.

Stahl, Frederick. “Standing Room Only for a Thunderbolt in a Wheelchair,” Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 2002. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html›.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of Silence: An Interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro 152 (2007): 18-21.

———. “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003).” Metro 156 (2008): 148-153.

———. “Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The Story of a Disabled Dancer.” Proceedings Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series 2007. Ed. Mark Harvey. University of Auckland, 2008 (in press).

Urban, Andrew L. “Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, Australia.” Film Festivals 1988. 6 June 2008. ‹http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm›.

http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm�

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html�

http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm�


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CHAPTER 6.

A Paper Arguing for the

Methodological Innovation

of the Thesis:

Aural Auteur Analysis.


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5.1 Preamble to the Fourth Refereed and


This paper represents the turning point of the thesis. From this point on, the

methodology of analysis is no longer standard auteur analysis, in which little to no

attention is paid to the possible signature use of sound in a film-maker’s body of work,

rather it is an approach in which the aural is emphasised.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Revising the Metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie Aural Auteur”

(accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the Indian

Association for the Study of Australia 4th International Conference - “Re-

imagining Australia and India: Culture and Identity”, 22-24 January 2008,

Kolkata, India. A revised version is currently also undergoing refereeing by Metro

Magazine).

Brief Abstract. Auteurism has, since its inception in the 1950s by the critics of Des

Cahiers du Cinéma, neglected the potential role of sound in deference to the visual mise-

en-scène: the auteur is literally defined by Astruc’s metaphor of the caméra-stylo, by

which he meant that the camera could potentially be wielded by the director as a novelist

might wield a pen. This paper argues that a review of the role of the aural in the practice

of the auteur is both overdue and necessary, and also suggests a further role for

nationality when considering the kind of auteur a film-maker may be. Australian film-

makers may be characterised by the combining of a European auteurist interest in what

Jonathan Rayner calls “personal writing and artistic vision” and an American auteurist

interest in “genre revision” (2003: 12). The paper concludes by suggesting that a

typically Australian sonic signature may - with detailed aural auteur analysis - be

detected in the work of Rolf de Heer and proposes the incorporation of the analysis of a

film-maker’s use of sound in any conceptual framework for the methodology of auteur

analysis.

Length: 5606 words.


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Front cover of the conference handbook.


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Revising the Metaphor: Rolf de Heer as Aussie Aural Auteur.

In his auteur analysis of celebrated Australian film-maker Peter Weir, Jonathan Rayner

stated: “[Weir’s] career is marked by a European brand of art-film auteurism, based on

personal writing and visual expression, in Australia, and by an American brand of

auteurism, based on genre revision, in Hollywood.”1 This distinction between the

auteurism of the two continents is curiously undeveloped in the literature and in this

paper I suggest that there actually exists a typically Australian kind of auteur in whose

work the European tendency for “personal writing and visual expression” is combined

with American “genre revision”, as exemplified by writer/director Rolf de Heer.

Furthermore, I propose this categorization of Australian auteurism can be shown to be

the evolutionary product of a trajectory of film-making characterised by two distinct –

yet interacting – influences, the effect of the Australian government’s attempt to

cultivate a National Cinema and the belated recognition of sound artistry in film-making.

This last factor leads me to the conclusion that auteur analysts ought to concern

themselves as much with the aural as they do with the visual signatures left on a film, as

has traditionally been their neglectful approach based, as it were, on the French-

originated metaphor of the caméra-stylo.

European Auteurism.

The notion of an artwork having an individual author has not always been accepted in

western culture. For centuries it was God that was seen as the locus of an artist’s

creativity and not any mere human. It is only since the Renaissance that the individual

artist has been associated with her or his creative discourse and it is only since the late

1940s that cinema has acquired the concept of an auteur, when a rift began to be

constructed between notions of commercial cinema and art cinema, although Susan

Hayward cited it as earlier:

Auteur is a term that dates back to the 1920s, in the theoretical writings of French film critics and directors of the silent era. At that time, the debate centred on the auteur (author of script and film-maker as one and the same) versus the scenario-led film (scripts commissioned from authors or scriptwriters) - a distinction that fed into the original high-art/low-art debate.2


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It was in 1948, however, that the argument for auteurism became really earnest when

French film-maker, left-wing intellectual and critic Alexandre Astruc devised the

metaphor of the caméra-stylo, by which he meant that the movie camera could

potentially be wielded as a novelist might wield a pen. His article, “Naissance d’une

nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo”3, contained the first cogent suggestion that an

artistic film does not come about from the toil of a production crew but, rather, from the

creative force of the director and her or his leadership. The film could become the end

result of the director’s self-expression and creativity through artistic use of the caméra-

stylo. Astruc imagined the cinema eventually breaking free of the restrictive demands of

narrative to attain a position in which images become a creative and self-expressive

means of writing just as subtle and flexible as that of poetry and prose. Before Astruc’s

manifesto it was generally believed that the monolithic nature of studio film-making

meant a solitary authorial voice could not make itself seen or heard in a film. Film

criticism, predominately sociological, assumed a movie could only reflect the ideology

of capitalism, being little more than a commodity product. For some, this meant film

could not be perceived as art at all. Where art was recognised in the movies, it was

usually a case of a ‘quality’ production dealing with a serious social issue and the work

of reviewers saw films “less often aesthetically evaluated than topically synopsized.”4

But from the 1950s on there became evident a kind of art cinema, in which a director’s

voice sometimes intruded to the extent of disrupting the verisimilitude of traditional

narrative. An informed and educated audience could seek these marks of authorship and

identify more with that author than even with the characters portrayed.

1951 was the year when Astruc’s contemporary, André Bazin, co-founded the French

film journal Des Cahiers du Cinéma and he is often regarded as the father of auteurism

due to his recognition and appreciation of the authorial style and Zeitgeist of such film-

makers as Charlie Chaplin and Jean Renoir, and his opposition to the un-theorised

political commitment in other French journals of film criticism such as Positif. But it

was left to one of the more polemic critics at Cahiers, François Truffaut, to champion

the phrase politique des auteurs in his 1954 article, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma

Française”. He used this label in collaboration with others of the Cahiers camp to


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virtually apotheosise American directors such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and

John Ford, whose work had been denied them during the war.5 Although American film-

makers were working within the repressive studio machinery of the Hollywood system

and the types of films and their scripts were often decided for them, the French critics

such as Truffaut believed that such artists could nonetheless achieve a personal style in

their work through their preoccupations with the themes they emphasised, the mise-en-

scène they enacted (i.e. everything visible within the frame, from camera angles to

actor’s gestures to set design and lighting) and the formal styles they employed. Truffaut

attacked the psychologically realistic French films of Claude Autant-Lara, Jean

Delannoy, Rene Clement and others, because their ‘quality’ films were more ‘writerly’

than ‘directorly’, most being screen adaptations of literary works.

The proponents of La politique des auteurs made immediate and specific demands. First,

they called for the adoption of a strong stance in favor of some directors and against

others, elevating the stature of French film-makers Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, and

Jean Cocteau, and of American directors D. W. Griffiths, Howard Hawks, John Ford,

and British-born Hitchcock. Secondly, the auteurist partisans called for the re-evaluation

of those Hollywood directors ensconced in studio systems who therefore had to

overcome many more obstacles than their European counterparts, even if their work was

ostensibly commercial and seemingly non-artistic. During the years in which studio

systems reigned supreme over Hollywood, directors were generally required to subject

their artistic visions to the whims of domineering studio moguls and influential movie

stars. They were part of movie ‘factories’ and that they were able to leave their

identifiable personal signatures on their films in the form of a personal world vision and

a distinctive cinematic style was therefore proof of their artistic prowess. Having

overcome the limitations of the hierarchical structure of Hollywood movie-making, such

directors deserved higher status, according to the Cahiers critics. Thirdly, the beginning

of the New Wave of French cinema, or Nouvelle Vague, was to some extent an exercise

by the Cahiers writers in applying their philosophy to the real world by directing their

own films, as exemplified by the work of directors such as Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and

Jean-Luc Godard. Visual effects such as jump cuts, rapid changes of scene, and shots


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that go beyond the usual 180º axis were used to not just mesmerise the audience with

illusory imagery and elaborate narrative, but to deliberately exceed the common

expectations of cinema-goers. This is what Rayner, in his appraisal of Peter Weir, most

probably refers to as European auteurism, that is, film directing based on personal

screen-writing and visual expression as evidenced by analysis of the mise-en-scène. It

must be noted, however, that Rayner did not arrive at any conclusion regarding the

European disavowal of film sound artistry.

American Auteurism.

The French critic’s idea of the film-making auteur slowly gained momentum in America

in the 1960s through the translations and writings of Andrew Sarris in the journals Film

Culture and Movie, and the popularity of ‘auteur theory’, as he rendered the phrase La

politique des auteurs, led to the formation of his canon of great directors. Sarris was the

editor of the English edition of Des Cahiers du Cinéma and in his book The American

Cinema (1968) he set up a system whereby directors were graded according to how far

their personal world-views were able to transcend the hierarchical film-making systems

under which they laboured. It was a controversial pantheon of significant directors

whose names alone were to be considered a criterion of greatness. Sarris stated three

premises of auteurism that he equated with “circles”: an outer circle comprising

“technical competence of the director as a criterion of value”, a middle circle comprising

“personal style” with the premise that “the distinguishable personality of a director is a

criterion of value”; and an inner circle comprising “interior meaning” which he

attempted to explain as being:

… extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material. This conception of interior meaning comes close to what Astruc defines as mise-en-scène, but not quite. It is not quite the vision of a world a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life. It is ambiguous, in any literary sense, because part of it is embedded in the stuff of the cinema and cannot be rendered in noncinematic terms.6

Here Sarris alludes to the primacy of the image for auteur analysis but the concept of

mise-en-scène remains somewhat more complicated than the meaning it possesses in the

theatre-world. Sarris later attempted to elaborate on its tenor:


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The art of the cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mystically as mise-en-scène. […] The whole point of a meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement.7

In other words, Sarris was referring to the signature a director leaves on her or his films

and the mysterious possibility a director is unintentionally leaving it and thus, with

auteurism, the term mise-en-scène became closely associated with techniques such as

the arrangement of visual components within the frame; the position, angle and motion

of the camera, as well as movement of actors etc. within the frame. All, one must note,

at the expense of the possibly auteurial contribution of sound.

British-born Hollywood director Alfred Hitchcock is renowned for cultivating his

persona as auteur, as he revelled in his status as ‘the master of suspense’ and made

cameo appearances in many of his films and personally introduced his TV series. Of the

book of tape recorded interviews with Hitchcock by Truffaut, biographer Donald Spoto

comments that:

Truffaut’s interviews established Hitchcock’s status as the quintessential auteur […] Hitchcock’s career was indeed in crisis, and he and Universal needed to have his accomplishments codified and celebrated by a respected colleague in the industry […] It also hurt and disappointed just about everybody who had ever worked with Alfred Hitchcock, for the interviews reduced the writers, the designers, the photographers, the composers, and the actors to little other than elves in the master carpenter’s workshop.8

This quotation reveals two interesting insights that have led many to reject auteurism:

firstly, identifying a director as an auteur is considered a good move for that director’s

career and has often been the motivating factor in industry use of the term. Secondly, the

label of auteur, especially if welcomed by the director, tends to belittle the achievements

of those many artisans the director has necessarily collaborated with. Of course, these

are not the only criticisms of auteurism, but with the reductions in costs of film-making

associated with advances in high definition videography, auteurism is undoubtedly

sustainable still as the basis for academic discourse. More and more independent


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directors are able to impress their artistic signature on their cinematic output. But for the

Hollywood film-making industry, an auteur is one who stretches, or revises, the

boundaries of known genres, not indulging in writing films of a personal nature but,

rather, churning out commodities audiences can compare to others of its ilk.

Certainly, a convincing argument can be made for the existence of a recognizably

European mode of auteurism, based, as Rayner puts it, on a director’s personal writing

and visual expression, and the evidence abounds in the cinema of the Nouvelle Vague.

But what evidence exists for the claim that American auteurs are characterised by genre

revisionism? Rayner argues:

Hollywood’s films can be divided into several conventionalised genres within a standard mode of linear narrative filmmaking, whereas art cinema (and all non-American, and particularly non-English-language, films, irrespective of their ‘artistic’ or ‘industrial’ circumstances of production, are circulated or received ‘like art films’ outside their countries of origin) can have as many genres as author-directors and an equal number of modes that may or may not conform to Hollywood narrative.9

It seems to Rayner that a simple yet defining difference exists for the directors of Europe

and America: the first group is unrestrained by financial concerns, hence freeing its

members to write and direct personal material while the latter group’s members are

forced by studio apparatus to conform to that which has previously been shown to

succeed at the box office. Even if one accepts the many exceptions and illogicalities to

this reductionist and artificial schism, one must needs ask where the Australian film

maker stands. In a similarly reductive argument, I would put it that the Australian

auteur, supported by considerable government schemes, is able to both subvert genres

and indulge in personal writing, and furthermore, is able to experiment with art-film

techniques (such as sound design, as I will shortly argue). This is due to a distinctly

Australian interest in telling a distinctly Australian story, that is, in the development of a

National Cinema, which, while diverging from mainstream cinema, still manages to

attract significant box office returns.


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Australian Auteurism.

Since the 1970s in Australia, when the separate states established film financing

organizations and tax incentives via the 10B (a) legislation were enacted, thus

encouraging the so-called ‘Renaissance,’ films that varied from the mainstream have

been regularly produced, and these films have been frequently described as Australian

art films. Kathleen McHugh, in her study of Australian film-maker Jane Campion

(Sweetie (1989) and The Piano (1993)), describes the establishment of the Australian

Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), with its deliberately cultivated identity as

an ‘arty’ institution, as commensurate with the goal of combining a uniquely Australian

auteur style with mass marketability:

… the goal of national industries and national film schools was to produce filmmakers whose vision would be sufficiently distinct from the Hollywood model to be claimed for a national perspective, while also remaining sufficiently similar to that model to be commercially viable in the international film market.10

Thus, a uniquely Australian National Cinema was cultivated in the 1970s, one which

sought to marry the artistic creativity of the film auteur with the industry requirements

of box office performance, a disavowal of the perceived culture versus commerce

binary. The most obvious and readily identifiable example of such commercially viable

Australian film-making is the ‘period’ film, as exemplified by several productions

released in the years 1975 to 1982. Such films were set in the not so long ago days of

Australia’s colonial past and are characterised by authentic costuming and props. Lest

the reader think that merely setting a film in the days of one’s forebears is enough to

qualify the work as an art film of the Australian National Cinema, I would like to draw

attention to a definition offered by Norman Holland, which states the art film is always a

“puzzle film,”11 hence the period film Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir 1975) is a

typical art film in that it confounds audience expectations of narrative resolution. Not

unlike a detective film, the puzzle film offers a riddle or enigma that engages the

characters, and the audience, in some significant struggle to comprehend. Unlike the

detective film, however, the puzzling Australian art film seeks to involve the filmgoer in

an unresolved narrative without offering a sense of closure. Things rarely wrap up nicely

with everybody ‘living happily ever after’ in an art film and characters often seem


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relatively directionless, not striving for the attainment of a certain goal, which when

fulfilled typically signals the end of the mainstream film. As David Bordwell put it,

“Firstly, the art cinema defines itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode, and

especially against the cause-effect linkage of events.”12 Instead of a standard story arc,

there may be an acknowledgement of failure on the protagonist’s behalf, or the

character’s perplexed status may continue unchanged, or only a partial or not entirely

satisfactory explanation may be offered. The audience is encouraged to speculate about

the solution to the puzzle beyond the end of the film, and, indeed, about the meaning of

the film generally. But as Bordwell notes, the riddle also concerns the intent of the

author, not just the outcome of the story: “In the art cinema, the puzzle is one of plot:

who is telling this story? How is this story being told? Why is this story being told this

way?”13 Because of the art film’s interest in both realism - with its ‘real’ (not studio)

locations, and ‘real’ problems - and in auteurial motivation, there is frequent and

deliberate ambiguity, hence the reader of this type of film needs to undertake a particular

strategy of meaning-seeking:

The art cinema seeks to solve the problem [of merging the realist and expressionist aesthetics] in a sophisticated way: by the device of ambiguity. [...] Thus the art film solicits a particular reading procedure: Whenever confronted with a problem in causation, temporality, or spatiality, we first seek realistic motivation. (Is a character’s mental state causing the uncertainty? Is life just leaving loose ends?) If we’re thwarted, we next seek authorial motivation. (What is being ‘said’ here? What significance justifies the violation of the norm?).14

Thus, the art film depends on a unique narrative strategy that hovers between the

classical narrative of mainstream Hollywood and an alternative modernist or avant garde

type of filmic disposition in which the auteur voices her or himself via ambiguity.

Narrative is not disregarded as much as it is in the avant garde or modernist film,

however, and the Australian art film retains many characteristics with the classical

Hollywood product. Verisimilitude and naturalism are still guiding characteristics and

attention is still paid to hiding the film-making apparatus in the Australian National

Cinema, which, unlike many of the films produced by Hollywood, are exercises in

puzzlement and personal writing.


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Non-visual Australian Auteurism.

The freedom to indulge in Rayner’s so-called personal writing and artistic vision, as

cultivated by support for an Australian National Cinema, has led to Australian film-

makers experimenting with more than just the visual components of mise-en-scène,

reflecting a departure from the hallmarks of European auteurism and prompting this

paper’s call for the metaphor of the caméra-stylo to be revised. Sound is an area that has

attracted the interest of those directors looking to capture the discerning public’s

attention, although Australian academic and film-maker Philip Brophy continued to

lament in 2003:

Everyone was still treating cinema as a theatrical medium, a visual medium, a photographic medium, a literary medium, but never a sonic medium. I realized that a whole range of film people who are meant to be sharp and intelligent were really missing an obvious point, which is that cinema is an audio-visual medium.15

Brophy’s criticism of the priority given by auteur analysts to the visual signature a film-

maker leaves, was further articulated:

… auteurism is forensically cited via the non-sonic discourses of literature, theater, and photography […] visuals are directed, while sounds are simply direct. Theorists have long smothered the ontological investigation of so-called direct sound with poor metaphorical assignations of truth and honesty.16

Gradually, however, the numbers of film-makers recognising the potential of sound

artistry are increasing and one Australian auteur that has not missed the “obvious point”

is writer/director/producer Rolf de Heer, a graduate of the Australian Film, Television

and Radio School and poster-boy for this country’s National Cinema. While his films

are more main-stream than avant-garde, the work of de Heer often features an elevated

presence of sound, at times raised to a level of dominance amongst the numerous

interactions informing the narrative. Music scholar Cat Hope comments: “each of de

Heer’s films merits a detailed treatise on the way they feature innovative sound ideas in

the scripting and production stages, resulting in some of the most challenging and

exciting cinema made in Australia today.”17 Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca

invented a new name for the cinema-goer at Bad Boy Bubby (1993) when they said “In

de Heer’s film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator.”18

Furthermore, D. Bruno Starrs has argued the label ‘aurator’ can also be used for the


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person experiencing de Heer’s award winning Ten Canoes (2006).19 Indeed, de Heer

may be, to use the term coined by Philip Brophy in describing Indian film director

Satyajit Ray, an “aural auteur.”20 Such a possibility can only be determined if a model of

auteur analysis in which sound is considered to be at least as important as the mise-en-

scène is thus duly applied to his oeuvre. Of course, the recognition of aural auteurism

should not be at the expense of ascknowledging the collaborative efforts between

director, sound editor and composer, but as Claudia Gorbman recently wrote, “The

auteur can write in cinema, using sound as well as the camera,”21 and if one seeks

auteurial inscriptions in the Australian National Cinema one must surely now

incorporate the analysis of sound into the methodology used.

Returning to Rayner’s subject, the films of Peter Weir, it is encouraging to note that an

aural auteur analysis, however brief, has already been conducted on his work. Bruce

Johnson and Gaye Poole, although limiting their study to Weir’s use of music,

conducted the only examination of an Australian film-maker’s auteurial use of sound to

date. While not addressing his entire oeuvre, their analysis of part of Weir’s work

reveals certain antinomies, or as they call them, polarities. For example, in Picnic at

Hanging Rock (1975),

… the organic timeless sounds of birds, wind and insects set against the ‘little fidget wheels’ of clocks and chimes in muted Edwardian interiors invoke the nature/culture polarity. The use of rhythm-based as opposed to tonally-based music helps to activate oppositions between abandonment and restraint: drums versus harmony, rock versus Mozart.22

Johnson and Poole find a similar binary opposition in Gallipoli (1981): “Weir again

constructs acoustic binaries that sketch thematic oppositions such as exotic/familiar

(Muezzin chant followed by a coo-ee), civilised order/violence (an opera record on the

battlefield).”23 In foregrounding the importance of sound in their research, Johnson and

Poole signal a change in auteur analysis that this paper seeks to advance: a re-

appropriation of auteur theory from a position in which the image is considered the

primary vehicle for the authorial director’s imprint upon the film. Like Rayner, they also

identify a shift in Weir’s auteurism from personal writing, in an European style, whilst


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resident in Australia, to the auteurial style of genre revision whilst working in America,

as indicated by “some effacement of his signature by the ‘professional values’ of

Hollywood.”24 Perhaps, had Weir remained making films in Australia, he might have

explored further his personal writing for film, while simultaneously reconstituting

familiar genres, as de Heer has managed to do. In other words, the Hollywood’s studio

effective constraint of directors to genre revision is not an overarching factor in

Australian auteurism. Thus, combined with his personal writing we also see glib genre

revision in the work of de Heer: in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project

(2003), de Heer confounds genre expectations of the horror film by making the monster

feminine;25 in Dance Me To My Song (1997), de Heer subverts Paul Darke’s genre of

the normality drama into a disability dance drama;26 and in The Tracker (2002), de Heer

overhauls the genre conventions of the western into an anti-western.27

While there may be a defined artistic personality known as the Australian film auteur,

who is detectable through the signature of the unusual role played in her or his oeuvre by

not just mise-en-scène but by innovative use of sound, it must also be conceded that this

auteurial influence is nothing less than intervention of an underlying ideological-generic

structure. In a position of relevance for Australian film studies, Robin Wood calls for a

“‘synthetic’ analysis [...] going beyond an interest in the individual auteur”28 to

recognise the “complex fabric in which, again, ideological and generic determinants are

crucial.”29 I would suggest that de Heer’s complex fabric and ideology sustaining his

world-view, in contrast to the capitalist ideal listed by Wood,30 as being served so

loyally by most of Hollywood, is one in which somewhat leftist ideals succeed over

consumerism and patriarchy. Rather than encouraging the audience to identify with a

controlling male protagonist, what I call the non-hyper male subject is privileged. De

Heer likes to commence a film within standard generic conventions but a project

involving his anti-patriarchal/white hegemony attitudes soon begins to grow and burst

forth from such generic expectations. Analysis of the decisions de Heer makes at that

level of film-making he most enjoys, sound post-production, in which he “get[s] to mix

it”,31 soon reveals a joyous tendency to amplify non-dominant voices, those discourses

in which the feminine is favoured over the masculine; indigenous over coloniser;


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imagination over physical prowess; community ideals over business. Not for de Heer the

auteurial capitalist ideology and braggadocio of John Ford’s wilderness/garden

antinomy, as indicated by the visual signifier of the cactus rose.32 Nor in Australia’s

secular, progressively equalitarian society is Hitchcock’s leitmotif of Catholic guilt,

original sin or the loss of innocence in which the blonde woman is victimised a welcome

ideology. Rather, de Heer’s signature world-view concerns an amplification of the voice

of the non-dominant people in society. As Adrian Martin has pointed out, de Heer tends

to identify with “the figure of the naive visionary,”33 someone who is isolated or

alienated from mainstream society, for example, children and Aboriginal Australians. In

many of his films this otherwise unheard voice is female. The ecologically moralistic

Epsilon (1995) tells the story of an extra-terrestrial with a vastly superior intellect,

housed in the body of a beautiful woman, who harangues a man about the environmental

plunder of the Earth by humans, all presented by the grandmotherly tones of a female

voice-over narrator.34 As a protest against her warring mother and father, the little girl in

The Quiet Room (1996) becomes mute, with her feelings voiced by a stream of

consciousness voice-over. In Dance Me To My Song (1997) the audience is exposed

throughout to the laboured breathing of a woman with severe cerebral palsy who

expresses herself through a computerised voice-box and eventually finds the love that

constantly evades her able-bodied, loud-mouthed but emotionally stunted carer.35

Alexandra’s Project (2003) features an alienated wife who finds a voice via her video

recorder and asserts herself from her emotionally isolating husband.36 Likewise with his

film The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, de Heer positions the filmgoer via an

identifying stance with the feminine: significantly, a female voice-over narrates the

story.37 De Heer not only writes personally for the non-hyper-male subject’s voice, but

employs rare tricks with sound, including the use of binaural sound recording

technology (see Hickey-Moody and Iocca 2004) or the aural point of view38 to position

the audience in the same diegetic space as his unlikely protagonists and thereby

confound generic expectations.

De Heer’s auteurial signature is not very mainstream Hollywood, but neither, I would

suggest, is it an unusual world-view for Australians of his approximate generation.


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Indeed, for myself, it seems a common world-view: de Heer and my contemporaries,

raised in the relative peace and prosperity of the liberating 60s under the influence of

myriad counter-cultures, whilst seeing the benefits of capitalism, are also able to see the

benefits of the socialist aspects of our Australian society. In an era of globalization,

Australia is a leading example of Alvin Toffler’s “third wave” civilization,39 in which

knowledge and information industries prevail, rather than agrarian or factory assembly

line industries. In such advanced economies, equality is achieved by brain power not

muscle power and the implementation of egalitarian ideals not racial or sexist ideologies.

Neither bourgeois entertainer nor metteur-en-scène, Rolf de Heer is, unquestionably, an

auteur who indulges in personal writing, but he also is one who is influenced by a multi-

cultural, tolerant, anti-sexist, anti-racist Aussie ideology to subvert Hollywood genres.

In revising Astruc’s metaphor of the camera-stylo, de Heer’s filmic signature serves as a

reminder that there is a neglected concept in the academy of not just an aural auteur but

of an Aussie aural auteur.


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Notes.

1. Jonathan Rayner, The Films of Peter Weir (NY: Continuum, 2003), p. 12.

2. Susan Hayward, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (NY: Routledge, 1996), p. 12.

3. Peter Graham, The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (NY: Doubleday, 1968).

4. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-68 (NY: De

Capo Press, 1996), p. 15.

5. At this point it is relevant to note that the Hollywood films the French critics were

suddenly exposed to were neither dubbed nor sub-titled, which meant their

appreciation was primarily based on a visual experience, a probable factor in

their neglect of the role of auteurial sound.

6. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the auteur theory in 1962,” in P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film

Culture Reader (NY: Cooper Square Press, 2000), pp. 128-133.

7. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-68 (NY: De

Capo Press, 1996), original emphasis, p. 36.

8. Donald Spoto, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (NY: Collins 1983), p. 495.

9. Rayner, pp. 3-4.

10. Kathleen McHugh, Jane Campion (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2007), p.

14.

11. Norman Holland, “The Puzzling Movies: An Analysis and a Guess at Their Appeal,”

Journal of Social Science, 1 January 1964, pp. 71-96.

12. David Bordwell, “The art cinema as a mode of film practice,” in Leo Braudy and

Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, (NY,

Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), pp. 774-782.

13. Bordwell, p. 779.

14. Bordwell, original emphasis, p. 779.

15. Raffaele Caputo, “Very sound: A Philip Brophy interview,” Metro Magazine, 136,


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2003, p. 112.

16. Philip Brophy, “Bring the noise,” Film Comment, 42.5, 2006, p. 16.

17. Cat Hope, “Hearing the story: Sound design in the films of Rolf de Heer,” Senses of

Cinema, 2004. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/sound-design-

rolf-de-heer.html

18. Anna C. Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca, “Sonic affect(s): Binaural technologies

and the construction of auratorship in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby”, Metro

Magazine, 140, 2004, pp. 78-81.

19. D. Bruno Starrs, “The audience as aurator again? Sound in Rolf de Heer’s Ten

Canoes” MetroMagazine, 149, 2006, pp. 18-20.

20. Philip Brophy, “Punk ambient”, Film Comment, 42.4, 2006, p. 16.

21. Claudia Gorbman, “Auteur music”, in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and

Richard, eds., Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 149-162.

22. Bruce Johnson and Gaye Poole, “Sound and Author/auteurship: Music in the

films of Peter Weir”, in Rebecca Coyle, ed., Screen Scores: Studies in

Contemporary Australian Film Music (North Ryde, NSW: Australian Film,

Television and Radio School, 1998), pp. 124-140.

23. Johnson and Poole, p. 133.

24. Rayner, p. 124.

25. See D. Bruno Starrs, “‘If we stretch our imaginations’; the monstrous-feminine

mother in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project

(2003),” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, no. 9, 2007.

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=10&id=990

26. See D. Bruno Starrs, “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me to My Song”,

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/sound-design-rolf-de-heer.html�

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/sound-design-rolf-de-heer.html�

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=10&id=990�


127

M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 11.3, July 2008.


27. See D. Bruno Starrs, “The Tracker and The Proposition: Two westerns that

weren’t?,” Metro Magazine, 153, 2007, pp. 166-72.

28. Robin Wood, “Ideology, genre, auteur,” in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre

Reader III, (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2003), p. 60-74.

29. Wood, p. 68.

30. Wood, p. 63.

31. In the production notes for The Tracker (2002), de Heer reveals his love of mixing

sound in post-production: “To experience all the elements and hopes for the first

time is, for me, the very best of all aspects of film making (it’s why I say to

myself, during the most difficult parts of any shoot, ‘It’s all right, stick with it,

you get to mix this’)” in Rolf de Heer, The Tracker DVD extra (Vertigo

Productions 2002).

32. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: British Film Institute,

1998), p. 66.

33. Adrian Martin, “Wanted: Art cinema,” Cinema Papers, December, 2000, pp. 30-3.

34. See D. Bruno Starrs, “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon

(1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, Forum: The University of Edinburgh

Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, no. 5, 2007.

http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/starrs.html

35. See D. Bruno Starrs, “Enabling the auteurial voice in Dance Me to My Song”,

M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 11.3, July 2008.


36. See D. Bruno Starrs, “‘If we stretch our imaginations’: The monstrous-feminine





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mother in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project

(2003)”, Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies (ISSN: 1465-9166),

University of Nottingham, no. 10, 2008.

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=10&id=990

37. See D. Bruno Starrs, “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old

Man Who Read Love Stories (2003)” Metro Magazine, 156, 2008, pp. 148-153.

38. See D. Bruno Starrs, “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer,”

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 27.5 (forthcoming 2010).

39. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (NY and Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981).



129

CHAPTER 7.

The First of Three Papers

Utilising Aural Auteur Analysis.


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7. Preamble to the Fifth Refereed and


The following three papers are the most innovative of the thesis, in that they seek to

foreground an auteur analysis of the films of Rolf de Heer in which the signature use of

sound is examined. Almost all of de Heer’s feature films are discussed here: the sixth

paper of the thesis considers Tail of a Tiger (1984), Incident at Raven’s Gate (1988),

Dingo (1991), Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996); the seventh paper

considers The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000); and the eight paper considers

The Tracker (2002), Ten Canoes (2006) and Dr. Plonk (2007). Only Alexandra’s Project

(2003) and Dance Me To My Song (1997) are not considered with an aural auteur

analysis in the papers of this section.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”,

Quarterly Review of Film and Video (ISSN: 1543-5326 - online, 1050-9208 – hard

copy), NY, London: Routledge, vol. 27, no. 5, 2010 (forthcoming: see letter of

acceptance in Appendix 12.2).

Brief Abstract. With reference to psychoanalytic and feminist film sound theory, this

paper argues that Rolf de Heer’s use of Edward Branigan’s 1984 concept of the aural

point of view (APOV) in his early films (Tail of a Tiger [1984], Incident at Raven’s

Gate [1988], Dingo [1991], Bad Boy Bubby [1993] and The Quiet Room [1996]) permit

greater audience identification with the unlikely protagonist/s and help define

writer/director/producer de Heer as an aural auteur.

Length: 7386 words.


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The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer.

Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer has written, directed and/or produced twelve feature

films, none of which feature the typically hyper-masculine, controlling heroes that much

of mainstream or classical Hollywood cinema is renowned for. In this paper I argue that

in de Heer’s early films his unlikely protagonists are made the subject of audience

identification through use of what Edward Branigan in 1984 called the “aural point of

view” (Branigan 94) or APOV.1 This post-production technique enables the audience to

hear what the character on screen apparently imagines her or himself to have heard,

serving to “‘humanize’ machine perception [...] by focusing on character, adjusting

framing to the human body, and emphasizing psychological interiority” (Lastra 2000,

140-1). The key to understanding the mechanism by which de Heer’s characteristic use

of the APOV works to support a unique, auteurial world-view lies in what Melissa Iocca

and Anna Hickey-Moody call his “aural construction of subjectivity” (Iocca and Hickey-

Moody 122) regarding such unusual and unlikely protagonists as the socially awkward

pre-teen Orville in Tail of a Tiger (1984, Rolf de Heer), the young eponym of Dingo

(1991, Rolf de Heer), the 35 year old man-child in Bad Boy Bubby (1993, Rolf de Heer),

or the mute little girl in The Quiet Room (1996, Rolf de Heer). Although they confine

their study to his cult hit Bad Boy Bubby, Iocca and Hickey-Moody note de Heer’s use

of binaural sound recording to create a “pre-Oedipal soundscape” - signaling their

pertinent psychoanalytic interpretation of this film - which contributes to “a marked

move away from insipid approaches to film soundtracks” (ibid), suggesting here the

tameness of much of what Hollywood makes audiences hear. Thus, the theorization of

subjectivity, identity and sound this paper draws upon, in its analysis of de Heer’s aural

construction of non-hyper-masculine and therefore atypical agents of narrative, is

grounded in psychoanalytic and feminist film scholarship. I subsequently argue that

complicit with the well-known, controlling, male gaze of classical Hollywood cinema is

a male voice functioning on an unconscious level to construct identification with the

heroes of dominant patriarchal ideology in most of the so-called “insipid” soundtracks of

mainstream Hollywood cinema: a voice de Heer has been actively engaged in nullifying.

In five of de Heer’s first films he encourages the audience to identify with innocent,


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vulnerable, child-like or un-masculine subjects through innovative, signature-like

aurality. But I suspect he has come to see these manipulations as obvious and ‘clunky’,

even amateurish, and has since sought to engage audiences with his unlikely

protagonists via well-honed narrative in his more recent films rather than the disruptive

act of post-production manipulation of the APOV. Nevertheless, these early film’s use

of this mechanism to guide subjectivity deserve scrutiny, and serve well in explaining

this film-maker’s present ideological stance.

Film Theory and the Aural Construction of Subjectivity.

In 1975, Laura Mulvey triggered an ongoing project to investigate the gendered gaze of

the scopophilic filmgoer in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Mulvey 6-18). Her

analysis of spectatorship proposed that the cinematic apparatus of Hollywood constructs

a patriarchal subjectivity whereby the audience is encouraged to identify with an active,

controlling male protagonist, thus voyeuristically reducing female characters to passive

objects of desire. The male gaze, Mulvey argued, is the dominant position constructed

by Hollywood for the audience (and by extension, mainstream dramatic feature films

elsewhere), in contrast to non-mainstream cinema, in which females (or other non-

dominant identities) are sometimes the agents of narrativity. Later, Mulvey hinted at the

possibility, with feminist intervention, that the female character could be the maker and

not simply the bearer of meaning, and even “to assert a women’s language as a slap in

the face for patriarchy” (Mulvey, 1979, 4). Only a few feminist film theorists, however,

have been inspired to examine the way sound reinforces the male gaze. Maggie Humm

acknowledged this deficiency, stating that “feminists rarely trace the ways in which

women in mainstream films often lack independent vocal energies as well as

independent images” (Humm 40). Noting “Hollywood’s tendency to recycle music” in

Strains of Utopia (1992), Caryl Flinn was one of those rare feminists when she argued

that Hollywood’s genre films (especially melodramas and film noirs) kept alive an

otherwise dull connection between film music and romantic, nostalgic notions of utopia

and restricted gender roles. Flinn wrote, “Music extends an impression of perfection and


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integrity in an otherwise imperfect, unintegrated world. This is the utopian function I

believe has been assigned to music in general and to film music of the 1930s and 1940s

in particular” (9). These “remote, impossibly lost utopias” (10) involve masculine,

heroic agents of narrative overpowering (if not physically then mentally) the female

objects of their (and the audience’s) desire, and which generally characterise the

classical film scores idealised in Hollywood’s major studio years. They are, perhaps, the

kind of film scores that Iocca and Hickey-Moody describe as “insipid” in comparison

with the aural soundscapes created by de Heer in depicting his alternative world-views.

The unexpected subject positioning of such alternative cinema as de Heer’s may be

uncomfortable for audiences accustomed to the usual ideological stance of Hollywood,

as Anahid Kassabian argued:

Obviously, removing a heterosexual masculine look does not remove masculine subjectivity from the circuits of desire in a film. But the kind of familiar visual erotic pleasure produced by looking at a female body through identification with a male character is interrupted when the looking and desiring character is a female one (Hearing Film, 2001, 86).

The case for an auditory correlate of the ubiquitous male gaze, however, has not been

convincingly argued. Robert Ryder suggests that in Walter Benjamin’s 1938 work on the

optical unconscious there lurks a latent theory of the “acoustical unconscious”:

Just as Benjamin’s acoustical déjà vu involves an echo stepping into the light of consciousness out from the darkness of a life seemingly passed by, the “other” nature of the camera involves a similar process whereby a space interwoven with the unconscious “steps into” a space interwoven with consciousness (Ryder 141).

I would suggest that this unconscious aural mechanism permits greater identification

with Hollywood’s typically hyper-male agents of narrative who, although insensitive

and aggressive, are typically valorised by the Hollywood apparatus as masculine and

superior. Kaja Silverman argued:

The female subject’s involuntary alignment with the various losses which haunt cinema, from the foreclosed real to the invisible agency of enunciation, makes possible the male subject’s identification with the symbolic father, and his imaginary alignment with creative vision, speech and hearing. Indeed, not only is woman made to assume male lack as her own, but her obligatory receptivity to the male gaze is what establishes its superiority, just as her obedience to the male voice is what “proves” its power (Silverman 1988, 32).


134

Thus there is a male voice cooperating with the controlling male gaze of mainstream,

commercial or classical Hollywood cinema. A prime example is that of the music in Star

Wars (George Lucas 1977), as Neil Lerner argues:

And in case Lucas’s screenplay did not make clear [Princess] Leia’s role as a relatively passive object, [John] William’s motif for her (slow, alluring, with the rising major sixth suggesting a passionate longing) further confirms that her character is associated with these reactionary gender roles […] In contrast, it is made apparent from the opening moments of the film that Luke is at the centre of Star Wars, as Williams’ score presents the heroic title theme, a melody that becomes Luke’s leitmotif throughout the film (2004, 99).

Lerner summarises that “William’s music – building, sequencing, ultimately climaxing –

conspires with the images to announce this significant step towards Luke’s achievement

of (one type of ) manhood. […] Film and score return us to a time of unproblematic

masculine dominance” (101). Of course, the screenplay usually precedes music

composition, with dialogue locking characters into their gendered roles, and Silverman

later affirmed in her paper “Dis-embodying the Female Voice” that Hollywood crafts

women so that they are “associated with unreliable, thwarted or acquiescent speech”

(Silverman, 1990, 310) and that the female character is written and performed with a

“receptivity” to the male voice (ibid), helping shore up patriarchal ideology in the same

way the male gaze does. In those relatively rare films in which the non-hyper-masculine

male is made the narrative agent, the audience’s construction of subjectivity is neither

automatic nor accustomed. Rather, the audience must be coaxed to identify with the

improbable subject. From the very start of his film-making career, audience

identification with such unlikely protagonists has been gently encouraged by de Heer.

Tail of a Tiger (1984, Rolf de Heer).

Not long after graduating from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in

Sydney in 1980 de Heer began directing his first film, Tail of a Tiger. The unlikely

protagonist of this believe-in-yourself story is 12 year old Orville Ryan, a buck-toothed,

bespectacled, bookish type who is obsessed with airplanes. His daydreams involve

airplanes, flying, and finally being accepted into the local gang of kids who play with


135

remote-controlled model airplanes. The gang cruelly destroy Orville’s model Tiger

Moth, but the slightly built lad finds an abandoned flour mill where he discovers a

broken down Tiger Moth biplane and its broken down, alcoholic caretaker, Harry

Campbell. The biplane becomes the engine of his triumph over the gang.

In this, his first feature film, de Heer toyed briefly with sound effects and Branigan’s

APOV, crafting subjectivity for the audience in two short scenes involving the Orville

and some rubbish in an empty alleyway. Within the first few minutes of the film, the

optimistic Orville is shown throwing paint tin lids against a wall in a deserted alleyway.

As they spin, an electronic whirring sound is heard: from Orville’s point of view (we

surmise) the tin lids are flying like an aeroplane. With this momentary lapse in aural

realism, de Heer allows the audience to enter into the mindset of this frustrated young

boy, whose actual voice is seldom acknowledged by his peers. He is a victimised

individual, not a controlling hyper-masculine identity, yet de Heer effectively constructs

him as protagonist of the film. Despite continual rejection from his peers, it appears the

boy’s spirit is not quashed and he can make paint tin lids fly with electronic pizzazz. De

Heer here foreshadows his even bolder forays into APOV in feature films to follow and

consolidates the meaning in Tail of a Tiger, when, humiliated after the gang have

destroyed his model biplane and just before he discovers the real Tiger Moth, de Heer

shows Orville returning to spinning tin lids. This time, reflecting the boy’s psychological

dejection, the sound they produce is just a dull clang as they fall impotently against the

wall. With these two APOVs, de Heer garners greater subjective alignment from the

audience with his unlikely protagonist.

The auditory technique involved here may be better understood when illustrated by an

example from another, better known film. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now

(1979), one of the first sounds the audience hears is that of an electronically synthesised

helicopter. Disconcertingly, however, it registers with the audience - on a sometimes

unconscious level - that the noise is not quite right. As Randy Thom, who worked as a

sound effects mixer on this film, explained:


136

… it’s Captain Willard’s brain that we’re listening to. […] The main reason that POV is so important in terms of our being able to make a contribution is that once the audience realises or feels that what they are seeing and hearing is being filtered through the brain of one or more of the characters in the film […] then they’re willing to accept almost anything you give them in terms of sound. At that point, once we get that idea across, we’re no longer in a straitjacket of objectivity (2003, 124).

Such a “straitjacket of objectivity” was deliberately loosened by de Heer when he first

employed the APOV in Tail of a Tiger. But he is not alone when it comes to aural

manipulation of subjectivity: since Apocalypse Now other Australian directors have

made similar departures from sonic realism. Kathleen McHugh notes the use of an

APOV by director Jane Campion in her film Passionless Moments (1983) to:

… represent internal psychological states. They do so through a sophisticated and sustained use of voiceover narration in conjunction with an emphasis on filmic sound honed and focused by a complete absence of dialogue. […] The film uses yet innovates the conceit of the deadline by making the immanent crisis all in Lindsay’s head. The alarm that we hear is therefore coded as internal diegetic sound – it too is in his head, an experience that the spectator shares with him but that the other characters in Lindsay’s world cannot (McHugh 32-4).

Although McHugh prefers to call it “internal diegetic sound”, it is the same technique of

the APOV sound sequence that de Heer has tentatively explored in Tail of a Tiger.

Incident at Raven’s Gate (1988, Rolf de Heer).

De Heer’s second film, the 94 minute science fiction/horror/thriller Incident at Raven’s

Gate, is noteworthy for how much he achieved on a shoestring budget in a genre usually

characterised by Hollywood fiscal excess. The film is about an alien invasion - with a

difference. De Heer’s aliens invade an outback community but remain unseen for the

length of the film. Philippa Hawker applauded the “particularly imaginative use of

sound” in this low-budget thriller in which “sound and image create the disorientation,

rather than the effects” (Hawker 278). In imparting the disorienting sense of mystery and

intrigue, sound provides a special focus for several of the film’s characters. Taylor, the

policeman, has a hearing aid and uses it effectively when his detective work requires

eavesdropping. But when it is taken away from him, he is engulfed in a silent world as


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Hemmings (a mysterious UFO scientist) undertakes a noiseless meeting with another

unidentified but official-looking character. The audience is encouraged to hear from

Taylor’s point of view, and just as he is unable to process what is going on, so the

audience remains uninformed. Indeed, it is through sound, and specifically the use of

another two striking APOV sequences, that the audience witnesses the first sign that

something very strange is going on at Raven’s Gate. When fast-driving Eddy is chased

by the cop their car stereo’s sound tracks mysteriously swap: Eddie’s punk rock music is

replaced by the Verdi opera of Taylor and vice versa. That the abhorrent punk noise

keeps on playing after Taylor takes it out of the machine and crushes the cassette

underfoot signals that something weird is going on. The use of contrasting types of

music further defines these two characters in other key moments of the film, too, such as

when barmaid Annie is killed. The tragedy is heightened by the sound of Verdi, and thus

the soundtrack is effectively used to accentuate certain events and manipulate our

reactions to these two very different characters, neither of whom compares to

Hollywood’s Stallone or Schwarzenegger in terms of braggadocio or the need to control.

Non-melodic, industrial sound is also used to signify the alien’s activity (the most

unusual - but unshown - character in this film). Indeed, the alien’s imposition upon the

internal sound diegesis of Eddie and Taylor, when their car’s sound systems swap,

indicate the potential for more than just the internal universe of the on-screen character

to be represented by the APOV, and this is why McHugh’s brief description of “internal

diegetic sound” is perhaps inadequate: the sound in Eddie or Taylor’s head may well be

in the heads of the aliens, too. Result: more unlikely protagonists. Thus, de Heer

develops a newer, bolder use of the APOV than in his previous attempt in Tail of a

Tiger.

Dingo (1991, Rolf de Heer).

De Heer’s next film, Dingo, also known as Dingo, Dog of the Desert, can be described

as an obvious vehicle for its star, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, but de Heer chose not to

do a veiled biopic. Instead, the film begins with the adult John “Dingo” Anderson


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aiming his trumpet at the sky, improvising a baleful blues lick in the vast Australian

outback. Alone, his music echoes around him hauntingly. The vision and the film’s titles

fade to reveal a scene of utmost relevance to this paper’s argument: the twelve year old

John Anderson breaking off an arm wrestle with his mate, overseen by the precocious

Jane (Dingo’s wife to be), because he - and he alone - suddenly hears music. It is the

afternoon of January 14, 1969, and a TNT jet freight plane is unexpectedly arriving on

the dusty airstrip of Poona Flat, somewhere in outback Australia. The music the boy

hears is the characteristically muted trumpet of Miles Davis, but all the townsfolk of

Poona Flat can hear is the roar of the jet engines. Magically, the audience is privy to this

little boy’s perception of events.2 On board the jet is the legendary Billy Cross (Davis)

and his eccentric ensemble. Davis’s brand of contemporary cool jazz erupts, rolling

across the desert town like a tsunami. For a few brief moments, the parochial township is

transported to another time and place. Black women in Caribbean head-dress and

coloured sunglasses anachronistically mingle with the Aussie beer-and-shorts crowd.

The vision fades to black before displaying a close-up of Cross/Davis performing in the

dark of what might be a Parisian nightclub. Then this hybrid of jazz icon and de Heer

creation re-boards the plane and disappears, but not before inviting the captivated young

boy called “Dingo” to look him up sometime in France. Once more an unlikely

protagonist is moulded through use of the APOV.

Dingo is the first film for which de Heer published a diary and these notes reveal his

considerable interest in recording and mixing the sound. For example, the diary reads:

It was Miles who suggested Michel Legrand to co-compose the music. […] He’s more film/traditional and Miles more avant-garde, so it was a great combination. […] The bulk of the soundtrack was composed with their only references being the script, a few pages of my notes and a one hour tape of Australian bush sounds we’d made for them. […] The sound mix went so well that Pete [Smith, the film’s music mixer] and I ended up doing the soundtrack album for Warner Brothers in America at Hendon [de Heer’s Adelaide studio] too (De Heer 1991).

De Heer continues in his web diary about the influence of the film’s first musical piece,

“Kimberley Trumpet” on his film-making process:


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I found the piece incredibly evocative - it “told” me how to shoot it […] Pete Smith, the music mixer, understood instinctively the dramatic relationship between what was happening on the screen and what could be drawn out of the music, and each time we ran through it I was deeply moved ... (De Heer 1991).

De Heer apparently enjoyed editing the film to the music and Tom O’Regan stated of the

result: “De Heer cuts and frames his shots as much as possible to the music, attempting

not just a film about jazz but a jazz film” (O’Regan 174). Takes varied in length and

purpose with seemingly self-indulgent fancy as de Heer improvised on standard editing

procedure. The before-mentioned opening sequence is a prime example: within the adult

Dingo’s flashback to his momentous first meeting with Cross, de Heer cuts to a

contemporary shot of the trumpeter performing in a nightclub, before returning to the

enacted memory of the adult Anderson. This bold, unexpected transition from flashback

to flashforward to flashback again indicates a director unafraid to explore inventive film-

making, and complements his use of the APOV, making the technique appear a less

distracting intervention by the post-production obsessed director when the film’s overall

manipulation of sound is considered.

Bad Boy Bubby (1993, Rolf de Heer).

De Heer’s next film, Bad Boy Bubby, presents a disturbing depiction of a modern urban

Frankenstein’s monster. Its horror involves the graphic depiction of mother/child

intercourse, matricide and patricide. The story focuses on Bubby, who has been raised

for apparently all of his 35 years in complete isolation by his domineering mother, Flo.

Less the suffocating mother-hen than the punishing matriarch, Flo uses Bubby for

emotionless sex - he’s only told he’s “good boy Bubby” when servicing her - and she

deceives him into believing the air outside is poisonous, wearing a gas-mask whenever

she leaves their drab, windowless and cockroach-ridden, cement-box apartment. His

long-estranged alcoholic priest of a father, Pop, whom Bubby does not recognise or even

remember, arrives unexpectedly, triggering a bizarre act of murder in which Bubby

asphyxiates both his scabrous parents with clingwrap, leading to his escape and heuristic

journey into the world of sonic wonder outside the front door.


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Certainly, sound is an important component of any audio-visual horror experience. As

Jonathan L. Crane said:

If science privileges sense data across observers, then the horror film trumps science by offering indelible sounds and memorable images that would rattle even the most dispassionate of research fellows. The malevolent soughing that runs through the Friday the 13th series, Bernard Herrmann’s electric psychostrings, the two-note riff of the great shark (Crane 153).

In Bad Boy Bubby writer/director de Heer used sound to demarcate the two distinctly

different worlds: the hell-hole of Flo’s dank and dirty apartment and the marvel of the

unexplored universe outside. The disjointed, minimalist dialogue between Flo and

Bubby is embedded in a claustrophobic, industrial, almost metallic soundscape, recalling

the sonic atmosphere of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1978). These deadening,

uninspiring aural circumstances, entirely devoid of music, are soon left behind. Once

freed, Bubby experiences an astonishing series of growth-enhancing meetings with

sound and music, from his initial encounter with a Salvation Army choir he hears from

afar and compulsively seeks out to the barking of an aggressive Alsatian dog. The

second part of the film is richly saturated with diegetic and non-diegetic music and

sound.

Yet there is more to the depressing atmosphere of the apartment than the absence of

sonic variety: the manner in which the sounds of Bubby’s melancholy prison is recorded

and heard contributes vastly to its sense of oppressiveness. De Heer’s long time

collaborator, sound designer Jim Currie, developed a binaural headset for the actor,

Nicholas Hope, to wear beneath his wig throughout the film, and Bad Boy Bubby is one

of the first feature films to utilise the recordings from binaural microphones as a key

feature of the soundtrack. This device, constructed by Fred and Margaret Stahl, permits

the stereo focus of the sound to change according to the movements and direction of the

actor’s head, and for his own breathing and bodily functions to be closely and intimately

recorded. The left and right channels of the recording are kept separate all the way from

the beginning of the recording process through to the playback in the cinema. Rather

than encouraging a critical distance from the text of the film the binaural playback

serves to increase identification with the wearer of the binaural headset. In interview, de


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Heer stated “[The binaural recording technology] is extremely subjective to the character

[…] it affects the viewer emotionally” (Gregory 2005). This close identification with

Bubby also stamps his authority as the protagonist of the narrative, in much the same

way Linda Aronsen regards voice-over narration: “Make sure that the character speaking

in voice-over is meant to be the protagonist, because the audience will assume that it is;

indeed, any character speaking in voice-over will take over the film” (Aronsen 63).

Sounds only Bubby can hear, like thoughts only he is privy to, place us in his world.

Thus, an intense, claustrophobic, unsettling feeling is choreographed by the close

identification of the audience with Bubby’s head and its position relative to the sonic

environment of the apartment. In assessing the effect of the binaural microphones on the

receptor audiences, Hickey-Moody and Iocca coined a new term for the cinema-goer at

Bad Boy Bubby when they said “In de Heer’s film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or

aurator, and secondly a spectator” (Iocca and Hickey-Moody 78), claiming that in

privileging the intimate noises of Bubby’s existence and producing an intensely

claustrophobic atmosphere of “gurgling, eating and pissing”, the audience is forced to

identify with him and alternatively to be disgusted by him. Whilst making us see things

(or rather, hear things) from his point of view, the sounds of Bubby’s bodily functions

also actively work towards a position of disrupted pleasure for the grimacing audience,

according to Hickey-Moody and Iocca. One particularly nauseating example occurs

when Bubby experiments with cling-wrap, enfolding his own face until the rustle of the

plastic and the struggle of Bubby’s breathlessness becomes almost too much for the

“aurator” to bear. Hickey-Moody and Iocca’s proposal of this new term may be

interpreted as a response to the call by Rick Altman for a “new vocabulary, more attuned

to the way film sound makes, rather than processes, meaning” (Altman 249). With the

listener positioned between the two microphones, i.e. virtually between Bubby’s ears, he

or she is perfectly synchronised with the protagonist’s sonic journey: the aurator hears

through the left ear that which Bubby hears through his left ear, hears through the right

ear that which Bubby hears through his right ear. What’s more, the highly sensitive

microphones accurately track the distance of sounds from their source and enable the

aurator to position the source: to the left or right in front or the left or right behind

Bubby. Thus they experience sound literally from the perspective of Bubby. This


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effectively challenges the “vococentrism” of Michel Chion’s model of aural importance

(Chion 5): the conventional sound hierarchy with dialogue positioned at the top, is

dismantled and reversed. Diegetic sounds not normally incorporated into the audience’s

experience of the universe of the film become unnervingly persistent and loud.

Iocca and Hickey-Moody later stated: “From a psychoanalytic film theory perspective,

the use of silence, sound and minimal dialogue in the first part of the film constructs a

fantasy of pre-Oedipal containment, as Bubby’s perverse life of confinement and abuse

with his mother is established” (126). Adopting Kaja Silverman’s concept of the sonic

envelope of the mother’s voice which surrounds the child before it can engage in

language or even understand its identity (1988, 72), they note that Bubby is in a similar

state of infantile containment. All his physical needs are met by Flo, who confines him

in a small space, “almost as if he were in a perverse nursery or a dark womb” (Iocca and

Hickey-Moody 127). But, Flo’s voice is not the familiar comforting voice of a sonorous

maternal envelope. “Flo’s aggressive and abusive tones and statements” (127) contrast

with the pre-Oedipal bliss of infantile containment and thus contribute to Bubby’s

unusual and non-hyper masculinity. The affective influence of Flo and Pop’s verbal

abuse is such that Bubby has a victimised and vulnerable subjectivity in the eyes of the

audience. As a result of his sonic circumstances Bubby earns the audience’s

uncomfortable sympathy and they identify even further with this victim of a most cruel

upbringing. Fortunately, Bubby finds a creative outlet - and cathartic salvation - in

music, as he finds an audience for his parrot-like renditions of past abuses via his

position as the idolised lead-singer of the pub band “Pop and the Clingwrap Killers”.

I would suggest that Bad Boy Bubby is little short of an extended APOV. Indeed, the

amplified and evocative sound environment produced in the film recalls the

experimental soundscapes of the films of Philip Brophy, which have been chronicled as:

“… the organization of more complex spatio-temporal relationships [that explore]

methods which have the potential to extend and enrich the vocabulary of film sound and

perception” (Samartzis 50-1). By using the binaural microphone system, de Heer


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literally and subjectively positions the aurator in the headspace of a most unlikely and

non-hyper-masculine protagonist. With a conventional soundtrack, Bad Boy Bubby

would have an entirely different effect on its audience.

The Quiet Room (1996, Rolf de Heer).

De Heer’s fourth film was the environmentally didactic Epsilon (1995, Rolf de Heer)

which involved much motion control photography of night skies and desert vistas. It

features a voice-over from a wise grandmother recounting her meeting with a former

surveyor who, after falling for an extra-terrestrial in the shape of a beautiful woman,

becomes intent on saving the world from eco-disaster (see Starrs, “Filmic ecowarnings”,

2007). As such, this film conforms with de Heer’s ongoing project to privilege non-

controlling or even feminist idealistic protagonists, but does not include the use of an

APOV, and therefore is not considered for the purposes of this paper. A year later,

however, came another film in which de Heer encouraged audiences to identify with an

unlikely protagonist - a mute little girl - via the APOV.

It can easily be argued that in his early films Rolf de Heer was a film-maker of

consistently limited means. His aspirations with each venture may not have been to

make the next Hollywood blockbuster, or even the work of his life, but to make a movie

with the resources available, if for no other reason than to keep a roof over his family’s

head. The website statistics box for The Quiet Room lists the film stock used as “short

ends – various stock” (de Heer 1996): the ingenious director made a film out of bits of

unexposed film left over from previous projects! What’s more, he cast his own children.3

The result is the story of a stubbornly determined little girl self-sequestered in her pretty,

blue-walled bedroom. But although her parents dote on her, this is no home, sweet home

scenario. With fatalistic cynicism, she watches her goldfish die, acts out happy families

with her Barbie dolls and draws crayon pictures of her own dysfunctional family. De

Heer had explored childhood in the past (most notably with Tail of a Tiger), but The


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Quiet Room signalled his most intense examination of child psychology to date, as he

created an intellectually fascinating but emotionally draining study of one little life

under severe strain: that of a seven-year-old only daughter and of the three-year-old she

once was. Making her silent enabled de Heer to probe and explore her inner life, using

voice over interior monologue to reveal her mental reasoning and emotional turmoil.

When her father sits her down to talk about the impending separation, he begins by

saying, “This isn’t easy,” and the child, in her voiced internal monologue, responds,

“Yes it is - just don’t say it.” Nursery rhymes are modified within her head; “Hey diddle

diddle, my Dad did a piddle, right on the bedroom floor. My dear Mum yelled to see

such a mess, so my Dad did a little bit more. Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Mum.” and “Mum

be nimble, Dad be quick. Mum and Dad, you make me sick.” The binaural headset, de

Heer’s technological contribution to the APOV, and also used so effectively in Bad Boy

Bubby, is employed yet again, this time to record the narration of the little girl and

differentiate it from her onscreen speaking voice, as rarely heard as it is. Thus, sound

designer Peter Smith and composer Graham Tardif’s unobtrusive score keep the child’s

narration always up front and close, and her parents can be overheard arguing in other

parts of the house, creating an unusual eavesdropping effect - a technique also explored

by Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation (1974). A sense of aural voyeurism is

developed, akin to Elizabeth Weis’s “erotics of cinematic eavesdropping” (Weis 79).

Sonic subjectivity is compounded when de Heer employs a particularly evocative

APOV: as the little girl is having her hair brushed by her mother, the noise of the

hairbrush is distorted and amplified, eventually blending into the sound of waves

breaking on the sand as the little girl fantasises about taking her longed-for dog for a run

on the beach. For a few brief seconds, we hear things as the protagonist, the mute little

girl, seems to imagine them. This combined with the binaural sound recording and the

eavesdropping effect gives a heightened sense of identification with yet another unlikely

protagonist.


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Conclusion: Rolf de Heer’s Emergence as an Aural Auteur.

Undoubtedly, the soundtrack is extremely influential in terms of a film’s emotional

impact. Perhaps it is ultimately more influential than the visual image. As director and

composer Mike Figgis claims:

People say, “Why do you want to shoot on 16mm?” I’d be happy to shoot it on High 8 and blow it up. I think the shittier it looks, or the more abstract you can make the image, by whatever means, the more chance you’re going to have of saying something that will hit the unconscious rather than the front of the head. […] As long as you have enough money to make sure that the soundtrack sounds like a film, because that’s the one thing people do expect (Figgis 6, my emphasis).

Figgis identifies the way sound can unconsciously trigger emotional states and director

David Lynch would seem to agree: “Sound is 50 per cent of a film. In some scenes it’s

almost 100 per cent. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion to a film” (Lynch 52).

Likewise, Rolf de Heer acknowledges, “Sound is, from my point of view, 60% of the

emotional content of a film” (qtd. in Starrs, “Sounds of silence”, 18). But this comment

reveals more than just agreement with Lynch: the “point of view” de Heer speaks of is,

in most of his early films, not just his own but also that of an unlikely protagonist whose

position the audience is encouraged to identify with on an unconscious level, hence the

relevance of a psychoanalytic theorising to this paper. As Iocca and Hickey-Moody

argue, de Heer’s uses of sound in Bad Boy Bubby, “make conscious the pedestrian

sounds of the everyday, challenging Claudia Gorbman’s [1987] assertion that “the

volume, mood and rhythm of the sound track must be subordinate to the dramatic and

emotional dictates of the film narrative” ” (Iocca and Moody 124-5). More recently,

however, Gorbman notes that with the digital revolution in music, auteurist directors are

able to employ sound (although she wrote specifically of music) in ways previously

unimagined:

The strictures and underlying aesthetic of the classical rules of song music simply no longer hold. Melodies are no longer unheard, song lyrics are perceived to add rather than detract from audio-viewing, and the sky’s the limit with respect to the possible relations between music and image and story (Gorbman 2007, 151).


146

Gorbman also seems to acknowledge the potential for Philip Brophy’s “aural auteur”

(“Punk Ambient”, 2006, 16), writing:

... the “auteur director” has placed a premium on asserting control of the texture, rhythm, and tonality of her or his work, and of the social identifications made available through music choices […] The auteur can write in cinema, using sound as well as the camera (2007, 156).

Well before such critical writing, however, de Heer realised the potential for the APOV

to strongly align the audience with his protagonist/s, no matter how non-mainstream he

made them. Particularly powerful when used near the beginning of the narrative, he

would no doubt agree with Thom regarding his statement: “Once the audience realises or

feels that what they are seeing and hearing is being filtered through the brain of [the

protagonist/s] then they’re willing to accept almost anything you give them in terms of

sound” (2003, 124). The “poor metaphorical assignations of truth and honesty” (“Bring

the Noise”, 2006, p. 16) that Brophy accuses theorists of hiding behind when they ignore

the auteurial potential of the aural seem even less relevant when de Heer’s work is

examined. Hickey-Moody and Iocca’s “aurator” (2004, 78) enjoying the sonic

experimentation of de Heer, finds him or herself subjectively aligning not with a

controlling, masculine matinee idol, but rather a less macho mortal, be it either Orville,

Eddie, Taylor, Dingo, Bubby or the mute little girl. But surprisingly - considering its

effectiveness - De Heer has not returned to obvious use of the APOV since The Quiet

Room. Certainly, sound remains an area of interest and the role of the aural is still at

times raised to a level of dominance amongst the numerous interactions informing the

narrative, with Cat Hope urging “each of de Heer’s films merits a detailed treatise on the

way they feature innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production stages, resulting

in some of the most challenging and exciting cinema made in Australia today” (Hope,

2004). Dance Me To My Song (1997, Rolf de Heer) features an aphasic girl who finds

love via her computerised voice synthesiser; a female voice-over narrates The Old Man

Who Read Love Stories (2000, Rolf de Heer); The Tracker (2002, Rolf de Heer) employs

Aboriginal folksinger, Archie Roach, as a singing narrator; the alienated wife in

Alexandra’s Project (2003, Rolf de Heer) finds a voice via her video recorder; the

Ganalbingu people of Arnhem Land speak in their own, non-English tongue for the


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length of Ten Canoes (2006, Rolf de Heer); and Dr. Plonk (2007, Rolf de Heer) is a

silent film in which the musical soundtrack cues the film’s slapstick humour.

Undeniably, study of de Heer’s use of sound is an ongoing project: de Heer is still film-

making and he should be considered a writer/director in his prime. This immigrant from

Holland to the multicultural success story that is the contemporary Australian milieu

preaches the pricking of our collective ears to those less voluminous voices of the

marginalised in this multi-faceted Antipodean society, particularly those who are still

innocent and child-like, and this world-view can be read even in the films from the

emerging de Heer. In short, his Zeitgeist is that such non-dominant entities deserve to be

heard and valued. And, as the continuing diversity of his oeuvre suggests, he is

committed to exploring new stories, earning the subjective identification of the audience

with his unlikely protagonists through innovative narrative rather than the intrusive post-

production techniques – as effective as they were – employed in his early films. Now,

with twelve feature films to his credit, de Heer says “I haven’t got the faintest idea

what’s next … It could be anything” (qtd. in Starrs, “Sounds of silence”, 18), but

audiences can be confident of hearing (and seeing) some unusual cinema as this aural

auteur continues to re-negotiate mainstream film-making’s patriarchal, controlling male

gaze and male voice.


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Notes.

1. The author recognises that sound has been experimented with since it first became

available to filmmakers, most obviously in avant-garde, art, and animated films, but also

in feature-length narrative films, including mainstream studio films; and that this work

has, also from the inception of sound, been the subject of a continuous stream of critical

and theoretical writing. This essay is particularly interested in exploring the specific

notions of ‘aural point of view’ and ‘the aural construction of subjectivity’ in de Heer’s

work.

2. It must be noted that the original script by Marc Rosenberg does not suggest that the

music Dingo apparently hears should be heard by the audience, let alone before the jet

itself is even heard or seen (see Rosenberg 1992, 3). This APOV-oriented inclusion of

the audience into the headspace of the young Dingo is entirely de Heer’s invention.

3. De Heer elucidates on the motivation for this: “[The Quiet Room] was another case of

“How do I pay the rent next month […] And so I thought, “What do I know well?” […]

So I decided to cast my seven-year-old daughter and having done that, I couldn’t not

cast my three-year-old because of the potential psychological damage she might suffer.

But by this time I was thinking the character was an only child. So what do I do about

that? Ah … if I cast the younger one as the same character but four years earlier, that

would work because my daughters sort of look alike. Having cast my seven-year-old

daughter, I now had this huge problem because she’d been in one small scene of my

previous film and had been very self-conscious, not fluid like kids normally are. […]

“Maybe if she doesn’t talk I can get away with it. So why doesn’t she talk? Well, maybe

she was born that way. Or maybe she’s decided not to talk. If she’s decided not to talk,

maybe I can hear her thoughts, and that’s really what I’m interested in – what do seven-

year-olds think? Why has she decided not to talk? Maybe because her parents were

fighting and this is her protest” (de Heer, 2005).


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Coyle, (UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2005): 122-136.

Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identification in Hollywood Film

Music, (NY: Routledge, 2001).

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/sound_design_rolf_de_heer.html�



151

Kassabian, Anahid. “Listening for identifications: Compiled v. composed scores in

contemporary Hollywood films”, in Cinesonic: Experiencing the Soundtrack, ed.

Philip Brophy, North Ryde, (NSW: AFTRS, 2001): 169-180.

Lastra, James. Sound technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation,

Modernity. (NY, Columbi UP, 2000).

Lynch, David. “Art and reaction”, in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures

1998-2001, ed. Larry Sider, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider, (London and NY:

Wallflower Press, 2003): 49-53.

McHugh, Kathleen. Jane Campion, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois

Press, 2007).

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,” Screen, 16, no. 3 (1975): 6

18.

Mulvey, Laura. “Feminism, Film and the Avant Garde,” Framework, no. 10 (1979):

3-5.

O’Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema, (London and NY: Routledge, 1996).

Rosenberg, Marc. Dingo, (Sydney: Currency Press, 1992).

Ryder, Robert G. “Walter Benjamin’s shellshock: Sounding the acoustical

unconscious”, New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2007):

135-155.

Samartzis, Philip. “Avant-garde meets mainstream: The film scores of Philip

Brophy”, in Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian Screen Music,

ed. Rebecca Coyle, (Sydney: Australian, Film, Television and Radio School,

1997): 49-64.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and

Cinema, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988).

Silverman, Kaja. “Dis-embodying the female voice”, in Issues in Feminist Film


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Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990): 309-329.

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon

(1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)”, Forum: The University of Edinburgh

Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, 5 (2007)

http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/starrs.html (accessed 17 February 2008).

Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of silence: an interview with Rolf de Heer”, Metro

Magazine, no. 152 (2007): 18 –21.

Thom, Randy. “Designing a movie for sound”, in Soundscape: The School of Sound

Lectures 1998-2001, ed. Larry Sider, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider, (London

and NY: Wallflower Press, 2003): 121-137.

Weis, Elizabeth. “Eavesdropping: An aural analogue of voyeurism”, in Cinesonic:

The World of Sound in Film, ed. Philip Brophy, (North Ryde, NSW: AFTRS,

1999): 79-108.



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CHAPTER 8.

The Second of Three Papers



154

8. Preamble to the Sixth Refereed and


Starrs, D. Bruno. “An Avowal of Male Lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man

Who Read Love Stories” Metro Magazine, Melbourne: Australian Teachers Of

Media, no. 156, 2008, pp. 148-153.

Brief Abstract. This paper argues that an aural auteur analysis of Rolf de Heer’s 2003

film adaptation The Old Man Who Read Love Stories reveals he has emphasised a

feminine reading of Luis Sepúlveda’s 1989 novella, Un Viejo Que Leia Novelas de

Amor. His rejection of Michel Beaulieu’s “semi-exploitative, violent, masculine, hunting

film script”, preferring to foreground the maternal, ecologically responsible cipher of the

wounded jaguar in a narrative in which excessively machismo values are disavowed,

presented by voice-over from an unidentified female narrator, serves as a rare exception

to Kaja Silverman’s and other feminists’ expectations of the male auteur.

Length: 4579 words.


155

halla



162

CHAPTER 9.

The Third of Three Papers



163

9. Preamble to the Seventh Refereed and


Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de Heer.”

(accepted for refereed publication in the 2009 conference proceedings of the

CHOTRO Indigenous Peoples in the Post-Colonial World Conference, 2-5 January

2008, Delhi, India. A revised version is currently also undergoing refereeing by

Cinema Journal).

Brief Abstract. Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca invented a new name for the

cinema-goer at Bad Boy Bubby (1993) when they wrote: “In de Heer’s film, the viewer

is primarily a listener, or aurator, and secondly a spectator” and I have argued the label

‘aurator’ can also be used for the person experiencing Ten Canoes (2006). This

Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime fable features dialogue recorded entirely in the

Ganalbingu language of the Indigenous people it stars, and is a prime example of what I

would suggest can be labelled ‘The Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer’. The

Tracker (2002) and Dr. Plonk (2007) have also included depictions of Aboriginal

Australians and each of the trio utilises Cat Hope’s “innovative sound ideas” to present

what I argue is an aural auteur’s signature revealing a post-colonial Australian world-

view that privileges the justice system and eco-spirituality of Aboriginal Australians.

Length: 7300 words.


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Front cover of the conference handbook.


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Sound in the Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer.

Despite his reputation as a cinematic collaborator, Dutch-born Australian film-maker

Rolf de Heer’s innovative and varied oeuvre has prompted many critics to invoke the

French label auteur.1 Such comments suggest a comprehensive auteur analysis of his

work is appropriate and as de Heer is the writer, director and producer of most of the

films bearing his name, the usually valid criticisms of authorship based on the

collaborative nature of film-making are less relevant to his work than to that of other

directors. While his alternative-styled cinema is more main-stream than avant-garde, de

Heer’s films often feature an unusually elevated presence of sound over the visual mise-

en-scène, at times raised to a level of dominance amongst the numerous interactions

informing the narrative and this has been acknowledged in the literature. Cat Hope

comments: “each of de Heer’s films merits a detailed treatise on the way they feature

innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production stages, resulting in some of the

most challenging and exciting cinema made in Australia today.”2 Anna Hickey-Moody

and Melissa Iocca even invented a new name for the cinema-goer at Bad Boy Bubby

(1993) when they wrote: “In de Heer’s film, the viewer is primarily a listener, or aurator,

and secondly a spectator”3 and I have argued the label “aurator” can also be used for the

person experiencing Ten Canoes (2006).4 This film5 features dialogue recorded entirely

in the Ganalbingu language of the Indigenous Aboriginal Australians it stars, and is a

prime example of what I would suggest can be labelled ‘The Aboriginal Australian

Films of Rolf de Heer.’ Three of his recent films have included depictions of Aboriginal

Australians and each of the trio utilises Hope’s “innovative sound ideas” to present what

I argue is an aural auteur’s signature6 revealing a post-colonial Australian world-view

that privileges the justice system and eco-spirituality of Aboriginal Australia.

The Aboriginal Australian Singing Voice as Narrator in The Tracker.

Most of de Heer’s previous feature films (Tail of a Tiger (1984), Incident at Raven’s

Gate (1988), Dingo (1991), Bad Boy Bubby (1993), Epsilon (1995), The Quiet Room

(1996) and Dance Me To My Song (1997)) are recognizably set in Australia, yet no


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Aboriginal person or depiction of an Aboriginal face appears in any.7 In 2002, however,

de Heer changed public perception of his work when The Tracker was released as he

drew unblinking attention to Australia’s history of maltreatment of its Indigenous

Peoples. As I have recently argued, in this film de Heer subverts the genre conventions

of Hollywood to create an Australian anti-western, whereby the European coloniser’s

celebration of the subjugation of American Indians is contrasted by a sense of

Aboriginal mastery of the dead heart of Australia, in which the European coloniser is

little more than a bumbling invader.8

The story of The Tracker starts suddenly, with no exposition other than brief subtitles

identifying the characters and an opening lament sung by well-known Indigenous

Australian singer Archie Roach. Vision grows from Peter Coad’s still painting of the

landscape into shots of three non-Indigenous troopers on horseback (the so-called

Fanatic, Follower and Veteran) led by the pedestrian and eponymous Aboriginal Tracker

(played by the popular Aboriginal Australian actor David Gulpilil), well after a manhunt

for an Aboriginal fugitive has commenced. The Tracker, with impressive bush skills and

ecological expertise, follows the fugitive’s almost invisible trail and procures food in

what appears to the non-Indigenous men to be a desolate, lifeless environment. Little

information about the alleged crimes of the wanted Aboriginal man is proffered, nor

how the rag-tag bunch of pursuers came to be formed, and eventually the narrative

culminates in the brutalised Tracker recycling the neck chains he is forced to wear into a

weapon of freedom and justice, using them to hoist the indignant and racist-to-the-end

head trooper from his own petard. The sparse script written for the Aboriginal Australian

Tracker in this scene is telling in its humanist attitude to the subaltern contemporary

Australian non-Christian religions de Heer seems interested in: as Gulpilil’s character

puts it, “God respect Aboriginal law as much as he respect white fella’s law. Maybe

more.” When the Aboriginal fugitive rapes an Aboriginal girl he is finally speared in the

leg as decreed fit punishment by Aboriginal Elders. This element of extra-judiciary

punition is deemed natural, non-problematic and just, as this conclusion to the affairs

enables the Tracker, and the audience, to experience closure and move on.


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Although it may at times look like one with its visual iconography, The Tracker

certainly does not sound like a Hollywood western. There is no Yodelling Cowboy or

Indian tom-toms and the ukulele-playing Follower is soon compelled to abandon and

remorsefully burn his instrument in the face of the Fanatic’s genocidal mission.

Avoiding a cliché soundtrack, the accompanying music to the film is not the Aboriginal

musical icons of didgeridoo and clap sticks, yet it nevertheless has a distinctly

Aboriginal Australian sound. This is the result of a fruitful collaboration between non-

Indigenous Australians de Heer as lyricist and Graham Tardif as composer, distinctively

filtered through the emotive larynx of Aboriginal folk-rocker Archie Roach as singer.

The haunting, plaintive interstitial ballads add vastly to the sombre, melancholy

atmosphere created by the film and Michael Atherton notes: “The use of the off-camera

singing voice as a narrator is central to the narrative of The Tracker.”9 According to de

Heer, the songs are “somehow additive to the action – they don’t describe the action, but

they’re additive to it and some of it, they are reflective of it.”10 The musical numbers

comment on the film’s diegesis, putting the rare sympathetic words of a non-Indigenous

male director/writer into the onscreen Zeitgeist of an Aboriginal character for a tale of

post-colonial justice found. De Heer also stated,

The words of the song glued themselves to Gulpilil’s character, it was as if he was singing them in his mind while the white men rounded up the small group of bush blacks, chained them, interrogated them in a language they didn’t understand and then shot them out of frustration and because they were ‘only’ black. The song had elements of a lament, not only for the Tracker but for all Australian Indigenous people.11

The music is simultaneously modern (electric) and ancient (traditional language), and as

Jake Wilson said: “These contemporary laments, backed by [steel resonator] guitar and

Hammond organ, create a kind of fourth-dimensional perspective that complicates our

response to the linear narrative – an extraordinary effect, like looking down a corridor of

time between past and present.”12 This effect hopefully alerts contemporary Australians

to the perils in mirroring the mistakes of the past.

On his official website for Vertigo Productions de Heer posted a diary of the seven

weeks spent shooting The Tracker, and the many weeks spent in post-production. This


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journal makes apparent his particularly strong interest in the audio side of his film-

making. In week one of shooting, on Tuesday, 27 February, 2001, he wrote; “I hate

shooting. I love the writing, like the pre-production (on this film, loved the pre-

production), love the post-production (I tell myself during the worst times of any shoot,

‘It’s okay, you get to do the sound mix on this’), but overall I hate shooting.”13 He also

explains how the quest for the narrating singer began; “Wednesday, May 9, 2001; […]

the vocalist ought to be indigenous [sic], preferably older and with a rough rather than a

smooth voice (we’d come to the conclusion a long time ago that the vocalist should be

male […]).” Eventually, de Heer was to settle upon the very popular choice of Archie

Roach to sing the movie’s ballads. De Heer was also involved in the selection process

for accompanying musical instruments; “Thursday, May 10, 2001; […] where dobro,

where Hammond organ, where accoustic [sic] or where electric guitar. The tone/mood of

each song was decided upon (as best we could with words as well as with the real

communicator, music itself).” De Heer’s diary is now clearly that of a sound artist

enjoying his work:

Wednesday, May 30, 2001; Another piece of music arrived, and, as is our wont, everything was stopped to deal with that. Receiving and fitting fresh music is about our favourite activity in the entire editing process, a delicious sense of anticipation, sometimes completely fulfilled, sometimes partially, sometimes disappointing.

Then de Heer gives a telling insight into his philosophy regarding the importance of

considering sound first and image second:

Thursday, May 31, 2001; […] there are those who argue, with some justification, that it’s better to cut the image and make sure it works in story-telling terms without any reliance on sound […] I’m not sure I agree, because sometimes you shoot stuff to work with sound in a very specific way [...] without the sound working, the cut simply doesn’t yet work, and there’s no way of knowing, apart from blind faith, whether it ever will.

De Heer also delivers insights into the song-writing process, a skill he admits he is not

well practiced at, and reveals how he came to record the original version of the songs

with himself standing in as vocalist:


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Wednesday, July 25, 2001; […] I thought I’d better provide a more accurate guide track for whoever is going to be our vocalist (and that’s another story). The only way to do this was to sing the words myself, and record that. Todd (Telford, the studio sound engineer […]) after an initial laugh or two set to the task of trying to make me sound half reasonable (“Don’t worry, I’ll stick on a ton of reverb...”), and we threw down some very rough recordings.

Soon, de Heer’s own vocal renditions were refined by Archie Roach himself. Referring

to the rehearsal process, de Heer wrote; “Monday, September 17, 2001; We had to call a

break then ... people sat silently, I was overwhelmed, Archie was overwhelmed. To have

sung this song to these images in his father's language was an experience that rocked

him to the core.” More insights into the satisfaction de Heer derived from mixing sound

to the visual were included in his last notes on post-production: “Friday, October 5,

2001; It’s hard to imagine that mixing atmospheres and foley [sic] can bring such

enjoyment, such satisfaction. But it does, and today was a day of great enjoyment for

me, and equal satisfaction.”

Roach and his band later performed the songs live in front of sold-out screenings of the

film in Melbourne and Adelaide. These unique events had profound effects on the

audience (evoking the spirit of the old black and white silent movies with their live

accompaniment, thus collapsing the years between 1920 and the 21st century Prime

Minister John Howard’s refusal to say ‘sorry’ to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal

Australians into a single, wince-inducing epoch of national shame) and signifying how

much narrative and emotional clout the songs themselves hold. With the sung narration

serving so powerfully, de Heer has played away from a dialogue heavy text; after the

songs, the silences carry the greatest emotional tension and impact in this film. While

developing the script de Heer said he began to get a strong sense of what the film should

be, “and it didn’t involve a lot of talking … Cinema doesn’t necessarily need a lot of

dialogue. If there’s a particular sort of story that’s told in a particular way – and that’s

really what I wanted – it has a sparse feel to it.”14 Playing over the top of the first

shocking massacre scene, the song “My people” speaks volumes about Australia’s

shameful acts of genocide, although when the killing begins the soundtrack suddenly

becomes empty. Devoid of all sound but that of gunfire and the victim’s screams, the

vision cuts to a still shot of another of Coad’s distinctively child-like paintings of the


170

slaughter. When the vision of the troopers finally returns we see the lead trooper

cleaning his gun and extolling to it, “Well spoken. Nice to have a comrade who speaks

English”, cementing his and our colonial shame.

Finally, de Heer repeats his mantra expressed in the opening pages of this diary:

Wednesday, October 10, 2001; To experience all the elements and hopes coalescing for the first time is, for me, the very best of all aspects of film making (it’s why I say to myself, during the most difficult parts of any shoot, ‘It’s all right, stick with it, you get to mix this’).

With this comment, de Heer confirmed his active interest in sound as a primarily joyful

part of his film-making and flagged a decisive factor in the consideration of his status as

an example of Philip Brophy’s “aural auteur”, in that his work “simultaneously

problematises the presumed literary criteria for authorship, and complicates the assumed

musicological criteria for composer.”15 De Heer’s aural auteurism can also be detected

in his subsequent Aboriginal Australian films.

Emphasizing an Aboriginal Australian Language in Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer

2006).

Ten Canoes (2006) opens with the colloquial and cheerful voice over English narration

of David Gulpilil (from The Tracker), in an accent recognizable to many as Aboriginal

Australian. Gulpilil begins by expounding on his people’s eco-spiritual theories of

creation and reincarnation, before introducing the naked ‘native’ huntsmen marching by,

chatting in their own language. By insisting Ten Canoes be voiced in the Ganalbingu

tongue of its Aboriginal Australian participants, writer/co-director/co-producer Rolf de

Heer has made a subtle statement about Indigenous pride and accented the sorry state of

affairs regarding many contemporary Aborigines in Australia. In this film the ‘magpie

goose people’ of Arnhem Land are portrayed as empowered people who are in control of

their language, their culture and their lives, rather than conforming with the frequent

media presentation of Aboriginal peoples as passive victims of colonial aggression,

disrespect and maltreatment. When discussing the seemingly perennial Aboriginal

problems of substance abuse, domestic violence, long-term unemployment and reduced


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life expectancy, the descriptor ‘disadvantaged’ is a term that immediately springs to the

minds of some commentators, but de Heer reminds us that it should not be used as an

automatic synonym for Indigenes. It is not Aboriginality that causes these problems per

se, but the way Aboriginal people are marginalised by the coloniser’s society.

Identifying and addressing the causes of the woe that infiltrates the lives of many

contemporary Australian Aborigines remains important, nevertheless, one must not

assume they have always been that way – or will always be so. With the help of its

unique, gentle and unobtrusive soundtrack, an era of idyllic well-being preceding non-

Indigenous settlement of Australia can be imagined, and de Heer convincingly takes the

filmgoer back to that black and white time of a thousand years ago – and suggests an

even earlier more rapturous Dreamtime which cameraman Ian Jones has lensed in

vibrant colour. For the non-Aboriginal de Heer, the starting point was an old black-and-

white photograph of canoe-making taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the

1930s, which Gulpilil proudly showed him there on site in Arnhem Land: it is an artefact

that has become part of the predominantly oral history of the Ramingining people. With

their eager participation and assistance, the film was shot on their land: in and around

the Arafura Swamp in north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia

in May and June, 2005, amidst man-eating crocodiles, mosquitoes and leeches. Such

trying circumstances certainly tested the physical endurance of both camera and sound

crews.

This, De Heer’s second Aboriginal Australian film, is the story of Dayindi, played by

17-year-old Jamie Gulpilil (son of David Gulpilil). Dayindi covets one of the wives of

his older brother, and to teach him correct cultural protocol, the crafty older brother

(Peter Minygululu) tells his potential rival an instructive ancestral story. It is a

cautionary Dreamtime tale of doomed love, kidnapping, sorcery, bungling misadventure

and ill-directed revenge which begins seriously with David Gulpilil’s voice-over

narration; ‘Once upon a time in a land far, far away…,’ before he dissolves into giggles

and steers the film’s ten bark canoes into the mythical waters of Arnhem Land for ‘a

story like you’ve never seen before.’ It is also, I believe, a story unlike any the audience

has ever heard before.


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Referring to the sound design and production in de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf

de Heer, 1993), Hickey-Moody and Iocca call de Heer’s audience member an “aurator,

and secondly a spectator.”16 They argue that in privileging the intimate noises of

Bubby’s existence through the use of binaural microphones and producing an intensely

claustrophobic atmosphere of “gurgling, eating and pissing”,17 the audience is forced to

identify with him and alternatively to be disgusted by him. With the listener positioned

between the two microphones, i.e. virtually between Bubby’s ears, he or she is perfectly

synchronised with the protagonist’s journey; the aurator hears through his left ear that

which Bubby hears through his left ear. Michel Chion’s hierarchy of aural importance18;

the conventional sound model with dialogue occupying the highest, most important

position, is dismantled and reversed by use of the binaural microphones. Diegetic sounds

not normally incorporated into the audience’s experience of the universe of the film

become fore-grounded; they are unnervingly persistent and strident. The evocative

sound environment produced in Bad Boy Bubby recalls the experimental sound-scapes of

the films of Philip Brophy, which have been chronicled as “the organisation of more

complex spatio-temporal relationships … [that explore] … methods which have the

potential to extend and enrich the vocabulary of film sound and perception.”19 Indeed,

understanding the significance of de Heer’s use of sound in this and his other films

requires academic attention at least equivalent to that which Anahid Kassabian has

argued is given to the subject of “reading” in literary studies and “spectatorship” in film

studies.20 With a conventional soundtrack, Bad Boy Bubby would have an entirely

different effect on its audience, rather, the diegetic dialogue is re-positioned in Chion’s

hierarchy.

In some respects, de Heer has continued his pre-occupation with satisfying the ‘aurator”

in the audience with Ten Canoes. Sound recordist Jim Currie and composer Tom

Heuzenroeder sought the “best way to capture the sonic authenticity of the Arnhem Land

wetlands.”21 With what journalist Sam Oster describes as a proscenium arch look, that

is, mostly wide shots, there was nowhere to place boom microphones and because the

actors were almost naked, lapel microphones were not an ideal option. Unscripted takes

and a desire not to interrupt the action with battery changes and conventionally


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interruptive sound recording systems were also important. Oster reports that: “De Heer

approached Adelaide University to produce a custom device for dialogue recording, and

was put in touch with Dr. Matthew Sorell, the research director of the Convergent

Communications Research Group at the university.” 22 The recording devices were

hidden in the naked actor’s hair or hung from their necks in traditional pouches and

synchronised to a horn sounded on the set each morning. The use of these ‘hair’

microphones resulted in about 100 hours of sound recording per shoot day with Currie

having to process about three gigabytes of information each evening. The outcome being

that, as Currie, describes; “all these fragmented bits and pieces that we’d shot over the

seven weeks had come together to form a shape that I’d never seen before.”23 With its

incidental music of traditional Aboriginal instruments, dialogue and singing performed

in Ganalbingu and its Aboriginal accented voice-over by Indigenous actor Gulpilil, Ten

Canoes recalls de Heer’s earlier subversive western, the didactic meditation on racism

that is The Tracker (2002). Like the singing narrator, Archie Roach, Gulpilil’s voice is

instantly recognizable to many Australians as an archetypal Aboriginal Australian. The

authentic Aboriginality and the “alien sounds of chirrups, croaks and slithers”24 ensured

Ten Canoes had a sound-scape quite unlike any the “aurator” at the Cannes film festival

would have heard before.

In interview de Heer elaborated on how his respect for the Ganalbingu-speaking actor’s

preferences over-ruled the expected foreign market needs:

… in Italy they normally dub everything and I said, ‘No, they cannot dub the dialogue. The actors don’t give permission.’ But if we force them to put out a completely sub-titled version, it really marginalises it to small arthouses. What you do is get a good Italian storyteller, one with a third world accent of some sort (because clearly we’re not going to find someone who speaks fluent Italian with an Australian indigenous [sic] accent, nor would anybody in Italy recognize it as an Australian indigenous [sic] accent) an African-language accent for example, and you have the storyteller tell that story in that way, then you have an Italian version that would play more broadly, while it still preserves their cultural desire to have their language heard and known.25

Not only does the emphasis on an Aboriginal Australian language further the effect of

elevating the status of the Aboriginal culture, the storytelling technique of recounting


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that which is also being seen delivers additional Aboriginal Australian authenticity. De

Heer describes Aboriginal storytelling style as one of “cascading repetition”:

For example: ‘See that man there, see that man sitting on a rock. Now, that man on that rock, he’s thinking. He’s sitting on that rock and he’s thinking about something. That man, see him, thinking about …’ There might be three concepts in a sentence, and the next sentence repeats those concepts and adds a new one. One of the original concepts might get dropped off and another one put in, but the others are always repeated, sometimes in a different order, and sometimes with a slightly different or elaborated meaning. It’s a painful way of storytelling. They’ll talk about something that’s really obvious that we would never say because it’s not part of the story.26

Liz Conor also notes that apart from the obvious significance in fore-grounding the

Ganalbingu language of the Aboriginal Australians it features, Ten Canoes is notable for

its storytelling style. Conor wrote:

If we are alert to the things that set pre-contact Aborigines apart from us, de Heer affirms that one real difference lies in the manner of storytelling. The gentle unwinding of events, which include murder, abduction, jealousy and longing, stands in contrast to the addictive heightened emotion of epic Hollywood.27

By privileging the Ganalbingu dialogue for the actors, an Indigenous accent for the

English voice-over by well-known Aboriginal Australian actor Gulpilil, and a “gentle”,

Aboriginal Australian style of cascading repetition narration of story-within-a-story, de

Heer’s film articulates as Aboriginal Australian in three ways and serves as a rare

example of cinema that elevates the marginalised Aboriginal people and their too often

overlooked culture. Indeed, the fundamental goal of most of de Heer’s films can be seen

as one of providing an amplified voice for the unheard, the marginalised, the ‘Other’. As

Adrian Martin has pointed out, de Heer tends to identify with “the figure of the naive

visionary,”28 someone who is isolated from mainstream society. Part of the isolation de

Heer’s protagonists endure stems from the struggle to master spoken language. In Bad

Boy Bubby the socially inept male protagonist mimics the phrases and gestures of those

he meets as he stumbles from situation to situation, until, by repetition and sheer good

luck, he achieves the zenith of societal struggle; a happy suburban family. As a protest

against her warring mother and father, the little girl in The Quiet Room (Rolf de Heer,

1996) becomes mute. The disabled female protagonist in Dance Me To My Song (Rolf


175

de Heer, 1997) can only express herself through a computerised voice-box. In

Alexandra’s Project (Rolf de Heer, 2003) the alienated wife finds a voice via her video

recorder and asserts herself from her emotionally isolating husband. Sandy George, in

The Australian newspaper, seemed to agree with Martin, stating: “His film, delivered in

spite of language difficulties and extreme physical challenges, is another that gives voice

to Australians who don’t usually have one.”29 Despite their isolation from mainstream

society, the Ramingining people have had de Heer tell their story eloquently, and

regardless of their unfamiliarity with the English language, have continued to be heard

as the press clamoured for interviews; also in The Australian, Nicolas Rothwell reported:

“Bobby Bununngurr recalls being in the canoes on set as more than acting, as being ‘full

of life, the spirits are around me, the old people they with me, and I feel it, out there I

was inside by myself, and I was crying’.”30

But with its embedded English narration, its process of bringing the non-Aboriginal

filmgoer into a story-world that effectively remakes the participants as actors (the cast of

mainly non-professionals ‘performing’ as authentic Aboriginal characters in their own

Aboriginal culture and in their own Aboriginal home, but simultaneously cultivating

venerated status as storytellers), questions may be asked about the extent to which

empowerment of the Ganalbingu people really occurs. Does use of the colonizing

European’s language for the voice over indicate de Heer’s underlying contempt for his

subjects as he controls and moulds the narrative to his own cinematic ends? Or does his

refusal to ‘mute’ the Ganalbingu tongue by dubbing it in English serve to further

empower the colonised Aboriginal people? In this writer’s opinion, it is the latter. The

Aboriginal Australian sounds coming from a non-Indigenous director are not

problematic; Ten Canoes was first shown at an outdoor basketball court in Ramingining

without sub-titles at all, much to the chagrin of the few non-Aboriginal Australians in

the audience at the time.31 For national and international release the concession to non-

Ganalbingu speaking audiences in providing English narration is not disempowering but

rather is pragmatic. Unlike the heavy-handed didacticism of his earlier treatise on 1920s

injustice to Aboriginal Australians in The Tracker, de Heer has subtly articulated his

concerns about Aboriginal Australians today. Rather than relying on guilt over the


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European coloniser’s past malfeasance, well-placed humour engages the non-Indigenous

audiences in both the voice-over and the plot; a long running joke about the sweet tooth

of one ‘Honey Man’; gags about men’s sexual performance; and comic depictions of

flatulence, all illustrate the universal humanity of the near-naked characters yet fail to

detract from their dignity as pre-colonization, non-industrial, Indigenous Peoples.

Indeed, the mere fact Ten Canoes seeks to tell a Dreamtime story, and not a

contemporary western, Christian-influenced narrative, indicates the writer/director’s

respect. No other film to date focuses to the same extent on simply recounting a

Dreamtime world-view. Some non-indigenous directors have even invented their own

‘Dreamtime’ legends, such as Werner Herzog did with his Where the Green Ants Dream

(1984). Other films have provided brief depictions or references, but Ten Canoes is the

first to dedicate itself entirely to such. De Heer’s story is that of the people of

Ramingining and is arguably authentic. All this I have already contended elsewhere,

with particular emphasis on de Heer’s use of the Aboriginal accent,32 but without the

placement of the film in context of de Heer’s oeuvre of Aboriginal Australian films and

with the elision of any tangential reference to the Aboriginal Australian justice meted

out in Ten Canoes. When a major plot development requires the settling of a serious

inter-tribal dispute, the punishment via spearing the leg is once again non-

problematically presented as an acceptable, normalised, extra-judiciary process. As in

The Tracker, de Heer seems to be saying in Ten Canoes that tribal justice, being swift,

sufficiently (but not excessively) punitive, and involving the Elders of the offended

party, is superior to non-Indigenous justice systems when dealing with aberrant

Aboriginal Australian behaviour. That the criminal eventually dies from the leg-spearing

is an event made seemingly less tragic by the spiritual notions of reincarnation the wise-

sounding narration from Gulpilil presents to frame the story within the Aboriginal

Australian connection to the land: the dead man will return to the status of a little fish in

the billabong, where he will wait to be born again.

In enabling the around 800 inhabitants of Ramingining to tell their own story in their

own language of Ganulbingu, with Aboriginal accented English voice-over, in their own

way of cascading repetition and foregrounding Aboriginal Australian spirituality and


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judiciary, de Heer has empowered them to the extent the social malaise of their

contemporary indigenous Australians seems an anomaly, not the expected norm, and as

the film’s success at Cannes indicates, he has managed to reach a very large and

appreciative audience. As I have reported elsewhere,33 de Heer’s project in remote

Northern Australia has blossomed into numerous other community-enriching ventures

such as a program for training local youth in video production. Ten Canoes is an

overwhelmingly positive contribution to the cinematic articulation of the Aboriginal

Australian voice.

The Inter-textual Aboriginal Australian in Dr. Plonk.

De Heer’s latest film, Dr. Plonk (2007), is a black and white silent film, shot like a

Chaplin or Keaton homage on a hand-cranked antique camera. It is the story of the

eponymous, time-traveling protagonist from 1907 who is mistaken for a terrorist by our

twenty-first century contemporaries and locked up, never to be released. His warning to

the law-makers of a century ago about the perils of ecological negligence (and, possibly,

television addiction) remain unheard and unheeded.34

The plot revolves around a seemingly rational scientist and inventor, Dr. Plonk (Nigel

Lunghi), who is married to a caring woman (Magda Szubanski) with a faithful man-

servant (Paul Blackwell) in a well-appointed mansion in de Heer’s hometown of

Adelaide, South Australia. The hard-working doctor calculates that the world will end in

100 years, but his warnings are ignored by the Prime Minister of the day so he invents a

time machine and travels to the future, intent on bringing back incontrovertible proof.

What he discovers in 2007 is a polluted, over-industrialised world in which ordinary folk

sit side by side in their comfortable living rooms, mesmerised by wide-screen television,

as outside the eve of the apocalypse apparently approaches.

This entire film is an exercise in aural auteurism in that de Heer has decided there

should be no voices to be heard at all and although his decision to make a black and

white silent film has been attributed to his discovery of unused film stock deteriorating


178

in his refrigerator at home, a more astute filmgoer will observe the many inter-textual

references this film voices. Of course, Dr. Plonk is not actually silent at all: with a

frenetic, relentless, authentically period soundtrack performed by the strings, piano and

accordion of ‘The Stiletto Sisters’ and composed by Graham Tardif, the film seems

unnaturally blanketed in sprightly wall-to-wall music, permitting equally unnatural and

unexpected visual moments of self-reflexive inter-textuality.

Regarding the Aboriginal Australian people, de Heer unexpectedly inserts a scene early

in the film in which Dr. Plonk accidentally travels back in time 100,000 years, with the

Indigenous locals emphatically claiming this land as theirs rather than the property of the

colonisers of the last 200 odd years. Encased in his coffin-shaped time machine, Dr.

Plonk is immediately surrounded by aggressive spear-wielding Aboriginal men who

carry him and his contraption onto a fire. The curious thing about the depiction of the

Aboriginal Australian men is their costuming: they wear obviously fake afro wigs and

grass skirts. Such a visual cliché recalls ignorant and condescending depictions of

Pacific Islanders by Hollywood in its wartime musicals and comedies. With this

spurious portrayal, de Heer seems to be silently directing the audience to his previous

two productions in which he has more accurately depicted Aboriginal Australians. As

Jake Wilson summarises,

The most inspired scene involves an encounter with an Aboriginal tribe straight out of Ten Canoes – they’re even filmed in the same way, lined up on the horizon as if for an anthropological photograph. More than an in-joke, the shot is a key to de Heer’s ongoing project: the fiction of time travel is revealed as literally a way of rewriting history, a short cut to the long view.35

The comic depiction of cannibals enacting the primitive justice of summary execution is

later juxtaposed with the comic depiction of inept 2007 ‘Keystone Kops’-styled policing

in which the innocent, well-meaning Dr. Plonk is branded ‘terrorist’ and indefinitely

incarcerated, as has happened recently in Australia’s real-life involvement in America’s

war against terrorism. Somewhere between the two extremes lie workable judiciaries,

one of which, de Heer seems to be suggesting, is the meditative tribal council that

characterises judicial decision-making in The Tracker and Ten Canoes. Although de


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Heer’s latest film features the shortest depiction of Aboriginal Australians in all three

films mentioned here, it nevertheless conforms to an authorial interest in foregrounding

a sense of holistic justice, as intuitively practiced by Indigenous Australians. The

Aboriginal people of 100,000 years ago, who instantly set out to burn – or perhaps, cook

– Dr. Plonk, are shown inaccurately in the moments before he successfully returns in his

smouldering time machine to 1907. By depicting them in ridiculous costume, de Heer

underlines the erroneousness of such a savage characterization. The audience is

reminded of his authentic portrayals of Aboriginal people in the other two films this

paper addresses. Unfortunately, regarding sound and the Aboriginal Australian, Graham

Tardif’s energetic score only changes slightly for this scene, bashing out a couple of bars

that merely hints at what early silent film composer Erno Rapee might have called

‘Jungle Music’. Nevertheless, this musical cliché serves to further consolidate the

deliberate inaccuracy of de Heer’s ironic depiction of Aboriginal Australians.

Denouement: De Heer Amplifies the Indigenous Voice and Empowers Aboriginal

Australians.

De Heer explained to journalist Michael Fitzgerald; “People talk about, What is a white

director doing making an Indigenous story? But I’m not, … They’re telling the story,

largely, and I’m the mechanism by which they can.”36 Like an amplifier, de Heer takes

the oral history of Ramingining, its spiritual and judicial meanings and broadcasts them

to his predominantly Christian, courtroom-based legal world of non-Indigenous

Australia. When approaching these remote people, De Heer has, in my opinion, realised

the potential for unintended cultural arrogance and was prepared to hide any halo of

prestige his career had so far created. He stated he decided to:

… relinquish the almost absolute power normally associated with producing and directing a film and cede it to the people I’d be making this with; give them editorial control and as much responsibility for the film as we, the white film makers, had responsibility. […] It was my (semi-conscious) reasoning that all this had to be dismantled, that notions of superiority and privilege had to make way for a perception by all those involved, white and black, of themselves as equals in the venture.37


180

Cat Hope lauds de Heer for his tendency to “feature innovative sound ideas in the

scripting and production stages”38 but I would suggest that his aural ideation anticipates

even the scripting stage. In interview, de Heer stated “Sound is sixty percent of the

emotional content of a film”39 and his online diary reflects his love for post-production

sound editing. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that he is constantly aware of how he

wants his films to not just look but sound. In The Tracker, he wanted the film to sound

as if it were the post-colonial voice of Aboriginal people, so he utilised a recognizably

Aboriginal Australian singing narrator whose music is simultaneously modern and

ancient. In Ten Canoes he wanted the Ganalbingu people to sound empowered and in

control of their pre-colonial culture so he directed all actors to speak in their native

language and insisted that even his Italian producers refrain from dubbing the film for

overseas markets. In Dr. Plonk, a film in which he is primarily concerned with western

society’s headlong descent into environmental apocalypse and associated dependence on

television, he manages to slip in an inter-textual reference to tribal justice, a form of

which he so ruthlessly parodies in his subsequent depiction of 2007 treatment of a terror

suspect in the same film. Sound in de Heer’s latest offering features much less of an

interest in amplifying the Indigenous voice than the previous two Aboriginal Australian

films, and this writer concedes Dr. Plonk may not deserve to be included in the nominal

grouping. Nevertheless, when its role as an inter-textual signpost to his other work is

considered, Dr. Plonk serves to remind audiences of the typically non-authentic

Aboriginal films produced by less respectful film-makers.

De Heer is not the first to attempt to lend an Aboriginal acoustic sensibility to their

films: Marjorie Kibby describes the soundtrack to Rabbit-proof Fence (Philip Noyce,

2002) as expressing “an Australia that is something closer to the Aboriginal perception

of it, the land as a living thing with a spirit and a voice,”40 yet its didgeridoo combined

with world music ranging from North American drumming to Ravi Shankar’s sitar falls

somewhat short of authentically articulating the aurality of Australian Aboriginality. In

his auteur analysis of another Hollywood-based Australian film-maker Peter Weir,

Jonathan Rayner stated: “[Weir’s] career is marked by a European brand of art-film

auteurism, based on personal writing and visual expression, in Australia, and by an


181

American brand of auteurism, based on genre revision, in Hollywood.”41 This distinction

between the auteurism of the two continents is curiously undeveloped in the literature

and I would tentatively suggest that there actually exists a typically Australian kind of

auteur in whose work an interest in specifically Australian issues predominates. Such

Australian auteurism is not rare but usually sees promising writer/directors succumbing

to the world-view flattening effect of Hollywood and its cash incentives. Resisting

tinsel-town, de Heer remains based in small-town Adelaide, South Australia, surviving

from film to film and making the French terminology used to describe him seem

artificial, affected and foreign. Nevertheless, despite the over-alliteration of the phrase

‘Australian Aural Auteur’, such a mantle may, indeed, be appropriate for Rolf de Heer.


182

Notes.

1. David Stratton wrote: “Aussie auteur Rolf de Heer has established himself as an

uncompromising film-maker” (David Stratton, “The Quiet Room, Variety Review”,

Vertigo Productions (1998). URL:

http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film-id=4&display=reviews [29

December 2007]); Ali Sharp stated: “de Heer’s presence is a victory for auteurism” (Ali

Sharp, “The old man and the jungle,” Metro Magazine, no. 140 (2004), p. 34) and Jake

Wilson declared: “Rolf de Heer is one of the very few auteurs who regularly succeeds in

getting features financed in Australia” (Jake Wilson, “The lady vanishes: Alexandra’s

Project and Rolf de Heer”, Senses of Cinema (2003). URL:

www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/26/alexandras-project.html

[29 December 2007]).

2. Cat Hope, “Hearing the story: Sound design in the films of Rolf de Heer”, Senses of

Cinema, (2004). URL: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/sound-design-

rolf-de-heer.html

[29 December 2007].


and the construction of auratorship in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby”, Metro Magazine,

no. 140 (2004), pp. 78-81.

4. D. Bruno Starrs, “The audience as aurator again? Sound and Rolf de Heer’s Ten

Canoes”, Metro Magazine, no. 149 (2006), pp. 18-21.

5. Ten Canoes won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film

Festival and six Australian Film Institute awards including Best Picture and

Best Direction (shared with Aboriginal Australian Peter Djiggir).

http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=4&display=reviews�

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/26/alexandras_project.html�




183

6. Hence in this paper particular attention will be paid to the use of sound in these

Aboriginal Australian Films of Rolf de Heer in order to explore if the term coined by

Philip Brophy in describing Indian film director Satyajit Ray, that of “aural auteur”

(Philip Brophy, “Punk ambient,” Film Comment, vol. 42, no. 4 (2006) p. 16), may be

usefully appropriated to describe this celebrated film-maker, or, if indeed, due to the

proclivities of maverick film-makers like de Heer, the term auteur deserves even further

categorization.

7. Not that de Heer was without experience in filming Indigenous Peoples before

The Tracker (2002): his work commenced in 1997 (belatedly released in 2003) on

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories features the Indigenous Shuar of Amazonian

Ecuador. But the film is in no way depictive of Australia or Aboriginal Australians

and that is why it is not under consideration in this paper. Even de Heer prefers not

to refer to this film, preferring to discuss a much earlier unproduced Aboriginal

Australian film The Other Side of the Frontier, in his recent paper on working with

Indigenous Peoples, “Personal reflections of whiteness and three film projects,”

Australian Humanities Review, no. 42 (Aug-Sep. 2007). URL:

http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August-

September%202007/Deheer.html

[29 December 2007].

8. D. Bruno Starrs, “Two westerns that weren’t? The Tracker and The Proposition.”

Metro Magazine, no. 153 (2007), pp. 166-172.

9. Michael Atherton, “The composer as alchemist: An overview of Australian feature

film scores 1994-2004,” in Rebecca Coyle (ed), Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film

Music and Cultural Identities, (London: John Libbey, 2005), p. 237.

10. Rolf de Heer, The Tracker DVD extra, SBS Movie Show 2002: unpaginated.

11. Rolf de Heer, “Personal reflections of whiteness and three film projects,”

http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August-September%202007/Deheer.html�



184


http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August-


[29 December 2007].

12. Jake Wilson, “Looking both ways: The Tracker”, Senses of Cinema (2003). URL:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/24/tracker.html

[29 December 2007].

13. Production Notes, Vertigo Productions website. URL:

http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film-id=8&display=extras

[29 December 2007].

14. Production Notes, ibid.

15. Philip Brophy, “Punk ambient,” Film Comment, vol. 42, no. 4 (2006), p. 16.


and the construction of auratorship in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby”, Metro Magazine,

no. 140, (2004), p. 78.

17. Anna C. Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocca, ibid.

18. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman, (NY: Columbia

University Press, 1999), p. 5.

19. Philip Samartzis, “Avant-garde meets mainstream: The Film Scores of Philip

Brophy”, in Rebecca Coyle (ed), Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian

Screen Music, (Sydney: AFTRS, 1997), p. 50-51.

20. Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identification in Hollywood Film



http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/24/tracker.html�

http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=8&display=extras�


185

Music, (NY: Routledge, 2001), p. 65.

21. Sam Oster, “Walkie talkie”, Inside Film, no. 80, (September 2005), p. 45.

22. Sam Oster, ibid.



25. Mike Walsh, “Ten Canoes and Rolf de Heer”, Metro Magazine, no. 149 (2006), p.

17.

26. Mike Walsh, ibid.

27. Liz Conor, “Ten Canoes: A timely release”, Liz Conor: Comment and Critique,

(July 15 2006). URL: http://lizconorcomment.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html

[29 December 2007].

28. Adrian Martin, “Wanted: Art Cinema," Cinema Papers, (December 2000), p. 30.

29. Sandy George, “Storybook charm avoids guilt buttons”, The Australian, (21

March 2006). URL: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18537860-

5001562,00.html

[29 December 2007].

30. Nicolas Rothwell, “Top end tales”, The Australian – The Arts, (27 May 2006).

URL:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19233398-16947,00.html [29

December 2007].

http://lizconorcomment.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html�

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18537860-5001562,00.html�




186

31. There are currently three versions of the film: (1) the Ganalbingu languages

dialogue version with English narration and English subtitles; (2) the Ganalbingu

languages dialogue and narration version with English subtitles and (3) the Ganalbingu

language and narration version without any subtitles.

32. D. Bruno Starrs, “The authentic Aboriginal voice in Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes

(2006),” Reconstructions: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 7, no. 3 (2007). URL:

http://reconstruction.eserver.org/073/starrs.shtml

[29 December 2007].

33. D. Bruno Starrs, “From one photo to Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer 2006) to many

canoes,” Artciencia.com, vol. 3, no. 7 (2007). URL:

http://www.artciencia.com/Admin/Ficheiros/BRUNOSTA397.pdf

[29 December 2007].

34. See D. Bruno Starrs, “Filmic eco-warnings and television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon

(1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007), Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate

Journal of Culture and the Arts, no. 5 (2007). URL:

http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue5/starrs.html

[29 December 2007].

35. Jake Wilson, “Dr. Plonk – Film review”, TheAge.com.au, (30 August 2007). URL:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/film-reviews/dr-

plonk/2007/08/30/1188067256355.html

[29 December 2007].

36. Mike Fitzgerald, “Keeping time with Rolf”, TIME Pacific, (20 March

2006), URL:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1172744,00.html

[23 April 2006].

http://reconstruction.eserver.org/073/starrs.shtml�

http://www.artciencia.com/Admin/Ficheiros/BRUNOSTA397.pdf�


http://www.theage.com.au/news/film-reviews/dr-plonk/2007/08/30/1188067256355.html�



187

37. Rolf de Heer, “Personal reflections of whiteness and three film projects,”


www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August-


[29 December 2007].

38. Cat Hope, ibid.

39. D. Bruno Starrs, “The sounds of silence: an interview with Rolf de Heer” Metro

Magazine, no. 152 (2007), pp. 18-21.

40. Marjorie D. Kibby, “Sounds of Australia in Rabbit-proof Fence”, ed. Rebecca

Coyle, Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and Cultural Identities, (London:

John Libbey, 2005), p. 157.

41. Jonathan Rayner, The Films of Peter Weir, (NY: Continuum, 2003), p. 12.



PART THREE.

Conclusion.

Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer – Part Three.

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CHAPTER 10.

The Unifying Essay.

“If we take out the title of the film and THE END and put all the films

together, we will have the figure of one man [sic], of an auteur, the life of

an auteur, transferred in many characters naturally”

(Bernardo Bertolucci qtd. in Gelmis 1970: xiii).


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10.1 Preamble to the Unifying Essay.

The prejudice shown by most auteur analysts in favour of the visuals prevents

appreciation of the considerable richness of film sound artistry. The late 20th and 21st

century cinemas, with their powerful surround sound speaker systems, are able to

emotionally and physically touch audiences. The advanced technology of the multiplex

can hurl sonic waves at the film-goer, rolling stereophonically from side to side of the

auditorium and prompting an uncanny sense of physical orientation to the filmic world

depicted. Veritable walls of crystal clear, static-free sound can force the film-goer

backwards in their seats, almost rattling the teeth in their skulls as they are physically

bombarded with the film’s soundtrack. Impossible to avoid, the bass register palpably

shakes the tiered cinema floor that rakes away from the silver plinth which film-goers

perceive only in blinking intermissions, raising their adrenaline levels and other bodily

responses as it assaults the ears. Alternatively, subtly insinuated auditory sensations can

gently caress the “aurator” as they raise hairs on necks or set them choking back tears

with the soundtrack’s expertly manipulated subjectivity for and identification with the

on-screen character. Non-diegetically, queasy glissandos and eerie Theremin can spook

the audience member who is emotionally aligned with the protagonist in one scene while

luxuriant strings and tympani can embolden that same audience member in the next.

Diegetic sounds of nature, like the incessant whirr of cicadas, can be amplified to

produce stultifying tension. Audiences can be taken into the headspace of the onscreen

character as they ‘hear’ her or his thoughts while other scenes employ god-like voice-

over narration to impress a sense of veracity. Indeed, frequently exercising many of

these auditory extremes in the one work, the modern film soundtrack is an extraordinary

tool for manipulating the emotions and understandings of an audience. While seeing

patrons jostle for the best seats there is no such thing as a badly positioned chair for the

blind cinema-goer (of which there are many), who most surely is bewildered by the

priority given by analysts to explaining only the visual meaning of a film’s director.

Although all this was not unknown to the researcher before commencing this doctoral

study, it is important to note how this belief has been concretised with the journey of the

thesis.


191

10.2 The Journey of the Thesis.

One suspects that as with most PhD theses, the journey this body of research undertook

was not entirely predictable. The first unplanned contingency involved the ambition of

making a creative work, that being a video documentary, or ‘biopic’, on the films and

life of Rolf de Heer, but this was soon reluctantly abandoned. It had been hoped that

such a study would provide another unique insight into the psychology of this intriguing

film-maker and even serve as a new kind of auteur analysis in itself. De Heer’s

indifference to that goal and unwillingness to provide any archived material of his life

(such as personal photographs), or, indeed, to permit interviews with his family

members, was soon politely communicated (although the thesis is certainly much richer

as a result of him making himself available for an interview). Before this realisation,

however, this researcher was labouring under the belief that the thesis would consist of

40% practice (or creative work) and 60% exegesis30 - the compulsory training31 and

initial milestones32

were completed with this goal in mind. Fortunately, it was possible

to consolidate work towards a revised goal of publishing refereed papers before the date

of the confirmation seminar (2 November 2007) loomed too large.

There were other unexpected but significant events in the journey of this thesis. One

could not predict, for example, the different ways editors conducted their refereeing

processes. Ideally, each paper would have been published promptly and in a way that

would have made the order of publication of the thesis’ papers a chronologically

sensible and ordered process for the reader. Unfortunately, some journals took more than

two years from submission to eventual publication (the last, in Quarterly Review of Film

and Video, is not expected to be in print until November 2010), while others took as

little as three months. An intention to proceed from the general to the specific,

chronologically and one film at a time, as recommended by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith in

30 This is a relatively low weighting for the creative component in a university that many student practitioners are drawn to because of the opportunity to submit a thesis that is up to 75% creative work. 31 “IFN001 – Advanced Information Skills (AIRS)” was completed in November 2006 with a result of 7 (85/100) and “KKP601 - Approaches to Inquiry in the Creative Industries” was audited in first semester 2007. 32 ‘Stage 2’ of the PhD thesis was completed and approved in May 2007.


192

his auteur analysis of film-maker Luchino Visconte,33

was unfortunately not achieved:

there is little semblance of chronological order in the films analysed. Nor was it

predicted that Rolf de Heer would produce no film in 2008 - not that the researcher

would begrudge de Heer a vacation - but another source of inspiration for the research,

that being the prospect of his thirteenth feature film possibly resulting in publication of

an extra paper, was to remain unrealised. The optimistically round figure of ten refereed

publications aspired to in the confirmation seminar was not to be achieved within the

time frame of the thesis.

Nevertheless, the thesis has succeeded in the publication of eight refereed papers.34

The

non-chronological publication dates of the rest of the papers aside, the first article to

appear in press, “The Tracker (Rolf de Heer 2002) and The Proposition (John Hillcoat

2005): Two westerns that weren’t?” in issue 153 of Metro Magazine, does represent a

logical starting point for the collection of papers of the thesis. Johnson and Poole note

that in 1954 for the critics of Cahiers du Cinema: “auteur theory became a method

whereby former genre films were reconsidered in terms of the aesthetics of authorship”

(1998, 125) and Raphaëlle Moine suggested that a director’s oeuvre can be considered to

be “the genre of the ‘auteur film’” (2008, 97). Thus, this first paper published on the

work of de Heer (and his contemporary director, John Hillcoat), serves to signal the

author’s interest in an auteur analysis of de Heer. In the subsequent papers of the thesis

the films are considered, not in terms of genre, but in terms of the “aesthetics of

authorship”, whereby the individual signing his name to the films is de Heer.

Surprisingly, there was a keen preparedness of editors of journals not even dedicated to

film sound to consider the submissions. Despite this researcher being a comparatively

unknown author, no editor seemed to consider the subject matter unsuitable even for

consideration. As Gavin Moodie pointed out, the “publications editor makes an initial

33 Nowell-Smith wrote: “rather than focus exclusively on elucidating the common underlying structures, ... consider the films singly, attempting in the analysis of each to bring out its relationship, hidden or overt, to the rest of [the director’s] work” (1967, 12). 34 The eighth paper - “‘If we stretch our imaginations’: The monstrous-feminine mother in Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra’s Project (2003)”, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, no. 10, 2008 – has not been included as one of the papers of the thesis as it deviates too much from auteur analysis in its consideration of evolutionary film theory.


193

judgment on the paper’s suitability” (2005, 2), before forwarding the paper for

refereeing, and this each editor seemed willing to do. This enthusiasm, one may assume,

was due to the dearth of writing on the films of Rolf de Heer, be it genre analysis, auteur

analysis or this researcher’s innovative aural auteur analysis.

Of course, there is some unavoidable overlap in the papers. Unlike the requirements of a

monograph, it was necessary to repeat the introduction to the paper’s subject, Rolf de

Heer, before steering away into new, unpublished argument. Many of the key quotations

culled from the literature are repeated. Nevertheless, this has not been done to the extent

that a charge of self-plagiarism could be levelled, nor could accusations be made that the

researcher has utilised Moodie’s cynical advice to capitalise on the “minimum

publishable unit” (2005, 7), whereby the number of an author’s publications is increased

by maximizing the overlap in each, adding only one new item of information to each

subsequent paper. Rather, each of the published articles is sufficiently different to its

companions for a reader of the collection to remain engaged and motivated to read on.

However, while it is hoped that the reader will receive these papers as a coherent

collection of work, there are some matters that were not addressed.


194

10.3 The Film Sound Industry in Australia.

One shortcoming of this thesis’ entirely textual analysis approach to understanding a

film auteur is that this methodology tells us little about the actual conditions of the

film’s production, an issue Andre Bazin would have stressed be considered. The fact that

de Heer has steadfastly declined offers from Hollywood to leave his home-town of

Adelaide and direct big budget blockbusters35

is unlikely to be considered relevant to an

editor or referee perusing a paper based on the textual analysis of one or more of his

films. Nevertheless, such a rejection of the siren calls from the big end of film-making

speaks volumes about de Heer’s cinematic world-views. As he said in interview, “What

I try to do is make films that don’t reduce people as human beings” (Starrs “The sounds

of silence” 2007, 21), suggesting that in his opinion, the Hollywood tradition does little

for humanity’s improvement. Without the pressures of Hollywood, de Heer has been

able to operate undisturbed and unfettered in his own studios, experimenting with

writing and editing, particularly the production and post-production of film sound, all

the while making films “that don’t reduce people as human beings”.

The acceptance for publication of the final three papers, which concentrate on de Heer’s

use of sound, reflect an awareness of the underdevelopment of critical attention to de

Heer and to sound in the film industry in Australia generally. Brophy wrote critically of

the situation in this country, at times denigrating the conservatism of our film-makers:

Sound and music mostly come to the fore in post-production. Traditionally, sound designers, sound editors, sound effects recordists, sound recording engineers, Foley artists and sound mixers will be actively employed on a film once the film has reached fine-cut (2001, 60).

One suspects that Brophy is justified in claiming that too many film-makers in Australia

leave consideration of the first component of the term ‘audio-visual’ to the last stage of

production, that of the “fine-cut”. Some possibly even take the end of shooting as their

cue to start working on (or at least looking for) another project, seemingly content that

their ‘rough-cut’ will be ‘fixed in the mix’ by audio technicians who have somehow

35 See comments by Jim Currie regarding De Heer’s rejection of an offer to direct a Chainsaw Massacre film in “De Heer de sound: Jim Currie on designing sound for Rolf de Heer” on page 251 of this thesis.


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intuitively absorbed an understanding of the director’s goals. Such reluctance or inability

to communicate with sound personnel after the shoot is not restricted to this country, of

course. Stephen Deutsch wrote:

It is relatively easy for any composer worth the name to provide music to fit a particular mood, far harder to judge what mood is required by the scene, and how much of it should be provided musically. Directors are often of little help here, sometimes not knowing themselves (or not being able to articulate) what emotional triggers need squeezing (2007, 6).

Deutsch recommended that composers proactively interrogate directors: “… after seeing

the rough-cut of a scene, a composer might ask whether the director was totally satisfied

by the performances, whether there might be some emotional nuance missing, or worse,

too prevalent” (ibid). Unfortunately, one suspects, by the time there is a rough-cut, too

often the typically harried film director has her or his mind on the next job already.

Brophy puts this directorial deafness in Australia down to two main factors: the

unrealistic and meagre sound training provided in our film schools and the ingrained

insecurity of film-makers in the national industry. With regard to the first, he wrote:

“tertiary/undergraduate film schools and courses [... cover] areas like cinematography,

editing, production management and even sound recording ... but more under the rubric

of directorial delegation than via strategic discussions with craftspeople” (2001, 58). He

neatly summarised the poverty of aural communication in what might be called ‘Film-

making in Australia 101’ with the comment:

… film training around the country accords hardly a passing regard to the way that sound and music affect the visual, dramatic and structural formation of a film. Again, directors are aurally impaired by training that claims sound to be something that happens after image (61).

Indeed, a cursory glance at the recommended textbooks for Australian undergraduate

film studies reveals an under-emphasis on training students to design a film for sound.

Martha Mollison’s 568 page tome entitled Producing Videos: A Complete Guide (2003)

has a mere eleven lines on sound design, although she did make the point that “… for

many videos sound design would (and should) have started in the project development

stage, now is the time [post-production] to face the reality of what material is actually at

hand” (251). It is easy to see how this advice could be overlooked or not received at all


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by the trainee film-maker. Regardless, Mollison’s text is on the recommended reading

lists of most film-making schools in the country. Other texts are even less generous to

sound personnel. Allan Rowe and Paul Wells advised budding film-makers that: “The

final element in constructing the ‘image’ of a film is the soundtrack” (2003, 76, my

emphasis) in Jill Nelmes’ text An Introduction to Film Studies (1996), and this

demeaning attitude to film sound artistry seems prevalent in the texts recommended to

students.

The second industry factor, Brophy wrote, relates to the unwillingness of some

Australian film-makers to be bold and inventive when it comes to sound:

Industry peers seem ever ready to scoff, scorn and scathe: that music is too ‘brooding’; that atmosphere is too ‘loud’; that effect is too ‘unnaturalistic’; that mix is too ‘noticeable’. Most frighteningly, otherwise intelligent and creative sound and music professionals working in the industry eventually start thinking the same way, second-guessing the constricted ‘myopic deafness’ of directors, producers and distributors (62).

Conservatism in the industry of film-making, given the expense usually involved and the

potential for box office failure, is certainly no uniquely Australian characteristic, but the

readiness of de Heer to experiment with sound marks him as an exceptional director. It

is perhaps to be expected that journal editors and conference convenors would be

interested in scholarly writing on his bold work.


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10.4 Overseas Aural Auteur Analyses.

Also not reflected in this collection of refereed published papers was the discovery that

other film-makers have been recently subjected to aural auteur analysis overseas, even if

this term was not actually used as a descriptor for the research. One of the latest studies

indicates the novel potential for an auteur to aurally stamp a signature on her films

through a subversive choice of Argentinean language for dialogue, begging an obvious

comparison with de Heer’s use of the Ganalbingu language in Ten Canoes, as outlined in

the seventh paper of the thesis, “Sound in the Aboriginal Australian films of Rolf de

Heer”, currently being refereed by Metro Magazine. Dominique Russell stated,

“[Director Lucrecia] Martel herself identifies one inspiration for the [Argentine cinema]

movement to pay close attention to audio as artists’ response to the abuse of language

and the disdain for Spanish in cinema under the military dictatorship (1976-1982)”

(2008, 1). Under a repressive military regime, Martel and her contemporaries were

subjected to governance in Spanish whereas in the “language of ordinary people ...

Buenos Aires tones predominate” (ibid), and Martel was able to make a political

statement, suggesting part of her Weltanschauung perhaps, via her use of film sound.

In this limited version of an aural auteur analysis, Russell also quoted Martel as saying,

“to be faithful to [a] childlike viewpoint, I worked with the idea that the sound could tell

more than the image, including more than the words” (qtd. in 2008, 2) and this prompts

a reconsideration of de Heer’s stated affinity with the child-like point of view. In the

DVD extra of Bad Boy Bubby, de Heer admitted: “In some ways, I’ve never been able to

lose the child-like part of me. Children are a great fascination for me. If a small child

was to come into the room now I’d sort of forget everything else that was going on”

(qtd. in Gregory, 1993). De Heer continued this revelation about his personal views in an

interview with Peter Malone: “The preciousness of childhood for me is important, above

almost anything else ... If a plot has no bearing on childhood, for some reason it’s less

interesting for me” (2001, 58) and in interview with Andrew L. Urban: “I've been

interested in kids and the way they think a long time ... since I was four” (qtd. in Urban

“De Heer, Rolf”, undated). De Heer summarised this aspect of his world-view: “I care


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immensely about how children are treated and what happens to them, and how cycles of

violence are repeated later in life as adults” (qtd. in Caputo and Burton 2002, 51).36

With

this director’s preoccupation with childhood it is worth noting Argentinean director

Martel’s similar preoccupation and Russell’s linking of it to sound.

Other papers have been appearing from overseas which, although not being sustained

aural auteur analysis conducted over a director’s entire œuvre, are nevertheless very

insightful analyses of individual films. In the case of Randall Barnes’ work on sound in

the films of the Coen brothers, it is possible that they may, with future publications, end

up being an aural auteur analysis by published papers comparable to that of this thesis.

Barnes’ first paper on Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen 1991) is a promising example,

suggesting that the more creative of independent US film-makers are considering sound

before, rather than after, shooting. Barnes reported that there were many scripted sound

effects for Barton Fink and that the “Composer and supervising sound editor were given

copies of the script to use as the basis for preliminary discussions in pre-production”

(2007, 2). Later Barnes had a paper on sound in the Coen brother’s Raising Arizona

(1987) published in the debut issue of the promising journal The Soundtrack in which he

wrote that:

By commencing their collaboration with their supervising sound editor and mixer and their composer at the script stage, the Coens communicate their commitment not just to these crew members, but also to a mode of production that prioritizes the soundtrack’s position in the construction of the film (2007, 27) .

The result is a soundtrack in Raising Arizona that constructs narrative as much as the

visual components of the film, particularly with regard to the featured repetitiveness of

the protagonist’s actions. Certainly, Barnes shows much potential for delivering a

sustained aural auteur analysis as his subjects, the Coen brothers, like de Heer, are quite

prolific in their film-making output. With the examples set by Russell, Barnes and the

writer of this thesis, perhaps more theorists will be submitting papers of aural auteur

analysis for future publication.

36 In my paper “If we stretch our imaginations”, I explore de Heer’s worldview regarding child-rearing in Bad Boy Bubby and Alexandra’s Project.


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10.5 De Heer’s Aural Signature

Expressed via Acoustic Binaries?

Johnson and Poole stated that the possibility of a “Film music auteur [... is] a strained

reading of the term auteur”, noting: “It is contentious to discuss a director’s use of film

music in terms of auteurism - most obviously because directors may be the authors of

the choice of music but they are rarely the authors of the music” (1998, 127, original

emphasis). Here we can note that de Heer, who almost never uses pre-existing music;

who wrote the lyrics to the songs in The Tracker; who works very closely with composer

Graham Tardif from sometimes before there is even a finished script; who is closely

involved in selection of musical instruments and musicians; and who even participates in

the rehearsals of the original film scores (as he did with singer Archie Roach for The

Tracker [2002] and with “The Stiletto Sisters” for Dr. Plonk [2007]), contributes

considerably to the creation of his film’s music and is therefore arguably an exception to

Johnson and Poole’s rule. Rolf de Heer does much more than just choose the music.

Johnson and Poole devoted most of their chapter on an attempt to locate “those

structures that disclose the catalyst ‘Weir’” (1998, 126), recalling Wollen’s concept of

the auteur as an “unconscious catalyst” (1972, 168), through analysis of Weir’s choice

of music. First they paid considerable attention to Weir’s use of mood music on set, a

practice de Heer is not renowned for (neither Rolf de Heer, Jim Currie or Graham Tardif

mentioned the practice during interview). They also note Weir’s “impulsiveness” (128)

in selecting music: the famous choice of Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan pipe music for Picnic at

Hanging Rock (1975) was apparently only made at the last minute in post-production

(128). In contrast, de Heer’s decisions about music have never been last minute affairs.

Nevertheless, his reluctance to use pre-recorded music, with its “affiliating

identifications ... [which are] “quite tightly tracked into identification with a single

subject position - usually one that does not challenge dominant ideologies” (Kassabian,

“Listening for identifications”, 2001, 170),37

37 See Chapter 2.6 of this thesis for more on Kassabian’s “affiliating tendencies”.

may mean he is less likely to be considered


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alongside popular music-loving directors such as Quentin Tarentino, as an example of

one of Gorbman’s “mélomane[s]” (2007, 149).

The majority of Johnson and Poole’s attention to sound in their chapter is devoted to

Peter Weir’s The Plumber (1979) and Gallipoli (1981) and mostly explores the choices

of music that chart “acoustic binaries” (1998, 133). They note that such music choices

do not necessarily reinforce a metaphorical dichotomy, but may actually act in virtual

disavowal of expected aural clichés. In the brief attention they pay to some other Weir

films, they cite the example in The Last Wave (1977) in which “the sound of the

didjeridu is associated with contained representations of Aboriginality (paintings,

photographs), but the technologically sophisticated synthesiser is heard when Aboriginal

characters appear” (130). A similarly reversed dichotomy is heard in The Tracker: the

naïveté of “The Follower” (Damon Gameau) and the insensitivity of “The Fanatic”

(Gary Sweet) are played out diegetically with music in the first quarter of the film. The

Follower plunks at his ukulele, strumming “The Copper’s Lament”, until The Fanatic

reprimands him for playing “doggerel” and sounding “like some dead animal being

strangled”. This musical cipher for The Follower’s own greenness in law enforcement is

soon contrasted by the striking sound of the dobro - an electric steel resonator guitar -

playing a few sudden notes in a minor key (itself a well-used sonic code in film for

‘menace’) when the Aboriginal fugitive is first sighted by The Tracker. The acoustic

binary of the ‘white trooper’s bush inexperience versus Aboriginal Australian

sophisticated bush expertise’ is established via de Heer’s choice of musical instruments.

Furthermore, the toy guitar continues to function metaphorically in the diegesis of the

film: after the first massacre at the hands of the callous Fanatic (a liminal moment in the

narrative of the film, marked by an abrupt termination of the extra-diegetic lament from

singer Archie Roach about “My people”, and leaving the gunshots and screams to

resound loudly in sudden and otherwise total silence), The Follower remorsefully burns

his ukulele on the campfire. He has been ‘blooded’ and, now, with the slaughter of

innocent Aboriginal Australians plaguing his conscience, there is no joy to be had in

songs about the life of a trooper. Thus the fiery sacrifice of the ukulele serves as a

musical metonymy: it represents his child-like innocence now forever lost.


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The most striking example of this acoustic binary in The Tracker, however, relates to the

narrative function of the songs de Heer has penned - which Richard James Havis calls

“adventurous” (2004) - and the language used to communicate them. While mostly

elegiac in style and words, it is significant that when The Fanatic is himself chained, and

his murderous position subverted, the accompanying song’s English lyrics then change

to the words of an Indigenous language. With natural justice served, the Aboriginal

Australian’s bush expertise is accentuated by the turn to native song lyrics as The

Tracker hoists and hangs The Fanatic by his own petard.

Another acoustic binary identified by Johnson and Poole in the work of Weir that can

also be found in the work of de Heer is that of ‘sanctioned order versus riot’, as

exemplified by the intrusive and discordant sound of bagpipes. Weir’s Dead Poets

Society (1989), for instance, features the bagpipe’s “untempered sound weav[ing]

through the dormitory fracas” (136), when, in a usually well-ordered New England

boarding school, a riot ensues. This acoustic binary is also heard in the prison scene of

Bad Boy Bubby (1993), in which Bubby is raped. Amid the structured order usually

expected - if not demanded - in a police cell, a pipe band complete with kilts and

sporrans is seen unexpectedly and quite incongruously accompanying the brutal anal

rape of poor Bubby, who is dumbfounded by the whole inexplicable event. After being

arrested due to his unknowing but unwelcome sexual advances, Bubby’s wide-eyed

wonder and confusion at the new world he is exploring is further fore-grounded by this

acoustic binary of ‘institutionalised order/anti-institutional rape and riot’ as personified

by the uniformed marching band of bagpipers blasting out a cacophony of disruptive

sound while he is unceremoniously buggered by his cell-mate.

The most consistently relied on and frequently returned to acoustic binary in de Heer’s

œuvre , however, is witnessed in his preoccupation with a ‘hyper-masculine/non-

masculine’ polarity, as I have argued most deliberately in the paper entitled “‘An avowal

of male lack’: Sound in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories” published in Metro

Magazine. Where women appear in the diegesis of de Heer’s films, they operate not as

loci of male castration anxiety or as objects for the patriarchal and voyeuristic male


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gaze, but as effective agents of narrative. However, it must be understood that this

polarity is not necessarily the same as a simple male/female gendered opposition. My

reading is that the non-masculine may include the sensitive or child-like male, whereas

hyper-masculine means macho, insensitive, exploitative and/or violent. Indeed, although

there are a number of women and children lead characters, most of de Heer’s

protagonists are male - but sensitive and child-like - and they enjoy success at the

expense of more aggressive, controlling or hyper-masculine antagonists.38 None of de

Heer’s protagonists is the controlling, macho hero of mainstream Hollywood, and the

narrative arcs they engage in often involve them recognising and celebrating these non-

hyper-masculine aspects of their personalities. Nurturing respect for the environment is

another aspect of the de Heer hero, with only Dr. Plonk failing to benefit from this

attitude.39

Thus we see a trend in the binary oppositions of protagonist and antagonist;

the former grow through non-masculine behaviour, the latter fail through exploitative,

hyper-masculine behaviour.

While this ‘hyper-masculine/non-masculine’ binary is rendered acoustically from the

very beginning of de Heer’s œuvre, the instances are not frequent. In his first feature

film, the children’s film Tail of a Tiger (1984), de Heer briefly sketches the acoustic

binary between the bullying Spike and the sensitive Orville, depicted by Orville’s ability

to imagine the electronic sounds of flying when he spins tin lids: a sound the audience

also hears, as explicated in this thesis’ paper entitled “The aural point of view in the

early films of Rolf de Heer”. This incident, while furthering audience identification with

an unlikely protagonist, indicates a refinement of the ‘hyper-masculine/non-masculine’

binary in suggesting that victims of bullying may achieve success through the strength of

their imaginations. In fact, a correlation between this and de Heer’s own childhood may

be drawn: in interview, Jim Currie mentions that de Heer was victimised as a child: “he

used to get beaten up at school” (Currie qtd. in Starrs “De Heer de sound”, 2009,

forthcoming - see Appendix 12.2.3). In his next film after Tail of a Tiger, the 1988

38 See Table 1 in Appendix 12.3 of the thesis, which lists the overwhelmingly non hyper-masculine, non-controlling, lead characters in de Heer’s œuvre and notes their mostly positive outcomes. 39 Of course, Dr. Plonk is a non-naturalistic, ironic comedy: the protagonist travels through time to tell the political leaders of 2008 about impending eco-apocalypse, is mistaken for a terrorist and imprisoned.


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science fiction film Incident at Raven’s Gate, de Heer again creates this acoustic binary,

but this time with pre-recorded music (possibly the only time he has not preferred to use

original music in his entire career), when the recklessly driving, macho ‘hoon’, Eddie, is

characterised by pounding hard rock music and the sensitive Policeman, Taylor, is

represented with the stately music of Verdi. Under the apparent influence of extra-

terrestrial aliens, the music playing on each car’s stereo swaps, as described in this

thesis’ paper entitled “The aural point of view in the early films of Rolf de Heer”, and

the macho Eddie is only able to resume his aggressive driving when his hard rock music

resumes.

This ‘hyper-masculine/non-masculine’ aural binary is also seen elsewhere in de Heer’s

body of work. In Dingo (1991), the young hero, John Anderson, hears the muted trumpet

of the film’s antagonist, Billy Cross, not the roar of the approaching jet engine carrying

the French jazz star to the tiny outback township of Poona Flat. The boy breaks off an

arm wrestle - the epitome of machismo contestation - because of the aural distraction,

although his opponent, Peter, is entirely unable to hear the music. Insensitive to the sonic

intrusion, Peter wants to compound his hyper-masculine success by wrestling again with

the other arm. Eventually the roar of the jet is heard by the rest of the township and

John’s erstwhile opponent and the crowd of mostly men speed to the airstrip in their

battered trucks and ‘utes’. Unable to appreciate the music that is then performed for

them, however, they leave without even perfunctory applause, with only John

sufficiently taken enough to actually acknowledge to Cross that: “It’s the best thing I

ever heard”. His arm-wrestling rival condescendingly asks with a sneer, “Did you get his

autograph?” Later the still macho adult Peter returns to Poona Flat, driving a red Ferrari,

intent on seducing Anderson’s wife after his own marriage has failed. He is still

insensitive to the music and plugs his ears with his fingers as the band ‘Dingo and the

Dusters’ rehearse. Weir’s attention to selecting pre-recorded music to create acoustic

binaries is absent in de Heer’s work, and may well be a consequence of de Heer’s

apparent preference for using original music with its concomitant absence of history.

Such original compositions, created in collaboration with Michel Legrand and Miles

Davis for Dingo, are examples of Kassabian’s afore-mentioned “assimilating


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identifications ... [which] encourage unlikely identifications” (Hearing Film, 2001, 2,

original emphasis). Compared to Frank Dunne (the handsome, macho hero played by

Mel Gibson in Weir’s Gallipoli [1981]), the pre-pubescent John Anderson is a most

unlikely protagonist for audiences to identify with.


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10.6 An Unconscious Weltanschauung?

In the interview conducted with de Heer he was asked, “Are you conscious, while you’re

making them, of any imprint or signature or world-view that you leave on your films

that indicates a preoccupation with the non-masculine voice?” His response was firmly

in the negative: “I don’t have that consciousness at all and I try to avoid signatures and

imprints” (qtd. in Starrs “The sounds of silence” 2007, 21), although he later makes a

concession to the possibility that there is a signature Weltanschauung to be detected in

his work when he concludes: “But look, you know, it’s up to guys who analyse to

analyse those things” (21). Previously, the question was put to him that the themes he

returns to in his films, the trope of the unheard voices of marginalised peoples, might be

an unconscious expression, and he was immediately in agreement: “Yes. I’m sure. I’m

sure there are degrees of unconscious [expression]” (20). These comments left this

researcher with the conclusion that de Heer, who has an expressed interest in the welfare

of children, unconsciously imparts in his films a coherent Weltanschauung or a

philosophy for living that rejects the antithesis of happy, healthy childhood as typically

represented by Hollywood with its favouring of aggressive, controlling, exploitative

hyper-masculinity. That antithesis is most eloquently illustrated by de Heer’s hyper-

masculine miners and hunters in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, who proudly

assert their machismo, exploitative greed and disdain for mothers (as elaborated in the

fifth paper of the thesis, “’An avowal of male lack’ Sound in The Old Man Who Read

Love Stories” published in Metro Magazine). It is telling that the old man, Bolivar

(Richard Dreyfuss), who lives in peaceful contrast to the ideals of the macho miners,

succeeds by gaining a place and a position with Josephina whereby a happy, healthy

family may be brought up. Like Bubby, we can see a sensitive, caring individual

succeeding despite the hyper-masculine forces around him attempting to gain control

over his life, with the realistic goal of a happy family life being his eventual reward.

Even in the film in which the distinctly un-auteurial move of disavowing authorship

occurs, Dance Me To My Song (1997), de Heer’s distinctive world-view can still be

read, as was argued in the third paper of the thesis, “Enabling the auteurial voice in


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Dance Me To My Song”, published in M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture. However,

it must be noted that in acknowledging and nurturing Heather Rose from the very start

(i.e. as an actor in Bad Boy Bubby [1993] and then as a screenwriter and actor in Dance

Me To My Song [1997]), de Heer was validating her existence in a way that not only

permitted and, indeed, helped to create her authorship, but also contributed to a public’s

perception of his signature world-view. An individual’s concept of self never exists,

according to Georg Hegel, in isolation: it always and only occurs when an Other serves

to validate its existence. He wrote in 1806: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself

when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being

acknowledged” (1977, 111). Despite suffering no intellectual retardation, Rose had spent

much of her life being cared for as if she were mentally disabled. Thus the significance

of de Heer’s acknowledgement of her co-writing and lead acting role cannot be

underestimated. What’s more, Rose is doubly an Other: different from de Heer due to

her disability, she is also an Other due to her gender. Simone de Beauvoir stated in 1974:

“He is the subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other” (2001, xix). Acknowledgement

of the Other, however, usually results from a desire to exclude, by either subordination

or stigmatization, that Other from society. Hegel noted that there is a concomitant “life-

and-death” struggle for dominance (1977, 114), because in acknowledging the Other, “it

has superseded the Other, for it does not see the Other as an essential being, but in the

Other sees its own self. It must supersede this otherness of itself” (111). This struggle for

dominance is not, apparently, even entered into by de Heer, as he leaves his name to

surface only in the final credits, supplanted by the opening title “A film by Heather

Rose”, and in this we see the true nature of his auteurial Weltanschauung. His is a

world-view in which caring for and listening to the vulnerable, be they children, the

disabled or marginalised minority groups is paramount. His film-making champions

those whose voices are not heard, those unlikely protagonists that are not the controlling,

hyper-masculine protagonists so often championed by Hollywood.

This signature interest in giving a voice to the marginalised and unlikely protagonists is

seen throughout most of de Heer’s work: the man-child Bubby succeeds by gaining a

happy, healthy family with children of his own in Bad Boy Bubby; the children of the


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future are nurtured by the Man who has learnt from the Alien woman in Epsilon; the

macho, demeaning father in Alexandra’s Project loses his family and children due to his

insensitivity; the little girl in The Quiet Room eventually sees hope for her family to

heal; the excessively macho men in The Tracker (The Fanatic denies the basic human

rights of Aboriginal Australians) and Ten Canoes (Ridjimiraril tries to deal with conflict

through murder) are executed because they are not good family material (i.e. unlikely to

be caring, nurturing parents); and in Dr. Plonk the good scientist is concerned for the

future of the planet, although the greedy powers in office in 2007 succeed in imprisoning

him. Such a world-view is less obvious in some of de Heer films than in others,

requiring close textual analysis to distil it, and the world-view is not always conveyed to

the audience via aural flourishes. Nevertheless, there is no doubt de Heer is concerned

with the potential for acoustic binaries to reinforce his world-view, although this may

not be a conscious awareness.


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10.7 An unconscious Preoccupation With

Designing Films For and About Sound?

More easily argued than the existence of acoustic binaries in his films is the possibility

that de Heer has a preoccupation with making much of his cinema not just with sound

but narratively about sound: its production and its reception by characters in his films.

Dingo (1991) is a film about an outback Australian jazz trumpeter’s life-long dream of

travelling to France and playing with Billy Cross, his childhood inspiration for becoming

a professional musician. Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is a film about an abused man-child

whose journey of discovery in the new world he is exposed to is led by his ear and

whose eventual success comes about through his becoming a singer in a band. The Quiet

Room (1996) is a film about a child’s refusal to speak because all she hears is the

constant bickering of her parents: her thoughts are communicated to the audience by

voice over narration. Dance Me To My Song (1997) is a film about a woman who

literally cannot speak without the assistance of a computer’s voice synthesiser. The Old

Man Who Read Love Stories (2000) is a film about a man who hears the sorrow of the

‘widowed’ jaguar and the at-risk Amazonian jungle she lives in. The Tracker (2002) is a

film about the subjugated Aboriginal Australian depicted through songs of Indigenous

lament. Alexandra’s Project (2003) is about a man who only hears his neglected wife

when she finally forces him to listen to a self-recorded videotape of herself firing verbal

missiles of feminist critique. Ten Canoes (2006) is a film about Aboriginal Australian

storytelling and the aural record of a people’s history is conveyed to the audience in their

own tongue. Dr. Plonk (2007) is a film about a scientist’s words of warning unheeded

and in which the story is told not with dialogue but with wall-to-wall music. Even the

three films de Heer has only produced or script edited seem to have been chosen because

they inspire thoughts about sound: there is the explicit reference to the aural in the titles

of Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1999) and Mojgan Khadem’s

Serenades (2002) while Ernie Clark’s Spank! (2001) is delightfully onomatopoeic.


209

What is ceaselessly interesting for this researcher about de Heer’s preoccupations with

an aurally imprinted worldview, is that it is probably not a consciously planned

approach. Nevertheless, he did not particularly promote this analysis of his work in the

interview with him. Wollen, however, encourages the analyst to find the auteur’s

signature, “which it is the task of the critic to construct” (1980, 270), no matter how

unconscious and elusive it may be. Richard Maltby wrote of the auteur’s mythic film,

the ‘one film’ an auteur spends her or his life’s work trying to make: “The recurrent

thematic consistencies or binary oppositions from which this myth could be distilled

were usually attached both to the unconscious preoccupations of the director, and to

those of the wider group for which she [sic] was taken to speak” (2003, 505). Herein

may lie a clue to the task of deciphering de Heer’s signature, or “interior meaning”

(Sarris 2000, 132): it is a typically Australian world-view, one that is quite probably

already part of the national collective sub-conscious. Psychoanalytic theory, with its

emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, can certainly contribute to our

understanding of how film sound can position an audience on side with an unlikely

protagonist. It is important to notice, however, that the unconscious operates on other

levels, too. The director is never able to operate in isolation from society, as Barthes and

Foucault argued, but is affected by the community’s ‘collective unconsciousness’, as

Carl Jung or Lévi-Strauss might call it.

As has been hinted at in the thesis’ fourth paper, “Revising the metaphor: Rolf de Heer

as Aussie aural auteur”, Australia is an egalitarian, multicultural, near-utopian society

compared to many more authoritarian or singularly homogenised monocultures.

Heterogeneity and diversity are the bulwarks against which many contemporary

Australians brace themselves when confronted with threats - real or imagined - from

bigger, stronger populations. Within this unconscious Australian Zeitgeist de Heer’s

Weltanschauung is perhaps commonplace,40

40 The Australian Government even lists a set of “Australian values” for prospective immigrants to commit to, which include: “equality of men and women […] a spirit of egalitarianism [… and] equal opportunity” (Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2007).

and, in a way, de Heer fits with Bazin’s

concept of the ideal auteur: a director whose work reflects the historical and cultural


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moment. Present day Australian opinion - if one can be permitted to generalise -

embraces an ideology opposed to the controlling, hyper-masculine heroics of Hollywood

which, if it ever hears the marginalised, too often seeks to exploit or denigrate them.

Likewise, the work of de Heer is relatively immune to Mulvey’s criticism of the typical

Hollywood construction of a patriarchal subjectivity in which the audience is

encouraged via the male gaze (and the male voice) to identify with an active, controlling

hyper-masculine male protagonist, thus voyeuristically reducing female characters to

passive objects of desire. Rather, de Heer affirms the egalitarian Australian construction

of parity between the genders. Nor does de Heer leave his audiences yearning for Flinn’s

“remote, impossibly lost utopias” (1992, 10) by using the insipid soundtracks of

classical Hollywood cinema that function to restrict gender roles. With its many female

role models, Australia and the Australian de Heer seek to refute Modleski’s accusation

of a “patriarchal unconscious” (1990, 58) and as Wollen’s “unconscious catalyst” (1972,

168), de Heer reflects rather than transcends this historical and cultural moment.

The cynic may wonder if perhaps this nation’s collective unconsciousness is no less a

myth than a director’s ‘one film’? De Heer’s unawareness - or disavowal - of an

auteurist signature, as indicated in his interview with this researcher, also sits well

within a post-structuralist criticism such as Lévi-Strauss’, who argued that the ultimate

objective of the human sciences is to dissolve, not constitute ‘man’. He wrote “We are

not therefore claiming to show how men think in myths but rather how the myths think

themselves out in men [sic] and without men’s [sic] knowledge” (qtd. in Leach 1970,

51). Perhaps one can never be sure how much of a world-view detected in a film is the

product of the alleged auteur and her or his unconscious preoccupations or the place and

the times in which she or he lives - but that does not mean the myth is any less

influential, if only insofar as it shapes people’s ideals. Freudian psychoanalysis and

Marxist Althusserian philosophy would posit that critics should pay close attention to

the relationship between the conscious discourse (e.g. the film) and that which is omitted

from it, thus shedding light upon the structural activities that gave rise to the discourse.

The structural activities giving rise to the discourses of de Heer’s films must surely have

at least something to do with the national world-view of this young country Australia,


211

and with this regard, the director’s singular “individual vision” (Grant 2008, 1),

tentatively identified as ‘de Heer’, may not be so personal and unique after all. Until,

that is, it is compared to the visions depicted in so much mainstream cinema from

Hollywood and then we then can see ‘de Heer’ as requiring a particularly unusual

reading strategy, one requiring the use of careful hearing as well as sight. While he may

not be a ‘tonal terrorist’, preferring as he does to make films that are accessible to the

general film-going public, or even as much a music-loving “mélomane” (Gorbman 2007,

149) as pop song-obsessed Tarentino, de Heer nevertheless makes a detectable aural

imprint on his films which furthers a typically Australian and egalitarian ethos.

Barry Keith Grant wrote on how auteurism has historically further moved film studies

forward:

… there is no doubt that auteurism’s great legacy is that it encouraged a more serious examination of the movies beyond mere ‘entertainment’ and helped move the nascent field of film studies beyond its literary beginnings to a consideration of film’s visual qualities (2008, 5).

This thesis has argued for another move forward in the history of film studies: the more

comprehensive examination of an auteur’s use of sound rather than just the film’s

“visual qualities”, focusing on one very Australian director, Rolf de Heer, and this thesis

has carefully heard this particular auteur’s aural world-view. However, this is certainly

not to suggest that the study of auteurism ends here. Indeed, the individual generally

held responsible for bringing auteur analysis to English-speaking academia, Andrew

Sarris, said of his ‘theory’: “[It is] the first step rather than the last stop in solving the

mysteries of the medium” (1990, 21), and aural auteurism is but another step forward.

The next step for de Heer, is impossible to predict. Currie postulated, “What will Rolf de

Heer do next? ... A cowboy musical with horsemen singing in the desert?” (qtd. in Starrs

“De Heer de Sound”, 2009, forthcoming), while academic Brian McFarlane stated, “I

hear it rumoured that Rolf de Heer’s next project is a nudist musical set in Antarctica”

(2008, 41). Perhaps, the source of such conjecture himself is more serious in his

predictions when he says, “I haven’t got the faintest idea what’s next … it could be

anything” (De Heer qtd. in Starrs “Sounds of silence” 2007, 21). Undoubtedly, de Heer


212

is not film-making’s only aural auteur and his signature world-view is not confined to

sound alone: for all we know his next film may be a bold exercise in mise-en-scène.41

41 Indeed, several of de Heer’s films have already boldly experimented with mise-en-scène: for example, the use of 32 cinematographers in Bad Boy Bubby; stop-motion control photography of the night skies and scenery to highlight the fragile beauty of nature in Epsilon; and the use of Peter Coad’s paintings to focus audience’s attention on the horror of the massacres in The Tracker, through, paradoxically, the elision of realistic vision of the violence. In fact, another (less innovative) thesis could have been written utilising standard auteur analysis alone of de Heer’s films. Were it not for the excessive alliteration, this alternative thesis might have been entitled Rolf de Heer Aussie Auteur (And Also Aural Auteur).

An auteur’s pre-occupations and urges to break cinematic conventions means it is

impossible for those who analyse to do so in terms of black and white, for in film art

shades of grey always exist. Nevertheless, as Roland Barthes said, “to listen is the

evangelical verb par excellence” (1985, 250, original emphasis) and this thesis has

shown the value in identifying Rolf de Heer as an aural auteur: a film-maker who wants

us to listen to as much as watch her or his work.


213

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11.2 Rolf de Heer's Filmography. Tail of a Tiger. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. James M. Vernon. Roadshow Entertainment, 1984. Incident at Raven’s Gate. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Marc Rosenberg and Anthony I. Ginnane. Hemdale/International Film Management, 1988. Dingo. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Mark Rosenberg, Giorgio Draskovic and Marie Pascale Osterrieth. Meza, AZ: Spectrum Films, 1991. Bad Boy Bubby. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Domenico Procacci and Giorgio Draskovic. Entertainment Film Distributors, Ltd., 1993.

Epsilon. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Domenico Procacci and Giuseppi Pedersoli. Roadshow Entertainment, 1995. The Quiet Room. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Domenico Procacci, Giuseppi Pedersoli, Sharon Jackson and Fiona Paterson. Fine Line Features, 1996. Dance Me To My Song. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Giuseppe Pedersoli, Domenico Procacci, David Wolfe-Barry and Paola Corvino. Palace Films, 1997. The Old Man Who Read Love Stories. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Michelle de Broca, Julie Ryan, Ernst Goldschmidt, Inaki Nunez, Eddy Wijngaarde. Palace Films, 2000.

The Tracker. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan, Bridget Ikin, Domenico Procacci and Bryce Menzies. Fandango, 2002.

Alexandra’s Project. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan, Domenico Procacci, Antonia Zeccola, Sue Murray and Bryce Menzies. Film Movement, 2003. Ten Canoes. Dir. Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr. Prod. Rolf de Heer, Julie Ryan, Sue Murray, Domenico Procacci, Bryce Menzies, Richard Birrinbirrin, Belinda Scott, Nils Erik Nielsen. Palace Films, 2006.

Dr. Plonk. Dir. Rolf de Heer. Prod. Rolf de Heer and Julie Ryan. Palace Films, 2007.

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Appendix 12.1

Letters of Acceptance for

As-yet-unpublished Papers.


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235


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Appendix 12.2

The Published Interviews: 12.2.1 Rolf de Heer. 12.2.2 Graham Tardif. 12.2.3 Jim Currie.


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halla



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graham tardif & the aural auteur

d bruno starrs on rolf de heer’s composer collaborator

NOT ONLY DOES THE SUBJECT MATTER OF ROLF DE HEER’S FILMS VARY WIDELY, THEIR

SOUNDTRACKS ARE ALSO ALWAYS DIFFERENT AND UNEXPECTED, AND ARE AT TIMES RAISED

TO A LEVEL OF DOMINANCE AMONGST THE NUMEROUS INTERACTIONS INFORMING THE

NARRATIVE. MUSIC SCHOLAR CAT HOPE COMMENTS: “EACH OF DE HEER’S FILMS MERITS A

DETAILED TREATISE ON THE WAY THEY FEATURE INNOVATIVE SOUND IDEAS IN THE

SCRIPTING AND PRODUCTION STAGES, RESULTING IN SOME OF THE MOST CHALLENGING AND

EXCITING CINEMA MADE IN AUSTRALIA TODAY” (WWW.SENSESOFCINEMA.COM). THIS

AUTEUR’S ATTENTION TO THE AURAL IS PERHAPS EXEMPLIFIED BY HIS LONG TERM

COLLABORATION WITH COMPOSER GRAHAM TARDIF, WHOM I INTERVIEWED IN MAY OF THIS

YEAR. TARDIF HAS CREATED THE MUSIC FOR 10 OF DE HEER’S 12 FEATURE FILMS, THE

EXCEPTIONS BEING A CONCESSION TO THE JAZZ ARTISTRY OF THE LEGENDARY MILES DAVIS

AND MICHEL LEGRAND IN DINGO (1991) AND THE INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN PERFORMERS OF

THEIR OWN MUSIC IN TEN CANOES (2006).

Since meeting de Heer when the budding writer/director/producer was still at the Australian Film,

Television and Radio School, and composing the music for his diploma short, The Audition,

Tardif’s subsequent career highs include The Tracker (2002) which he says “was built around the

idea of these paintings [by Peter Coad] and these ten or eleven songs going through the film. To a

large extent, the music informs [de Heer’s] thinking.” Certainly, de Heer is a director attuned to

sound designer Randy Thom’s demand that directors should be “Designing a movie for sound”

(www.filmsound.org), not simply leaving it to the end in the hope it may be somehow improved by

the hasty addition of some great music.

Tardif explains how early he is usually involved by de Heer in the process: “We’d have a lot of

discussions and we’d sit down and talk about what it should be like and we’d plot the film out

together and then I’d come up with the music based on that discussion […] but I’d actually start

serious thinking when there’s a finished script.” I asked Tardif how he communicates melodic ideas


244

to someone without musical training: “We speak in terms of the feeling of the scene or the

underlying emotion that he’s trying to convey rather than discussing diminished sevenths or

anything like that. We can talk musical styles, I mean he’s not musically illiterate to the extent that

we can’t talk about whether it would be a western style or a percussive, or, you know, he’ll

understand that, or whether it’s classical or orchestral or rock.” Thus, Tardif and de Heer decided

early in pre-production for The Tracker that they wanted the feel of a live band fronted by an

Indigenous male singer. The result was Archie Roach later performing the songs—which de Heer

had penned and Tardif had composed—live at a screening of the film in the Melbourne Concert Hall.

Awards were received for best score from the Film Critics Circle and the IF Awards. The songs

serve as an extra character, expressing the sorrow of a subjugated people, and Tardif’s music

positively charges the text of the screen’s image.

But Tardif’s scores are not guilty of simply retelling the story or redundantly repeating what the

dialogue or visuals have already made clear. He illustrates his occasional intention to juxtapose

conflicting emotions by referring to a scene in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000), a film

characterised by a lush, epic score performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and a 40-voice

choir: “Where they were rowing back across the river after the leopard had been killed, now that

was something where I think I used music against what was going on in the action to give a lot

more depth to the scene, rather than just replicate what’s going on in the action, to juxtapose the

visuals which were quite fast paced, but the music was quite slow and glorious in a way. Rather

than give a sense of the pace of the boats and the rowing it was more a sense of what the

homecoming actually meant: it was an achievement and a victory but at the same time, because the

death of the leopard was not something the old man had wanted to happen, it was a tragedy as

well.”

Alexandra’s Project (2003) had an entirely different kind of score. Within a minimalist, synthesised

soundscape, the non-diegetic music evokes a sense of tense foreboding that maps the

deterioration of suburban family life. Tardif identifies this as one of his favourite works because

“unlike other films in which I had multiple tones and dynamics and instruments to work with, I

wanted to push the tension with the minimum tonal range that would actually work with the

minimum palette possible, so it was probably my most experimental film.” With such a spare,


245

unobtrusive, electronic score, ambient sounds like the turn of a key in a deadlock take on an almost

menacing aspect and the hyper-reality of these sounds, amidst the relative silence, informs the

audience that Steve, the beleaguered husband, is very isolated and disconnected from any outside

help. The sound scenarios in Alexandra’s Project transcend the traditional role of the soundtrack of

merely supporting the onscreen image. The auditory elements of the film’s metallic timbre highlight

not just Steve’s mental terror but also further the depiction of the suburban brick veneer house as

family prison. The integration of all the aural ingredients communicates these ideas effectively, and

rather than following the eye, they lead it.

In 2007, de Heer returned to Tardif to compose for his slapstick silent comedy, Dr. Plonk, which

Tardif identifies as another film score he is proud of “because it was 90 minutes of wall-to-wall

music.” Performed by Melbourne band The Stiletto Sisters, the combination of violin, piano

accordion, double bass and piano is beautifully lively, and one senses this black and white homage

to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin would not have worked as well with de Heer’s original idea of

accompaniment by a single Wurlitzer organ, regardless of any period authenticity it may have lent.

But Tardif acknowledges the expense involved in composing and recording original music for films

rather than pre-recorded songs, “Whenever you go into a studio you have to be really prepared

because of the cost of time—$50,000 a day for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. If you’re not

‘there’ when you go into the studio you’re just spending studio time rewriting and that’s really

counterproductive. With The Stiletto Sisters I worked with them for a week after the score had been

written...we got the score right and then went into the studio for three days to do the recording.”

De Heer’s reliance on original music is in stark contrast to the Australian film industry’s tendencies,

as identified by Rebecca Coyle: “In the period from the so-called renaissance of Australian film that

occurred in the 1970s, there have been two identifiable ‘eras’ in film music. In the first period,

orchestral arrangements were frequently used [… as opposed to] the subsequent era, when

Australian film followed an international tendency to include popular music in soundtracks”

(“Introduction: Tuning up”, Screen Scores, AFTRS, Sydney, 1997). But de Heer’s bucking of the

trend is not surprising, for as Tardif puts it: “With his combination of the sound and the music, he

is an aural auteur.”

RealTime issue #85 June-July 2008 pg. 27


246

“De Heer de Sound: Jim Currie on designing sound for Rolf de Heer” By D. Bruno Starrs. Starrs:

What do you think is Rolf de Heer’s ideological stance in his films?

Currie:

Well, if you’re going to examine Rolf de Heer’s ideological stance, and you can only do

it in bits, the first bit you wish to examine is crew selection. That’s a fundamental base.

It’s almost important as, from my perspective, almost important as the casting of his

work. Because the two form the building blocks that enable him to have the realization

of his script, of his idea, of his dream. He’s a dreamer. He dreams wonderful things.

When we did Bad Boy Bubby [1993] for example, I never questioned that it was a

creative work that somebody had come out of their head and then put it all down.

However, when we went to Venice [Film Festival], there was a suggestion from the

interviewers: “Did you have a problem with your mother? Was there something in your

past life or in your childhood that initiated the whole thing of Bad Boy Bubby?” No, of

course not, it’s just a creative work. It just came out of his head.

I just thought I’d toss that in.

Starrs:

Talking about particular films of Rolf’s, with Dr. Plonk [2007] he’s made a silent film.

Do you think that Rolf de Heer doesn’t care about sound?

Currie:

Absolutely not. No, Rolf de Heer’s care for sound is possibly the highest that you could

imagine. And he involves himself in all levels of the sound work as well. Apart from Dr.

Plonk, which he brought through as a musical score, I mean it’s a silent film in the sense

that it was shot as a silent film, but it has a musical score that accompanies the work. We

discussed how the audience would receive the music. What intention should we have in


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trying to create the idea of an old time musical? So, for example, we used various

combinations of reverb. So although we only had these conversations right at the end of

the film, in a short space of time, well, having worked with Rolf for 20 years, it was

quite possible because we’re both manoeuvring and moving in the same plane.

Another example: the jumping off point for Rolf and I into a different creative world

was Bad Boy Bubby. The first third of the film were recorded by Rolf himself. He knew

what he needed, so he went off with a recorder and a mike, by himself, into the factory

area and found the sound that he wanted and came back and said to me “Here, work with

this.”

I can’t think of many directors that first of all have that level of involvement or have the

skills to pick up the recording gear and say, “Yep, I’ll be back”, and off he went and

found stuff and said, “Look, here, work with this”.

Before that there was [Incident at] Raven’s Gate [1988]. Rolf came into the edit suite

just mucking around, and he looks - in those days there were dubbing charts with the

tracks all laid out, streamers on them - and he said, “Good, very good.”

He said, “What are these tracks?”

“Stereo tracks.”

He said, “There’s only two of them.”

And I said, “Yeah, that’s right, everything else is in line. The other hundred and so

tracks in line.”

And he said, “I thought this was Dolby Stereo. Why are there only two tracks in

Stereo?”


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So, already, at Raven’s Gate, at that early stage of his career, he was beginning to

question the medium and the method, and incorporating that into his thinking.

“Why are there only two stereo tracks if this is called Dolby Stereo?” “Where is the . . .”

So then we began a discussion and I guess we learnt from each other over 20 years.

So when it comes to things like The Tracker [2002], we knew pretty well what we were

going to do beforehand and the basis of everything that we’d learnt and put together

resolved itself in Ten Canoes [2006].

Starrs:

Back to Bad Boy Bubby, he used 32 cinematographers but only one sound designer,

yourself, and one composer, Graham Tardif. Why do you think he was prepared to

experiment with the vision and not the sound?

Currie:

Oh, we were experimenting with the sound. Oh yeah. The lead actor, Nick Hope, had

two microphones ala the binaural setup, and that was Rolf’s idea. People gave me the

credit for it. And I said “No, it’s not my idea. It’s Rolf’s.” Rolf road-tested the

microphones. We put it on the hat that he wears. And we went off and went into traffic,

we went into shops, we went around the factory area, in and out of buildings, with me

trailing behind with a recorder. So, oh yeah, Bad Boy Bubby was a big experiment in

sound right from the start. And then we read in a magazine that there was this new MS

microphone from Neumann in Germany. It was a studio microphone, but it wasn’t meant

for field work, so we adapted it and stretched it to the limit to use it in the field. So it

was one big experimentation all the way through. You couldn’t have 32 recordists, it

would be a complete mess. You needed continuity, it was still experimentation, of which

he and I were the main protagonists in that experimentation, but you couldn’t have 32

recordists, as you could with the pictures. See the DOPs never got the script before or

after, they only got their own scene. Poor dears. But they could light it any way they

liked.


249

Starrs:

Academics, Anna Hickey-Moody and Melissa Iocco, suggested in Metro Magazine that

the label ‘aurator’ be used for a person who goes to one of Rolf de Heer’s films. Aurator.

What do you think of that term?

Currie:

What does “aurator” mean?

Starrs:

Oh, okay. Rolf was also a bit dumbfounded with that term. Well, they suggested that for

the person in the audience of a Rolf de Heer film, sound is more important than vision.

Rather than being a spectator, they are an ‘aurator’.

Currie:

Cinema overall is 70% sound. Because your ears are far more developed than your eyes.

You cannot stop yourself hearing, even if you put your finger in your ears, you still hear.

Because it goes through the cheek bones and everything. But eyes are . . . you can shut

your eyes and that’s it.

See, the interplay of music with an audience is so special because no matter what the

picture does, the music can take them to a new way of considering the image. It’s a

transporter. And I regard atmospheres as being on the same continuum. They transport

people. They fix the audience. Whether it’s done intellectually or whether it’s sub-

conscious, I don’t know. It takes them and puts them in a special spot.

Starrs:

Do you think Rolf de Heer’s films give a voice to marginalised people? People who

otherwise wouldn’t have a voice - women, children, Aboriginal people, for example?


250

Currie:

If you’d said to me ‘Does Rolf de Heer show great concern with the environment and

the damage done to the environment by the human race?’, I would have said definitely,

‘Yes’. Does he give a voice to marginalised people? Yeah, you could argue that. Well

there was the lass with cerebral palsy in the wheelchair [in Dance Me To My Song

(1997)]. I mean, yeah. That’s Heather Rose. There’s the Aboriginal people from

Ramingining [in Ten Canoes]. But what it did for the people from Ramingining is it

gave them a memory. It projects: ‘Yes, they are humorous, they are intellectual, they are

an embodiment of their 40,000 years of culture’. Yeah. They’re very proud. They

thanked us for assisting them to have a memory for their Aboriginal youth. So that’s

how I view Ten Canoes. I mean Ten Canoes was a huge responsibility, because if it

wasn’t accepted by the white society, then we would have made something only for

ourselves and the Aboriginal community, but its aim was to rest as a document with the

Aboriginal community and also go out to the wider world to inform, to entertain. We

weren’t sure of that bit because it’s in Ganalbingu and [laughing] there’s not a white

person in it!

You know even the ‘Making Of’ documentary [The Balanda and the Bark Canoes (dir.

Molly Reynolds, Tania Nehme and Rolf de Heer 2006] was careful that there were only

flashes of white people, the rest was focused by Molly Reynolds on the craftsmanship of

the canoe making and how Ten Canoes evolved.

But, you only underestimate Rolf de Heer at your peril. I can tell you. And don’t try and

second-guess him. Because who would have thought, 15 minutes after we’d finished the

last bit of Ten Canoes, the Dolby guy had just left, Rolf said “I’ve got a bit of an

apology to make to you, mate.”

I said, “Oh. What’s that?”

He said, “My next film is going to be a silent film.”


251

Well, I thought it was one of his Dutch jokes. He’s a very good jokester. He keeps a

straight face. But it was true! [laughing]. So you wouldn’t have suspected that, would

you? Then, during the making of Dr Plonk,, I said to him “So the next one is going to be

a musical? A cowboy musical with horsemen singing in the desert?”

It’s not: “I’m going to do something totally out of left field.” Since Bad Boy Bubby, Rolf

has never taken a backward step. He’s always gone to something new, something that

challenges him. So it’s not a “I’m going to do something right off the wall this time, I’m

going to do something unexpected like Alexandra’s Project [2003].” We went from The

Tracker, Alexandra’s Project, Ten Canoes, to Dr Plonk.” I mean, it’s, it’s just who he is.

Starrs:

Do you think Rolf de Heer is a particularly macho sort of director?

Currie:

No, definitely not. No. No. In fact, because he came to Australia from Holland via

Indonesia, and hardly spoke any English, he used to get beaten up at school. But he had

a brother. Big boy. And his brother used to wait outside the school and keep all the

larrikins and the boofheads away - I mean that was Australia in the 60s and 70s when if

you looked different, or you came from an ethnic background you were, you know, a

wog, mate. You know? You’d go to the footy and eat pies and pasties. Is he tough? Yes,

he’s tough. But, he’s mentally tough. As in a macho guy? Does that mean when he goes

into the desert, he walks into the desert without any shoes and socks on? Or in South

America, he walks through the swamp … I mean in South America he walked through

the jungle … you know, he just went straight off into the … Brave as all getout. Is that

macho? I don’t know. I think to put a term onto a filmmaker that he is a ‘macho

director’, is not part of what the inner drive of being a filmmaker is all about. And where

he is a particularly adventurous filmmaker, mentally adventurous, and physically he

backs that up by going into the field … and he won’t do anything that … he won’t risk

the film crew in a way that some other producers and directors do. He will be there, like

in Ten Canoes, he was there in the water, with the crocodiles – incidentally I was in the


252

boat – but he was in the water, with the DOP and with all the other lighting people and

people that needed to be in the water to film the action, so if that’s being macho, yes,

maybe he is. I don’t see the word macho in my head, he’s just a filmmaker and exposes

the intellectual and physical attributes of him achieving the film, achieving the idea, and

he’ll do it himself.

Starrs:

At the gym that I train at, there are young guys who go to the cinema a lot. They like

films with action and car chases and explosions and blood and guts, and not many of

them have seen a Rolf de Heer film. Why do you think Rolf doesn’t make films for that

demographic?

Currie:

I can only answer for why Rolf doesn’t make violent, or a different type of genre film,

those car chases and smash and grab things. Years ago he was offered a large amount of

money, that would have set him up for life, to do one of the Chainsaw Massacre films.

And me included said to him, “Well, why are you not doing this? You’d get a million

US or whatever they pay these directors …”

And he said, “Because I can’t show it to my children.”

Now that was that and we’ve never discussed it again. And he knows that I don’t like

violence in films, I don’t like mistreatment of children in film. I back off that. I’ve not

done some films because, whether it makes any difference to the filmmaker or not,

because they have … in the script there is denigration of children. Not interested. “Oh

well, this is a demonstration …” No. You can do those demonstrations in real-world

documentaries. It’s not in my lexicon, or Rolf’s, to do so.

Starrs:

What do you think an auteur is? And is Rolf de Heer an auteur?


253

Currie:

Oh yeah, is Rolf de Heer an auteur? Yes, he is. Absolutely. And there are only two of

them in Australia. They’re both Dutch, for whatever that means. There’s Rolf and Paul

Cox. And to my mind, because I’ve worked with them both - for Paul, 30 years, and

Rolf, 20, only because Paul’s older - they are the only Australian filmmakers that can lay

claim to being auteurs. An auteur to me is somebody who captures the whole idea of

filmmaking, has control of every area, writes the script, is involved in the production and

does not seek to create a mountain, but seeks to create a small gem that embodies the

human spirit and will be uplifting for the future generations. Whether that’s correct by

the academics, I’ve no idea, Bruno.

Starrs:

It is a very loaded term.

Currie:

Well used, isn’t it?

Starrs:

It’s well used. And often misused. And sort of misunderstood. The people who coined it,

the French critics in the 1950s, were primarily interested in the visual signature of a

filmmaker.

Currie:

That’s right.

Starrs:

Perhaps because after WWII, when they’d been denied most of the Hollywood films,

they were suddenly swamped with Hollywood films of which sound, because it was in a

foreign language, was of a lesser consideration to them.

Do you think that Rolf de Heer is an ‘aural’ auteur?


254

Currie:

Yeah. Because, let me give you an example of Rolf de Heer’s measure of the integration

of sound. So if he’s an aural auteur . . . this is when we were in South America, with The

Old Man Who Read Love Stories, we were having a meeting, a multi-national crew,

there are Dutch, there are Belgiums, there are French, there are Australians. And at that

meeting, Rolf stood up and says “One more thing, in a lot of this film, the sound is

actually more important than the picture.”

I heard the DOP fall off his chair.

And that would have been a stunning revelation to everybody else for Rolf to say

publicly what he and I discuss, and of course the Australian sound crew suddenly were

walking on air, because the director had stood up in front of the whole 60 or 70 people

and said that.

Starrs:

So how does that make him an aural auteur? An auteur of sound?

Currie:

He’d already heard the jungle. He’d understood its interrelationships. He understood its

interrelationship with the principal character, which was the old man [Richard

Dreyfuss]. He knew how the jungle affected the old man and the jaguar, and their

relationship. So he was already building those things in his head before we’d even

started. He and I had been to all the locations in South America and investigated them.

And when you know someone well you just talk about this or that. You know, “It looks

good.” “Yeah.” “Well that’s a good sound, yeah, we should get some night sounds,

right.”

We built up this expectation between us that I’ll bring back from these locations a

catalogue of sounds available. From The Tracker we came back with about 8 hours of

different sounds of Arkaroola [in South Australia]. I mean that’s the truth in location that


255

the audience has, they hear and feel and taste the realness of the location. The same with

Old Man in South America and the same with Ten Canoes. There would have been

about 16 hours of material and we used every bit of it in the sound design. And that’s

Rolf and I, that’s our expectations, that’s what we do. That’s an aural auteur. The

dialogue that he uses is very carefully chosen, he understands and he likes the dialogue

to be from the location and not post sync. In fact, I can’t think of a film where we’ve

done much post sync. We did one word from The Tracker. We didn’t do any on

Alexandra’s Project. Dr Plonk didn’t have any. No. And so I think that’s quite a

justifiable term to use with Rolf, yeah.


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Appendix 12.3 Table 1.

Protagonists and Antagonists - Their Outcomes

in the Films of Rolf de Heer.

Film Title Protagonist Protagonist’s

Outcome

Antagonist Antagonist’s

Outcome

Tail of a Tiger

(1984)

“Orville” – a

sensitive, insecure

juvenile male with

a dream.

Realisation of his

dream of building

and flying a

biplane.

“Spike” – a

bullying juvenile

male.

Frustration and

loss of face due to

his victim’s

success.

Incident at

Raven’s Gate

(1988)

“Eddie” – an

insensitive adult

male.

Becomes more

sensitive to the

needs of others.

“Richard” – a

controlling jealous

adult male.

Loses the love of

his wife.

Dingo (1991) “John ‘Dingo’

Anderson” – a

sensitive juvenile

male with a dream.

Becomes a happily

married family

man and achieves

his boyhood dream

of playing trumpet

alongside his jazz

idol.

“Peter” – an

insensitive

juvenile male who

cannot hear the

music and wants

to continue arm

wrestling.

Becomes a

successful

businessman but

fails in his

marriage and fails

to seduce Dingo’s

wife.

Bad Boy Bubby

(1993)

“Bubby” – a

sensitive,

inexperienced

male man-child.

Becomes a happily

married man with

a wife and two

playful children.

“Flo” and “Pop” –

Bubby’s

insensitive,

uncaring parents.

Murdered by

Bubby.

Epsilon (1995) “She” – an

ecologically

sensitive adult

female (from the

planet Epsilon).

Rescued and

returned to her

home planet.

“He” – a macho

and ecologically

insensitive adult

male.

Becomes a

champion for the

environment.

The Quiet Room

(1996)

An un-named

juvenile female.

Forces her parents

to attempt

reconciliation.

Her squabbling

parents.

Realise their

faults.

Dance Me To My

Song (1997)

“Julia” – a well-

meaning, sensitive,

woman-child.

Wins the love of a

caring man.

“Madelaine” – an

insensitive, selfish,

adult female.

Unable to win the

love of several

men.


257

The Old Man Who

Read Love Stories

(2000)

“Antonio Bolivar”

– a sensitive adult

male who tries to

live in harmony

with the jungle.

Wins the love of

Josephina.

The “Slimy Toad”

Mayor – who

wants to exploit

the jungle.

Loses the love of

Josephina.

The Tracker

(2002)

“The Tracker” – a

sensitive,

respectful, adult

male.

Gains his freedom

from the troopers.

“The Fanatic” – an

insensitive, racist

murderer.

Is executed for his

crimes.

Ten Canoes

(2006)

Dayindi – a young

man on the verge

of adulthood.

Learns not to covet

Minygululu’s

wife.

Minygululu – a

wise tribal elder.

Quells potential

rivalry through

storytelling.

Dr. Plonk (2007) “Dr. Plonk” – a

sensitive,

environmentally

aware adult male.

Mistaken for a

terrorist and

imprisoned.

Politicians who

refuse to believe

the predictions of

apocalypse.

They continue

heading for

environmental

apocalypse.


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12.4 Ethics Application and Approval.


259


260


261


262


263

Documents

AURAL AUTEUR: SOUND IN THE FILMS OF ROLF DE …Aural Auteur: Sound in the Films of Rolf de Heer. iii LIST OF PUBLICATIONS FORMING PART OF THE THESIS. 1. Starrs, D. Bruno (2007). “The