Cirrus@Austlit

'A recent spate of remakes of film titles dating from the Australian cinema revival in the 1970s suggests a renewed interest in this significant corpus. It has a deeper resonance insofar as the original films also represent landmarks in Australian Gothic aesthetics. In two of these productions, Storm Boy (2019) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018), the renewal of the Gothic discourses and the allied figure of the child are inflected by an optimistic vein of “post-millennial Gothic”. It is apparent in the styling and in the post-feminist and cultural consciousness of both productions, and the sense in which both remakes provide resolutions to the earlier films and embed layers of contemporary social pedagogy in the revised Gothic scenarios. Both of these productions suggest a recognition that the films of the cinema revival may not speak to a current generation, and this dissonance is particularly apparent in the revised figure of the lost child in the remakes.' (Publication abstract)

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