The soundtracks of Australian transcultural cinema: re-sounding the past

Abstract

This thesis addresses a gap in current scholarship on Australian cinema by highlighting the role of the soundtrack in what I call an Australian transcultural cinema. I argue that the iconic sounds belonging to the national cinema from the 1970s and 1980s are variously repositioned, silenced and manipulated in the more recent transcultural cinema in ways that critically re-sound Australia’s history. I develop three concepts – the sonic fetish, sonic artefact and sonic spectre – that codify and help explain why sounds hold certain meaning and are stored in bodily ways and in memory. Providing a method for listening to the soundtracks of transcultural cinema, I argue that soundtracks need to be broken down and listened to as sound events and that silence should be recognised for the powerful role it plays in a film soundtrack.

By examining the development of the film sound industry in Australia, I highlight the reasons why the soundtrack is an integral element in recent Australian films. My argument is supported by interview material from interviews I conducted with some of Australia’s most respected filmmakers, sound professionals, educators and industry personnel for this project. To support my findings I provide a series of close listenings of films that include: 'Walkabout' (Roeg 1971), 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' (Weir 1975), 'The Sound of One Hand Clapping' (Flanagan 1998), 'Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy' (Moffatt 1989), and 'Samson and Delilah' (Thornton 2009b).

I conceptualise Australian transcultural cinema as a genre that draws from global and cultural influences, where boundaries are blurred and meanings take on new shapes and forms. I highlight how this cinema makes use of the sonic semantic markers and syntactic elements of the road movie, melodrama and Gothic genres to tell stories that cut across the Australian landscape and challenge ideals and representations of Australian society, home and family. I argue that the Gothic, operating as a mode and generated by the soundtrack, underpins the melodrama and the road movie in Australian transcultural cinema.

Through my examination of sound in Australian cinema, I argue that, largely driven by the soundtrack, Australian transcultural cinema generates and can resurrect sociological hauntings and in doing so, sounds out Australia’s ghostly remains.