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'The re-release of Ted Kotcheff's 1971 film Wake in Fright was a highlight of the 2009 Sydney International Film Festival. The film had been 'lost' for decades but in the early twenty-first century, members of the original production team began searching for surviving copies. In one of those truth as stranger than fiction turns, a copy was found in a vault in Pittsburgh 'marked for destruction and imminent disposal'. Dedicated collaborative work between film technicians, digital experts, sound engineers and film archivists meant a restored version was produced and screened at Cannes and Sydney in mid-2009. Almost forty years after the original film had opened in Sydney, Paris and London, it resurfaced to much acclaim...The re-released version of Wake in Fright re-envisions Australia for a new generation of viewers. Though it was made decades ago, to watch it today is to engage with new ways of understanding Australian-ness. The shifts in cultural norms around attitudes to the environment, to Indigenous rights and culture, to gender relations, sexual relations, and taboos and prejudices, mean that the same scenes shot in Broken Hill in 1970 resonate in both familiar and alien ways.' (p. 388)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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‘A Heart That Could be Strong and True’ : Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright as Queer Interior
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-15) 'In ' "A heart that could be strong and true": Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright as queer interior' Monique Rooney presents a compelling reading of the complicated relations between self and other, interior and exterior, in the iconic, troubling text of Wake in Fright. Her discussion focuses on the play of aurality and lyricism in the novel's account of outsider relations, and proposes a reading that draws on Michael Snediker's 'emphasis on a potentially joyful Freud' in classic accounts of queer melancholy in order to attend to what she determines is a 'critique of processes of masculinist dis-identification' in the novel. This important discussion works to reanimate critical consideration not only of a significant and neglected text, but also of broader debates around the reach and nature of metropolitan subjectivities in post- WWII literature in Australia.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 3)
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‘A Heart That Could be Strong and True’ : Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright as Queer Interior
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-15) 'In ' "A heart that could be strong and true": Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright as queer interior' Monique Rooney presents a compelling reading of the complicated relations between self and other, interior and exterior, in the iconic, troubling text of Wake in Fright. Her discussion focuses on the play of aurality and lyricism in the novel's account of outsider relations, and proposes a reading that draws on Michael Snediker's 'emphasis on a potentially joyful Freud' in classic accounts of queer melancholy in order to attend to what she determines is a 'critique of processes of masculinist dis-identification' in the novel. This important discussion works to reanimate critical consideration not only of a significant and neglected text, but also of broader debates around the reach and nature of metropolitan subjectivities in post- WWII literature in Australia.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 3)