Post-colonial New Zealand cinema : Gothic aesthetics and the repression of Pākehā violence in New Zealand in Fantail
Loading...
Other Title
Authors
Lynch, Caitlin
Author ORCID Profiles (clickable)
Degree
Grantor
Date
2017-12-21
Supervisors
Type
Journal Article
Ngā Upoko Tukutuku (Māori subject headings)
Keyword
New Zealand films
post-colonial
women in film
Fantail (Film - 2013)
gothic aesthetics
colonialism
violence
historical representations
identity
Māori in film
film studies
post-colonial
women in film
Fantail (Film - 2013)
gothic aesthetics
colonialism
violence
historical representations
identity
Māori in film
film studies
ANZSRC Field of Research Code (2020)
Citation
Lynch, C. (2017). Post-colonial New Zealand Cinema: Gothic aesthetics and the repression of Pākehā violence in Fantail. Pūrātoke: Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Creative Arts and Industries, 1(1), 7-16. Unitec ePress. Retrieved from: http://www.unitec.ac.nz/epress
Abstract
Fantail (2013), written by Sophie Henderson and directed by Curtis Vowell, has not yet received scholarly attention for its relationship to several dominant trends in New Zealand cinema. This essay examines Fantail’s protagonist Tania as a new articulation of the gothic Pākehā woman in identity crisis, a trope embodied in films such as The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993). Through Tania, Fantail acknowledges the harmful consequences of Pākehā repression of colonial violence, ignorance of Māori historical disenfranchisement and eroticisation and appropriation of Māori culture.
This reading models how gothic aesthetics, adaptations of past tropes, and restricted narrative subjectivity can function within film as tools of critique, allowing Fantail to simultaneously perpetuate and criticise dominant representational trends in New Zealand’s national cinema.
Publisher
Unitec ePress
Permanent link
DOI
Copyright holder
Unitec ePress
Copyright notice
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License