Post-colonial New Zealand cinema : Gothic aesthetics and the repression of Pākehā violence in New Zealand in Fantail

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.