Australian Video Art Archive

Peter Callas

 

Night's High Noon: An Anti-Terrain

00:06:12 1988

Created amidst Australia's 1988 bicentenary celebrations, Night's High Noon proposes a very different interpretation of recent Australian history and identity. For Australia's Aboriginal peoples, the Bicentenary represented two hundred years of dispossession from their land, cultural destruction and racial prejudice. Proposing an 'antiterrain' or flipside to stereotyped notions of Australian identity, abstract ambient imagery is intercut with figurative references, including the image of outlaw and national hero Ned Kelly. Representations of indigenous peoples allude to the appropriation and objectification of Aboriginal peoples, their artforms and traditions, in white Australian popular culture. Truth and meaning are similarly.
- KENT, Rachel, Peter Callas: Initialising a History Selected Video Works 1980-1999, in Alessio Cavallaro (ed), Peter Callas: Initialising History. Sydney: dLux Media Arts, 1999.

Music by: Graeme Revel.

Produced with the Assistance of the Australian Film Commission.

DVD available.