John A Douglas
Screen Test # 4 Australiana
00:02:26 2006
Douglas reinterprets a scene from the 1971 Nicholas Roeg film, Walkabout. He has chosen the stylised aesthetic elements of the father’s suicide scene transforming them into an iconic image that reflects a tension of uneasiness. His interpretation is highly subjective and personal, yet it evokes the nightmare of the Australian dream as a lived childhood experience. If we take the entire opening sequence of Walkabout as an account of a middle-class Australian male who has it all (an apartment on the harbour, swimming pool and children in private schools, etc.), then we can see the attempted murder and successful suicide as a metonymy of the frustration of trying to keep it all together. The suicide in this image depicts a controlled and internalised frustration, characteristic of the quietness of suburbia and evokes a feeling of uncertainty characteristic of our present times.
DVD available