Journal articles on the topic 'Philippine Mythology'

The Philippines is one of the countries rich in culture, characterized by different literary art forms, such as indigenous rituals and folk narratives that are passed on to future generations. However, although there have been recurring studies about these literary pieces, some narratives and fields of literary studies are being neglected, such as Philippine Mythology. Yet, the preservation and recognition of Philippine myths may be resolved through the copious integration of these myths into the academe. In this article, the author introduced the state of literature, mainly folk narratives, in Philippine schools and the nature of myths, including the different mythological creatures present in them. There are many discussions concerning the appreciation of these texts from different articles and studies from prominent authors, yet reliving these myths remains not progressive. Schools are one of the most accessible yet trusted sources of facts and important learning, which also are home for young generations who are supposed to be heirs of these value-laden artifacts.

For the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (apt) (2015–16), Sydney-based artists Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra collaborated to present Ex Nilalang, a series of filmic and live portraits exploring Philippine mythology and marginalized identities. The artists’ shared Filipino ancestry, attachments to the Filipino diasporic community, and investigations into “Philippine-ness” offer obvious cultural connections to the “Asia Pacific” concerns of the apt. However, their aesthetic interests in inhabiting fictional spaces marked by the “fantastic” and the “monstrous”—alongside the lived reality of their critical queer positions and life politics—complicate any straightforward identification. If the Philippine archipelago and island continent of Australia are intersecting cultural contexts for their art, the artists’ queering of identity in art and life emphasizes a range of cultural orientations informing subjectivities, always under negotiation and transformation, and at once both the product of and in excess of these (island) territories.

An integral inculturated faith is anchored to the Filipino cultural heritage and identity. Primal cosmic beliefs and practices carried the holistic customs of stewardships towards God’s creation where it embodied the union and mutuality of the natives to nature rather than control and subordination. The research utilized primary materials written by Spanish ethnographers in the 16th-17th century. Although their observations were from the colonizers’ perspectives, it still revealed beliefs and practices at that time common among early Filipinos. One needs to filter and decipher those accounts to unearth early Filipinos experiences of oikenomous. Although the study was limited to the Tagalogs, still the dynamics of power-relations between the inhabitants and nature were demonstrated using the lenses of Foucault’s discourse on power. The findings of the research could have implications to inculturated faith given the open atmosphere of the Church for its renewed evangelization that includes stewardship towards God’s creation where harmony and communion with Mother Earth strengthens our bonds with God and find each other in a place we truly call a home.ReferencesPre-hispanic influence on filipino culture. (1958). Sunday Times Special Issue on the Foundations of Filipino Culture, pp. 2-5.Two lectures: Critique and power. (1998).Blair, E. and Robertson, A. (1903-1990). The Philippine islands, 1493-1898: explorations by early navigators, Descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest conditions with european nations to the close of the nineteenth century. (eds. at annots. ), 55. 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Relacion de las Yslas Filipinas. 5, 38-252. Madrid: B & RMadness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. (1965) London: Random House Inc.Morga, A. (1609). Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. 15, 25-288. Mexico: B & RNational Historical Commission. (1887). Coleccion de documents ineditos de ultramar, Madrid.Notes on Philippine Divinities. (1968). Asian Studies.Pastells, P. (1925) Historia general de Filipinas in catalogo de los documentos relativos alas Islas Filipinas. Barcelona.Pigafetta, A. (1522). The first voyage around the world. 33, 24-266. Madrid: B & RPlasencia, J. (1589). Customs of the Tagalogs. 7, 173-198. Manila: B & RPre-history of the Philippines. (1967). Manila: National Museum.Ramos, M. (1990). Philippine myths, legends and folktales. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.San Agustin, G. (1998) Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas: 1565-1615. (Bilingual Edition.) Translated by Luis Antonio Maneru. 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This study looks into the dynamics of fantasy in the so-called telepantasya or pantaserye, particularly in how it uses the concept of space. It shows how the worlds of reality and fantasy are differentiated in these locally-produced television series. Encantadia and Majika on GMA 7, and Super Inggo and Da Adventures of Pedro Penduko on ABS-CBN 2 are analyzed for this purpose. An in-depth analysis of these shows leads the writer to conclude that there are many elements of “fantastic narratives” adapted from the West, particularly the dichotomy between reality and fantasy. This dichotomy is not found in Philippine mythology, where the “mysterious” (kababalaghan) coexists with and impinges on the real.

The article deals with the issues of physical and geographical features of the territory of Mount Vottovaara (which is the highest point of the West Karelian Upland) and its geological history. It is compared with one of the most famous attractions in the UK – Stonehenge Jam. Hypotheses of the origin and formation of this area are presented. The mountain keeps a large number of secrets, the main and most interesting among which are up to 1,600 individual stones located on its top – components of an ancient cult complex. They can be fully considered seids, many of which resemble unusual stone buildings, and according to a number of researchers who played a cult role and belonged to the culture of the ancient Sami. One of the hypotheses of the origin of the Votovaara seids connects them with the manifestation of glacial exaration processes during the periods of ancient glaciations. Another explains the presence of numerous traces of paleoseismic dislocations by a strong catastrophic palaeo-earthquake that occurred at the end of the Preboreal – the beginning of the Boreal period due to the degradation of the Late Valdai (Ostashkovsky) glaciation and the тrapid removal of glacial load. There is also a hypothesis, partly related to the ancient mythology of a Worldwide Flood, or a catastrophic flood of universal scale. According to one version, it could have happened due to the fall of a large meteorite in the area of the Philippine Sea. The tangential impact of the meteorite led to a shift of the solid earth’s crust along the surface of the liquid mantle, and the shock wave passing through the earth’s crust (compression wave) formed a ridge on the territory of modern Karelia, which includes Vottovaara. Finally, there is a version of the formation of the massif as a result of a powerful volcanic eruption that occurred several million years ago.

Cet article critique la conception du mythe littéraire chez Philippe Sellier et Pierre Brunel, pour lesquels les mythes littéraires sont issus des mythes ethno-religieux et n’ont pas leur source dans la littérature. Cette définition apparaît comme ethnocentrée et n’est pas applicable universellement. La Perse présente trois périodes mythologiques : l’ère pré-sassanide, l’ère post-sassanide persane et l’ère post-sassanide shi’ite. La mythologie shi’ite est une mythologie littéraire. Elle possède à la fois des caractéristiques du mythe littéraire et des caractéristiques du mythe ethno-religieux. Il s’agit donc d’une mythologie qui est née de la littérature, avec auteur et datation, mais en même temps elle fonde une vérité et instaure la civilisation shi’ite. La mythologie shi’ite ne peut s’inscrire dans la définition de Brunel-Sellier, et il faut donc définir le mythe littéraire d’une autre manière. Cette nouvelle définition doit prend sa source dans la littérature, et être capable de comprendre tous les mythes littéraires du monde. Ce que le mythe littéraire de Brunel-Sellier ne parvient pas à faire.

Cet article critique la conception du mythe littéraire chez Philippe Sellier et Pierre Brunel, pour lesquels les mythes littéraires sont issus des mythes ethno-religieux et n’ont pas leur source dans la littérature. Cette définition apparaît comme ethnocentrée et n’est pas applicable universellement. La Perse présente trois périodes mythologiques : l’ère pré-sassanide, l’ère post-sassanide persane et l’ère post-sassanide shi’ite. La mythologie shi’ite est une mythologie littéraire. Elle possède à la fois des caractéristiques du mythe littéraire et des caractéristiques du mythe ethno-religieux. Il s’agit donc d’une mythologie qui est née de la littérature, avec auteur et datation, mais en même temps elle fonde une vérité et instaure la civilisation shi’ite. La mythologie shi’ite ne peut s’inscrire dans la définition de Brunel-Sellier, et il faut donc définir le mythe littéraire d’une autre manière. Cette nouvelle définition doit prend sa source dans la littérature, et être capable de comprendre tous les mythes littéraires du monde. Ce que le mythe littéraire de Brunel-Sellier ne parvient pas à faire.

The 1945 battle for liberation witnessed the massive decimation of Manila’s urban built-heritage and the irreplaceable treasures of colonial architecture. Despite the seemingly impossible task to resuscitate war ravaged Manila, it rose again. Out of the ashes, modernism provided the opportunity to craft a new architecture for a newly independent nation. Modernism emerged as the period’s architectural symbol of survival and optimism. In a post-colonial cultural milieu, Filipino architects pursued the iconography of national mythology channeled through the pure surfaces and unadorned geometries of modern architecture. They found in modernism a convenient aesthetic modus to denounce the colonial vestiges embodied in the infrastructure of American neoclassicism in pre-war Manila and sought to create new-built environments that conveyed emancipation from the colonial past and celebrate the vernacular forms processed through modernist geometric simplification. Modernism, therefore, was a logical choice, for it provided a progressive image. The Philippines post-independence architecture endeavored to dispense an image that stimulated a national spirit, inspired patriotism, and invoked faith in the unknown future of the national imagination.

This article aims to show the postcolonial discourse of the Philippines through the utilization of magical realism in the novel When the Elephants Dance (2002) by Tess Uriza Holthe. When the Elephants Dance is intrinsically structured into four main sections which describe the events leading up to Japan’s surrender. Inside these four sections, the story is integrated with five sub-stories from accompanying characters which are A Cure for Happiness, Mang Minno, Ghost Children, The Twilight People, and The Portrait of an Aristocrat. These sub-stories act as one of the highlights of the novel since they are utilized by the characters as a way to retain their sanity and cope with the tragic experiences of living in the middle of a war. The characters’ coping mechanism of telling their life stories that are filled with Filipino mythology reflects the postcolonial discourse of the Philippines prior to and during World War II. With the research limitation of analyzing the story of Mang Minno, this research will use the theory of magical realism by Wendy B. Faris to see the presence of magical realism, as well as the utilization of New Historicism as a bridge to analyze the postcolonial discourse. The results show that by integrating magical realism and history, Holthe was successful in depicting historical events that occurred in the Philippines under the fictional aspect of the novel. Holthe used magical realism to conceal the postcolonial discourse of alterity and emphasize the magnificence of Catholicism in the Philippines.

Edgar Calabia Samar’s Janus Silang book series is a significant body of contemporary young adult fantasy novels in the Philippines. Samar’s ambitious series that successfully melds alternate online tech-worlds, everyday Filipino life, and ancient supernatural, god-inhabited worlds, is worthy of study. In creating this fantasy world, the Janus Silang series underscores the richness of Filipino mythology and lore by cohesively layering these lived worlds by way of spatial and temporal play. This paper wishes to study the value of this “world(s)-building”, entering this by way of the study of onomastics, the study of proper names of all kinds and the origins of names. Using both toponomastics and anthroponomastics, or the study of place names and human naming, respectively, this inventive, powerful focus on naming solidifies the Janus Silang series’ development of unique Filipino characters and narratives and its reintroduction of the cultures of its imaginary worlds for young, contemporary Filipino and global readers

This paper exhibits narratives on Catholicism and Spanish colonialism in the Philippines – primarily executed by the state and political apparatuses of Spain. Accordingly, colonialism is only an accident to Catholicism and vice-versa due to the inevitability of resistance, which always exists in the dynamic network of power relations. Catholicism and colonialism are not absolutely and essentially inseparable with one another, since conflict between the two has been occurring since the colonial period and until today. There is a clear dynamic interconnectedness between Catholicism and colonialism, but Catholicism is not Spain as how colonialism is not Catholicism. More so, this paper used ethnography with a review of primary and secondary sources of historical data that argues the ‘emergence of consciousness to the socio-cultural and historical narrative of present-day downtown Santa Ana as a precolonial burial site called ‘Lamayan’ with its ancient mythology of ‘Diwata sa Bukal’. Furthermore, the Santa Ana Lao Ma is enshrined in the Taoist temple behind the Santa Ana Church; and the contemporary Filipinization of Ntra. Sra. de los Desamparados seen in Mandaluyong and Marikina are cases of post-colonial resistances that people find today. Keywords: Post-colonial Resistances, Power Relations, Catholicism, Virgin Mary

Abstract This paper takes up the visual art piece “Diwata: Queering Pre-Colonial Phillipine Mythology” by the artists Renz (he/him/they/them), Natu (he/him), and Ram (she/her) at the 2021 Southeast Asia Queer Cultural Festival. I argue that in performing tactics of transtemporal minoritarian aesthetics, the artists destabilize contemporary cultural acceptance of anti-queer and anti-trans norms. Engaging the transformative artistic embodiments of pre-colonial mythologies, I highlight these acts of performing within a queer affective spatio-temporal arc. I approach “Diwata” through the provocation that the artists’ embodied art enacts a performative: “My gender is pre-colonial.” Through this focus, I unpack several of the cultural figures embodied by the artists. I attend to the figures in three primary ways: aesthetic reading, mythological/historical reference, and artists’ reflection. Understanding the importance of embodiment to the politics of “Diwata,” I analyze the visual works as both image and performance. Working across studies in folklore, religion, and historiography, I expand the figures in relation to how their practices of gender and sexuality subvert contemporary norms. These artists from the Philippines enact a disobedient epistemological orientation to LGBTIQ expression. The artists do not simply announce that what would now be characterized as queer and trans histories were a part of their culture before colonial oppression; they instead reanimate these oral histories, mythological narratives, and persistent practices as manifest through their bodies. I argue that “Diwata” offers an alternative rendering of queerness and transness that thickens the topography of what counts as queer and trans theory. I also want to suggest that this queer Southeast Asian perspective provides a necessary alternative to the continual focus on the recent past as originary. The recent decades are continually posited as the most vital historical precursors for queer theory. These movements and theoretical formations are genealogically important in the United States and the reach of the US abroad. And, even as there is still much to unpack about the transnational currency of the term queer, the recent decades’ dominance in narratives about where queer theory might come from often reaffirms white Western centrality, even while attending to decolonial and anti-racist commitments. Working through the far distant past, this paper instead builds with transtemporal minoritarian aesthetic tactics animate gender-variant possibilities of embodied queer worldmaking.

The mythological origin of a place does not literally tell us where we are or who we are, they can be clues to understand the significant stories of history of a place it may be in the form of words and phrases used by the first inhabitants and speaking of the things that they saw, experienced and heard in the world around them. The study was conducted to unearth the mythological legends of different local communities in the municipality of Pontevedra, Capiz. The study used a qualitative-historical-ethnographic research designs and data were gathered through interview. The results revealed that out of 26 local communities in the municipality of Pontevedra, Capiz, Philippines, there were seven local communities with two legends. Most legends were classified as allegorical and philological theories; each legend has legendary root; one local community legend has relevance to its festival celebration; 15 local community legends have relevance to its topographical location and 10local community legends are relevant to the livelihood of the people. The names of every local community can be traced to its own legend, has etymological root and do not show relevance to their festival celebrations. The researcher recommended the use of locally produced literary materials in reading centers for the preservation of historical and cultural aspect of the municipality.Keywords— Mythology, legend, qualitative- historical- ethnographic method, Pontevedra, Capiz, Philippines

Traditionally, the peoples of Southeast Asia have held beliefs in numerous forms of vampires often crossed with ghosts or other spirits, such as Pontianak of the Malay Peninsula, Phi Krasue and Phi Pop of Thailand and the Aswang and Manananggal of the Philippines. These have been theorised as manifestations of fears and repressed aspects of life, including, previously, of dangers that lurk in the wilds surrounding villages. In modern times rumours of and belief in vampires persist and have moved to cities, but these tales are also joined by a more modern bloodsucker, the organ harvester. Poorly-sourced stories of dubious veracity circulate on Facebook feeds, warning parents to keep a close eye on their children lest they are snatched away and killed for their organs. This paper examines parallels between traditional vampire legends of Southeast Asia and current rumours of organ trafficking targeting children, and delves into some of the anxieties fuelling the contemporary stories, anxieties that ultimately spring from the region’s fraught reaction to Neoliberalism.Keywords: Vampires, Southeast Asian vampires, Organ trafficking, Social media, Mythology, Neoliberalism

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.