By Dr Vrasidas Karalis
I still remember the deep impression that Mad Max (1979) had on my generation in Greece in the late ‘70s. Despite the fact that we were all trained in the long and sometimes dead time of political movies like Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players, Tarkovsky’s Stalker or Bertolucci’s The Conformist, the frantic pace, the relentless movement and the lucid transparent dialogue of the film made us feel at home in cinema, as the most imaginative art and the art that transfigured the tensions of everyday life into a cosmic drama with deep existential significance.
We didn’t know much about its director or indeed about Australian cinema. Mad Max was the introduction for a whole generation of European viewers to the grand miracle that the Australian cinema was in the post-Whitlam period, to the prodigious decade of a cultural revival through which the lucky country confronted the complex ambiguities that have emerged in the sixties.
I would suggest today that George Miller’s cinema represents the most popular and widely discussed achievement of the seventies cultural renaissance and the internationalisation of the Australian cinematic tradition that was achieved by filmmakers like him, Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Phillip Noyce and Bruce Beresford through films that were both commercially successful and artistically significant. It still remains an iconic creation in global cinema because it brought a certain cinematic experimentation to its most mature expression, an experimentation which goes back to Buster Keaton, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick but also to John Ford, Douglas Sirk and Jean Renoir.
George Miller’s versatility with cinematic genres and stylistic forms is probably the most surprising element of his aesthetics. Miller does not simply tell a story or visualise an idea: he thinks visually. He knows how to hold the camera steady and focused: he therefore gently guides the eyes of his viewers by offering them a symmetrical frame which absorbs the viewer within it.
There are two elements of his poetics I would like to stress here: the immersive frame and what he himself calls ‘found objects re-purposed’. Every image of his cinematic canvases surrounds the individual with a glowing aura which immerses the mind into the bright, archetypal and mesmeric colours of his movies. The immersive frame makes every image full of powerful psychological energy which hits the eye and then the mind and transports the individual into the narrative imperative, as he calls it in one of his most revealing texts.
The other element is the ability of his images to recall and recollect other cinematic experiences and evocative images. He calls this modernist technique ‘found objects re-purposed’ as it combines references, allusions and formal scripts into the complete narrative story-telling of its own. This device transforms his images into open-ended conversation with other styles and filmmakers consolidating the global relevance of his visual language.
Finally, I think of George Miller as the ultimate visual mythographer of the human experience in Australia. There are some distinct imaginative cinematographers in the country, like Peter Weir and his Fourth Wave for example but Miller’s mythoplastic explosion is unique, continuous and unparalleled. His cultural monomyth consists of the persecuted innocent, a hero in search of a lost home, who nevertheless manages to survive and find fulfilment against all odds and against the dark forces operating within his own psyche.
His latest film Mad Max: Fury Road offers us a monumental reimagining of his hero, only doubled, both male and female, both animus and anima in a constant conflict before their final reconciliation. The plot is subterranean and latent: the viewer has to wake up his own individual memory and connect themselves with what Miller called the ‘numinous, that sense of dread and awe we feel when confronted with the immensity of time and space.’
The immersive colours of the film, the striking and sharp forms all diffused in each frame and the transparent dialogue make very scene like an El Greco painting, full of pulsating brightness and imaginative force. Red, blue, brown and yellow colours work within a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk through continuous explosive music and accelerated speed to produce images of depthless resolution and evocative power.
The film is also a limit, a liminal cultural and artistic space, which synthesises the visions and the visual potentialities of Miller’s orientation. After Babe and Happy Feet, in which the inner child became the sole protagonist of a new vision of radical innocence, Mad Max: Fury Road retraces the steps of a lost innocence which, despite the brutality of a post-cultural war, still remains an invitation to life and existence, the noble dream of a gentle spirit. I am really curious to see what will follow next.
Vrasidas Karalis is the Sir Nicholas Laurantus Professor of Modern Greek and Chair of the Department of Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney. His latest publications include A History of Greek Cinema (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012) and Realism in Post-War Greek Cinema (I.B. Tauris 2016). He has published essays on Greek, Australian and Russian cinema and taught on American cinema with special emphasis on Elia Kazan and John Cassavetes. He has also published two volumes of oral history, Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris (2007) and The Demons of Athens (2014). He has also edited volumes on Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Cornelios Castoriadis. He is the editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand). He is currently researching for a book on Elia Kazan, one of the twentieth century’s most honoured and influential directors in both film and theatre.
Photo: Professor Dr Vrasidas Karalis and George Miller at a presentation of Miller’s work as part of the Greek Festival of Sydney 20 April 2017. Discussed during the lecture were Miller’s Greek background, his visual aesthetics as well as his contribution to world cinema as a producer, writer and director.
