THE EMPIER MASTERPIECES
Wake In Fright
TED KOTCHEFF’S BOOZE-SOAKED AUSTRALIAN NIGHTMARE
WORDS JAMIE GRAHAM
NO - ONE DOES bleak and nasty quite like the Aussies. The Boys, Wolf Creek, Animal Kingdom, Snowtown, Hounds Of Love, Killing Ground… They’re enough to make the Mad Max movies seem like a Sunday picnic in Regent’s Park, George Miller trimming away the real, sick-making violence as surely as those triangular sarnies are shorn of crusts.
Premiering to rave reactions at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, Wake In Fright is the granddaddy of Australia’s savage cinema, a sweatstained, booze-soaked, forcefully toxic masterpiece that glowers at the vanguard of both the Ozploitation and Australian New Wave movements. Nick Cave calls it “the best and most terrifying film about Australian existence”. New Wave luminaries Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford and Peter Weir credit it with demonstrating there could be, after decades of stagnation, a national cinema to appeal on the international stage.