|
|
|
"In a culture in which so little film analysis is characterful, let alone brave enough to locate film in the big cultural picture, Brophy is very much a felt presence in his little book. (...) Brophy's writing (...) is itself "a raging whorl", sucking a host of associations into its vortex and swirling towards its destructive, knockout punch line. Then the storm starts up again slowly building to a series of coups de grâce."
Keith Gallasch, Real Time No.85, June-July 2008"Brophy's achievement is to make Priscilla seem a richer experience by his wide-ranging excavations beneath the film's gaudy surface. (...) Maybe you'd like a clearer guide through the film's journey, but you won't often have so many stimulating landmarks pointed out along the way."
Brian McFarlane, Australian Book Review, No.303 July-August 2008"Brophy (...) has penned a brilliant, scorching, bravura polemic – one of the best that I have read in recent years on Australian film culture – on a key 1990s film and an iconic phenomenon that is so (alas) predictably categorical, formulaic and indicative of our cultural demons, obsessions and limitations as a national film culture."
John Conomos, Screening The Past, No.23, 2009
Link to online review
Keith Gallasch, Real Time No.85, June-July 2008
Film-maker Philip Brophy, probably still best known for the cult horror movie Body Melt (1993), presents a provocative take - or series of takes - on Stefan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). The book scarcely constitutes an introduction to the film: it almost counts on the reader's having done some serious thinking about the film before coming to grips with what Brophy offers. You are not in for, say, an auteurist reading or a cultural studies contextualisation.
The prologue announces at once an idiosyncratic stylist. Dissociating himself from conventional readings of the film, he proclaims firmly: 'My purpose is to re-ambiguate Priscilla'. (Did he make up 'ambiguate'? I've never heard it before, but plan to use it again.) What emerges is not a clear linear reading of the film, but 'more an assessment of the signs circulating within the movie'. Those with fond memories of Priscilla as exhilarating road movie cum camp extravaganza should prepare to re-affectionate those memories on different grounds.
The study opens with an analysis of the image of Shirl, the outback pub habitué whose crude homophobia attracts from one of the three queens the famous riposte about the only way she'll get a bang. Brophy writes: '[Shirl's] oral gape is the glassy eye of the film's sociological hurricane: a raging whorl of misogynistic energy that spins around this charade of a butch dyke.' Thus, he locates the way the film goes about ;the silencing of women', and goes on to interrogate its representation of gays and women and 'Malestralia'. His unifying motif is the concept of 'reading a map' of early Australia: the film is as unconducive to a collective liberal reading as those early maps were misshapen when they tried to come to terms with the white sense of a new land mass.
Brophy undermines notions of Priscilla as a feel-good film. It may, he claims, 'flaunt gay visuals, but every time the conflicted queens open their mouths, the film reveals itself to be as macho as the Victorian Bitter advertisements', That is an example of the kinds of contradiction that Brophy sees feeding into the film's tortured generic and ideological complexities and confusions. As a musical, he finds it undercut by its 'unrelenting nihilism', fired by 'self-loathing' as this 'labyrinthine text' is. Does that sound like the Priscilla you remember?
One of the strengths of the book is its wildly eclectic intertextual references. Brophy's achievement is to make Priscilla seem a richer experience by his wide-ranging excavations beneath the film's gaudy surface. The book constitutes an attack on the liberal mouthpieces of Australian culture whom he would dismiss for their homogenising labours which suppress the dissident elements in the cause of identifying a collective 'Australiana' at work.
Brophy's language, sometimes over-ornate, won't be to everyone's taste. The illustrative stills are smaller than one would like and a bit muddy, and there are surprising typos. Maybe you'd like a clearer guide through the film's journey, but you won't often have so many stimulating landmarks pointed out along the way. Not having seen Priscilla since it first appeared in 1994, I now feel that I only half-watched it and have less-than-half thought about it since.
Brian McFarlane, Australian Book Review, No.303 July-August 2008
Link to online review
John Conomos, Screening The Past 23, 2009
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy