Thematising the Global: Recent Australian Film (Essay‪)‬

NOT PARIS; OR, GLOBALISATION REPRESSED Released in the 1970s, a decade which saw the emergence of a New Wave of Australian nationalist cinema, Peter Weir's film The Cars that Ate Paris (1974) is an expressionist counterpoint to his more famous impressionist study, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). While the painterly mise-en-scene of Picnic at Hanging Rock directly recalls the Heidelberg School of the 1880s and 1890s, The Cars that Ate Paris complicates the nationalist narratives and symbols that the Heidelberg School set in motion. Picnic at Hanging Rock's lost children, themselves a venerable tradition, embody the ambivalent enclosure of colonial Australia in an estranged landscape. Yet, the anxieties in The Cars that Ate Paris are sourced beyond national boundaries. To put this another way: if Picnic at Hanging Rock acquires its cues from Frederick McCubbin's painting Lost (1886), then The Cars that Ate Paris abstracts its visual and psychic references from Arthur Boyd's The Expulsion (1947-48), and the angel driving the inhabitants from its paradise is none other than an insistent world external to the nation.