Wake in Fright · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A glass of beer arrives that John Grant didn't order. Somebody has shouted him one. He drinks it, because in Bundanyabba refusing a drink isn't a preference, it's an insult, and the composition has left him nowhere to put an insult: men at his shoulder, ceiling low, door outside the frame. Then the next glass arrives. That's the whole machine. Six days later the schoolteacher has no money, no clothes of his own, and no remaining belief that he's a different order of person from the men buying him drinks. Nobody locked a door. There was never a villain.

Deleuze sorted films by what their images actually do, and most films run on what he called the action-image: someone takes in a situation, acts on it, the situation changes. Wake in Fright carries all that hardware and never fires it. Grant perceives beautifully. He's the most educated man in every room he walks into, and it buys him nothing, because his perception is attached to no act that would alter anything.

What takes over is the concept this film exemplifies more purely than almost anything outside Deleuze's own examples: the impulse-image, and the cinema built from it, which he called naturalism. His cases were Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey. Naturalism here has nothing to do with being lifelike. It means a world where conduct isn't motivated but driven — thirst, heat, the urge to shoot something — and it comes with a fixed geography. There is the derived milieu: the real place, with its jobs and clocks and manners. And under it, showing through wherever the crust tears, an originary world of pure appetite that was there before the town and will outlast it.

The Yabba is that structure at full power, which is why shooting in Broken Hill matters beyond authenticity. Real miners in the background, an RSL club, a working drinking culture, a licensed kangaroo cull. That's the derived milieu, filmed flat. Then the film keeps letting it break. The two-up game tightens into a loop of coin, hand, face, crowd until gambling stops resembling a game and starts resembling a seizure. The drinking passages elide time so thoroughly that neither Grant nor we can say how many days have gone; the film simply refuses to help us count. And then the night hunt, lit by the hunters' own spotlights and vehicle headlamps, the image flaring and unstable and documentary-grade, with nothing over the originary world at all.

The hunt is where theory has to stop being polite, because the animals really die. Bazin's whole claim for photography was that the image carries the being of the thing it recorded, and a killing on film is a killing. Kotcheff took that ethical posture from Rouch's Les maîtres fous: an unassimilated outsider's camera filming an actual ritual as it happens, including real animal death, declining to soften it or reframe it. That's why the sequence is unbearable in a way staged violence never is. There's no craft to retreat into.

Deleuze says the impulse doesn't take objects, it takes fragments — a part-object it charges up, a fetish. In this film it's the schooner glass. Not a symbol of anything. A thing torn out of the world and made compulsory, arriving unbidden, the round advancing on Grant like a ratchet. And every friendly gesture around it reads as a symptom of a drive nobody in the film can name. Mateship, filmed as coercion. The casting completes the argument: Chips Rafferty's stoic-bushman body was manufactured by Harry Watt's Overlanders, Crown Film Unit method, real drovers and real sun, and Kotcheff hires that exact body as Jock Crawford so the national persona can be turned inside out while it smiles at you.

Naturalism, Deleuze says, runs on a line of steepest slope. Everything degrades. Costume charts it with no commentary at all: shirt and tie at the schoolhouse, other men's cast-offs by the end. The Lost Weekend had already codified the bender as accelerating dissolves and collapsed time rather than dramatized scenes, and Anthony Buckley's cutting pushes that logic past its limit into the final montage of superimposed fragments — a dream-image in the strict sense, a delirium anchored to no datable memory, just the inside of a mind coming apart.

But Buñuel taught Deleuze that entropy alone isn't the whole shape. What Buñuel adds is repetition, the circle. The Exterminating Angel is guests who could walk out and don't, returned at the end to where they began. Kotcheff takes that structure exactly. Brian West opens on a slow near-360 pan at Tiboonda that turns all the way round and finds nothing: scrub to the horizon, a pub, a schoolhouse, a railway line. The film ends by drawing the same circle with the same gesture. Grant's bus goes back to the Yabba. The slope was a ring.

This is also the film's precise place in the history. From L'Avventura it inherits the stranded protagonist, no antagonist, no restored order, elliptical cutting that drops the connective scenes we expect — Deleuze's crisis of the action-image, the voyage that transforms nothing. Most films that reached that crisis went forward, into the time-image, where the character stops acting and becomes a seer and time shows itself directly. Wake in Fright goes the other way. Grant doesn't become a seer. He becomes an appetite. From Bad Day at Black Rock it takes the encirclement grammar, an outsider pinned by a transport schedule while townsmen close a ring around him in wide shots, complicity blocked spatially instead of spoken, and moves it indoors into the heat, where the frame becomes a closed set with no adjacent room to escape into. The pub crowd is filmed as one body, a single affective unit, individual faces snatched out of it by aggressive zoom.

And the colour does its own work: ochre, dust-white, beer-amber, skin rendered raw and burnt rather than tanned, a hue that soaks up the feeling of everything it touches. That palette is why the rescue was an emergency. Eastmancolor dyes had shifted in every surviving print, and only the negative — found in a Pittsburgh warehouse in cans reportedly marked for destruction — carried it. Most of the world first saw this film's actual colour in 2009.

What it did to filmmaking: it refused the outback as spectacle at the exact moment Australian cinema was about to build an industry on picturesque landscape. Sunlight as assault, not beauty. A man stood up at a screening in 1971 and shouted that this is not us. Kotcheff said it is. The film's whole afterlife has been the concession.

Watch it again and count the drinks. You can't, and that's the point — the film has already taken the counting away from you. Then ask the question it actually leaves open: what, physically, was ever stopping Grant from getting on a train? Nothing. That's the Buñuel joke, and it's the horror.