Rabbit-Proof Fence · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A single wire runs to the horizon, and a girl puts her hand on it. The rabbit-proof fence — built to keep vermin out of a continent's farmland — becomes, for Molly, a thread to follow home. Hold onto that gesture. Almost everything Phillip Noyce's film does, it does along that line.

Deleuze, watching cinema, noticed that some films run on what he called the action-image: a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting carries us from situation to act to new situation. The Western is its home country, and Rabbit-Proof Fence is built on a Western's bones — John Ford's The Searchers, abduction and pursuit staged across monumental land. But Noyce performs a quiet inversion. In Ford the white man hunts; here the abducted children are the searchers, walking some 1,500 miles home while the apparatus hunts them. The pursuit is real, yet the film's center of gravity is not the chase. It is the walking.

Here Deleuze hands us a finer tool. He described what he called respiration-space, or skeleton-space: an action that breathes between two scales — the vast encompassing country, and the taut single line a body draws through it. That is this film's whole grammar. Christopher Doyle — yes, the same Doyle of saturated Hong Kong interiors with Wong Kar-wai — turns his intimacy inside out, setting three small figures against salt pan, scrub, and hard ochre light. The land dwarfs them. And the fence is the skeleton: the spine that organizes the walk, what Deleuze called the line of the universe, linking one scattered station to the next across emptiness. The journey transforms nothing about the policy — and that is the point. What it transforms is an object. A line of colonial engineering becomes a way home. In Deleuze's vocabulary the fence works as a symbol: a single thing that condenses the film's whole relation, control turned, by an act of navigation, into homecoming.

The film withholds the discharge an action-image usually promises. John Scott's editing lets distance accumulate as ordeal — measured, unhurried, full of what Deleuze called dead time, stretches where nothing advances the plot and the everyday is simply held. We watch the girls watch the land. Everlyn Sampi's Molly carries the film on watchfulness, not words; her body, exhausted and resolved, becomes the argument. Deleuze would call this a cinema of the body — duration carried in posture and attitude rather than dialogue — and he had a sharper word, the gest: a stance that exposes a social relation. David Gulpilil's Moodoo, the Aboriginal tracker conscripted to hunt children who could be his kin, is one long gest. He could catch them. The way he doesn't quite is the whole colonial bind written into a man's shoulders.

This is where the film stops being only a survival story. Against the open country Noyce stages its opposite: A.O. Neville's Perth office, with its files, its photographs, its measuring of a child's skin against a chart. Kenneth Branagh plays him soft, certain, benevolent in his own mind — which is worse than a villain. The cross-cutting between bodies on the land and the telegraph-and-police network that pursues them draws the line cleanly: the lived body set against the bureaucracy that claims to own it.

And there is a deeper register at work, the one Deleuze reserved for political cinema. He said modern political film begins where the people are missing — where the political fact is that a people has been broken or denied, and the film must summon them rather than simply represent them. The Stolen Generations are exactly this: children taken to be dissolved into someone else's nation. Noyce answers with what Deleuze called fabulation — story-telling as an act of witness. The film opens and closes by grounding itself in the real women's lives, and it refuses a clean triumph. Homecoming arrives; then the closing text reopens the wound, insisting on the long shadow the policy cast. The film is not lying to you, and it tells you so. That is the old documentary contract — André Bazin's faith that the camera can hold the real — put to political use.

Listen, too, to the friction in the sound. Peter Gabriel's processed, electronic score plays over 1931, against wind and outback silence. Image and sound are not illustrating each other; they pull in different directions, the present scoring the past, and the gap between them is felt rather than smoothed. Deleuze prized exactly this kind of audiovisual disjunction — sound and image as two semi-independent things, communicating across an interval.

The lineage is precise. Walkabout (1971) launched Gulpilil and framed the outback as an active force, not backdrop; Noyce uses the grown Gulpilil to bridge 1971 to 2002. Picnic at Hanging Rock taught the staging — a starched colonial institution against sacred land, sustained by duration and environmental sound instead of plot. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith proved Australian cinema could indict its own record directly, and Noyce's own Newsfront gave him the true-history instinct he returns to here after two Hollywood decades. Doyle carries In the Mood for Love's natural-light intimacy and transplants it onto desert. Out of these, Rabbit-Proof Fence made one of the most internationally visible Stolen Generations narratives — a template for telling a nation's buried history as one small body crossing a very large country.

Watch it again for the fence. It is never only a fence. It is the line a film walks between an action that cannot win outright and a witness that cannot be silenced — and a girl's hand, finding the wire, choosing which way is home.