Wake in Fright

I finally got round to watching Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, a film that until recently was one of the great lost films. It was unavailable on VHS or DVD for many years until it's Editor Anthony Buckley went on a search for the original negative and unearthed it in a shipping container marked 'For Destruction'. It's a sweaty, visceral depiction of life in Australia's outback, a film that Nick Cave has called 'The best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence'.

The film's most notorious scene is a kangaroo hunt that Kotcheff makes a point of emphasizing in interviews was shot on a real kangaroo hunt and that no animals were injured or killed for the sake of the film. The crew found the hunt extremely hard going. According to Kotcheff the footage that ended up in the film was from the tamer end of the rushes they shot. 

Wake in Fright originally screened at Cannes in 1971 and then in 2009 became one of only two films to be selected for the festival twice when the restored version was selected by Martin Scorsese. He had this to say about the film; 'Wake in Fright is a deeply - and I mean deeply - unsettling and disturbing movie. I saw it when it premiered at Cannes in 1971, and it left me speechless. Visually, dramatically, atmospherically and psychologically, it's beautifully calibrated and it gets under your skin one encounter at a time, right along with the protagonist played by Gary Bond. I'm excited that Wake in Fright has been preserved and restored and that it is finally getting the exposure it deserves.'

The films structure reminded me of Scorsese's After Hours. Both films follow a single character's nightmare journey and both end up exactly where they started, the massive psychological change they have been through contrasting sharply with the unchanged environment they find themselves back in.