Cut-up country The Polemics of Presentation in [Censored] and Terror Nullius
On the eve of its premiere in March, video-art work Terror Nullius (2018) – by the duo Soda_Jerk, Sydney-born sisters Dan and Dominique Angeloro – was disowned by one of its funding bodies. The Ian Potter Cultural Trust, which gave A$100,000 for the making of the film, distanced itself from the finished product, describing it as ‘a very controversial piece of art’ and ‘un-Australian’. There’s some irony in this, given that Terror Nullius explores Australian cultural identity, as expressed through Australian cinematic identity. The Angeloros, in an interview with me, call themselves ‘deep nerds for Australian cinema’, and cite films like Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer, 1993) and Tracey Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) as formative inspirations. Comprising a voluminous array of samples – spliced together after an ‘incredibly labour-intensive’ eighteen months of frame-by-frame rotoscoping – their ‘political revenge fable in three acts’ is a satirical mashup of Australian cinema and iconography: a feminist, queer upending of what has been, largely, a blokey cinematic mythology. ‘If being un-Australian means calling bullshit on a lot of the really ugly things that pass in our current political climate, then we’ll happily wear it,’ the duo offer. ‘But, for us, Terror Nullius is not about the nihilistic annihilation of national identity; it’s a project that is deeply invested in trying to rethink what being Australian could mean.’
In digging into Australian cinematic history, the duo examine – and often subvert – the stories that have already been told. In re-contextualising these images, they’re also evoking the shadow history of films unmade: the stories that haven’t been told, and the people who haven’t been able to tell them. This is something that Terror Nullius shares with Sari Braithwaite’s documentary [Censored] (2018), which screened alongside it at this year’s Sydney Film Festival (SFF). Braithwaite’s work is likewise assembled entirely from Australia’s cinematic past: an essay-movie fashioned from scraps of censored celluloid cut from films by the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board from 1958 to 1971.
