- Title
- 'Probably a White Fella': Rolf de Heer, The Tracker and the Limits of Auteurism
- Creator
- Hamilton, Emma
- Relation
- Unbridling the Western Film Auteur: Contemporary, Transnational and Intertextual Explorations p. 65-84
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/b13339
- Publisher
- Peter Lang
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Rolf de Heer, a Dutch-Australian migrant and writer-director, has created some of the most incisive and well-known films in contemporary Australian cinema, including but not limited to The Tracker (2002), Ten Canoes (2006), Twelve Canoes (2008) and Charlie’s Country (2013). His oeuvre examines, in particular, the nature of relationships between colonized and colonizer and challenges us to reconsider the nature of the Western itself and how its tropes apply to international contexts, the historicity of the Western, and the genre’s connections to themes of identity and origin mythology. While de Heer’s status as an auteur exists relatively unchallenged amongst film critics, this chapter uses the de Heer film The Tracker to explore not only the ways in which de Heer fits within traditional definitions of ‘auteur’ but also, and perhaps most significantly, the potential limits of auteurism, given the extent to which de Heer was bound by contextual and historical discourses, star power, studio systems and other factors. Further, while a great deal of scholarly attention has been directed towards understanding the changing representation and reception of First Nation Peoples in the American Western film genre, less attention has been paid to the representation of Indigenous Australians in Australian Westerns. This chapter examines the ways in which such representation intersects with history, auteur and international genre entanglements, to various effect. © Peter Lang AG 2018.
- Subject
- Rolf de Heer; western film genre; film theory; history
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1440887
- Identifier
- uon:41249
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781787071551
- Language
- eng
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