Produced by Fiona Cochrane and Fiona Macdonald with the Assitance of the AFC.

The film’s rich generic heritage draws upon European art cinema and various English, Australian and American film avant-garde traditions. Its resonant images, narrative conventions, and mise-en-scene configurations also suggests the work of an artist who is at home with the intertextual poetry of working with two or more camera-based art forms (particularly cinema and photography). The film’s riveting pictorial compositions are finely photographed with formal inventiveness and wit and its atmospheric soundtrack subtly captures the filmmaker's theme of male existential absurdity. Clearly, Macdonald's ample photo-cinematic interests evoke the border-crossing experiments of photographer-filmmakers like Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Hollis Frampton, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Consequently, characterising the film’s conceptual and formal architecture is a subtle dialectic between cinema and photography.

The film's obsessive characters travel through a highly atmospheric studio-based landscapes encountering, conquest, death, fascism and banality and deliver their respective bewitching tragi-comedy monologues under various headings which speak of the individual seeking meaning, desire and transcendence - "The Cave", "The Crater", "The Mountain" and "The Void". From the opening black and white images of the protagonist (Fritz Hammersley) and a helmeted male figure engaged in an elemental sword fight (worthy of Pasolini's stark mythopoetic cinema) to a stooped, shrouded male figure (Craig Judd) contemplating the ethical complexities of carnality, knowledge and inertia in the film's concluding scenes, Ideological Landscape is a sharply delineated investigation of existential voyaging through a surrealistic landscape.

At several significant moments, the film transcends its near abstract semi-narrative elements to become completely abstract in black and white, reminiscent of similar stylistics of self-reflexivity in Brakhage's autobiographical/landscape films or the more "apparatus" driven investigations of structuralist cinema (Frampton, Sharits, Snow) in the sixties and seventies. By its very nature, Ideological Landscapes echoes the complex lyrical and generic markers of landscape cinema and video. In this context, the film in many different scenes graphically ironises the recurring motifs, iconographic references and mythic registers of landscape in Australian painting (White, Stow, Wright) and cinema (Miller, Duigan and Heyer).

In many different contexts, the four monologues constitute a stimulating black absurdist comedy that cuts across complex debates, icons and myths representing Australian art, culture, identity and knowledge. The male narrators tell us stories that embody their quest for identity through the highly stylised studio-structured landscapes, also accompanied by natural landscape footage that mirror back to them their own desires, obsessions and quirkiness. In this critical sense, landscape plays an enormously important role as metaphorical stage on which these male-defined narratives of desire, ideology and obsession are constructed. This reflects on the many epic male journeys that feature in the mythology of White Australia.

The film's non-didactic playful mise-en-scene is evocatively rendered by exquisite atmospheric audio-visual stylistics that point to its marked cinematic/photographic concerns. Often, the audience sees the male characters located in a landscape of fiery sunsets and panoramic horizons suggesting Lyotard's romantic sublime, a landscape beyond the "cultivated zone" where meaning collapses. In the second section "The Crater" a male figure (Andrew Hurle) narrates an absurd story of murder and mystery: two brothers disappear, their dog is found at their home starved to death and a grass-eating hermit nomad lives near a mountain named Hopeless. Hurle’s existential monologue, the harsh countryside and weird characters are aided by a series of magnified charts, graphs and slides. The absurd monologue is, at the same time, steeped in the language of logic and science. And it is this counterpoint of comedy and science that critically reappraisses the past historical journey-narratives which have characterised the cultural epic myths of White Australia.

The third section, "The Mountain", depicts a male character (Tony Clark) who literally meditates upon the profound character of the human condition and looks at reconciling Western and Eastern systems of thought. This is the most stylised section of the film with suggestive archetypal landscape features and abstract backdrops and a scene featuring the protagonist looking through a telescope against a large black pattern indicative of Mandlebrot's sets and Chaos theory. This section is perhaps the most reflective and non-confronting of the four.

Ideological Landscapes is, therefore, an ironic black comedy that burlesques the mythic conventions and stereotypes that mark our still lingering popular propensity to recycle the many male narrative-journeys that figure in our histories of White Australia without examining them in a more searching and diacritical manner. The four non-narrative stories are quite engaging journeys in themselves as they individually point to the obsessions, limits and strangeness of male desire told in a metaphorical commentary on our society and its cherished socio-cultural values. It’s a sharp, funny look at the premises and cliches of our White Australia "nation-texts", of male epic journeys and conquest.

Ideological Landscapes is a welcome addition to our elaborate independent cinema particularly in a time when we are witnessing a form of cultural amnesia, oblivious to the complex riches of that tradition in Australian film. Macdonald has given us a subtle and engrossing film that matters in terms of its unique thematic and formal preoccupations.

John Conomos
1999

© The artist and

Fiona Macdonald, film still,
Indeological Landscapes, 1998

Fiona Macdonald, film still,
Indeological Landscapes, 1998