Week 5 - Mad Max

This week in lecture we watched the movie Mad Max.  I actually really enjoyed this action type film.  There seemed to never be a dull moment so I was constantly at attention.  Mad Max was an action film based in Australia that included themes of love, vengeance, and society.  The gang in the area kept the cops constantly on edge and after the death of his best friend, wife, and child, the protagonist in the film Max turned into what you could consider a madman and was basically an executioner.  He went after every member of the gang in revenge for what they took away from him. 

                Before the lecture we talked a lot about the influence of land and how landscape can affect film.  Landscape can help shape a national identity, especially in Australia.  The Outback is often a symbol of Australia.  We also talked a lot about the sublime which is a mixed feeling of pleasure and pain that we feel in the face of something of great magnitude and grandeur.  This sublime is so great we can’t even comprehend its limits.  It was given an example as the ocean.  We know how beautiful the coastline is and we can conceive the ocean, however we cannot understand the center of the ocean and the loneliness it contains.  The extent of its magnitude is just too great.

                When I watched the movie I tried to think about the landscape and its part in the movie.  To be completely honest I couldn’t find exactly how it tied in.  However, during our tutorial we further discussed the landscape theory and the influence it had on the movie.  I understand now that the movie couldn’t have taken place if it wasn’t in this location.  Every time we saw the highway with empty land all around it you knew something extreme was about to happen. 

                From the reading by Morris I also learned the importance of “premonition of repetition” which is, ‘It is almost mandatory in action films that a shot of calm, beautiful scenery anticipates terrible events, in Australian film, and idyllic beach scene in particular..’.  I would not have picked up on that myself in the movie but now thinking back I can remember Jess lying peacefully on the beach when she hears seagulls call and she looks around to find complete “nothingness”.