Month: November 2017

The New World (2005)
Dir. Terrence Malick

One cannot with a clear conscience cast an eye backward or forward into a colonial history and resist feeling horrified, and an artist dealing in history should undo the anesthetizing effect of its make-pretend inevitability- to do something with that sense of horror. Whether this means humanising and thus validating outrage, suggesting alternatives, or just shaking progress narratives comes down to what a work requires of its audience. In The New World we are thrown into a shapeshifting vision of the past that variously heightens and betrays its subject matter. Malick avoids the historiography that we might expect from an intelligent artist- this is not an untold story, this is not a new angle, this is not even a ‘true’ recreation of events, these are all moments and figures from collective myths that we are asked to dream again.

Kilcher, Bale, and Farrell all play archetypes and play them well, and Malick treats their emotions seriously rather than using specificities to make us believe in them. Bale is too Good, Farrell is all crying eyes, Kilcher is too much an angel, but we’re there. The setting never explicitly looks back and revises itself either, so it is to the director’s credit that The New World comes to feel like a new wound in spite of itself. In something like William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, the artist-historian is pushed toward the future but desperately clambers back to find moments and relics and counterarguments to dismiss the feeling that any of this was meant to be; that there was never another way. Vollmann makes history present through compressing events and aftermath through an urgent and mangled language that causes our hearts to race, but Malick’s approach seems almost simplistic- rather than picturing all time ‘now’ he pretends to transport us to another time altogether, making us remember, re-witness what we think we know.

We see a closeup of a person looking at something/someone, and in the next cut expect to see an eyeline match, but instead we jump over the shoulder of someone else looking at that original person who has their back turned to us both. Did their eyes ever meet or were they always engaged in other things. Or is this another day altogether? It doesn’t matter. The most breathtaking shot in the film is one that is never repeated and is almost embarrassedly understated- the middle of Pocahontas’ forehead to the parting in her hair, that unromantic area that you adore in someone when you love them and when it’s kissed you tingle and shrug and go red smiling. Watching a film about a contentious and grim subject that nevertheless gasps for air just to fill its lungs highlights how dire a place the director was in when he made the vampiric Knight of Cups. Sometimes The New World’s fat spirit is too much to handle- the title cards should grate or embarrass the flow of the work, but instead they give us room to breathe. Some things do stop time, or rather slow it and rearrange it like rocks jutting out of a stream- I’ve never liked or disliked Malick’s writing, but Kilcher delivers lines with this disappointed fear that makes them heartbreakingly stilted. They’re too straightforward, even artless, to be stylised, but she delivers them that way any way. Malick’s not being clever and neither is she, which makes some of the exchanges so unusually painful:

“I suppose I’m happy”

“Married? You said you did not know the meaning of the word exactly.”
“But I am”

“Did you find your Indies, John?”

The New World’s theatrical cut might be straightforward. Malick’s fluid-through-fragmentation impressionism gives a breathless quality to the advertised subject matter: love, period, encounter. We see Pocahontas’ act of faith bind her to John which keeps the invaders fed which leads, Malick knows we know, to centuries of genocide culminating in reservations and pipeline disputes and Thanksgiving celebrations. There is a great amount of pain in this, but through the theatrical cut we’re asked not to judge this original sin, because the sin’s name was love. Next to the more cerebral extended cut it seems that the theatrical might have been achieved through hacking away at data- a prosaic explanation for what might be one of the great love stories, but which results in an almost completely different work. The extended cut is all but dispersed, decentralised, meaning that the sounds, cuts, images all charge themselves and never in the service of linear storytelling- it’s form, not style (or form and style). Rather than abundant broken strokes, the extended cut takes the form of water through a more rigorous film language. The recurring, almost obsessive images of lakes and rivers make it known- it’s all subjectivities and experiences that dance and flutter and fold into one another, always the same and different, back and forth forever. The theatrical landscape is a sort of Eden for Smith’s Adam and Pocahontas’ Eve, but extended it is given its own memories, moods, and facets of character.

If the film’s narrative was non-linear it’d be unimaginative, because this is part of the film’s secret- whatever the blurb says and whatever people praise, it’s not about the subject matter or even the images. The whole power’s in the edit. Its relentlessly discontinuous editing makes for a hallucinatory overlapping present that is more complicated, less manipulative than the simple shuffling of events. It’s quieter that way, and able to mimic different ways of timekeeping, different ways of piecing a film or a life together. This makes the lesson where Pocahontas learns to tell colonial time more of a clear turning point in the film- hearing the fluidity of experience conceptualised as static ordered numbers ushers in a drab procession through further disenchantment, right to the grave. If there is one thing the theatrical cut does better here, it turns this final act into something that can only be described as a free-fall, and one of the best free-falls in all of art. The extended cut is at this point still emotional of course, but it feels considered where the theatrical has the floor fall out from beneath us. If there’s truth in the more conceptually strong extended cut it is that this story is just one that can be found in a sea of unsettled accounts and causes and connections, voices yelling and crying. But then if that theatrical free-fall works it’s because it lets go, submitting itself and us directly to the yelling and crying.

The truly obvious radical work is for someone else, and it’s tempting to call The New World evasive or even humanistic for its absence of explicit outrage, but there is this oblique anger in it that would be bubbling beneath the surface were it not so elemental. The film does not try to conceal the fact that the arrival is violence, that the trust of the invaders is a tragic mistake, and that their/our ‘civilisation’ is a disease, but Malick forgoes an assumed universal Native American perspective to advocate the landscape as an agent and observer. The quasi ethnography of the first act doesn’t pretend to hold any communicable information, nor does it assume the perspective of those present necessarily. And yet there the film is, shapeshifting until it becomes something else. The subject dealt with directly should be painful, and dealt with cartoonishly should be propaganda, and dealt with aesthetically should be insensitive. How again does it feel like a new wound? How does it hurt more and hurt different every time we sit down and watch it? Days of Heaven was shot from the perspective of a vengeful landscape calling forth the apocalypse, but the thoughts and feelings of The New World are harder to pin down. These people never meant well, they never meant to leave, they were always gonna spread like a disease, and The New World suggests that the landscape always knew because it remembers like a river.

Richard Dawson Peasant (2017)
Weird World

The first thing that one notices in Richard Dawson’s guitar playing (which he claims is as important as the voice), is that it sounds exactly like Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. His phrasing’s odd but his dexterity shines when he lets it, and furthermore his bum-notes ring to open new and unexpected avenues rather than just ending there as prickly avant-gardeisms. Whether this music is ‘ritual community music’ or avant-garde is something that Dawson never wants us to know exactly, and precisely what makes his work so excellent. Any interview will show him conflicted, explaining how he’s learned those riffs through playing sludge metal, how those Orcutt and Bailey excursions are him studying Orcutt and Bailey, how he puts coins in his acoustic because he studied the recording of the person who did it first, and so on, but smiling fully like it all just came together. The compulsion to be rough and make-pretend commonsense in order to capture and interrogate a national consciousness is commonplace across all the arts (it’s probably something to do with performative masculinities and circumnavigating a fear of the cultural/intellectual elite in order to get a point across (would people have listened to what Springsteen had to say about transgender rights if he was not also ‘The Boss’?)), but it is curious when the artist is resoundingly avant-garde.

Virginia Woolf obsessed over Joyce, or specifically her repulsion caused by Joyce, and reading her private and public vitriol reads a lot like the self-image pushed by Dawson, ‘self-taught working man,’ ‘raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating,’ ‘illiterate and underbred,’ ‘a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’ (lol). For all Woolf’s classist and racist contempt, there is the sense that she is frustrated by not being able to understand if she’s reading a genius, a hillbilly, or a genius pretending to be a hillbilly. This of course is by design. Economist Galenson later articulated two motivations for creation: experimentation and conceptualism. Experimental artists look for answers through making, while conceptual artists start with an idea to be proved through the work. Experimental artists are always ‘becoming’, with their best works yet to come, while conceptual artists tend to run out of steam (see for example the post-Cubist career of Pablo Picasso). Dawson’s first album was called Sings Songs and Plays Guitar which now seems like a red herring, though in truth The Magic Bridge and everything before it was a song suite, and The Glass Trunk worked as a series of experiments stemming from a clear conceptual framework. Since then it’s been wholly concept, from idea to execution.

Galenson’s framework is reductive and daft as it is helpful- many have pointed out that it is context that motivates creation and not individuals working in a vacuum, but it is still a tidy way of appreciating the fundamentally searching quality of one artist’s work as well as the rougher and more argumentative qualities of a contemporary. It’s also a nice thing to consider before setting out to make something, although one can always feel the push and pull of ‘idea in head’ and ‘where this execution is taking me’. Dawson’s work arrives at concepts through years of study and experimentation, which makes it more organic than disruptive, and offers the benefit of being both meticulously constructed and feeling like a work in progress- as good as this all is, his best work is certainly still to come. With Nothing Important the concept was the responsibility of individuals, and now this time it’s collective responsibility. Why in turbulent times someone would make an album set in the medieval period is plain enough- to return to Joyce, History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. For Dawson and Joyce, history is a nightmare that is happening- there is no then and now because they constantly inform one another, and the best we can do is remember the horrors that have occurred while recognising our responsibility to lives lost and lives to come. It’s a sincere work which leaves no room for jaded cynicism or political conservatism. History and community are for Dawson sites of erasure, nationalistic grand narratives, and barbarism, until they become reflexive and at that point they have the potential to become revolutionary.

Not that I will ever share in the (erroneous) ‘they used to make albums, not songs!’ rhetoric that lends itself to rockist nostalgia, much less call for an outright return to the pompous concepts of yesteryear, but Richard Dawson is one of very few artists working that can make a release feel like a gift to the audience rather than content existing just to generate content. In all likelihood the next one’ll be a new set of experiments, and this’ll continue to feel momentous. Like Johnnie To or Yeezy there’s an unsettledness to the artist that makes them vital, and also a generosity that leaves things in full clarity for us to hold onto and fixate over. Of course made under a restless spirit it’s an event in some ways, but mostly like an actual gift that we are grateful for and can warm up to and enjoy and fall out with and apologise to and learn from. Nauseating and pimply, its covert intellectualism guides its big fat emotions to bigger realisations- Joyce said with vast readership that he wanted to write ‘the moral history of my country’ (did I nick that comparison from someone on here?), and Dawson, humbly as singer of songs and player of guitar, takes this to heart. However much he tries to lead us off Joyce by citing the ruddy peasant world-paintings of Bruegel, we catch him in the act taking from both and doing more.

The average reviews on here are genuinely upsetting, not because I disagree with what they have to say, but because they aren’t really saying anything at all. Because here’s what this is, Peasant is a new old work by someone who plays the bard and talks shit and goes off in private to study everything until his brain’s mangled and his fingers are bleeding, not because he’s stuffy like a perfectionist, but because he believes in everything that came before him one hundred percent and he believes in what he’s doing right now maybe even more, because he’s channeling it all towards something that’ll improve things, because he wants to improve things, ’cause he cares where we came from just as much as where we’re going next. He cares where we are right now, because right now’s heading in both directions at once and that makes us responsible here and now to both. And more important than everything I’ve said is this thing which leaves visible all the smudges and cracks of the author’s hand, and but which yearns to transcend its own mundane origins- it’s not Dawson’s, it is ours and everyone else’s in it, and there are lives and stories and whole worlds in this thing that we owe it to listen to, hard as that might be when the sun’s dying and all sense of the world is lost. But that’s the thing- it’s ours.

Pulse (2001)
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

What got you started on the internet?
Nothing in particular…
You wanted to connect with other people?
Maybe… I don’t really know…

You cannot begrudge Kurosawa for wanting to explain the film through the mouths of the characters, because then all that’s left for the viewer is to trudge through the misery of its implications. For a viewer that is slow to understand even the things that the film says outright (me), this works to circumnavigate uncertainties and leave us feeling tired and alone- watching Pulse has a very similar effect to walking to work on a crisp and decent morning and coming across a missing persons poster sellotaped just above the button at the pedestrian crossing near your house. It is possible that this attack on the viewer’s sense of safety and wellbeing is all one needs from Kurosawa, and that the internet in Pulseis simply a conceit to allow for new terrifying images, but it seems more that the director is cautiously examining his works in terms of what looks to be the final frontier for human connection. If we cannot stand to be, or through circumstances just cannot be with one another physically, we can now connect remotely through dots- abstract and immediate. Given the ability to share with countless lonely individuals, why would we not just help one another, listen to one another, and generally spread good will? Something like Unfriended would later examine how that utopianism would buckle under compulsory connection via enacted and complicit cruelty, a kind of hyperconnection that make-pretends remoteness (which in turn stokes said cruelty). The weird tragedy of Pulse is that it feels around for something to say not about bullying, but about lonely people who want to be warm. The new millennium must have been an incredibly exciting time for Kurosawa to establish the frameworks for a whole new era of despair.

People don’t really connect, you know
Like those dots simulating hauntings
We all live totally separately

Most of the film’s scares derive from its characters receiving live feeds of other people, lurking cold and alone in their own sad rooms. They jump back, recognising themselves in these images of blunt loneliness. The point here seems to be that even if we are to share and listen to one another in full sincerity, we will make ourselves sick with the pain of others- our own situation becomes real when it’s reflected back to us, like a depressive mirror stage. There is no sense of community in this despair (Nightmare on Elm Street), in fact it severs social bonds. These people withdraw further into themselves instead of helping one another through mutual loneliness. ‘If two dots get too close, they die.’ On discovering that their friend has hanged himself, a group of friends reflect that they had no idea he was so sad, and then offer super deadpan I suppose I think about it all the time and can see why he did it. Would knowing more about his mental state have saved this friend? Pulse seems to say that even if omniscience was possible there would be nothing we could do, and in fact knowing might be a bad thing. If this is the case then it is sort of the opposite of Unfriended– connectivity in Pulse could never be used as a malicious force because it is only ever a dead end. As something which finds us in and broadcasts us from the vulnerability of our own homes, there is inadequate distance for professional and social performance. We become doppelgängers, dots getting too close and then disappearing. If we look at the material quality of the ‘dots simulating hauntings’, there is something to be said for the voluntary breakdown of a physical body into information, and the infinite distribution of this ghostly self. Kurosawa does not seem interested in how this matters in terms of physical and digital bodies, but that we have the potential to become through our own pixelated worthlessness a kind of boundless plague.

Death was… eternal loneliness

When I was running today I took with me the appreciation that Auckland contains pocket after pocket of unused space, all overgrown with weeds. I thought about Kurosawa’s ‘dots’ and how if these pockets began to find one another and link up, they would form a big green wall of divine uselessness that would laugh at all of the big-scale things that humans value and hold onto and treasure. London is very much the same. I feel that these green useless spaces have the potential to grow and spread, and they are benign if not just indifferent to us and what we do. Their charm is that they are in no way a picturesque reminder of what the land once looked like, but rather evidence of what happens when we brutally landscape everything and then forget how to use it. The ‘natural way of things’ has long been lost, and we’re too far gone the other way. These are not ‘the good plants’, but ‘the bad plants’, and they only emerge when we are not doing the job we started as landscapers of the whole world. Victor Hugo called the land between the city and the country the ‘bastard countryside,’ and these are bastard plants and prankster ghosts. In Pulse there are no bastard plants to mock and outlive us. No rats and insects and birds. Instead, everybody lives in a sad apartment building where half the rooms are vacant, never to be filled, and on every block’s an abandoned factory. People die in Pulse all the time and they disintegrate not out of respect for the bodies, but because the people in it disappear and no one ever finds them. They turn into of all the noble things, oil stains.

Kurosawa’s films are the most inventive with pretend simplicity that you are likely to find outside of like Tarkovsky, but/and I find every time that I can barely stomach what they say and how they force the viewer with all of their soul to feel as well. I fundamentally disagree with every point they make, but am also familiar with every one of these points, because I think about them and squirm with fear every single day of my life. ‘I am cold.’

Halloween (1978)
Dir. John Carpenter

One could fairly assume that through parody, replication, and saturation Halloween’s individual merits have long been lost to its importance and so dulled by virtue of its own influence- its innovations the norm, since then antique. Certainly a so-what response is reasonable, but I’ve never had the ability to see through the eyes of an imagined past audience and Halloween strikes like an arrow. Carpenter equates the camera with the killer in the opening POV sequence and this threatens to read like an exploitation trick, but there’s something about it disturbingly inevitable, black eyed, bereft of desire. Dr Loomis confirms as much when he says his patient as a child was already a lost cause, pure evil, and in the right mood there’s pathos to this resignation, but Carpenter wants him to take on any Shape that we need. In one of its best scenes a group of patients lurch glowing white in the pitch black field and later Michael’s mask takes on the same quality- forgotten ghosts, bogeymen, or just people, they are whatever we need them to be. These Shapes and by extension cameras are a mirror, a black hole and a blinding light.

In a cinema of scares we all jump the same, but in an architecture of horror we’re left to deal with how it feels in our own guts. Carpenter is one of the great directors of space, and Halloween is as immersive as one would expect, but this is complicated by that opening scene. We undergo a split and then combined recognition- we imagine ourselves in the scene, and we see ourselves being watched through the eyes of a watcher. There is something surreally awful about seeing yourself in the eyes of another for two hours. Peeping Tom like Halloween combined the camera with the knife and added a mirror so victims could watch themselves die, but Halloween does not attempt such malicious intimacy. Had the cameras a desire to harm or punish or strip, the watcher/watched would divide itself but Halloween is emphatically reflective.

Anyone who has ever made anything knows you can hear, see, taste everything wrong with it the moment you see someone else hear, see, taste it, and Halloween from a distance shows you everything wrong with your life- it is the difference between looking at yourself in the mirror before leaving the house, and while you’re at the party having seen other people. Without an obvious judgement from within the camera’s gaze we become paranoid- it’s not watching us because we’re young (Friday the 13th), or attractive (Blow Out), or just people (Maniac), but whatever we see in its cold black eyes, whatever form its blank white face takes. If the camera is Laurie’s perception of herself, then she is alienated, meandering, alone. In the way of overt violence, she also sees herself as vulnerable, a potential victim. Laurie is afraid that she will be attacked in public spaces and this is sadly not uncommon, although its prevalence has been described as a Spatial Paradox: women tend to be more afraid of attacks in public over domestic spaces, however they are more likely to be attacked at home by somebody they know. There is no telling what Laurie sees in Michael’s blank glowing face and glistening black eyes, but it’s something and someone she recognises.

But then everyone sees it different- even Laurie sees something different every time we/she looks. The reflection shows us whatever we need it to show, whatever we currently need to deal with. Loomis calls it pure evil, and it is hard to deny that there is something purely evil in the camera’s impassivity, but even this can lead to entirely different takes depending on whether or not one believes in evil (America loves its serial killers). Is Loomis recognising his own failure as a doctor, or is it something else? In the hit film It Follows, Mitchell imitates Halloween’s cameras to mimic the eye of the grim reaper, the morphing Shape of the attacker, but the idea was already fully formed in this older work. All the attacks take place in houses, in the manufactured Safety of the suburban streets, or does it matter more that Laurie stands up to the Shape, fighting her way out of the closet? It could be mid-tier Carpenter (I always thought it was until recently) but that still means that it’s the densest and most generous of its time.

The Last Wave (1977)
Dir. Peter Weir

The best intentions have not achieved change (…) in every area of life for our people, inequality persists. Much more needs to be done.
-Patrick Dodson, 2017

A myth persists that the 1967 referendum gave Aboriginal people Australian citizenship, the right to vote, and made it so they were finally represented by the Commonwealth as people instead of ‘flora and fauna’. While some have pointed out that Aboriginal people could apply (!) for citizenship before this date, were already able to vote in some places, and were never classified as flora and fauna, the 1967 referendum represented a genuinely momentous time in Australian history wherein non-Indigenous Australians voted en masse for the rights of Aboriginal people. The fact that these myths were and are still believed by many Australians is not indicative of some sort of historical ignorance on their part, but instead speaks to the fact that they seem like entirely plausible realities.* The Last Wave moves uneasily through post-referendum Sydney- it has after all been ten years since white Australians agreed that they would like the country’s Indigenous people to become recognised by the same laws and rights that they have, and now an Aboriginal man is found dead outside a pub and there’s no way it’s not ending up in court.

David and Annie are the average white Australians that voted Yes. David jumps at the chance to represent (through Legal Aid) a group of Aboriginal men accused of murder, even though his only experience is in corporate taxation. He’s never done this before, but he wants to do good for those who are now subject to the same laws as non-Indigenous Australians. He and Annie sit around their nice house with their blonde children reading books on Aboriginal culture, and both of them pause on a ‘then’ and ‘now’ image. ‘Then’ is a low-angle shot of a proud elder looking into the distance, ‘now’ is a homeless man drinking piss under a bridge. They pause because they did their bit letting the government know that they feel bad about the concentration camps that were built to annihilate all Aboriginal people, but here we are in the present witnessing self-annihilation. This mindset- to mourn those who’ve been historically wronged, is one of the dangerous forms that ‘best intentions’ can take- the Dying Race is revived through peoples’ inability to recognise that they must continue to act and listen. This is in no way specific to Australia- the average white New Zealander will walk past art by living Māori to find the portraits of Māori painted by Charles Goldie, triggering a nostalgic recognition of when Māori were Dying.** This pseudo-respect means mourning those who are still very much alive, and responding to problems with Oh, isn’t it sad.

When the Aboriginal men Chris and Charlie come to dinner, very much alive and not dead or pissed under a bridge somewhere, the Burtons freeze up. Annie attempts to make conversation, ‘I paint’, gesturing to the wall which has two paintings- a watercolour of a frog and a rough approximation of an Aboriginal dot painting. It is unclear which is her painting and what that means- if hers is the attempt at the dot painting then the Burtons fully misunderstand the nature of those paintings as concealing secret rituals unavailable to the non-Indigenous viewer (the market for dot paintings made a lot of white art dealers very, very rich, they line the walls of many a wealthy art collector’s house). If hers is the frog then we see two parallel worlds in stark contrast. Later, Annie looks out the window and sees Charlie standing out on the road. She’s met him, but she goes to call the police. A knock at the door follows and she is relieved to find a white face on the porch, and not Charlie’s. Aside from the fact that these scenes are very much an Australian forbear to Get Out‘s first act, they highlight the overlapping of worlds that takes place when colonists realise that they cannot ignore the other voices; those who’ve been there for something like 75,000 years. The explanation of Dreamtime is a vivid way of making David understand what is happening, but this occurs in any meeting of worlds. His journey is not a descent into obsession or madness, but what comes with the act of actually empathising. The film does not offer a way forward, but it is not meant to. It asked ten years on whether any real progress had been made since the 1967 referendum, and this year marks its fifty year anniversary. I am not Australian, and this is very much a conversation for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, but from a distance it seems that for every movement trying to improve things, cuts are made to communities, sacred sites are deregistered, and works of anti-Aboriginal propaganda are produced by popular national historians. Whether or not things are improving, the task is continued empathy and the risk is thinking, with the best intentions, Oh, isn’t it sad.

Like Picnic at Hanging Rock, there is much to be said about the colonist’s own alienation from a landscape that they have tried and failed to turn into a simulated Home (England), as well as from this (imagined) Home itself, but a million words would not be enough. Weir’s films are almost compulsively elusive, and yet describing the themes and narratives of his works comes too easily. This ease is what makes his films so frustrating- they are frequently described as dreamlike, but they are more like waking up and spending the entire day trying to remember past the boring residual bits you’ve been left with. It is not that he obscures simple ideas with arthouse tricks, but that simple descriptions don’t do these ideas justice. His solution is to turn us into bewildered amnesiacs. I remember in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, the author using the word ‘despair’ and then having to backpedal to say No, really marinate on the word for a minute. This can be a problem in art- recognising words and concepts in a work can lead to the generation of a platform from which to appreciate the thing from afar. Our understanding comes premeditated, our feelings hypothetical. Weir’s films use their medium to ensure that we are not just gliding over words and ideas- we can cite ‘the tyranny of distance’, alienation, annihilation, and the collision of worlds, but Weir absolutely forces us to feel them.

*Aboriginal affairs before and after 1967, regardless of what the referendum said, still tended to be dealt with on a state by state basis rather than according to the laws of Commonwealth, and often by departments whose chief concerns were flora and fauna, not people. Not not people, but not people either, then. Before the 1967 referendum those with Aboriginal ancestry were added up in order to be subtracted from the population census numbers. Not not not people, but something to subtract from human numbers. An absence. Terra nullius: How can a country be taken from a people that never existed?

**Goldie was actually painting as the Māori population of New Zealand was for the first time since colonists arrived, growing. His subjects look back, defeated, but what we are actually seeing is a white New Zealander fetishising colonial subjugation. Contemporary viewers thus take part in a second or even third hand perpetuation of the Dying Race. He might be one of our best technicians, but he is certainly our worst artist.