FEELING AND "FEELING" ON FILM

Before the premiere screening of Blaze at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, Del Kathryn Barton stood on the stage of the State Theatre and offered a framework to interpretation: that this was, amongst other things, a film about the generative power of female rage. The audience applauded; some (including me) cheered.

Rage has a certain proximity to shock – to outrage, perhaps – in the way that it strikes our nervous systems, running freezer fluid through the veins of the person possessed by it. It can feel begins with series of luscious shots across Barton’s five-panel painting 2017, before launching into the sequence of shocks which will determine the logic of the film as being precisely one of rage: one of embodied thinking and feeling, of comradeship (especially, but not only, between women), and of a radical softness which is absolutely commensurable with strength.