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Clip description
While running away, Griffin (Hamish McFarlane) enters a showroom full of televisions that are all switched to the same channel. Confused, he stares at a man on screen, thinking the man can hear him, and asks him where the cathedral is. Searle (Marshall Napier) sees Griffin from outside, smashes a window and enters the room. They tussle.
Curator’s notes
The significant detail in this scene is the ‘grim reaper’ AIDS awareness campaign that screened on Australian TV in the late 1980s and is showing in the background as Searle and Griffin fight. The film uses this TV commercial to draw an implicit parallel between the bubonic plague ravaging Grifffin’s medieval homeland and the contemporary deaths caused by HIV/AIDS.
A likely inter-textual reference that may bypass many audience members on a first viewing is that the grim reaper was a central character in Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal (1957) – an obvious reference point for this film. Another possible reference: the bank of TV screens is reminiscent of a scene in the science-fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), where David Bowie’s alien sat watching televisions all tuned to different channels, calmly absorbing everything he was seeing. Griffin, the ‘alien’ in this case, has a very different reaction: he has no concept of what a television is, or how it might differ from reality.
