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Vacant Possession (1994)

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clip Family at war

Original classification rating: M. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Tessa (Pamela Rabe) has begun to see visions of her mother and father in the house. At the kitchen table, she explains to her new friend, Millie (Olivia Patten), why she never had kids. Her father went a bit crazy after the war and had her declared 'uncontrollable’, so she ran away. That night, Tessa 'sees’ her father back in the kitchen, reliving air raids. She remembers how she and her mother would find him asleep at the table with his service rifle.

Curator’s notes

by Paul Byrnes

The film is clever in the way it seamlessly mixes the different time periods together, suggesting how Tessa’s consciousness is drifting in and out of the past. Her father is estranged, rather than dead, so we are initially unsure if it really is him in the kitchen. The mother, seen at the end of the scene, is dead, which makes it clearer that this is an imaginary moment. In a sense, Tessa’s delusions connect her more directly with her father, who clearly suffered a post-traumamtic reaction after the war. Tessa is grieving for her mother and her own baby, lost when she was 16. That’s the part she doesn’t tell Millie, who reminds her of that lost daughter. The baby’s father, also now dead, was Mitch, Millie’s uncle. The white family and the Aboriginal family are thus entwined, through history, grievance, blood and death. That’s one of the film’s underlying pillars – that the races are not separate in Australia.

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