1977 Directed by Peter Weir
Australian lawyer David Burton agrees with reluctance to defend a group of Aboriginal people charged with murdering one of their own. He suspects the victim was targeted for violating a tribal taboo, but the defendants deny any tribal association. Burton, plagued by apocalyptic visions of water, slowly realizes danger may come from his own involvement with the Aboriginal people and their prophecies.
Richard Chamberlain Olivia Hamnett David Gulpilil Frederick Parslow Vivean Gray Athol Compton Peter Carroll Walter Amagula Michael Duffield Nandjiwarra Amagula Hedley Cullen Wallas Eaton Jo England John Frawley John Meagher Malcolm Robertson Greg Rowe Katrina Sedgwick Ingrid Weir Tony Llewellyn-Jones
Australian Film Commission McElroy & McElroy Derek Power South Australian Film Corporation Last Wave Productions
Black Rain, A Última Onda, Die letzte Flut, Den siste bølgen, L'ultima onda, La última ola, La Dernière Vague, Utánam a vízözön, הגל האחרון, Последняя волна, Ostatnia fala, 잃어버린 시간, Последната вълна, 最后大浪, Poslední vlna, Остання хвиля, Ultimul val
France
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Panorama of European Cinema
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Kaohsiung Film Festival
Australia
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Australia
Colombia
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Finland
France
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Greece
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Part of 30 Countries in 30 Days. Today: Australia!
"I've lost the world I thought I had."
In 1970, the War Memorial Museum in Auckland, New Zealand, had to move one of their exhibits because it was repeatedly cracking the glass of its display case. The exhibit was six centimetres long, did not appear to have physically touched the glass, and was too light to break it anyway.
It was a 'pointing bone', an Aboriginal ritual instrument feared for its ability to destroy anything it pointed towards. I wonder if Peter Weir had heard of this story before he started work on his haunting 1977 drama The Last Wave, whose plot is sparked by a death by pointing bone.
It…
Ambiguous and mysterious, Peter Weir's The Last Wave is a multilevelled story, focusing on a lawyer defending an Aboriginal man against a murder charge, and broader than that encompassing an apocalypse foretold by an ancient culture. It is cleverly built up - normal aspects of Western culture shown as insignificant in the face of extreme weather and a reality beyond our comprehension. Pure cosmic horror! The commentary on culture and the clash between two civilizations is up front throughout. This blends well with the fascinating Aboriginal belief system - particularly the Dreamtime - which is a key part of the narrative. It's all very ambiguous and never thoroughly clear which aspect of the story is the reality to be believed…
Awful Anglo settler culture receives premonitions of its own cataclysmic doom through the dreams of the culture they wiped out, or do they?
This one had all of the otherworldly strangeness and the same sense that the land itself is reacting to the pathogen of colonial culture with its own unknown and unspeakable antibodies that was in of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock', but didn't quite do it for me in the same way.
The Last Wave is an apocalyptic vision presented amidst the collision of two worlds. It focuses partially on the contrast of the modern and the old, of a new world built in metal and concrete versus a society tied to nature and mysticism. It presents White Australians as detached from the Aborigine people within their society. The Aborigines have had their languages, cultures, and tribal law destroyed. What The Last Wave presents is a pragmatic world confronted with mystical ideas. The tension builds through fear of the unknown, with a sense that events are beyond the understanding of Western man. The White Man has lost all touch with the past. The coloniser, who steals relics, romanticises the natives, kills, destroys,…
Like so many other movies directed by Peter Weir, The Last Wave encompasses an ambivalence that has a slightly otherworldliness to it. It is more questioning than a straightforward narrative tale, but the apprehension and appreciation of nature are always in the foreground. Its mainly interested in examining the tension between two fundamentally diverse cultures, that of Aborigines whose sincere and mysterious connection to the land foregoes the regulations and restrictions of the anglophone civilisation around them. Weir achieves a fantastic job of amalgamating the non-fictional with trance-like sequences, in conjunction with apprehending the aboriginal viewpoint.
drink rain to sleep & sink into dreams. god floods the world with category 5 visions, baptismal tides and psychic downpours, loud & deep
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…
Peter Weir's The Last Wave is elementally opposable to his previous masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Picnic is all about fire. The sweltering heat of the deep outback, the towering formation of igneous rock. It is tan and red and orange and brown. Dusty and covered in sweat. The old gods from deep within the Earth have forced their way to the surface and they demand a small personal sacrifice. Three young maidens will suffice to appease their ancient appetites.
Wave is all about water. The cold rain falling in sheets. Storms of melon-sized hailstones and oily mud. It is blue and green and grey and black. Perpetually soaked. The myth of the Destroyer, come to start the world's cycle…
watched on TCM as a part of a retrospective they’re doing on Australian new wave
Richard Chamberlain is crazy good in this.
David Gulpilil forever
Last night I had a super real-feeling nightmare that a huge flood was about sweep in and kill everyone and then the flood descended and it was so intense I jolted awake in that way that only people in movies do.
I didn’t remember that until I had already picked this movie and was halfway into it…
Der Film von Peter Weir ist in jeder Hinsicht ein Muster an Mehrdeutigkeit.
Aus erzählerischer Sicht geht es in der Geschichte um Mysterien und juristischen Intrigen. Sie hat aber auch typische Elemente des fantastischen und übernatürlichen Kinos, insbesondere traumhafte und apokalyptische Themen. Es gibt Momente großer Suggestion, wie die geisterhaften Erscheinungen der Maori oder das Eindringen des Protagonisten in heilige Kultstäten.
Der Regisseur schafft es, die Spannung aufrechtzuerhalten und die übernatürliche Grundstimmung geht nie verloren. Das Tempo ist aber sehr langsam und es gibt auch kein spektakuläres Ergebnis bzw. Ende.
Om tare tuttare ture soha
La civilización del hombre blanco burgués, que todo corrompió, que perdió lo sagrado, que ya no sabe lo que son los sueños. ¿Cómo competirle a lo natural con el artificio?
El ciclo, símbolo fundamental en este film cíclico, de un protagonista que está en función, que es el puente, para concluir un ciclo.
Y, por supuesto, la dualidad de los mundos que deben encontrarse en ese circuito. Partiendo de esta base hay dos símbolos claramente introducidos, que trazan toda la narración: el agua y el sol. Ambos, como bien se sabe, tienen un movimiento cíclico.
El film empieza con Charlie proyectando en el cielo, la simbologia del Tiempo del sueños, como explica el film, la…
