Sometimes my favorite films are the ones I find the hardest to watch. And when I say “the hardest to watch” I don’t mean films that I have trouble staying interested in but films that literally make me want to look away from the screen. Plenty of directors make these kind of films von Trier, Haneke, and Herzog are some of the finer craftsmen but none of them have been able to produce a film that wholly disturbed me as much as Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 Wake in Fright did.
Wake in Fright is being billed as Australia’s great lost film. Originally produced in 1971 it premiered at Cannes and received spectacular praise from critics. It made a particularly deep impression on budding director Martin Scorsese “it left me speechless. Visually, dramatically, atmospherically and psychologically, it’s beautifully calibrated and it gets under your skin one encounter at a time..” Yet, despite how well it was received by critics the film performed poorly at the box office and was rejected by the Australian public. In an interview with Stack magazine Kotcheff tells an anecdote about a man standing up during the middle of a showing in Australia and shouting at the screen “That is not us!” After watching the film it’s easy to understand why it was originally rejected. Wake in Fright depicts Australians as genial yet despicable alcoholic simpletons who are steeped in a culture of meaningless and inescapable violence.
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