This video does what I think all good audio-visual scholarship should do, by allowing the viewer / listener to “feel” the argument on an emotional level, as well as understanding it on an intellectual one. Campora both illustrates and enacts the haunting of the landscape, as well as the “uncanny” reminder of Indigenous dispossession and white guilt that (as is argued in the cited scholarly texts and the video’s written accompaniment) come to the surface of Weir’s films. The clips have been well selected and edited to communicate this, in an interplay of image, sound, on-screen text, and written exegesis.

As a result of this enactment of a scholarly argument, the video then allows indigenous filmmakers’ work to respond to this discourse around Weir’s films, through communicating their more hopeful depiction of the landscape. Feelings of homecoming and redemption effectively take over from those of uncanny haunting and guilt that (it is argued) characterize white Australia’s ‘frontier myth’ of a landscape to be survived rather than tamed.

The written exegesis ponders how such a video can constitute “academic” thinking. By citing, illustrating and interrogating a scholarly source, before providing a counterpoint example to further the scholarly terrain, this video seems to me to realize this goal.

The only thing I think is missing is some more explanatory detail on exactly what is being sought in certain pivotal moments of the video, and how these inform the creative decisions being made in the broader project.