Events

1 May 2008

The Search for a Hidden Fate: Lacan’s ‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ and Murphy’s Utu

Seminar

In this presentation, I will offer a reading of Geoff Murphy's film Utu (1983) through an interpretation of Lacan's Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' (1955). The first part of my presentation will detail my own reading of Lacan's seminar, paying particular attention to why it is, if at all, a "letter always arrives at its destination". Through my interpretation of this most famous of Lacanian dictums, I will investigate the psychoanalytic link between repetition and fate. The second part of my presentation will read Murphy's film Utu through these concepts, arguing that the film posits New Zealand in the film's present as the direct outcome of a fate determined 100 years earlier, during the end of the New Zealand Wars. This is what I will refer to as the 'short circuit of history', by which the film invites the spectator to understand the events of the 1970s and 1980s as a repetition of an existing historical structure. By inviting the viewer in the present to write a retrospective historical narrative, the film is, I will argue, searching out a hidden fate of the nation, one that was determined in the past, the effects of which we are experiencing in the present.

Visual Arts and Media

film, television and video

Organisation:

Film, Television and Media Studies, University of Auckland