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Book: The Music of Fantasy Cinema

Chapter: Numinous Ambience: Spirituality, Dreamtimes and Fantastic Aboriginality

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.20993

Blurb:

This chapter deals with the musical construction of the Other, the Australian Aboriginal Otherness in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), a film that Hayward concludes could probably not have been made in a later, more politically correct, time, because of the way it constructs a fantasy around Aboriginal spirituality. The film represents a significant point in fantastic music, with a move away from the orchestral timbres of classical Hollywood practice into soundtracks characterized by synthesized, atmospheric and ambient sound.

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