In recent years the Adelaide suburb of Snowtown has become home to the largest wind farm in South Australia. Yet it will be some time before the region becomes principally known for renewable energy. As the site of the serial killings carried out by John Bunting and his accomplices between 1992 and 1999, it is impossible to banish images of body parts, barrels and bank vaults. Even the title of this event seems a macabre oxymoron for a place synonymous with death.
Justin Kurzel’s unsparingly graphic film was released in 2011 and caused almost as much controversy as the murders themselves. Now the Adelaide festival has commissioned a screening of previously unseen footage from the movie accompanied by a live rendition of the score composed by the director’s brother, Jed Kurzel. The project is impressively realised, though from an outsider’s perspective it’s hard to know what to make of this apparent need to revisit the trauma. A courageous act of artistic expiation? Or a macabre compulsion to keep scratching the sore?
What is certain is that nobody except the Kurzel brothers could have successfully made this movie. They were brought up in the under-privileged suburb it depicts, and almost exclusively drew the cast from members of the local community whose lack of acting experience became no obstacle as nothing about the film was an act. Kurzel chose to shoot on faded film stock which gave everything a washed-out, degraded look; yet the situation was handled with an empathy that, in other hands, could easily have become merely exploitative and prurient.
Jed Kurzel’s ominous, insistent music was a fundamental factor in the film’s success. It’s intriguing to discover from this screening that much of the rejected footage featured oppressive studies of persistent rain and leaden skies. The final edit had a parched, arid atmosphere; which the score permeates like sticky humidity.
For the live re-creation, Kurzel led a six piece band switching between synthesiser drones, treated percussion and choppy guitar. It’s an edgy, electric sound whose heavy pulse and cumulative intensity brings to mind the compositions of Louis Andriessen and the industrial metal in vogue at the time the murders took place. It’s heavy, hypnotic and mostly restricted to a single key, indicative of demoralised community that has sunk into the poverty trap with little chance of escape.
Marcel Weber’s accompanying montage of cancelled footage is truly disturbing. Freed from narrative responsibility, the camera dwells for rather too long on images of under-nourished children amusing themselves in joyless playgrounds or hanging listlessly around the estate. Rather creepily, the viewer becomes complicit with the voyeurs and predators the community is determined to expunge. An extended cut of the notorious scene in which a python gobbles a rodent is as gruesome as it sounds. And the images of playful kittens leave a horrible presentiment that in Snowtown, there is almost certainly more than one way to skin a cat.
