Il paesaggio e la nazione plurale: The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert

Abstract

The article is part of the volume Configurazioni e trasfigurazioni. Discorsi sul paesaggio mediato. The book asks to question the relationship between the landscape and its worlds (literary, cinematographic, virtual). The fundamental question of the article is how one can grasp the sense of the landscape of the Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994). Therefore, analyzing the famous film, the essay wants to correlate the sense of the landscape and the idea of nation. The landscape as a symbol is the frame of reference that will be examined, in particular the line of thought that imagines the landscape as the mental construction of a subject. In this way it will be possible to highlight the relationship between landscape cinema and Australianness. Finally, since the journey is, according to tradition, a place of encounters and clashes, exchanges and experiences, we will follow the adventures of the three protagonists along the road from Sydney to Alice Springs. Priscilla, the coach containing stories, represents the metaphor of the search for one’s own fluid identities under a present Australian landscape that reveals the construction of an ideological landscape, of a process of appropriation of spaces and, finally, still reveals the various identity and cultural differences .