This is a phenomenally racist film. It is racist in so many ways that its racism is not internally consistent. Here are a list of ways in which this film is racist:
-The whole narrative is based around the idea that Indigenous Australian Jedda is unable to resist her primitive urges despite being raised by white parents. Despite this, her love interest Joe does not experience the same internal struggle.
-Joe is played by a white actor in the worst blackface I have ever seen.
-The film employs National Geographic-style objectification, lingering on the naked bodies of Indigenous men, women and children for an uncomfortably long time despite being made at a time when it could not show white nudity.…

2nd Charles Chauvel (after 40,000 Horsemen)

The kindest thing that can be said of Jedda is that it's a profoundly confused film, grappling with questions of Native culture and integration into White society that ultimately it cannot answer, for it is too entrenched in Commonwealth colonialism to ever recognise the binaries it rigidly clings to are the precise problem. Chauvel should be credited for his inclusion of Native performers in the film, both in main roles and as tribespeople. The performances he gets out of the two leads are very impressive, especially from the native man who excites Jedda; her performance is somewhat blunted by some pretty lousy dubbing. But the film makes a clear divide between the white people…

Jedda stands alone.

Jedda is a film full of firsts, expressed vividly through an experienced hand peaking in his last hurrah. But Jedda is also justly considered a deeply contentious classic. Assessed in terms of pure cinematic language, Jedda is an unbridled strike of lightning and one of the most beguiling and captivatingly sensualist Australian films to date. It is our The Birth of a Nation, our Searchers, all rolled into one, excavating and fashioning the troubling relationship between an ancient land and modern race relations through archetypal 50s melodrama, thereby capturing the very heart of the Australian experience and dialogue, in all its white man illusions and more deep-rooted forms of knowing.

Jedda was Australia's first colour film, and…

Faraway, so close. Best intentions and all that. Reaching and falling short. Deluded and delusional, a product of one's environment and their times. Circumstance beats intention.

Jedda is a horribly racist film. From its opening title card and roughly every minute of its run time thereafter you'll encounter something awful said or implied about First Nations people - something about which to wince and from which to recede; to withdraw. I needn't repeat them, I'm sure you know them or can guess. And yet.

It simultaneously draws you in. It's beautiful. Homestead and cliff face alike pop and vibrate with near-psychedelic saturation. Its characters buzz with a wrought yet stoic Sirkian tumult. Pulses and tempers and passionate intentionality vividly thrumming…

It is very difficult to know how to rate a film like this one. It occupies an important place in Australian cinema history - it was the first Australian film shot in colour, the first to use Aboriginal actors in leading roles, and it was in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1955 (it lost out to Delbert Mann's Marty).

It would be unfair to judge its portrayal of Aboriginal people by modern day standards but equally inappropriate to judge it using mainstream Australian values from the mid-1950s, since these have changed so fundamentally since then. It is also telling that the film was shown in overseas markets as Jedda the Uncivilised.

It tells the story of Jedda…