The Camera in the Karoo

After the publication of Dusklands in 1974, film became an increasingly central interest for Coetzee, shaping his creativity in multiple ways, eventually culminating three years later in a cinematically inflected novel. Notes composed at the end of the writing of the ‘Vietnam Project’ already show the growing pull of cinema, as Coetzee began thinking about his next novel: ‘New book: film script, with explicit commentary’. 1 In the final stages of writing Duskland s, Coetzee appeared to be searching for a form of writing that had the visual force of large-scale, high-resolution moving images projected on the cinematic screen. Thinking about the power of film, Coetzee observed that by contrast, television’s ‘essential failings were its tiny screen and the poor definition of its images’, making it unable to ‘convey anything of the dynamism’ of the war.