Yearly Archive for: ‘2011’

Screening the Past > 2011

Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial

Motion picture serials, the forerunner of today’s serialized television dramas, have been around since the earliest days of the narrative cinema. Exhibitors rapidly realized that in order to assure continued audience attendance, open ended “cliff hangers” were sure to keep viewers returning week after week, to find out the latest plot twists, character developments, and of course, how the hero …

Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif

The representational chamber is an energetic dispositif. To describe it and to follow its functioning, that’s what needs to be done. – Jean-François Lyotard (1993: 3, translation amended) Graphics, Stacks and Materiality It is always fascinating and instructive to return to a moment in history when a change in the conditions of culture loomed on the horizon. In terms of …

“These Are The Choices We Make”: Animating Saltwater Country

Associate Professor John Bradley is Director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He has been actively involved in issues associated with Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management for 30 years. The majority of this research has been undertaken in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory with particular emphasis on the marine and island environments …

Two Laws: A Filmmaking Journey

Alessandro Cavadini was born in Italy and educated at Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano. He worked in design, theatre and film and continued in these fields in Paris and then in Australia. In addition to his own films with Reddirt Films, which he produced, directed, shot, and edited, he has worked in various capacities in 15 other projects in Paris, …

Was Two Laws Experimental?

Asking this question of a film that was shot in 1980 in the remote Australian Aboriginal community of Borroloola is part of a broader set of questions about technique and form (politics and aesthetics) for arts practitioners. What is an experiment for the arts, as opposed to the sciences? Is it a process of composing a piece (of writing, film, …

Story, Film Style and Cross-cultural Collaboration in Aeroplane Dance (1994)

In 1997, Graham ventured into writing and directing new media. From 1997 to 2000 he co-wrote and directed the encyclopedic documentary (CD-ROM and website) Mabo – The Native Title Revolution, which was nominated for a British Academy Award (BAFTA) in 2001. In 2002 and 2003 he worked in Yirrikala in Arnhem Land where he directed the documentary Lonely Boy Richard …

Aeroplane Dance: Whose Story?

In the early 1990s, Trevor Graham with the Yanyuwa people at Borraloola created a film called Aeroplane Dance (1994) (known by Yanyuwa speakers as Ka-Wayawayama). It begins with the line that this is “the story of one American Bomber who created a legend” – amplified by the first end credit stating that it is based upon the official report of …

Screen Attachments: An Introduction

© Isaac Julien In an essay published in 2000 Anne Friedberg observed: Now, a variety of screens – long and wide and square, large and small, composed of grains, composed of pixels – compete for our attention without any arguments about hegemony. Not only does our concept of ‘film history’ need to be reconceptualised in light of these changes in …

Cinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch’s Inland Empire

In the lead-up to and long shadow following cinema’s centenary in 1995, film has increasingly been understood and defined in terms of its disappearance or demise. Over the past decade, film studies conferences have been regularly peppered with papers on cinema’s passing, journals have run special issues on the medium’s anticipated death, and leading film theorists have bookended their publications …

Cinema Lost and Found: Trajectories of Relocation

Alfredo The movie theatre is already completely full and, at the entrance, a small crowd keeps pressing to enter. In the projection booth, Alfredo is working, as usual, with the assistance—and perhaps even more so with the companionship—of little Totò. The projectionist has an idea: using mirrors, he intercepts the beam of light coming from the projector that is destined …

Models of Collaboration in the Making of Ten Canoes (2006)

Film is an inherently collaborative art form produced by the skills and decisions of (among others) the director, co-director, producers, photographer and cast. According to the norms both of the commercial narrative film industry and ethnographic practice, a vertical hierarchy privileges the authority, control and decision-making of the director. Alternatively, collaboration can operate as a collective process that distributes authority, …

Darlene Johnson on Making Films in Arnhem Land

Interview by Therese Davis Darlene Johnson is from the Dunghutti tribe of the East coast of New South Wales and currently resides in Sydney. Her first short drama, Two-Bob Mermaid (1996), won the Australian Film Critics Circle Award for Best Australian Short Film. It was nominated at the Venice Film Festival for the Baby Lion Award. It won the Best …

A Portrait of Harry Potamkin

One page after creasing the cover of the anthology that informs this investigation, I was immediately drawn to a portrait of its author. It is a shadowy monochrome photograph of a young man’s side profile, captured by Irving Lerner. Immortalised in that bygone moment, this twenty-something male can be seen as stern, contemplative and ambiguous. The young man reflectively stares …

DVD Screen Culture for Children: Theories of Play and Young Viewers

The viewing practices of film audiences have undergone some significant changes over the last few decades, particularly since the release of films in DVD format. DVDs, as John Thornton Caldwell has argued, allow viewers to forge “new relationships with film and television” (2008, 306). Bonus or special features figure prominently in many DVDs marketed to the adult market, but even …

Victorian Indigenous Communities and Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling, as a specifically developed and trademarked technique, is one of the ways in which Indigenous communities in Victoria have greatly increased access to the tools of media-making and new media forms in digital culture to tell their stories. In contrast to industrial models of media production, Digital Storytelling is a social, “grassroots” film practice, first developed in the …

Brief Encounters: Theorizing Screen Attachments Outside the Movie Theatre

© Isaac Julien We should note that the word “emotion” comes from Latin, emovere, referring to ‘to move, to move out’. Of course, emotions are not only about movement, they are also about attachments or about what connects us to this or that. (Ahmed 2004, p.11) Spectatorship is not only the act of watching a film, but also the …

The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime

Absence can be considered as a resonant field in which cultural objects such as painting, film and video art interact through an act of representational negation—the viewer experiences a thing that is both not there and there, an imminent presence. We find this resonant field in the whiteness of a canvas or in the blue and green screens of digital …

The Farm (2009) and Indigenous Remembrance

The Farm is a story about a place that my family simply calls “the farm”, but is specifically Tally Ho farm, near Bodalla in NSW. I recently “Googled” Bodalla and found a sparse, almost blank map, which I thought was rather appropriate: a lack of detail, a lack of representation of Indigenous peoples, and a lack of filmic representation. To …

Fingers, Futures, Fates: Viewing Interactive Cinema in Kinoautomat and Sufferrosa

Introduction Why do we sit so close [to the screen]? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh. Michael Pitt in The Dreamers (2003) In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, a character describes his cinephilia as an indolent, almost submissive absorption of images, eyes glued to the screen as he sits …

Waterbodies: Moving-image installations at Termemilano Spa

unless a man be born again of water John 3.5 In recent years, the health spa experience has become a popular and widespread social practice. The quest for bodily relaxation and wellness is permeating the needs of contemporary society, as a way of counteracting the stressful pace of city life. What is more, health spa centre designers are increasingly integrating …

Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise Stanford University Press, 2010 ISBN: 9 780 804761 680 US$27.95 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Stanford University Press) Some thirty thousand or so years ago, prehistoric human beings painted and drew on the walls of what is now known as the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, located in the …

A Minoritarian Digital Poetics of YouTube

[Martin Arnold, excerpt from Alone] I Does the short digital video shared over the Internet constitute a form or genre of its own? Do such digital movies have a particular sensibility? The film theorist Vivian Sobchack once argued that this was so. In her essay “Nostalgia for a digital object”, Sobchack points out that online moving images obey neither the …

Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Peter Limbrick

Peter Limbrick, Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2010 ISBN: 978-0-230-10264-4 272 pp AUD$147.95 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan) In his latest book Making Settler Cinemas, Peter Limbrick traverses some essential cinemas of the world, Ford in the USA, Ealing Studios in Australia …

Rethinking Screen Encounters: Cinema and Tamil Migrant Workers in Singapore

Introduction Over a five month period — August to December 2010 — I conducted field research in Singapore where I interviewed 40 South Asian migrant workers engaged in both skilled and unskilled work, three senior executives from the construction industry (a major sector that employs unskilled foreign workers), an executive from the Singapore Construction Workers Association (SCAL), an organisation responsible …

Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing, Susan L. Carruthers

Susan L. Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing. California: University of California, 2009. ISBN: 9780520257313 US$21.95 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) A professor in the Federated Department of History at Rutgers University, Susan L Carruthers’ research on American and British 20th century history focuses on the relation of media to conflict and war. …

Diasporas of Australian cinema, Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert (eds)

Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert (eds), Diasporas of Australian cinema Intellect, Bristol, UK/Chicago USA, 2009 ISBN: 1 841 50197 2 US$40 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect) My first problem with this book was its title. From the title alone, I assumed it would be about the spread of Australian cinema into other cultures (probably a study of …

Théâtre du Soleil Meets the Cinema: Acting and Mask Work in Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière

Were it not for the well-sustained intermedial formula that characterises Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière, ou la vie d’un honnête homme (France, 1978), the film might appear to a distracted viewer as little more than a big-budget movie displaying an above-average predilection for carefully composed tableaux. The director of the film is a well-known and lauded theatre director, founder and primary force …

The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller

Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead University of Illinois Press, 2010 (the first paperback edition of the 1986 hardback version) ISBN: 978-0-252-07772-2 US$25 (pb) 408pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) In the Criitque of Pure Reason Kant draws a distinction between negative and indefinite judgment. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, the example that Kant …

Dancing Ledge / Kicking the Pricks, Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8166-7449-7 256pp US$18.95 (pb) Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8166-7450-3256pp US$18.95 (pb) (Review copies supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Film-maker, painter, queer activist, AIDS awareness activist, gardener and writer, Derek Jarman has left a great legacy in a variety of artistic and cultural …

Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood

Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds University Press of Kansas, 2010 ISBN 978-0-7006-1743-2 US$34.95 (hb) 312pp (Review copy supplied by University Press of Kansas) Who are the “All Time Winners in an All Time Losers Game”? [1] Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood’s thoroughly researched cultural …

Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Ella Shohat

Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation I. B. Tauris, 2010 (Revised Edition) ISBN 13: 9781845113131 US$30 (pb) 416pp (Review copy supplied by I. B. Tauris) When Ella Shohat’s doctoral dissertation was first published as a book in 1989, it stood out as a groundbreaking and insightful analysis of the Israeli cinema. At a time when film …

The Fall of Buster Keaton

James L. Neibaur, The Fall of Buster Keaton: His Films for M-G-M, Educational Pictures, and Columbia Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-0810876828 US$45.00 (pb) 225pp Neibaur’s The Fall of Buster Keaton concentrates on films which have been dismissed or glossed over in other works on Keaton, namely the films he made for MGM, Educational Pictures and Columbia Pictures. This …

The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Suzanne Buchan

Suzanne Buchan, The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8166-4659-3. US$25.00 (pb) 296 pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Suzanne Buchan quotes Polish author Bruno Schulz, who wrote that “poetry happens when short-circuits of sense occur between worlds” (p.66). This is an …

Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, Karen Beckman

Karen Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4726-2 US$24.95 (pb) 305pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Since the industrial revolution, technology has completely altered ways of living. In the twenty-first century, a deluge of new technology has continued to crash into our daily lives, altering modes …

Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry

Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8166-4456-8 US$25.00 (pb) 368 pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) “The Society of the Spectacle is beyond criticism. It is a book in which everything that needs to be said has been said. It is the book, or the book. Debord’s …

Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition University of Chicago, 2010 ISBN: 9 7802 267266 56 US$25.00 (pb) 408pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) It is often said of Histoire(s) du cinéma that its main “character” is Adolph Hitler, due to the frequency with which the man is invoked throughout Godard’s opus. In the …

Television as Digital Media

James Bennett and Niki Strange (eds), Television as Digital Media Duke University Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4910-5 US $26.95 (pb) 400pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) In 2006 Luxembourg became the first country to make the switch from analogue to digital-only television. Since then, more than 30 countries have followed suit. But while some nations like the United States …

Twilight of the Idols

Mark Lynn Anderson, Twilight of the Idols University of California Press, 2011 ISBN: 9780520267084 US24.95 (pb) 238pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) The recent trend in cinema studies to “look past the screen” has occasioned all kinds of interesting work on distribution, exhibition, regulation, reception, and star studies taken in their own right, not just as supplements …

Drawn To Sound: Animation Film Music and Sonicity

Rebecca Coyle, Drawn To Sound: Animation Film Music and Sonicity London: Equinox Publishing LTD, 2010 ISBN: 9 7818 455335 26 UK£16.99 (pb) 258pp (Review copy supplied by Equinox Publishing) No longer can animation be branded as simply Disney’s Mickey Mouse or Warner Bros Bugs Bunny – new players, new technologies and new methods have emerged. From 3D modeling to live …

Terry Gilliam (British Film Makers)

Peter Marks, Terry Gilliam (British Film Makers) Manchester University Press, Manchester UK, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-7190-7032-7 US$84.95 (hb) 274 pp. (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) Published as part of the Manchester University Press series dedicated to British filmmakers, Peter Marks’ Terry Gilliam opens into a critical debate over national cinema and identity. For the Minnesota-born Gilliam, his classification as …

Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era

François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.), Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era (Trans. Lance Hewson) Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-90-8964-083-3 US$35.00 (pb) 271pp (Review copy supplied by University of Amsterdam Press) François Albera and Maria Tortajada’s collection Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era is comprised of eleven essays that examine a …

The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture

Belinda Smaill, The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ISBN: 9780230237513 US$80.00 (hb) 221pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan) One of the strengths of Belinda Smaill’s book is the range of documentaries it discusses: pornography documentaries; a focus on the work of Kim Longinotto; Asian Australian documentaries; and the 2008 season of the Australian Idol television program. …

Capital and Co.: Kluge/Eisenstein/Marx

Let’s be frank – the idea of filming Karl Marx’s Das Kapital strikes one as, at the very least, strange. To film thousands of pages written in a dry language of 1860s political economy? To film … what, exactly? The notions of productive forces, relations of productions, use value and exchange value, commodity fetishism and capital per se? To film …

Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age Indiana University Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-253-22252-7 US$24.95 (pb) 392pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) Kerins says at the outset that a few years ago it was customary to begin any book on film sound by stating that it was an area that had been largely ignored, but …

The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film

Thomas Waugh, The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780816645879 AUD$49.95 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Thomas Waugh is a senior scholar in documentary studies who has focused during his entire career on left-wing, dissident, and activist film, which he groups under the term “committed” …

Steven Soderbergh

Aaron Baker, Steven Soderbergh Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011 ISBN: 9 7802 520779 68 US$19.95 (pb) 148pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) Since the inception of auteurism, studies of directors have proliferated largely in short-form writing, from the capsule entries in Sarris’ The American Cinema to the slim volumes on directors included in the Secker and …

Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History

Julie Hubbert (ed.), Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011 ISBN: 9 780 5202410 22 US$34.95 (pb) 528pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) This volume is a welcome addition to the literature on film and music. It runs to just under 500 pages, with 53 contributions (historical documents) assembled …

Incomparable Bodies

But First … Necessarily coexisting human beings are not thinkable as mere bodies and, like even the cultural objects which belong with them structurally, are not exhausted in corporeal being. – Edmund Husserl, Origin of Geometry[1] In the Kingdom of the Effigy In cinema we must – as a matter of method – remove those glasses which Dr Coppelius …

Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema

Joe Kember, Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-85989-801-0 £47.50 (hb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press) New media forms don’t emerge in a vacuum. They evolve over time through technological advancements and cultural demands. Cinema is no exception. While some early films may have awed audiences, as …

Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship

Jonathan Auerbach, Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-8223-5006-4 USA $23.98 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Since American film noir has focused on scholarly discussion for nearly six decades now, the appearance of any new study offering original insights and new perspectives would appear to offer a …

The Artist as Ecologist

(First published in Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York 1970 ) For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the …

Counter-Archive. Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète

Paula Amad, Counter-Archive. Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète New York: Columbia University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-231-13501-6 US$34.95 (pb) 408 pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) Until research in this century revealed its existence, Albert Kahn’s “Archives de la Planète” had not even warranted a footnote in film history, its film collections of unedited, documentary …

Cerebrum: Intermedia and the Human Sensorium

(First published in Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York 1970 ) The technology to produce such environments as Kroitor and Thompson describe has existed for some time; what has not been available is the necessary consciousness. Man has been so busy proving his right to live that he has not learned how to live. Thus we exist in an environment …

Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

Jane Park, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4980-8 US $25.00 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) As a study about race, ethnicity and films, Jane Park’s Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema has much to both admire and be interested in. The study is methodologically distinctive …

Intermedia Theatre

(First published in Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York 1970 ) Susan Sontag once defined the “two principal radical positions” in contemporary art as that which recommends the breaking down of distinctions between genres, and that which maintains or upholds those distinctions: on the one hand seeking a “vast behavioral magma or synaesthesis”; on the other hand pursuing “the intensification of …

Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities

David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. ISBN 978 0 7486 33920 UK £60.00 (hb) 254pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) This book aptly begins by telling us that it is not about Sean Connery and a skim through the contents makes it clear that neither is it about Braveheart (USA …

Introducing Occasional Papers

Welcome to Screening The Past’s series of Occasional Papers, an initiative to extend the space of the journal and publish essays and articles longer than the customary 5000 word length. Three Occasional Papers will be published within a year and released in between each issue of the journal.

Modernism, Cinema, Adolescence: Another History for Teen Film

I’m allowed to go to picture shows, That is, if nurse is feeling able; But we only go to Mickey Mouse, I’m not allowed Clark Gable! It’s such an imposition For a girl who’s got ambition To be an in-between! (Love Finds Andy Hardy, USA 1938) In film buff histories, the retrospective compilations produced for awards shows, and in commentary …

Understanding Virginia: Quoting the Sources in Terrence Malick’s The New World

How much they err, that think every one which has been at Virginia understands or knows what Virginia is. – Capt. John Smith These words appear upon a black screen at the beginning of the 2008 “Extended Cut” of The New World, Terrence Malick’s film about John Smith, Pocahontas, and the founding of the Virginia Colony. They are followed by …

Normalcy in Jazz-Mad America: Clara Bow in My Lady of Whims

Earlier versions of this article were presented to the biennial conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (November 2008) and to the University of Otago Department of History and Art History’s Work in Progress Seminar (May 2010). America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy. —Senator Warren G. Harding, 14 May …

Vertigo and the Maelstrom of Criticism

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) is a site of cultural fascination. Brian de Palma has remade the film twice (Obsession [1976], Body Double [1984]), while it has been reworked or quoted in films such as Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), and Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994). Chris Marker pays tribute to Vertigo (“a film I …

“Working in Communities, Connecting with Culture”: Reflecting on U-matic to YouTube A National Symposium Celebrating Three Decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking

In June 2010, the Film and Television Studies program at Monash University and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) co-hosted a national symposium celebrating three decades of Australian Indigenous community filmmaking. [1] The occasion for this event was the DVD release of the internationally acclaimed Indigenous community film Two Laws (1981), produced thirty years earlier by the Borroloola …

Missing in Action, Caught on Film: Silent Film Actor “André de Beranger” Goes to War

Young Duke Cameron lies mortally wounded on a smoky, bloody Gettysburg battlefield. Suddenly, a northern youth appears above him, bayonet poised to strike him through. A glimmer of recognition passes over the youth’s face. The wounded Rebel is his childhood chum. As the Yankee lowers his rifle and bends over his dying friend, a shot rings out. He falls to …

Musical Modernism in Brian May’s Australian Film Scores

Introduction Film music has provided a useful space for the exploration of modernist composition. It is through this association with popular film texts that audiences who were otherwise dissociated from new music composition consumed modernist techniques. Modernist techniques adopted in film scores include the conscious use of atonality and dissonance (often linked to specific film genres such as science fiction …

Giorgio Mangiamele’s Clay and the Beginnings of Art Cinema in Australia

“Clay…the least commercial work ever made in the history of cinema.”[1] Almost two decades ago Graeme Cutts quite rightly characterised Giorgio Mangiamele as “one of the forgotten directors of the Australian cinema” (Cinema Papers, 1992, p. 17). In the intervening years, Mangiamele has frequently scored a mention in the new standard histories that have appeared, and has now achieved his …

What is Digital Cinema?

First published (In English and German) in Telepolis – das Magazin der Netzkultur (www.ix.de/tp). Munich: Verlag Heinz Heise, 1996. (Republished with the permission of the author) Cinema, the Art of the Index 1 Thus far, most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities of interactive narrative. It is not hard to understand why: since the majority …

Alternative Primary Sources for Studying Australian Television History: An Annotated List of Online Pro-Am Collections

Introduction It is possible to write many different histories of Australian television, and these different histories draw on different primary sources. The ABC of Drama, for example, draws on the ABC Document Archives (Jacka 1991). Most of the information for Images and Industry: Television Drama Production in Australia is taken from original interviews with television production staff (Moran 1985). Ending …

‘Give It a Go You Apes’: Relations Between the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Early Australian Film Industry (1954–1970)

This paper extends our previous analyses of the early history of the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, by examining the relations between the festivals and the Australian film industry, from 1954 to 1970. [1] Like those previous papers, it is built on the premise that the history of the two Festivals is best understood as an ongoing negotiation between the …

China’s New “Women’s Cinema”

Chris Berry, “China’s New Women’s Cinema” originally appeared in Camera Obscura, Volume 18. Copyright 1989 Camera Obscura. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. “Women’s cinema” (女的电影院 ) is a term that has come into common critical usage in the People’s Republic of China over the last year or two. Certainly, Chinese commentators are aware …

Ford At Fox Part 3b

Four Men and a Prayer (1938) Let’s get this straight first off: Four Men and a Prayer is not a religious picture. Far from it. Or, at least, given the angelic overtones of this last shot, it is no more a religious picture than Doctor Bull is. The print on the DVD is excellent. There are no extras. It shares …

Films by Gordon Ball (dvd review)

(Canyon Cinema.www.canyoncinema.com) US$50 (individual) US$150 (institution) Some films move you, some films entertain you, and some films enlighten you. Watching Gordon Ball’s films is a transcendent experience, and I’m sure that’s just what Ball intended; viewing them in sequence is to follow the trajectory of a life from ecstatic youth and endless possibility into the more circumscribed and difficult terrain …

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh

Maitland McDonagh, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8166-5607 US$22.95 (pb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Towards the end of ‘An Interview with Dario Argento’, Maitland McDonagh suggests to the director that only he “could take the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and make a …

Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince, Mark A. Vieira

Mark A. Vieira, Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010 ISBN: 9780520260481 US$34.95 (hb) 528pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Irving Grant Thalberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1899 with a congenital heart condition that would kill him 37 years later. By the time of his death he had …

Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, Homay King

Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4759-0 US $22.95 (pb) 216pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier develops an analytical framework for attending to a broad range of visual texts, from cinema to art installations. Homay King is equally expansive in terms of the historical periods and genres from which she …

Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre, James Kendrick

London: Wallflower Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906660-26-0 UK£12.99 (pb) 144pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Upon first receiving a copy of James Kendrick’s Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre, the thought of a book consisting of only one hundred and thirteen pages (plus notes) that deals with the broad concept of film violence instantly flagged suspicion. This book is part of …

The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s, William M. Drew

Lanham/Toronto/Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010 ISBN 978-0-8108-7680-4 US$50 (pb) 243 pp (Review copy supplied by The Scarecrow Press, Inc) The afterlife of silent films has lasted much longer than anyone would have predicted in 1930, the year most industry people declared the medium dead. In transitioning from commercial product to historicized, aesthetic object, silent film has survived more than …

New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, Darcy Paquet

(Short Cuts)London: Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906660-25-3 UK£12.99 (pb) 135pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves reads as a series of vignettes through which the reader glimpses the turmoil of the last three decades of South Korean history. The glimpses are in fact iconic scenes from the films of New Korean Cinema that the …

Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, Tom Kemper

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780520257078 US$21.95 (pb) 312pp (review copy supplied by University of California Press) Were Tom Kemper naming his book right now, he might be tempted to title it ‘The Social Network’,d befitting the nexus of personal connections that formed the basis for the rise of Hollywood talent agents in the 1930s. …

British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade, Laurel Forster and Sue Harper (eds)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-1734-9 US$67.99 (hb) 310pp (Review copy supplied by Cambridge Scholars Publishing) As Laurel Forster and Sue Harper relate in their Acknowledgments and Preface, the scholarship in British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade was borne out of a multi-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project on British cinema in the …

Casablanca: Movies and Memory, Marc Augé (Translated and with an Afteword by Tom Conley)

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota PressISBN: 978-0-8166-5641-7 US$18.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In this essay, prolific French anthropologist Marc Augé uses the means of autobiography to investigate the traumatic collective history of France during the second World War. What sets this elegant work apart from mere remembrance or dry theory is Augé’s use of the film …

English Filming, English Writing, Jefferson Hunter

Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-253-22177-3 US$24.95 (pb) 376pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) The founding argument of this book is stated on the first page: “(The author) is obliged to take literary connections into account…” Why is he obliged to do so? Because: “English filming turns out to have a great deal to do …

Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing, Kathleen Battles

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8166-4914-3 US$22.50 (pb) 282pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) For anyone interested in the representation of crime, Kathleen Battles’ study of the radio crime drama in the 1930s is essential reading. While Battles admits that she is primarily concerned with addressing a gap in the cultural history of …

The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, James M. Welsh, Gene D. Phillips, and Rodney F. Hill (eds)

Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010 ISBN: 978 0 8108 7651 4 US$70.00 (hb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by The Scarecrow Press) James M. Welsh, in his Introduction (“So Why Does Francis Coppola Deserve His Own Encyclopedia”) to The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, writes that the main function of the text could be worded as explaining “why Coppola matters.” …

Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory – Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, (Edited by Erica Carter, Translated by Rodney Livingstone)

Berghan books, 2010 ISBN 978-1-84545-660-3 US$95.00 (hb) 314pp (Review copy supplied by Berghan Books) The work of Béla Balázs (1884-1994) belongs to the classical film theory period, a period which came to an end around the mid-1960s. The two most prominent figures of classical film theory are Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and André Bazin (1918-1958), whose works have not only overshadowed …

Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s, Patrice Petro (ed.)

New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8135-4732-9 US$25.95(pb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by Rutgers University Press) This excellent volume, part of the series Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema, edited by Murray Pomerance and Adrienne L. McLean for Rutgers University Press (five volumes published, five more forthcoming, covering each decade of the 20th century in American cinema from the perspective of …

Wake in Fright, Tina Kaufman

Sydney: Currency Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-86819-864-4 AU$16.95 (pb) 71pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) “It’s death to farm out here, it’s worse than death in the mines; you want them to sing bloody opera as well?” Doc (played by Donald Pleasance, qted by Kaufman, p. 26). Tina Kaufman notes in her study of Wake in Fright (Australia/USA 1971) that …

Neo-Noir, Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck (eds.).

London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906660-17-8 (pbk) UK 16.14 ISBN 978-1-906660-18-5 (hbk) UK 45 267pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) It is hard to believe that that the term neo-noir has been in common currency for approximately the past forty years. Bu, t with the exception of the pioneering works of Alain Silver and James Ursini, …

Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel, Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis (eds.)

Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 1 4384 3030 0 US$ 29.95 (pb) 264 pp. (Review copy supplied by SUNY Press) Second Takes examines a proliferating cinematic mode of production that increasingly informs film release schedules: the sequel. As Michael Cieply states in a 2007 New York Times article, “In the last five years, only about 20 percent of …

On Michael Haneke, Brian Price and John David Rhodes (editors)

Detroit, Wayne State University Press ISBN: 978-0-8143-3405-8 US$29.95(pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) Introducing their edited collection of work on Michael Haneke, Brian Price and John David Rhodes describe the director as “one of the most innovative filmmakers of this or any other moment of film history” (p. 8). This type of declaration, common to many …

Introduction to Reprints of Two Essays on Blake Edwards

Years ago we were sitting in Blake Edwards’s bungalow on the Culver Studios lot. When he walked in to begin a long interview, he remarked that he had just come from a session with his analyst, Milton Wexler, where they had discussed our books on his films. We lightheartedly asked whether, after a lifetime of psychoanalysis and our two books …

Detecting, Defecting & Whistling in the Dark: The Films of Blake Edwards

This article was originally published in Velvet Light Trap no. 13 Fall 1974. It is published here with the kind permissions of the authors. A woman enters a bar where she expects to meet and negotiate with her sister’s kidnapper. A man looks her over. Perhaps he is the man, but, strangely, he moves to another room. She, hesitatingly, follows. …

“Crazy World Full of Crazy Contradictions”, Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria

This article was originally published in Wide Angle vol. 5 no. 4 1983. It is published here with the kind permissions of the authors. When we first see Victoria Grant (Julie Andrews) in Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria, she is friendless, without money or a job and starving. When her hotel manager demands the rent she hasn’t paid for two weeks and …

On Blake Edwards

This article was originally published in American Directors Volume II, edited by Jean-Pierre Coursoson and Pierre Sauvage (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1983). It is published here with the kind permission of the author. For the appearances are glimpses of the unrevealed. (Anaxagoras) Blake Edwards, the most important comic stylist (along with Richard Lester) of the 1960s, and without peer today, parlayed …

The Bitter Essence of Blake Edwards

This article was first published in the Village Voice, 5 May 1987. It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Let’s talk bottom line for a sec. With Blind Date Blake Edwards has bounced back at the box office from almost certain oblivion after his distinctive brand of cerebral slapstick bombed out in A Fine Mess. Indeed, …

Sophisticated Naturalism

Interview with Blake Edwards by Jean-Francois Hauduroy This interview with Blake Edwards was first published in English in Cahiers du cinéma in English, Number 3, 1966. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holder of the following interview conducted by Jean-Francois Hauduroy reproduced in this Tribute to Blake Edwards. As these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holder …

Ridicule and Panic: On Blake Edwards

This article was originally published in the French monthly cinema journal Positif, no. 290, April 1985. It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Translated from the French by Edith Nicolas, with thanks to Adrian Martin and Gabriel Stibio. In A Shot in the Dark (1964), a photograph of the President of the French Republic shaking …

Blake Edwards, Switch, and the Price of a New Man

Cinephiles have a remarkable capacity to abstract the films that they love. If, as Laura Mulvey once put it, narrative cinema is ‘an illusion cut to the measure of desire’, [1] these buffs cut an even finer illusion to the measure of their very particular desire. They can watch the collected works of John Ford and not even remember the …

Topping the Topper: Blake Edwards

Interview by Raffaele Caputo This interview was originally published in Cinema Papers no. 85, November 1991. Leslie Halliwell once wrote of Blake Edwards, “a man of many talents, all of them minor.” This is perhaps the standard view of Edwards among many critics, particularly Anglo-American. He has been described as one who showed a great deal of promise early in …

Strange Bodies: On The Great Race

This article was first published in English in Cahiers du cinéma in English, Number 3, 1966. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holder of the following article by Serge Daney reproduced here in this Screening The Past Tribute to Blake Edwards. As these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holder is asked to contact the Screening The …

The Party

This article was originally published in Movie no. 17 (Winter 1969 – 70). It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Nothing to lose— If we are wise, We’re not expecting rainbow-coloured skies. These are lines from the song which Michèle (Claudine Longet) sings halfway through the film and the party; the musicians played it at the …

You Can’t Keep A Good Auteur Down / Cruel To Be Kind

You Can’t Keep A Good Auteur Down This article was originally published in The Chicago Reader 23 August 1974. It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Most of the people I know don’t seem to like Julie Andrew’s too much. And so, I suppose that most of the people I know aren’t going to like The …

The Party

“In India we don’t think who we are, we know who we are.” Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party (1968) In film after film Blake Edwards explored the various ways in which human beings expose, mask, shape and shed their identities. This theme is the driving force behind The Party and it takes the film in unexpected directions. It also …

“The China Film”: Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Hollywood

The time is short; the enemy is sly; And all who once loved peace and sorely tried; But she shall take her people this reply: “Our cause is common, and your pride our pride Your triumph ours: sacred as ours, your loam,” When she goes through the far horizon, home. – Anonymous, Sonnet III, “Three Sonnets Written for Madame Chiang” …

Tokens of Exchange, or The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Lover: Marginal Asian Characters in 1920s Australian Cinema

Since Australia’s film renaissance from the mid-1970s, there have been numerous films featuring Asian characters in both leading and marginal roles. This paper traces the historical representation of Asian characters in Australian feature films, focusing on films from the 1920s as establishing some of the earliest tropes that have persisted through to contemporary examples. Character types—from the cook to the …

Working Within the System: An Interview with Gerry O’Hara

Gerry O’Hara is a true original, and if he never really got the chance to definitively climb out of the ranks of assistant directors into the realm of full-fledged feature directors, he nevertheless managed to carve out a solid career in the cinema working with such luminaries as Sir Laurence Olivier, Ronald Neame, Michael Powell, Sir Carol Reed, Anatole Litvak, …

Two Channels, Two Truths: Reporting the Iraq War in Control Room

The image we make ourselves of history is, more than ever, shaped by the audiovisual record. But the documentary image and sound cannot provide a transparent view on reality; it represents a world by mediation through an interpretive act. Therefore the documentary film’s historical account requires a perceptual engagement that resists the pull of the indexical and views the audiovisual …

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