Author Archive for: ‘Lesley Speed’

“No matter how far you run”: Looking for Alibrandi and coming of age in Italo-Australian cinema and girlhood

[1] Looking for Alibrandi (Australia, 2000) is significant not only because it is the financially most successful Australian teen film [2]  and a winner of five AFI awards. [3] This film has also played an important role in increasing the cinematic profile of Italo-Australians. It has attracted audiences that exceed the hitherto limited markets for most Italo-Australian films and expanded the …

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Leonie Naughton: The Pleasure of Reinvention

Leonie Naughton was my Honours supervisor, PhD principal supervisor and mentor in my sessional teaching work at Monash University during the 1990s. Leonie Naughton took over teaching German Cinema when she arrived at Monash in 1990, and had also been appointed to teach courses about popular film. She quickly achieved prominence in the Department of Visual Arts for her ability …

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Prurient Exuberance: Early Australian Sex Hygiene Films and the Origins of Ozploitation

Australian exploitation films that were made since the 1960s have received considerable attention in Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! However, Hartley’s film and much of the subsequent interest in Ozploitation overlooks the fact that exploitation films existed in Australia since at least the 1910s. In its most basic definition, an exploitation film …

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Strike Me Lucky: Social Difference and Consumer Culture in Roy Rene’s Only Film

Abstract Strike Me Lucky (Australia 1934) presents an imaginative view of Australian society and consumer culture in the 1930s. The only film starring vaudeville star Roy Rene, it has been largely dismissed because of its poor box office performance and perceived artistic failure. Yet Strike Me Lucky is significant for centring on a prominent Jewish Australian comedian and for being an early screen …

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In the Best Film Star Tradition: Claire Adams and Mooramong

When the Hollywood silent movie actress Claire Adams married Australian grazier Donald “Scobie” Mackinnon in 1937, the Australian press embraced the event as a glamorous love story. [1] After the couple moved to his property, Mooramong, near Skipton in the Western District of Victoria, Claire Mackinnon became part of the emergent, modern Australia of the mid-twentieth century. Remodelled by the …

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