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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
© 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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
© 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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
[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…
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)…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
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)…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
(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…
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…
(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;…
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…
(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…
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)…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Sydney: Currency Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-86819-864-4 AU$16.95 (pb) 71pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) “It’s death to farm out here, it’s worse than death in the mines; you want…
London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906660-17-8 (pbk) UK 16.14 ISBN 978-1-906660-18-5 (hbk) UK 45 267pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) It is hard to believe that…
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 1 4384 3030 0 US$ 29.95 (pb) 264 pp. (Review copy supplied by SUNY Press) Second Takes examines a proliferating cinematic mode of…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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’,…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…