Author Archive for: ‘Belinda Smaill’
Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary
In 2006, B. Ruby Rich’s editorial for a special “documentary studies” issue of Cinema Journal observed that the “landscape for documentary production, history, and theory is richer than it has been in the United States at any time since, perhaps, the last explosion: the direct cinema or cinema verite movement of the early 1960s.”[1] Documentary cinema has seen a revival …
Read MoreIntercultural Romance and Australian Cinema: Asia and Australia in The Home Song Stories and Mao’s Last Dancer
Abstract This essay frames an examination of The Home Song Stories (2007) and Mao’s Last Dancer (2009) through tracing the cultural and symbolic development of intercultural romance in Australian cinema between white and East Asian characters over recent decades. This history of Asian Australian intercultural pairings in Australian film gestures towards a number of changing socio-cultural concerns. These couples are rendered in ways that …
Read MoreLost 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 …
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