Category Archive for: ‘Issue 16 – First Release’

Introduction This article aims to expand our knowledge of the success or failure of sound technologies in the Australian exhibition market in the years between 1924 and 1929. Crucial to this issue are the complex relations between previously unrecognised groups and individuals involved in promotion of sound technology and in the wiring of Australian cinemas. The process by which all …

Introduction December 2002: After the Film and History Conference in Adelaide, I am flying home, having given my paper on Australians in early (1915-1925) Hollywood. I flip through the airline magazine and am amused to find an article about Australians in today’s Hollywood. “Aussies are making it big in Hollywood, winning awards and demanding huge fees,” declares the lead-in. “But …

In the first few decades of the 20th century, many members of the Sydney elite, like civilized people throughout the world, feared the challenge posed to their old culture by the new, mechanical and American “tinned culture – cinema, gramophone, wireless”. [1]  Against its incursions they staged a reaction in which good taste, anti-commercialism, anti-modernism and anti-Americanism became synonymous. This rejection …

Australian cinema industries have always looked to the United States for the innovation of products and practices which can be put into place in Australia once they have been trialled upstream in the marketing process. Just as the US serves as a first market for international film releases in which an unstable commodity is given a more or less reliable …

As the title of C. J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke might suggest, its narrative revolves around questions of masculinity, and as early as 1946, Dennis’s biographer, A. H. Chisholm was speculating as to its author’s personal interest in such questions. He wondered whether Dennis’s predilection for “tough” characters in some of his verse was a reaction to the exaggerated …

In a dream I had last night, I was about to address a seminar on the cinema. The members of the seminar were professors, some distinguished, some I knew. It was a small group. I had nothing prepared in detail, a few notes only. Nor can I remember whether in the dream there was a topic or theme to the …

In 1986, Michelangelo Antonioni exhibited a series of still images in Rome called Le montagne incantate, Magic Mountains. He painted watercolours of shapes resembling mountains. Some of the images were constructed collages of painted paper. The shape of mountains suggested by the watercolours and collages were only that, suggestions, a possible, but not a certain figuration. At another glance, in another moment, …

In the 1950s the Australian public had little or no interest in supporting an Australian film industry. In fact, as Lee Robinson remarked some years later in an interview with Graham Shirley, if the public were aware that a feature film was Australian it meant death at the box-office: ‘To put an Australian tag on it [an Australian feature film] …

The recent death of prolific Australian filmmaker Tim Burstall aged 76 marks a significant moment in Australian film culture. Perhaps more than any other Australian filmmaker over the last half-century his career features an eclectic output of writing, short films, feature films, and television productions straddling the fault lines running through many of the debates in Australian film culture. Initially …