Category Archive for: ‘Issue 23 – First Release’

[1] In Memory of K.K. Mahajan [2] I would like to begin (as a good Australian citizen), with an anecdote I heard when I was at the Queensland Art Gallery for the Asia Pacific Triennale in early 2007. Julie Ewington, the curator of Australian art, recalled a tutorial in the Department of Fine Arts at University of Sydney in the early …

Mulberry Omelette Once upon a time there was a king who could call all the power and treasures of the earth his own, but who for all that was not happy and who became more and more despondent from one year to the next. One day he summoned his personal cook and said to him, “You have served me faithfully …

Manny Farber: February 20, 1917 – August 17, 2008 Manny Farber portrait by Fielding Dawson Manny Farber changed the way film was written and thought about. He demonstrated new ways to approach cinema and shared with us new ways to see film. His influence on two generations of film critics has been profound (see the Screen-L selection of obituaries on …

The interviews to be published on a regular basis across this and future issues of Screening the Past derive from an ARC-funded project, entitled Australian Film Theory and Criticism, undertaken by Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams of Monash University, and Noel King from Macquarie University. This research project takes as its object of study the development of film studies in Australia, especially in …

Tim Groves and Costas Thrasyvoulou Introduction Richard Combs claims that Michael Mann’s films have an opaque or self-enclosed quality that frustrates interpretation.[1] One reason for such resistance is that Mann’s cinema is often busy and restless. His work shifts constantly between realism and abstraction, the epic and the intimate, the kinetic and the reflective. As Combs suggests, Mann’s films are about transformation …

Luis M. Garcia-Mainar Recent contributions to the study of genre have stressed the role of its internal laws, such as historical trends or industrial factors, in the formation and development of generic forms, while failing to take account of the interactions of these forms with social circumstances. This attention to the internal mechanisms of genre has spread and gained impetus …

Why, after a lapse of four decades, rake over the remnants of what are at best little more than footnotes to the film revival? The first and most obvious answer is simply because it was and is there in the memories of those surviving who participated and in the now generally hard-to-find documentation in the form of notes, reviews and …