Category Archive for: ‘Issue 24 – First Release’

Therese Davis I would like to reflect on the conference themes of “remaking history” and “remapping cinema” by focussing on the construction of an Indigenous perspective on Australian national history in the recent seven-part television documentary series, First Australians.[1]  I am interested in the question of why the producers chose to take a national perspective in this series, and I want …

The rise of cinema around the turn of the 20th century as a popular cultural activity is commonly linked to the emerging modern lifestyle of city residents – a product of urbanisation, industrialisation, mass production, mass consumption and the consequent growing affluence of the general populace. This connection was made by commentators of the period[1] and continues to be used …

After more than a hundred years of filmmaking in New Zealand the corpus of films made either by or about New Zealanders has built up to such an extent that it is now possible to trace changing representations of themes and motifs repeated over time. This article looks at representations of a controversial topic: the collection of Maori artefacts, especially …

1. Introduction The two films to be presented in this paper were produced in the 1980s at the height of Hong Kong’s popularity as an Asian film hub, although they both reflect an unfamiliar side of the city’s cultural ethos. Their historical concerns with the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between December 1941 and August 1945 mask the underlying allegorical …

1. Introduction ‘History returns forever – as film,’ voiced Anton Kaes.[1] However, film in turn returns as history. Cinema is a culture we can refer to and use to encode our experiences, to analyse the past with, and to observe as markers of time and of trends. This common relationship with film is revealed in the autobiographies and memoirs shaped …

“Those Who Wait” is the title of an essay, first published in 1922, by Siegfried Kracauer.[1] In this essay, Kracauer employs the image of waiting to describe a mass of people whose connection to one another is based on a sense of “metaphysical suffering from the lack of a higher meaning in the world.”[2] According to Kracauer, these people have …

Every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries … an undetermined journeying practice, having constantly to negotiate between home and abroad, native culture and adopted culture, or more creatively speaking, between a here, a there, and an elsewhere. Trinh T. Minh-Ha.[1] Ever since the Oscar-nominated Ofela? (The Pathfinder, 1987) by Sami director Nils Gaup, and the Maori films, Ngati (Barry …

I have essentially set myself two tasks in this paper. Firstly, to look at Thomas Elsaesser’s (2000) notion of the ‘historical imaginary’, particularly drawing on those aspects of it which correspond with the psychoanalytical concepts of both ‘deferred action’ and ‘the imaginary’. In drawing on such concepts I hope to make clear the complicated time structure which is inherent in …

One significant aspect of the work currently being done on the history of film exhibition and audiences in the United States stresses the importance of rural cinemas and itinerant showmen (Fuller Seeley, 2008). It is perhaps a commonplace of Australian film history that rural exhibition venues outnumbered urban ones, and that travelling picture show men played a vital role in …

So instead of looking through the window at history we’re actually going to climb through that window to the other side and feel it. (Janice Feyen, Pioneer House) The historical re-enactment reality series, of which Pioneer House (New Zealand 2001) is the first New Zealand example, constitutes an anomaly in reality programming because it signals a clear intention to identify itself with a …

1. Les Glaneurs est la glaneuse (1999) Agnès Varda has been linked to the work and the ideas of the French Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol) having to do with four aspects of her films: the bringing together of fictional and documentary elements (all her fictions have a documentary presence and in her documentaries, either fictions and stories emerge …