Category Archive for: ‘Issue 28 – First Release’

Abstract This article is a reconsideration of The Virgin Spring that focuses upon the rape at the centre of the film’s action, despite the film’s surface attempts to marginalise all but its narrative functionality. While the deployment of this rape supports critical observations that rape on-screen commonly underscores the seriousness of broader thematic concerns, it is argued that the visceral impact of …

Abstract The death of Jean Harlow during the filming of Saratoga (USA 1937) created problems for the film’s completion and promotion. Famously, M-G-M completed Harlow’s remaining scenes using shots of a body double, filmed with her face obscured. Despite its resulting aesthetic problems, Saratoga is on record as one of Harlow’s highest grossing films (Glancy 1991), and its success has been seen simply the …

Marius Sestier holding a stereo viewer. Postcard. Marius Sestier Collection. National Film and Sound Archive. Courtesy Mme Petitbois and Messrs Sestier and Jeune. Patineur Grotesque (Australia 1896), although filmed in Melbourne, was unknown in Australia until recently. The film was found and preserved by the Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchivum (the Hungarian National Film Archive) in 1966 but was not identified as a …

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 …

Abstract Godfrey Reggio’s non-verbal film Koyaanisqatsi can be seen, in retrospect, as a pioneer both of the emergent environmental film genre, and of certain tropes of visual narrative that have come to dominate popular culture. This essay argues that the film articulates a critique of the inability of “anti-natural man” to distinguish between the “natural” and the “artificial.” My close reading of …

Abstract An implicit theme in natural history documentaries for decades has been the likely impact of such human activities as population growth, land clearing, mining, pesticide usage, and pollution on animal species, leading potentially to the extinction of species. In more recent times the risk of extinction has shifted so that the focus is now on humans and the future …

Abstract Approaching the millennium, and in its immediate wake, a strong sense of historical lateness emerged, a very particular fin de siècle. In film history, this was immediately preceded by the milestone of 1995, with its retrospective gaze across the first century of cinema, complemented by a gaze into the future. And the rise of digital technology ensured that the circulation …