Category Archive for: ‘Issue 32 – First Release’

I’m allowed to go to picture shows, That is, if nurse is feeling able; But we only go to Mickey Mouse, I’m not allowed Clark Gable! It’s such an imposition For a girl who’s got ambition To be an in-between! (Love Finds Andy Hardy, USA 1938) In film buff histories, the retrospective compilations produced for awards shows, and in commentary …

How much they err, that think every one which has been at Virginia understands or knows what Virginia is. – Capt. John Smith These words appear upon a black screen at the beginning of the 2008 “Extended Cut” of The New World, Terrence Malick’s film about John Smith, Pocahontas, and the founding of the Virginia Colony. They are followed by …

Earlier versions of this article were presented to the biennial conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (November 2008) and to the University of Otago Department of History and Art History’s Work in Progress Seminar (May 2010).  America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy. —Senator Warren G. Harding, 14 May …

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) is a site of cultural fascination. Brian de Palma has remade the film twice (Obsession [1976], Body Double [1984]), while it has been reworked or quoted in films such as Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), and Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994). Chris Marker pays tribute to Vertigo (“a film I …

Young Duke Cameron lies mortally wounded on a smoky, bloody Gettysburg battlefield. Suddenly, a northern youth appears above him, bayonet poised to strike him through. A glimmer of recognition passes over the youth’s face. The wounded Rebel is his childhood chum. As the Yankee lowers his rifle and bends over his dying friend, a shot rings out. He falls to …

Introduction Film music has provided a useful space for the exploration of modernist composition. It is through this association with popular film texts that audiences who were otherwise dissociated from new music composition consumed modernist techniques. Modernist techniques adopted in film scores include the conscious use of atonality and dissonance (often linked to specific film genres such as science fiction …

“Clay…the least commercial work ever made in the history of cinema.”[1] Almost two decades ago Graeme Cutts quite rightly characterised Giorgio Mangiamele as “one of the forgotten directors of the Australian cinema” (Cinema Papers, 1992, p. 17). In the intervening years, Mangiamele has frequently scored a mention in the new standard histories that have appeared, and has now achieved his …

Introduction It is possible to write many different histories of Australian television, and these different histories draw on different primary sources. The ABC of Drama, for example, draws on the ABC Document Archives (Jacka 1991). Most of the information for Images and Industry: Television Drama Production in Australia is taken from original interviews with television production staff (Moran 1985). Ending …

Motion picture serials, the forerunner of today’s serialized television dramas, have been around since the earliest days of the narrative cinema. Exhibitors rapidly realized that in order to assure continued audience attendance, open ended “cliff hangers” were sure to keep viewers returning week after week, to find out the latest plot twists, character developments, and of course, how the hero …

One page after creasing the cover of the anthology that informs this investigation, I was immediately drawn to a portrait of its author. It is a shadowy monochrome photograph of a young man’s side profile, captured by Irving Lerner. Immortalised in that bygone moment, this twenty-something male can be seen as stern, contemplative and ambiguous. The young man reflectively stares …