Category Archive for: ‘Issue 34 – First Release’

Agnès Varda’s 1958 short L’Opéra Mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman) is a provocative investigation into Varda’s personal response to her first pregnancy with her daughter Rosalie. This sixteen minute black-and-white piece, produced at the dawn of the French nouvelle vague, offers a poetically emphatic insight into Varda’s reflections upon her own physicality and sexuality. The development of her body …

Introduction The story of Alexander Pearce’s arduous journey through southwest Tasmania and the gruesome fate that befell his comrades on their famishing trek across the island state has been narrated many times in song, on the stage, in print, and on screen. Most famously, the story of Pearce’s escape with seven other convicts from the Sarah Island penitentiary in Macquarie …

Introduction The actors in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury [1970]) are English and Italian. The film has an English and an Italian version, both dubbed. The speech of the characters in the two versions is ‘popular’, the speech of ordinary people. Almost certainly Chaucer’s poem in Middle English went through a series of transformations for …

Scott’s reputation in the film age When Sir Walter Scott died in 1832 he was the most famous novelist the world had ever known. Remarkably, Scott took up fiction only in middle age, after abandoning narrative poetry when he found himself eclipsed by Byron’s mega-celebrity and greater poetic originality and vigour. Over a twenty-year long career as a novelist he …

In the early part of 2009, I was preparing to teach The Jazz Singer (1927) as part of an introductory Media Histories subject for Australian university students. [1] While searching for reading material to pair with the film’s screening, I was challenged to find a recent essay that was not in dialog with Michael Rogin’s treatment of the film in …

In its multiple forms, the cinema offers opportunities for an encounter. Unlike the act of viewing, encountering rejects passivity and engages; it brings two together: the self and the other, the camera and the world, the audience and the film. Cinema allows us to document, revisit and transform these encounters. More than an experience, it’s a space for one to …