Category Archive for: ‘Issue 36 – First Release’

Ginger Mick (Gilbert Emery) and Bill (Arthur Tauchert) in Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke. From the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Introduction Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke, completed in 1919, is considered a landmark Australian film. Yet audiences in the United States did not feel as enthusiastic about the film as did those in Australia. In fact, the film …

Il gatto selvatico (1) Bernardo Bertolucci’s La via del petrolio (The Oil Road) is a film made for RAI television in 1965. The film was commissioned by the Italian oil company Eni [Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi] in 1964. The film is in three parts: Le origini (Origins), Il viaggio (The Voyage), Attraverso l’Europa (Across Europe). The first part of the film …

This article draws from primary sources at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Department of Defense Film Liaison Branch archive at Georgetown University Special Collections, the Stanley Kramer deposit at UCLA Arts Special Collections and the declassified files at George Washington University’s online National Security Archive.[1] It is less concerned with the dramatic, aesthetic, narrative and textual readings of Stanley Kramer’s …

What is a shot? A first definition might proceed as follows: the shot, whether in still photography or cinema, is a record of what happened and is so essentially; there is no shot which is not a record of what happened. The shot is external to the event and only comes to exist in surviving the event, in remaining after …

In the closing scene of John Duigan’s Careless Love (Australia 2012), the protagonist Linh is seated alone in a dark, imposing hallway outside a university lecture theatre, waiting to take her final exam in social anthropology. Linh’s secret life as a prostitute has just been exposed in the newspapers, following the assassination of her client and friend, Luke, an American …

The truth of our placement, when film works as art, is a continuous sense of drawing nearer to a place we seek, with some last vital task or piece of business not yet accounted for. Any moment, perhaps, things will be sorted out, and we can finally set our bags down. But until then, let us keep ourselves in a …

If I analyse myself today, I see that I always wanted, primarily, to make a film of research under the form of spectacle.  (Jean-Luc Godard) I like to say that there are two kinds of cinema, there is Flaherty and there is Eisenstein. That is to say, there is documentary realism and there is theatre, but ultimately, at the highest …

Hey, little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? I got a bad desire (Bruce Springsteen, “I’m on Fire”) And it’s no surprise, little girls hurt sometimes (Icehouse, “Hey, Little Girl”) Beautiful has been commonly read as an exploration of the darkness that lurks beneath pristine images of middle-class suburbia. I argue, though, …