Category Archive for: ‘Issue 39 – First Release’

The “public” spaces of film criticism – by which we mean film reviews and essays – are what most Australians think of as comprising film criticism. These public spaces of criticism were established at the inception of the cinema in Australia, [1] and have been developing alongside broader media transformations ever since. While a fixture of film culture in Australia as …

[1] Any Melbourne Cup race is a dramatic competition. In 1896, Newhaven was the favourite and, having streaked past the finishing post six lengths ahead of the other horses, was clearly the winner almost from the beginning. For the first time, motion-picture cameras captured the action on and off the course as Marius Sestier, a representative of the frères Lumiere, …

When the Hollywood silent movie actress Claire Adams married Australian grazier Donald “Scobie” Mackinnon in 1937, the Australian press embraced the event as a glamorous love story. [1] After the couple moved to his property, Mooramong, near Skipton in the Western District of Victoria, Claire Mackinnon became part of the emergent, modern Australia of the mid-twentieth century. Remodelled by the …

Two major studies of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr have been published in English recently, and both are impressively comprehensive, so rather than repeating their work I will take a more focused approach here by working through the key film in Tarr’s œuvre, Damnation. Central to my reading is the relation between the aesthetics and the narrative of the film, which, …

Abstract: This article explores how the film Toomelah (2011) by Australian Indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen amounts to an affirmation of the values of intercultural dialogue between peoples who do not always see the world in the same ways as each other. A descendant of the Gamilaroi [1] people of northwest New South Wales and also of Hungarian, German, and Croatian descent, …

Introduction: Altman’s Last Stand, or Buffalo Bill and the Indians and the Bicentennial Western [I]n Paris they referred to McCabe [& Mrs. Miller] as an anti-western and they called it the “demystification of an era”. That was my reason for getting involved in McCabe in the first place because I don’t like Westerns. I don’t like the obvious lack of …

Abstract: Costume designers, like many artists working in Hollywood, were required to master their own craft while also understanding how their creative decisions would impact others working on the same film. This was particularly true when designing for a black-and-white film. Designers needed to understand the sensitivities of film stock to ensure the desired onscreen appearance of the costume. Some …

In the course of the research for my doctoral thesis, The Hollywood Left and McCarthyism: The Political and Aesthetic Legacy of the Red Scare, in February of 2010 I was kindly granted interviews with three leading authorities on this vast topic: Jon Lewis of Oregon State University, Dennis Broe of Long Island University, Brooklyn, and Brian Neve of Bath University, …

Interviewed February 14, 2010 Can we start with your response to what are some common misconceptions about the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), in terms of its aberration in the long liberal democratic tradition in American culture and politics? I suppose there are at least two ways of looking at this. I think the dominant perspective on HUAC, which most …

Interviewed February 12, 2010 I would like to start with your assessment of the film gris period in Hollywood and what it represented in the context of film noir. How do you respond to Thom Andersen’s reading of this movement as the highest expression of noir, with its heightened social and psychological realism? It comes at the tail end of …

Interviewed February 9, 2010 I’d like to discuss some interrelated issues concerning the legacy of the blacklisting period. They can be grouped into the categories of the industrial-economic legacy, the political legacy and the artistic-aesthetic legacy. You have commented that teaching American film history requires a full stop at the blacklist, as it does with discussions of the coming of …

INTRODUCTION The New Hollywood Question What is the continuing appeal of Robert Altman’s 1970s cinema? If his once much-discussed and often critically praised films from the first half of that much-mythologised decade remain of interest beyond being historical museum pieces exemplifying the more progressive edge of pre-Jaws (Stephen Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) New Hollywood, what drives …

In his film noir Fallen Angel (1945), Otto Preminger depicts a passionate love triangle. Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) is a stone-broke New York drifter and self-proclaimed press agent who reaches Walton, a small California beach town. There he hooks up with two local women: June Mills (Alice Faye) is an upright girl, who shares a house with her older sister, …