Category Archive for: ‘Issue 43 – Dossier’

[1] ‘Peak’ Production Between 1958 and 1959 four significant international/transnational feature-film productions were made in Australia: On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Season of Passion, Leslie Norman, 1959), The Siege of Pinchgut (Harry Watt, 1960) and The Sundowners (Fred Zinnemann, 1960). [2] In many respects, this represents a period of peak production ‘down under’ prior …

The ‘marine adventure film’ is an emerging genre among the blockbuster films emanating from the industry hub centred in Queensland’s Gold Coast. The characteristics of these films derive not only from Hollywood adventure epics but from the particular use of locations and setting provoked by contemporary trends in digital mise en scène, and the influence of location offset incentives of …

This article examines the signification of the undead and the production of a supernatural ontology within the pseudo-documentary Lake Mungo (Joel Andersen, 2008). The narrative concerns Alice, a sixteen-year-old girl in the rural Australian town of Ararat who has drowned mysteriously at a reservoir on the edge of town and subsequently returns to haunt her family home and the site …

The French director Phillipe Grandrieux’s cinema is rife with screams. In his first two feature-length films, Sombre (1998) and La Vie nouvelle (2002), the human scream is built into the sonic fabric of the soundtrack and visualised through the vibrating camera. It is never simply a question of the person who screams, but rather cinema’s capacity to intensify the violent …

The serial killer film is nothing if not prolific: Robert Cettl discusses over six hundred examples in his annotated filmography, Richard Dyer argues that there are over two thousand serial killer films, and the IMDB lists more than 3500 film and television titles. [1] As with any genre, the serial killer film is marked by its typicality. Indeed, Philip Simpson …

This special dossier contains research originating from the “Sea Change: Transforming Industries, Screens, Texts” conference, which was staged at Victoria University of Wellington in November 2016. This highly successful event was the inaugural conference of the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ). As the conference title suggests, this gathering of some eighty experienced and emerging scholars …

In 2007 Revolution Studios released renowned theatre and opera director Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical Across the Universe. Taymor and fellow writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais used 33 Beatles’ songs to form a story of young bohemians in New York during the Vietnam War era. [1]  Across the Universe received praise for its attempt at reinvigorating the musical genre, its strong artistic visual style, and its reinterpretation of …