Category Archive for: ‘Issue 44 – First Release’

It is said that during the 1951 shoot for Twentieth Century Fox’s Kangaroo, the first Technicolor feature shot in Australia, Adelaide ran out of green paint. The reasons are not entirely clear. Something to do with how the colours of the Australian landscapes registered on the Technicolor of that era? Coincidentally, green was Fox studio head Daryl Zanuck’s favourite colour. …

What e’er thou hearest or seest, stand all aloof. Romeo and Juliet v.3 Prelude We have all worried through this labyrinth many times. And virtually every scholar who really cares about Hitchcock has found a vertiginous minotaur. All of this worrying-through has to be taken as part of the record now. I will speak for myself. When in 2002 I …

On 24 September 1896, the Lumière representative to Bombay and Australia, Marius Sestier, received a telegram from the home office in Lyon. The films he had made in India and shipped back to France before leaving Bombay in mid-August had been opened by customs and ruined. [1] He was just eight days into his Australian tour and all of his …

[1] Production still from Dad And Dave Come To Town (Australia 1938). Dir. Ken Hall. Cast: Bert Bailey (Dad Rudd), Connie Martyn (Mum). [2] The joke here is a sound joke. Moreover it is a sound joke which gains its punch from the silence in which it is made. The reader/viewer of this still hears nothing, imagines a tiny shifting …

Introduction: On Cinematic and Anthropocenic Dreams How to think about cinema in a way that truly takes the measure of what this celluloidal gathering of collectable and projectable light has been for a world transformed by the power unleashed by the unrestrained combustion of solid, liquid and gaseous residues of extinct life, and of what it has yet to be …

2018 marked the fortieth anniversary of John Carpenter’s pivotal slasher film Halloween (1978) and the release of yet another sequel, Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018), in which Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), now a grandmother, is determined to eliminate her brother Michael Myers after he escapes from prison. Since 2005 there have been a range of other remakes, prequels and …

In the early 1950s Hollywood explored several new technologies in order to fight a major box office decline. In 1948, more than 90 million Americans had visited the theatre at least once a week, but this figure decreased to 51 million in 1952. [1] In 1953, only 32.4 per cent of all cinemas were making profit from the sale of …

English-language Ozu scholarship was established by the pioneering work of Paul Schrader (1972), Donald Richie (1974), Noël Burch (1979), David Bordwell (1976 and 1988) and Kristin Thompson (1976 and 1988). [1] However, Adam Mars-Jones is accurate when he summarises the frustrations of Ozu lovers looking for sustained interpretations of individual Ozu films: “the history of his films’ reception in the …

In a two-day event dedicated to the work of a film scholar whose published writings are not vast, it was inevitable that some choice quotes and passages got repeated mention during the conference Film as Film Today (held at the University of Warwick, 4 – 5 September 2018). One in particular surfaced again and again, a straightforward but evidently valuable statement about …

From its beginning and for nearly a decade, the AIDS crisis in the United States was characterised by inaction. ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in 1987 with its famous slogan “Silence = Death” directed at the White House and the Reagan administration’s lethally inadequate response to the crisis. [1] But a similar silence fell upon another …