Category Archive for: ‘Issue 46 – First Release’

Introduction Reenactment as a mode of inquiry about the past and as a broader cultural form in cinema, theater and television has become prevalent across the world. For example, reenactments of the American civil war, of WWI and WWII have become to tourist attractions in the USA, which at times aspire to rewrite history so as to reshape the historical …

“When a character moves off the screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the décor which is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen” [1] – André Bazin When a camera moves, it constantly changes the status of the objects …

Introduction The majority of audiences in North America and Europe, broadly categorised as ‘Western’, are accustomed to tightly controlled episodic structures, culturally engrained storytelling conventions, and deep-rooted expectations of a linear system of cause and effect. This tradition has been popularised by contemporary narratologists, such as Joseph Campbell with his hero’s journey (1993, 1972), but can be traced to the …

Heuretic: 1: (logic) The branch of logic concerned with discovery or invention The notion of photogénie, as articulated by French filmmaker and philosopher Jean Epstein, is a quasi-mystical quality of the cinema-image to imbue meaning and moral enhancement into environments and the objects within them, and to disassociate and break apart space-time into a new and tactile screen-reality [1]  . It …

“Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu” (Nothing will have taken place but the place) – Stéphane Mallarmé, cited in Paris nous appartient (Jacques Rivette, 1961) Many of the themes and approaches to cinematic form seen in Jacques Rivette’s nearly thirteen-hour Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971) – known in English simply as Out 1 – were already present in …

I am convinced that the contemporary 15 minutes of fame is 15 minutes of hate. 15 minutes of death threats. Even more ephemeral due to the incitement by keyboard warriors. In January 2020, I published The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury). The manifesto culminated many ideas I had been working with (in partnership, as a …

In February 1927, Paramount studios produced the romantic comedy It as a star vehicle for feature player Clara Bow, whose reputation was soaring based on her flapper characters in several successful movies, including The Plastic Age (1925), Dancing Mothers (1926), and Mantrap (1926). Paramount producer P.B. Schulberg contracted British romance author Elinor Glyn for $50,000 to write the novella of …

Cultural Sensitivity Warning This article includes images and references to Aboriginal people who are now deceased and other content that may be culturally sensitive. Some words, descriptions and images included reflect the attitudes of the individuals who created them at a particular historical moment and which are now understood to reflect a system of oppression. These images and descriptions do …

In her book on The Back of Beyond (1954), Sylvia Lawson describes John Heyer’s Shell Film Unit production as “a key moment in Australian film history in general, not just in the special register of documentary”. [1] Lawson considers the film across a history of viewing and reviewing, and in a variety of teaching situations pointing to “its emotional charge, …

Two remarkable moments in Max Ophüls’ Le plaisir (1952), both “La maison Tellier,” second of the film’s three movements. We have already been introduced to the eccentric, charming, late nineteenth-century European world through Ophüls’ and Jacques Natanson’s adaptation of Guy de Maupassant narrated subtly, mellifluously, and cautiously by Jean Servais off-camera and visualized in the gliding imagery of Christian Matras. …

Preface: Adrian Slattery died from cancer on 14 May 2016, at the age of 30. He wrote and submitted the following text as an Honours dissertation in Film & Screen Studies at Monash University in late 2011; I was the supervisor/advisor on his chosen – and highly unique – topic of Stoner films. Adrian (I well recall) was just as …

Introduction: Screening the Past continues its tribute to the legacy of Tom O’Regan (1956-2020) by publishing, for the first time, this essay co-authored by Huw Walmsley-Evans (also of University of Queensland). Tom sent it to me in 2018 for my opinion, as it had not yet found a home at that time. It offers an elaboration, along a different axis, …

Introduction: The following, extraordinary essay is the extant material for a 2018 lecture prepared by Tom O’Regan (1956-2020), to whom Lisa Bode paid moving tribute in our previous issue (http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-45-tom-oregan/vale-tom-oregan/). It takes the form of a vast, rhizomatic “brainstorm” – the type of speculative thinking at which Tom was so brilliant, and which was also so characteristic of his ebullient …

No film director, local or foreign, can claim such an impact on the politics and the arts in Australia now as the poet, communist and homosexual, Pier Paolo Pasolini, dead now for more than 20 years. (David Marr, 1998) When it comes to classification in Australia, no film has had quite the same history as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or …

And lightning blinded all, however strong —Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Dorothea Wender When evil comes, it comes at an angle: this is the sense evoked by Charlotte Dacre in Zofloya (1806). In its most climactic passages the scenery shifts from a Venetian noble’s castle to the mountain range behind it. Victoria de Loredani, having committed two murders, is now in the …