Archives for: ‘31 - Cinema Between Media’

Screening the Past > 31 - Cinema Between Media

Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif

The representational chamber is an energetic dispositif. To describe it and to follow its functioning, that’s what needs to be done. – Jean-François Lyotard (1993: 3, translation amended) Graphics, Stacks and Materiality It is always fascinating and instructive to return to a moment in history when a change in the conditions of culture loomed on the horizon. In terms of …

Cinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch’s Inland Empire

In the lead-up to and long shadow following cinema’s centenary in 1995, film has increasingly been understood and defined in terms of its disappearance or demise. Over the past decade, film studies conferences have been regularly peppered with papers on cinema’s passing, journals have run special issues on the medium’s anticipated death, and leading film theorists have bookended their publications …

The Colour of Nothing: Contemporary Video Art, SF and the Postmodern Sublime

Absence can be considered as a resonant field in which cultural objects such as painting, film and video art interact through an act of representational negation—the viewer experiences a thing that is both not there and there, an imminent presence. We find this resonant field in the whiteness of a canvas or in the blue and green screens of digital …

Théâtre du Soleil Meets the Cinema: Acting and Mask Work in Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière

Were it not for the well-sustained intermedial formula that characterises Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière, ou la vie d’un honnête homme (France, 1978), the film might appear to a distracted viewer as little more than a big-budget movie displaying an above-average predilection for carefully composed tableaux. The director of the film is a well-known and lauded theatre director, founder and primary force …

Capital and Co.: Kluge/Eisenstein/Marx

Let’s be frank – the idea of filming Karl Marx’s Das Kapital strikes one as, at the very least, strange. To film thousands of pages written in a dry language of 1860s political economy? To film … what, exactly? The notions of productive forces, relations of productions, use value and exchange value, commodity fetishism and capital per se? To film …

Incomparable Bodies

But First … Necessarily coexisting human beings are not thinkable as mere bodies and, like even the cultural objects which belong with them structurally, are not exhausted in corporeal being. – Edmund Husserl, Origin of Geometry[1] In the Kingdom of the Effigy In cinema we must – as a matter of method – remove those glasses which Dr Coppelius …

“Working in Communities, Connecting with Culture”: Reflecting on U-matic to YouTube A National Symposium Celebrating Three Decades of Australian Indigenous Community Filmmaking

In June 2010, the Film and Television Studies program at Monash University and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) co-hosted a national symposium celebrating three decades of Australian Indigenous community filmmaking. [1] The occasion for this event was the DVD release of the internationally acclaimed Indigenous community film Two Laws (1981), produced thirty years earlier by the Borroloola …

“These Are The Choices We Make”: Animating Saltwater Country

Associate Professor John Bradley is Director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He has been actively involved in issues associated with Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management for 30 years. The majority of this research has been undertaken in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory with particular emphasis on the marine and island environments …

Two Laws: A Filmmaking Journey

Alessandro Cavadini was born in Italy and educated at Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano. He worked in design, theatre and film and continued in these fields in Paris and then in Australia. In addition to his own films with Reddirt Films, which he produced, directed, shot, and edited, he has worked in various capacities in 15 other projects in Paris, …

Was Two Laws Experimental?

Asking this question of a film that was shot in 1980 in the remote Australian Aboriginal community of Borroloola is part of a broader set of questions about technique and form (politics and aesthetics) for arts practitioners. What is an experiment for the arts, as opposed to the sciences? Is it a process of composing a piece (of writing, film, …

Aeroplane Dance: Whose Story?

In the early 1990s, Trevor Graham with the Yanyuwa people at Borraloola created a film called Aeroplane Dance (1994) (known by Yanyuwa speakers as Ka-Wayawayama). It begins with the line that this is “the story of one American Bomber who created a legend” – amplified by the first end credit stating that it is based upon the official report of …

Models of Collaboration in the Making of Ten Canoes (2006)

Film is an inherently collaborative art form produced by the skills and decisions of (among others) the director, co-director, producers, photographer and cast. According to the norms both of the commercial narrative film industry and ethnographic practice, a vertical hierarchy privileges the authority, control and decision-making of the director. Alternatively, collaboration can operate as a collective process that distributes authority, …

Darlene Johnson on Making Films in Arnhem Land

Interview by Therese Davis Darlene Johnson is from the Dunghutti tribe of the East coast of New South Wales and currently resides in Sydney. Her first short drama, Two-Bob Mermaid (1996), won the Australian Film Critics Circle Award for Best Australian Short Film. It was nominated at the Venice Film Festival for the Baby Lion Award. It won the Best …

Victorian Indigenous Communities and Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling, as a specifically developed and trademarked technique, is one of the ways in which Indigenous communities in Victoria have greatly increased access to the tools of media-making and new media forms in digital culture to tell their stories. In contrast to industrial models of media production, Digital Storytelling is a social, “grassroots” film practice, first developed in the …

The Farm (2009) and Indigenous Remembrance

The Farm is a story about a place that my family simply calls “the farm”, but is specifically Tally Ho farm, near Bodalla in NSW. I recently “Googled” Bodalla and found a sparse, almost blank map, which I thought was rather appropriate: a lack of detail, a lack of representation of Indigenous peoples, and a lack of filmic representation. To …

Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise Stanford University Press, 2010 ISBN: 9 780 804761 680 US$27.95 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Stanford University Press) Some thirty thousand or so years ago, prehistoric human beings painted and drew on the walls of what is now known as the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, located in the …

Story, Film Style and Cross-cultural Collaboration in Aeroplane Dance (1994)

In 1997, Graham ventured into writing and directing new media. From 1997 to 2000 he co-wrote and directed the encyclopedic documentary (CD-ROM and website) Mabo – The Native Title Revolution, which was nominated for a British Academy Award (BAFTA) in 2001. In 2002 and 2003 he worked in Yirrikala in Arnhem Land where he directed the documentary Lonely Boy Richard …

Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Peter Limbrick

Peter Limbrick, Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2010 ISBN: 978-0-230-10264-4 272 pp AUD$147.95 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan) In his latest book Making Settler Cinemas, Peter Limbrick traverses some essential cinemas of the world, Ford in the USA, Ealing Studios in Australia …

Dancing Ledge / Kicking the Pricks, Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8166-7449-7 256pp US$18.95 (pb) Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8166-7450-3256pp US$18.95 (pb) (Review copies supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Film-maker, painter, queer activist, AIDS awareness activist, gardener and writer, Derek Jarman has left a great legacy in a variety of artistic and cultural …

Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing, Susan L. Carruthers

Susan L. Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing. California: University of California, 2009. ISBN: 9780520257313 US$21.95 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) A professor in the Federated Department of History at Rutgers University, Susan L Carruthers’ research on American and British 20th century history focuses on the relation of media to conflict and war. …

Diasporas of Australian cinema, Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert (eds)

Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, Anthony Lambert (eds), Diasporas of Australian cinema Intellect, Bristol, UK/Chicago USA, 2009 ISBN: 1 841 50197 2 US$40 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect) My first problem with this book was its title. From the title alone, I assumed it would be about the spread of Australian cinema into other cultures (probably a study of …

Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood

Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds University Press of Kansas, 2010 ISBN 978-0-7006-1743-2 US$34.95 (hb) 312pp (Review copy supplied by University Press of Kansas) Who are the “All Time Winners in an All Time Losers Game”? [1] Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood’s thoroughly researched cultural …

Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, Karen Beckman

Karen Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4726-2 US$24.95 (pb) 305pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Since the industrial revolution, technology has completely altered ways of living. In the twenty-first century, a deluge of new technology has continued to crash into our daily lives, altering modes …

The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller

Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead University of Illinois Press, 2010 (the first paperback edition of the 1986 hardback version) ISBN: 978-0-252-07772-2 US$25 (pb) 408pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) In the Criitque of Pure Reason Kant draws a distinction between negative and indefinite judgment. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, the example that Kant …

Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Ella Shohat

Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation I. B. Tauris, 2010 (Revised Edition) ISBN 13: 9781845113131 US$30 (pb) 416pp (Review copy supplied by I. B. Tauris) When Ella Shohat’s doctoral dissertation was first published as a book in 1989, it stood out as a groundbreaking and insightful analysis of the Israeli cinema. At a time when film …

The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Suzanne Buchan

Suzanne Buchan, The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8166-4659-3. US$25.00 (pb) 296 pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, Suzanne Buchan quotes Polish author Bruno Schulz, who wrote that “poetry happens when short-circuits of sense occur between worlds” (p.66). This is an …

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