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22 Articles

Associate editors for refereed articles

Felicity Collins Associate Professor, Department of Cinema Studies, La Trobe University Greg Dolgopolov Lecturer, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Anna Dzenis Lecturer, Department of Cinema Studies, La Trobe University Beryl Exley Professor, School of Education & Professional Studies, Griffith University Trish Fitzsimons Associate Professor, Griffith Film School, Griffith University Lisa French Professor and Dean, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University Dan Golding Senior Lecturer, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology Ben Goldsmith Postdoctoral Researcher in Education, Centre for Education in Media Practice, Bournemouth University Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Adjunct Professor, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University Olivia Khoo Associate Professor, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University Brian McFarlane Adjunct Professor, Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology Jane Mills Associate Professor,…

A screen translation of a supposedly unfilmable Tim Winton novel about separated lovers, Gregor Jordan’s film carries plenty of reverberations for audiences in a time of pandemic-induced mass isolation. Speaking to the director, Stephen A Russell asks about the difficulties of adaptation, the experience of shooting on sacred land in remote Western Australia and the decision to cast two overseas actors in the lead roles. In the canon of Australian literature, Tim Winton is up there with Peter Carey on the list of revered authors whose novels are most often dubbed ‘unfilmable’ (as if cinema isn’t capable of tackling complex and unwieldy ideas, non-linear narratives or impressionistic forms). Nevertheless, Dirt Music (2019) director Gregor Jordan – previously responsible for works including Ned Kelly (2003) and Buffalo Soldiers (2001) – was…

Alone

Together

House of Horrors

Marrying conventional horror tropes with a sensitive depiction of the impact of dementia on three generations of women, Natalie Erika James’ debut feature gives shape to fears of neurological and physical deterioration, as well as the experience of living in a hostile and unsafe domestic space. As Josh Nelson finds, the film diverges from previous representations of the condition in the horror genre – and cinema more broadly – through its identification with the sufferer. When Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James’ Relic premiered at Sundance this year, a number of critics likened the film to both The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018).1 Beyond the surface similarities – they’re all horror-themed feature directorial debuts with female leads – what unites these releases at a more substantial level…

House
of
Horrors

Performance, Transgression and Transformation

What would happen if you used Mike Leigh’s rehearsal process to bring to life a Miranda July project that channelled the renegade, independent spirit of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s? Chances are it would end up bearing more than a passing resemblance to The Five Provocations (Angie Black, 2018). Until now, the film has screened almost exclusively at film festivals, including the Melbourne Queer Film Festival and Lorne Film; but it has since been picked up by Label Distribution, and was scheduled to be released on multiple streaming services in late September. Audiences will be able to watch The Five Provocations through iTunes, Google Play and Vimeo. While this is writer/director Black’s first feature, the film’s inclusive lens and emphasis on the experiences of social outsiders resonates with…

Performance, Transgression
and Transformation

The first Australian feature to be headlined by an actor with Down syndrome, Paul Barakat’s tale of a young man who dreams of a professional boxing career while coping with prejudice and condescension breaks new ground in representation of disability on screen. The film’s strong performances and evident good intentions can’t, however, wholly make up for the limitations that the narrative itself places on its protagonist, writes Hanna Schenkel. Danny (Chris Bunton) is an accomplished athlete. The defined musculature of his back and arms betrays both physical strength and mental discipline. The shelf next to his bed is heavy with trophies and medals – even at his young age, evidence of a long and successful gymnastics career. But despite his success – or, maybe, because of it – the gymnasium…

A seething commentary on the global migration crisis, fish-out-of-water horror-comedy Two Heads Creek (2019) concerns faint-hearted Polish-British butcher Norman (Jordan Waller), who flees a hostile post-Brexit Britain with his melodramatic sister, Annabelle (Kathryn Wilder), to travel to the titular Australian rural town in search of their birth mother, Mary (Kerry Armstrong). Directed by local filmmaker Jesse O’Brien and scripted by British actor Waller, it’s a film that both knowingly embraces and – thanks to its partially international perspective – overcomes genre-film clichés regarding Australian aggression towards outsiders. I talk to producer Judd Tilyard about the challenges of authentically depicting Aussie national identity on screen and achieving a tonal balance between horror and comedy, and why it’s crucial to understand rather than undermine genre audiences. Oliver Pfeiffer: What attracted you to…

Playing out a narrative of imagined grief within the real-life settings of her parents’ greenhouse and her bedroom, Allison Chorn’s hypnotic film is part immersive documentary, part allegorical self-portrait. As Susan Bye argues, the film’s soundscape plays a central role in conveying liminality and threat, combining with its visual rhythms to constitute a work both Gothic and uncanny. The Plastic House (2019) is an exquisite piece of poetic filmmaking that is both intimate and disquieting. Primarily filmed inside a plastic-covered greenhouse on filmmaker Allison Chhorn’s parents’ farm, the project is a work of docufiction motivated by the hypothetical premise that Chhorn’s parents have died, and she has been left to continue with the task of planting and growing the family’s yearly crop of runner beans. Apart from some post-production sound…

Investigating the legacy of an eleven-year-old Puerto Rican salsa singer who achieved momentary fame before vanishing without a trace, Sam Zubrycki’s documentary explores the complicated relationship between the child star and the New York record producer who discovered him, along with the broader importance of the musical genre to contemporary Latin American culture. Speaking to the director, Jasmine Crittenden asks him about the documentary’s winding path to completion, and the impact that it has had on the lives of its subjects. In 2014, Australian filmmaker Sam Zubrycki was in a record shop in Cali, Colombia, when he heard a voice on the stereo unlike anything he’d ever heard before. ‘It was so mysterious, so powerful, so strong,’ he tells me. ‘You could hear so much heartbreak and so much emotion…

Among a spate of collaborative Screen Australia endeavours, a pair of recent queer-themed projects – Network 10 documentary-funding initiative Out Here and ABC short-film series Love Bites – have shown what can be achieved with flexible running times and online delivery. In focusing on bodily performance and regional life respectively, each offer much-needed forms of representation – and, Kim Munro suggests, ought to be given the opportunity to reach a broader viewership. ‘You have to see it to be it.’ While tennis legend Billie Jean King was speaking about gender equality on the tennis court,1 the aphorism has broad application, especially concerning on-screen representation. Acknowledging the lack of diversity in the Australian screen over the past few years, as well as the barriers for emerging filmmakers to get a start…

Singing from the Rooftops

Following a group of young singers from audition to performance at a prestigious Brisbane opera school, Liselle Mei’s documentary is an intimate representation of female friendship and artistic development that doesn’t shy away from some of the less edifying aspects of opera culture. As Rebekah Brammer writes, the film is also a production thoroughly situated in the city of Brisbane – both diegetically and behind the scenes – and ultimately serves as a paean to its setting. Founded in 2011, the Lisa Gasteen National Opera Program1 – based at Griffith University’s Queensland Conservatorium and headed by Gasteen herself – proclaims itself as ‘the premier elite training program for young Australian opera singers’, providing a short and intensive course that enables students to train locally in a way previously only available…

Singing from the Rooftops

Sweet, Sour and Spicy Country

Blurring documentary and fiction, Warwick Thornton’s six-part television series sees the Indigenous filmmaker retreat to a makeshift dwelling on the picturesque northern Western Australian coast to cook, tell stories and pass the time in quiet contemplation. As Kenta McGrath finds, the show – which was filmed before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but released in the midst of it – carries immediate resonance in its minimalist focus on isolation, subsistence and healing. As long there are films, there’ll be films about lone men surviving in nature. Whether these men are forced into such a situation, like the sailor who becomes stranded at sea in All Is Lost (JC Chandor, 2013), or they choose it, like a young romantic’s self-imposed stint in the Alaskan wilderness in Into the Wild (Sean…

Sweet, Sour and Spicy Country

Signs and Wonders

Replete with references to the zodiac and associated symbology, UK–New Zealand miniseries The Luminaries is a tense drama set in the multicultural world of nineteenth-century Aotearoa goldfields. Scripted by Eleanor Catton, the author of the ambitiously structured novel of the same name, the production provides intriguing insights into the challenges and limitations of televisual adaptation, as Anthony Carew finds. When a screen adaptation of a beloved novel radically rewrites its source text, viewers who love the book can get defensive. Those screenwriters who raze, change and chop up the book, it’s usually posited by protective fans, lack appropriate respect for the text, and perhaps even fail to understand what it was that made it great in the first place. But what about when it’s the novelist themselves doing the rewriting?…

Signs and Wonders

Hidden Idols and Clued-in Contenders

The latest and most successful local spin-off of the popular US reality series, Network 10’s Australian Survivor diverges in many key respects from its American counterpart. Despite some teething problems, the show has gradually developed its own merits and identity – thanks in no small part to its contestants’ reality-television literacy, Dave Crewe suggests. Australian Survivor has graced the pages of Metro before. Back in 2018, scholar Stuart Richards examined his dissatisfaction with the show’s first season1 through the lens of how the US series and its ‘paratextual media’2 have manifested across its two decades of history.3 Richards is unmistakably a huge fan of Survivor, and I don’t disagree with his misgivings surrounding the Australian version’s shaky first steps. But, as someone who became a fan of the format thanks…

Hidden Idols and Clued-in Contenders

‘ Rummaging Through the Rubble ’

With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing film and video art out from cinemas and galleries and tentatively into the online space, radical digital platform Prototype has led the way, offering a spate of short works responding to the lockdown. Looking at three of these films – Robert Nugent’s Picnic Places, Leyla Stevens’ Scenes for Solace and Sarah Hadley’s Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) – Kim Munro finds artworks that both flourish through limitations and reflect our fraught current moment. In The Five Obstructions (co-directed by Lars von Trier, 2003), Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth is asked to remake his cult short The Perfect Human (1968) five times over, under increasingly severe constraints. Orchestrated by the Machiavellian von Trier, the film plays out in a cat-and-mouse dynamic. For the first reimagined version,…

‘ Rummaging Through the Rubble ’

Laughter Through Tears

Over the course of three decades, Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman has crafted narratives both political and deeply personal, often finding moments of wry humour and comedic fantasy against the grim backdrop of Israeli occupation. As Anthony Carew finds, the director has channelled influences as diverse as Jacques Tati and Yasujirō Ozu into work that is ultimately global – and quietly hopeful – in its outlook. In his fourth narrative feature film, It Must Be Heaven (2019), Elia Suleiman – forever a protagonist in his features, a mute spectator known as ES – stages a scene in a production office. ES is in Paris, in the middle of a wide-eyed global journey echoing the filmmaker’s own years in exile from his homeland, Palestine. A French producer (played by real-life producer Vincent…

Laughter Through Tears

Indeterminate Past

The third feature by Laos’ first female filmmaker, this rural tale of murder and loneliness is part high-concept science fiction drama, part macabre ghost story. Speaking to director Mattie Do, Kate Robertson sees in the film a profound and emotionally impactful meditation on grief, memory and the impossibility of mending the past. In the near future, The Old Man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) lives near a small rural village outside Vientiane, eking out a living by selling salvaged scrap. As a child – The Boy (Por Silatsa) – he came across a young woman terribly injured after a motorcycle accident, The Girl (Noutnapha Soydara), and held her hand as she died: an act of kindness that created a supernatural bond between them, her spirit staying close to him throughout his life, tethered…

Indeterminate Past

Cinema Science Picking Up the Frequencies of The Dish

The Dish (Rob Sitch, 2000) is perhaps the perfect end-of-term movie for a secondary Science classroom. Every teacher knows the scenario. Assessment’s been completed, the curriculum’s been covered, but there’s that slender week of classes sitting between you and your students and those ever-appreciated holidays. Starting a new unit of work is inconceivable, but you want to do something more productive than letting the students have free time (read: Minecraft). It’s times like these you need The Dish. The brainchild of Australian mainstay Working Dog Productions – also responsible for the likes of Frontline, Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Castle (Sitch, 1997) – The Dish tells the simple story of how a small contingent of Australian technicians played an integral role in the most iconic television event of…

Cinema Science
Picking Up the Frequencies of

The Dish

Counterfeit Images A History of Blackface on Australian Television

This article contains examples of historical racist language and imagery that some readers may find distressing. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are also warned that the article features images and names of deceased individuals. In June 2020, Netflix removed four Australian comedy shows starring Chris Lilley from its platforms in Australia and New Zealand.1 While no official reason was given, it was commonly assumed that this action was prompted by Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and around the world – demonstrations that have primarily served to bring attention to disproportionate rates of police violence against unarmed black people,2 but also since sparked discussions about broader issues surrounding racial inequality, including that of media representation. The streaming service’s move brought renewed attention to longstanding criticisms of the…

Counterfeit Images
A History of Blackface on Australian Television

Pandemic Paradox Navigating Technology in the Time of COVID-19

The war against the COVID-19 pandemic is being fought on two fronts. On the first, the global community has suddenly found itself faced with a common enemy stealthily moving towards it or already hiding in its midst. With the virus spreading from continent to continent, various institutional bodies have marshalled their forces to contain and mitigate its effects through social distancing and digital contacting. Modern technology thereby makes it possible to adapt to an encroaching existential threat. Makeshift working and learning environments help counter the virus’s spread with remote desktops and videoconferencing. Communication platforms such as Zoom, Webex and Microsoft Teams ensure that Australians can safely attend business meetings and virtual classrooms in their underwear or pyjama bottoms.1 Despite restrictions on physical gatherings, socially isolated families and friends are able…

Pandemic Paradox Navigating Technology in the Time of COVID-19

‘ The Show Must Go On ’ Transgression and the Carnivalesque in Moulin Rouge!

Before it even truly begins, the period musical Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001) invites us into the spectacle at its heart: behind an onstage conductor leading an unseen orchestra, a red curtain is drawn to reveal a white screen, onto which is projected a series of silent-film-style title cards listing credits and the words ‘Paris, 1900’. This sense of constructedness is maintained as the first character we meet, Toulouse (John Leguizamo), materialises – in black-and-white, framed by graphical L-brackets – to sing the film’s prologue, ‘Nature Boy’. We get a ghostly glimpse of our protagonist, Christian (Ewan McGregor), then the camera launches over Paris and weaves through alleyways. As the screen slowly fills with colour and the camera finally rests on Christian’s face, Toulouse’s song crescendoes with the film’s ostensible…

‘
The Show Must Go On
’ Transgression and the Carnivalesque in Moulin Rouge!

INA BERTRAND There are two stories to be told here – one about a remarkable film, and another about three fabulous sisters. We will come back to the film later. The McDonagh sisters The sisters were Isabel, Phyllis and Paulette, the eldest of the seven children of John Michael McDonagh, a doctor who, in the early 1900s, lived in Macquarie Street, catering to the upper crust of Sydney society from his consulting rooms there as well as from his private hospital in College Street. The sisters had been educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Elizabeth Bay. They boarded at school during the week, but returned home every weekend, where they listened spellbound to performances by artists from J. C. Williamson Ltd., Sydney’s leading theatrical company – for which…

scope screen industry views

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: AUSTRALIAN CINEMA UNDER LOCKDOWN Rochelle Siemienowicz Back in March, when pandemic lockdowns first hit Australia, we all hoped cinemas would be open again by mid year. Surely the COVID-19 crisis could not drag on too long. Yet here we are – at the time of writing – in the middle of Melbourne’s second lock-down, with no end in sight. Just a few weeks after gingerly opening sanitised doors, cinemas were shut again. Other states have been luckier, but ongoing social-distancing restrictions and a lack of tentpole crowd-pleasers from Hollywood mean that nobody’s going back to the movies in quite the way they used to – not for a very long time. This prolonged crisis is devastating for theatrical exhibitors, and we can expect some businesses…

scope screen industry views

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