Towards a politics and art of the land : gothic cinema of the Australian new wave and its reception by American film critics

This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode.

Gilles Deleuze and early cinema: The modernity of the emancipated time

Although the transition from the movement-image to the time-image is among the most commented-upon Deleuzian problems, Gilles Deleuze neglected the previous transition from ‘images in movement’ to the first regime of the movement-images. As my approach will be transhistorical, focusing especially on early silent movies and recently expanded cinema through early moving images (Lumière Brothers) and 1970s structural films (Malcolm Le Grice), I will reflect on how we can think time and moving images outside of this closed Deleuzian movement-image/time-image conceptual framework. In other words, we can ask: how can we expand this conceptual framework? Drawing on David Martin-Jones’ ‘attraction-image’, my aim is to explore the role of early cinema and the reasons for Gilles Deleuze’s own historical and technical (mis)judgement of early silent cinema. In this sense, the emergent studies on the history of early silent movies, and the growing field of Deleuzian studies on film, together have an important role on the philosophical and historiographical analysis of film’s expression of time and modernity.

Democratic corporealities of love : the architectural cinema and eroticized publics of Pauline Kael

The American film critic Pauline Kael’s career interestingly parallels the Cold War period but nobody has explored this yet. Filling that gap, this essay constructs Kael’s writings and critic’s persona as a contribution to a discourse of international democracy. Kael was part of a generation of American critics who took seriously the importance of art to politics. However, she goes further than her contemporaries by energizing this relationship through her emphasis on corporeality—both on screen and off screen—and on the eroticized body. A discernible philosophical lineage runs from Plato’s version of love as described by Socrates in The Symposium to Kael’s writings and bodily habits. In this lineage, love is figured as relational and desiring. A second line of relationship between Plato and Kael is in the way they each connected erotic discourses to the very similar architectures of the andrôn (men’s quarters), for Plato, and the modern American cinema or screening room, for Kael. Plato and Kael draw out the inherent spatial energy of these places (which is most evident at the borders of andrôn and cinema) through the interactions they construct of images and talk with the erotic, love-based relationality of bodies. They thereby maximize the bodily powers of these architectures as places where a public of differences and (inevitably) “loose” democracy might form. Kael’s advocacy doesn’t suggest a formal political program so much as a more feminine democracy of erotic discourses allied to an energizing architecture suitable to the accumulation of plural, participatory corporealities.