It's not only rock and roll: rockumentary, direct cinema and performative display

The documentary form commonly referred to as rockumentary has become, since its inception in the early 1960s, a staple of American direct cinema. In keeping with its associations with observational direct cinema, rockumentary emphasizes showing over telling; that is, rockumentary privileges the visual capacities of documentary over patterns of exposition. While the ‘documentary display’ of rockumentary is comparable to certain features of  the early ‘cinema of attractions’ it exceeds such features in its focus on  performance. Typically, an emphasis within documentary theory on unmediated and unreconstructed access to the real as the basis of documentary film has not admitted a place for notions of performance before the camera. Rockumentary, with its relentless foregrounding of the performing body and the performance of musicians, revises this  understanding. This essay examines rockumentary within the context of direct cinema as a mode centred on a documentary performative display as it operates within selected works from the 1960s to the present. The film theorist Brian Winston has claimed that ‘[d]irect cinema made the rock performance/tour movie into the most popular and commercially viable documentary form thus far.’ The inverse of this assessment may be closer to the mark: the rockumentary turned direct cinema into a commercially and widely available form, one which the rockumentary has at times returned to and superseded in its scopic attention to performative display.

Men, masculinities and symbolic violence in recent Indonesian cinema

This article investigates images of men and masculinities in post-New Order Indonesian popular culture, focusing on a recent and path-breaking Indonesian film, Kuldesak. The theoretical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is utilised to suggest that if Indonesian women are to be assisted in their efforts to resist the gender inequality of Indonesia's patriarchal gender regime, then the social gendering of men and masculinity must also be understood.

Anglo-Indians in Hollywood, Bollywood and arthouse cinema

Apart from a few disparaging remarks about offensive stereotypes by Anglo-Indian writers and politicians such as Gloria Jean Moore, Frank Anthony and Gillian Hart, critics have paid very little attention to the representation of “mixed-race” Anglo-Indians in the cinema. Drawing on screen theory and recent theories of cinema spectatorship, this essay provides a comparative analysis of how Hollywood, Bollywood and arthouse films represent Anglo-Indians. More specifically, it analyses three paradigmatic films: Bhowani Junction (1956), Julie (1975), and 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). Combining formal analysis of narrative structure, mise-en-scegravene and genre with historical analysis, the paper examines the ideological work performed by these texts, which use Anglo-Indians to dramatise specific political conflicts in India such as those generated by the British partition of India in 1947 and the more recent issue of globalisation.

Cinema of (coming) attractions : Bruce Conner's a movie and documentary display

Bruce Conner's film 'Movie' (1958) constructs an argument concerning popular media and history within and through a radical juxtaposition of images to release new and productive meanings. It also comments on the media's representation of history as violence and analyses the consequences of aggression and violence.

Cinema's new waves : an interview with Albie Thoms

Albie Thomas is a seminal figure in the history of Avant-Garde film in Australia. In the mid-1960s he helped found UBU Films, the precursor of the Sydney Film-Makers' Co-operative, and he has made a number of short and feature-length experimental films. Thoms has written on film and film cultures for an array of journals and maintains an active involvement with aspects of the surf film industry in Australia. In this interview, Thoms discusses his early UBU films, and the connections between those films and Palm Beach (1979). Styles of surf film and the influences on Thoms' filmmaking are also discussed.

The "other" in film : exclusions of Aboriginal indentity from Australian cinema

Throughout the latter half of the past century, cinema played a significant role in the shaping of the core narratives of Australia. Films express and implicitly shape national images and symbolic representations of cultural fictions in which ideas about Aboriginal identity have been embedded. In this article,1 exclusionary practices in Australian narratives are analyzed through examples of films representing Aboriginal identity. Through these filmic narratives the articulation, interrogation, and contestation of views about filmic representations of Aboriginal identity in Australia are illuminated. The various themes in the filmic narratives are examined in order to compare and contrast the ways in which Australian films display the operation of narrative closure and dualisms within the film texts.

2nd Hand Cinema

A celebration of the offal of cinema, old films, old soundtracks, drawing directly on the film, using stamps and food-dyes to create discarded imagery. To chew film up and spit it out as painting direct.

Expanded cinema

3-screen film performance constituted from hand drawn direct-on-film imagery and scratched soundtracks that are further manipulated through the performance to comment and respond on the position accorded such marginal work, namely its complete erasure and marginalization within critical debate in Australia, and to further lay bare the processes of image manipulation.

Communicating the 'unspeakability' of violent acts in cinema

This paper explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning‟s experimental narrative film Landscape Suicide (1986, 16mm, 95min USA). As a belated example of Judith Walker‟s „Trauma Cinema‟, this film in part re-enacts the court transcripts of two perpetrators of physical violence: Ed Gein and Michelle Protti. Teenager Protti killed another student with a kitchen knife after having been subjected to bullying by a group of girls and Wisconsin farmer Gein shot a storekeeper‟s wife, took the body home to then skin and dissect it. Gein‟s case is said to have provided the model for the cinematic serial killers portrayed in Psycho (1959), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In its strategy of communicating or representing the overwhelming and traumatic impact of violence cinematically Landscape Suicide is contrasted to the melodrama and shock of mainstream violence in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs for its ability to identify „unspeakable‟ aspects of overwhelming experience. This paper will concentrate on the representation of Ed Gein‟s violent acts, rather than Protti‟s and enlists recent neurological research that suggests a model for forgetting that is identifiable in the film‟s structure and content.