Wrong side of the road

On its release in 1981, Ned Lander's 'Wrong Side of the Road' won that year's Jury Prize at the Australian Film Institute Awards. Emphasising the film's status as a pre-eminent Australian production, the theorist and critic Sylvia Lawson, writing in 2013, called Wrong Side of the Road 'the best Australian film of 1981 and indeed of many other years'. Progressing at a restrained pace, it breaks 'Hollywood conventions (which most Australian films obediently copy) about what constitutes a proper narrative focus', with the result that the film stands as 'something of an event in Australian cinema'. In this way, Wrong Side of the Road is the 'first narrative feature to take the experience of a contemporary Aboriginal group [of characters] as its theme instead of using them as contrasts or complements to the main action'.

Reworking direct cinema: performative display in rockumentary

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 observational direct cinema as a mode centred on a documentary performative display as it operates within selected works from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century. 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 is closer to the mark: the rockumentary turned direct cinema into a commercially viable and popular form, one which the rockumentary has at times returned to and innovatively superseded in its scopic attention to performative display.

Dont look back

The award-winning film Don't Look Back (1967) captures Bob Dylan on tour and on the cusp of change in 1965. Dylan was rapidly shedding his image as a folk musician and being reborn as a rock persona – and D. A. Pennebaker was there to record this fascinating transformation.This insightful book charts the ways in which Pennebaker revised aspects of observational 'direct cinema', a style of film-making that he helped to pioneer, in order to represent in innovative ways Dylan's onstage performances and backstage actions. Keith Beattie's perceptive and nuanced analysis explains the relationship between 'pose' and the performative presentation of 'persona', which forms the basis of the film's portrayal, and explores Pennebaker's relationship with Dylan in the film-making process. In doing so, the book highlights many remarkable moments fromDont Look Back and demonstrates how this landmark film eschewed the informationalism of the documentary form, revealing a captivating portrait of its beguiling subject.