Poetics of the uncanny : Jean Painlevé, documentary display, and documentary theory

In Grierson's theory of documentary, films of the so-called cinema of attractions were relegated to the position of 'lower forms' in contrast to his description of documentary as a form of civic pedagogy. The modes and forms of a cinema of attractions, which form what is here referred to as the practice of documentary display, did not disappear with the ascendency of Griersonian documentary; instead such approaches continued to inform avant-garde film. This paper examines the connections between nonfiction documentations and avant-garde film- and the resultant implications of this meeting for documentary film theory- through an analysis of the film and critical writings of Jean Painlevé (1902-1989). Painlevé, whom, according to Bazin, 'occupies a singular and privileged place in French cinema', informed his understandings of documentary through contact with, among others, Buñuel, Man Ray, Bataille, Eisenstein, and Grierson. The analysis of Painlevé's surrealist documentary display and his extensive body of critical literature on documentary foregrounds overlooked documentary works and constructs, or resurrects, ignored perspectives on documentary film as a way of extending and revising documentary film theory and the documentary canon.

Documentary display : re-viewing nonfiction film and video

Not all documentary films and videos are sober depictions of the real world. Documentary representations can present expressive, entertaining and spectacular images. This book examines such innovative approaches as they occur within the process of 'documentary display' - a practice which emphasises the visual attractions of documentary representation. Works of documentary display explore modes of exhibitionistic 'showing' in which sensation is frequently the vehicle of cognition and knowledge. Such a display is analysed within the popular and prominent forms of found-footage film, 'rockumentary', the city film, nonfiction surf film and video, and certain views of natural science topics. This accessible and informed study - with its focus on entertaining, popular, spectacular and sensational froms of nonfiction representation - makes an important contribution to theoretical analyses of documentary film and video

Documentary tensions and the filmmaker in the frame

This thesis identifies a distinct category of documentary in which the filmmaker is shown negotiating their authorship and performing their authority. Close analysis of three films investigates conceptual tensions that arise when a filmmaker is framed as both a specific subject and a documentary author.

Buchenwald ball

A celebratory story about a group of orphans from the holocaust who found their way to Australia and became a family. In 2006 they held the 60th anniversary Buchenwald Ball.

Kotla walks: performing locality

This film tells the story of the residents of Kotla Mubarakpur, an 'urban village' in South Delhi, focusing on the family of Sarita and Raman Bhardwaj, their friends and neighbours. The film tracks the imagination of the unofficial city forever in the process of breaking the topographic skin of the 'official' city of the Master Plan. It explores the ways in which the texture of urban spaces is woven into ideas of belonging, intimacy, friendship, ambition, and the desire to be 'here' but also somewhere else.

First time tragedy: second time farce

The re-enactment of the First Fleet from the United Kingdom to Australia and the arbitrary celebration of the two hundred years of British settlement becomes a catalyst to consider the issues of colonialism, cultural and national identity. This film looks at the construction of national identity and dissent around the Australian Bicentennial.

Refugee : a recipe in six steps (2004)- Documenting the hidden

The research involved the production of a documentary and exegesis, arguing that to emphasise the importance of the indexical image in documentary is to overlook the active involvement of viewers, who don't need to see reality in order to infer that a given film is making arguments about reality.

D.A. Pennebaker: Interviews

This wide-ranging and insightful collection of interviews with D. A. Pennebaker (b. 1925) spans the prolific career of this pioneer of observational cinema. From the 1950s to the present day, D. A. Pennebaker has made documentary films that have revealed the world of politics, celebrity culture, and the music industry. Following his early collaborations with Robert Drew on a number of works for television, his feature-length portrait of Bob Dylan on tour in England in 1965 (the landmark film Dont Look Back) established so-called direct cinema as a form capable of achieving broad theatrical release. With Monterey Pop, Pennebaker inaugurated the popular mode of rock concert film (or "rockumentary"), a style of filmmaking he has expanded on through a number of films, including Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Depeche Mode: 101. Pennebaker has always regarded collaboration as an integral part of his filmmaking methods. His long-running collaboration with Richard Leacock and subsequently his work with Chris Hegedus have enriched his approach and, in the process, have instituted collaboration as a working practice integral to American direct cinema. His other collaborations, in particular, with Jean-Luc Godard and Norman Mailer, resulted in innovative combinations of observational techniques and fictional aesthetics. Such films as The War Room, which was about the 1992 Democratic primaries and was nominated for an Academy Award, and the 2009 Kings of Pastry continue to explore the capacities of observational documentary. In 2012 Pennebaker was the first documentary filmmaker to be awarded an Academy Honorary Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

From city symphony to global city film : documentary display and the corporeal

In the introduction to his history of the relationship between the body and the city in Western civilisation, Richard Sennett includes an anecdote about attending a cinema in New York. Sennett uses the story of watching film as a way of commenting on the place of the body and senses within urban settings and is concerned to document 'physical sensations in urban space' as a way of addressing what he sees as the 'tactile sterility which afflicts the urban environment.'[1] While Sennett's work performs an important task by drawing attention to various historical conditions implicated in urban and metropolitan experience, it is possible to rework the categories he deploys - bodies, the city, and film - into a very different argument concerning representations of the city. Indeed the three categories coalesce in the so-called city film - works which include the 'city symphony' of the 1920s and subsequent documentary representations of urban spaces, among them the New York City films of the 1940s and 1950s, and films of non-Western cities produced in the decades from the 1960s to the present - within which the city is realised through a focus on people.

The films of John Hughes: a history of independent screen production in Australia

ABSTRACTIn The Films of John Hughes: A history of independent screen production in Australia filmmaker and academic John Cumming tells the ongoing story of Hughes’ work illustrating the delicate balance of individual, collective and corporate agendas that many contemporary artists need to negotiate. This story begins in the 1960s with a generation of intelligent, socially engaged young people who challenge established power structures, conventions and stereotypes in art, politics and the media. Experiments were being made with grassroots democracy, with new social formations and new ways of seeing and communicating. The book also pays attention to earlier periods of cultural and political activism that captured Hughes’ imagination in the 1970s and became the subject of a number of his films over a period of nearly forty years. Through these films Cumming traces the outline of post-war film culture and production in Melbourne from the 1940s and sets this history within the context of international trends in independent filmmaking throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st.The work of an independent filmmaker has always included a great deal more than directing films. Working in an artisanal mode, he or she often performs, or has a hand in, every aspect of craft at the same time as engaging in discussion and organisation around the wider sphere of screen culture and industry. In addition to having proficiency as a producer, photographer, sound recordist, editor, distributor and exhibitor of films, there is research, organisation, lobbying, entrepreneurship and mentoring to be done. As an independent producer-director, John Hughes has engaged in all of these activities – often simultaneously. He is also a scholar, writer, organiser, activist and teacher. As a television bureaucrat he was both eminent and innovative, and through his filmmaking he has become a leading historian of Australian documentary cinema. ‘… that view – that art and politics are inherently at odds – is still lurking around. It is at the heart of cultural conservatism; and John Hughes’s film-making, from the 1970s to the present, confounds its proponents. His cinema is at once crowded, detailed, elegant and absolutely lucid; at the same time, it is shot through with political and historical understandings.’ Sylvia Lawson, ‘Such a Bloody Wonderful Place’, Inside Story, 28 April 2013.