Fatal women in renaissance tragedy, 1550-1650

Drawing upon the femme fatale of film noir, this thesis examines the presence of a fatal woman on the Renaissance stage. The thesis analyses the representation of emotionally and sexually independent women as fatally attractive to, yet ultimately destructive of, the men they entrap and seduce.

Exhumed [book of poetry]

Unpredictable and boisterously entertaining, Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed is a collection of interconnected prose poems exploring the reanimation of canonical texts against a backdrop of popular culture references: William Carlos Williams, Nabokov, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson are paired with ‘Happy Meals’, Hill’s Hoists, Bonds t-shirts and the Moonee Valley Bistro. Divided into two parts – ‘Inter’ with its play on intertexts and ‘Disinter’ where the references are unearthed, these prose poems are fractured moments centred on love, betrayal, abandonment and death. Atherton’s appeals to l’humour noir and the politicisation of the poet’s private spaces make for an exhilarating and intoxicating read.

Sounding loneliness in under the skin

How one affectively sounds loneliness on screen is dependent on what instruments, melodies, voices and sound effects are used to create a sonic membrane that manifests as melancholy and malcontent. It is in the syncretic and synesthetic entanglement that sounding loneliness takes root. It is in the added value inherent in the “sound-image” – to draw upon Chion1 – that loneliness fully emerges like a black dahlia. So many lonely people, where do they all come from? And yet, as I will suggest, this sounding loneliness is not only textually specific, simply or singularly driven by narrative and generic concerns, but is historically contingent and nationally and culturally locatable. For example, the sounds of urban isolation of the American 1940s film noir are different from the Chinese peasant laments of Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984), or what I will presently argue are the British austere strings of sounding loneliness today. When one employs a “diagnostic critique”2, one undertakes to find the history in the text and the text in the history. It is in the interplay between sound and image that historical and political truth emerges. These contextualised and historicised soundings change across and within national landscapes and their related imaginings. We don’t just see the crumbling walls of the imagined nation state, but get to hear its desolate tunes: The Specials wailing “Ghost Town” – the anthem of/to Margaret Thatcher’s first wave of 1980s neo-liberalism – is a striking case in point. But what specifically is this contemporary “sounding loneliness”, and where does it come from? I would like to suggest that this age of loneliness is composed in, through and within the sonic vibrations found in the wretched politics of austerity. My case study will be the anomic soundings of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013).

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.

Reflection: humour in poetry: in praise of the light touch

While humour can be defined as something that is fun or amusing, it can also reference something much darker, such as l’humeur noir. André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor, the first of its kind, was intended to “showcase…the Surrealist conception of humor” according to his translator, Mark Polizzoti (1997: v). The prose poems in this selection are often surreal and use a kind of gallows humour to discuss death and abandonment.