Directory of World Cinema : Australia and New Zealand 2

Building on and bringing up to date the material presented in the first installment of Directory of World Cinema : Australia and New Zealand, this volume continues the exploration of the cinema produced in Australia and New Zealand since the beginning of the twentieth century. Among the additions to this volume are in-depth treatments of the locations that feature prominently in the countries' cinema. Essays by leading critics and film scholars consider the significance in films of the outback and the beach, which is evoked as a liminal space in Long Weekend and a symbol of death in Heaven's Burning, among other films. Other contributions turn the spotlight on previously unexplored genres and key filmmakers, including Jane Campion, Rolf de Heer, Charles Chauvel, and Gillian Armstrong.

From Aussiewood Movies to Guerrilla Filmmaking: Independent Filmmaking and Contemporary Australian Cinema

Independent filmmaking within the context of Australian cinema is a multifaceted subject. In comparison to the United States, where production can be characterised as bifurcated between major studio production and so-called ���indie��� or independent production without the backing of the majors, since the 1970s and until recently the vast majority of Australian feature film production has been independent filmmaking. Like most so-called national cinemas, most Australian movies are supported by both direct and indirect public subvention administered by state and federal government funding bodies, and it could be argued that filmmakers are, to a certain degree, ���dependent��� on official mandates. As this chapter demonstrates national production slates are subjected to budget restraints and cut-backs, official cultural policies (for example pursuing international co-productions and local content quotas) and shifts in policy directions among others. Therefore, within the context of Australian cinema, feature film production operating outside the public funding system could be understood as ���independent���. However, as is the case for most English-language national cinemas, independence has long been defined in terms of autonomy from Hollywood, and ��� as alluded to above ��� as Australia becomes more dependent upon international inputs into production, higher budget movies are becoming less independent from Hollywood. As such, this chapter argues that independence in Australian cinema can be viewed as having two poles: independence from direct government funding and independence from Hollywood studios. With a specific focus on industry and policy contexts, this chapter explores key issues that constitute independence for Australian cinema. In so doing it examines the production characteristics of four primary domains of contemporary independent filmmaking in Australia, namely: ���Aussiewood��� production; government-backed low-to-mid budget production; co-productions; and guerrilla filmmaking.

Cinema studies : Women's Experimental Cinema edited by Robin Blaetz

Women���s Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom are still working today. In each essay in this collection, a leading film scholar considers a single filmmaker, supplying biographical information, analyzing various influences on her work, examining the development of her corpus, and interpreting a significant number of individual films. The essays rescue the work of critically neglected but influential women filmmakers for teaching, further study, and, hopefully, restoration and preservation. Just as importantly, they enrich the understanding of feminism in cinema and expand the terrain of film history, particularly the history of the American avant-garde.

From cinema to TV : still the same old stories about journalism

Television drama used to be the poor relation of the full length feature film made for cinema. No self-respecting movie star would be seen dead in the former, and successful TV actors rarely sustained careers of comparable brilliance in the film industry. Those days are gone, if a series such as House of Cards is any indicator of the trends.

Australian International Cinema

The limited terms in which international production is currently discussed in Australia do not allow for serious consideration of the multiple and complex ways such production enables new connections with filmmakers and audiences around the world. The narrowness of the debate also prevents us from considering fully what that production entails for Australian cinema, what it means, who it speaks to, and how it could spark new conversations about the possibilities of filmmaking and storytelling in this country.

Metal Skin and the cinema of noise

In traditional communication and information theory, noise is the demon Other, an unwelcome disruption in the passage of information. Noise is "anything that is added to the signal between its transmission and reception that is not intended by the source...anything that makes the intended signal harder to decode accurately". It is in Michel Serres' formulation, the "third man" in dialogue who is always assumed, and whom interlocutors continually struggle to exclude. Noise is simultaneously a condition and a by-product of the act of communication, it represents the ever present possibility of disruption, interruption, misunderstanding. In sonic or musical terms noise is cacophony, dissonance. For economists, noise is an arbitrary element, both a barrier to the pursuit of wealth and a basis for speculation. For Mick (Jeremy Sims) and his mate Kev (Ben Mendelsohn) in David Caesar's Idiot Box (1996), as for Hando (Russell Crowe) and his gang of skinheads in Geoffrey Wright's Romper Stomper (1992), or Dazey (Ben Mendelsohn) and Joe (Aden Young) in Wright's Metal Skin (1994) and all those like them starved of (useful) information and excluded from the circuit - the information poor - their only option, their only point of intervention in the loop, is to make noise, to disrupt, to discomfort, to become Serres' "third man", "the prosopopoeia of noise" (5).

Settings, subjects and stories: Creating Australian cinema

The story of Australian cinema is often told as one of brave and often futile struggle by passionate and talented filmmakers to tell Australian stories against the backdrop of an industry dominated locally as well as globally by Hollywood and its agents. In theses narratives international interests are often cast as the villains in the valiant struggle for national filmic self-expression. But such a focus on the national aspects of Australian cinema elides the depth of the international aspect of Australian cinema. A legend has grown around the last decade of the nineteenth century as a time of intense artistic and political activity when a national sensibility welled in writing, poetry and painting. Film too played a part in creating and sharing a vision of a nation, but from the earliest days film also linked Australia to the world.

Cinema Cities, Media Cities: The Contemporary International Studio Complex

This report, written for the Australian Film Commission (now Screen Australia) is the first major study of the development and role of studio complexes in the spread of film production around the world. The report is divided in to five chapters. First, it examines policy-making around studios, including government support for new facilities around the world. Second, it situates the phenomenon of the contemporary studio complex within the international production ecology. Third, it provides examples of the three types of studio complex: production precinct; cinema city; and media city. Fourth, it describes the networks of production that sustain studios. And fifth it explores the place of the studio in the relationship between 'local' and international production.

Public history, private memories: Historical imagination in the new Italian cinema 1988-1999

The concern with the following arguments started during a study of national and international cinemas, from the desire to account for a cinema that internationally was doing well, but was undervalued domestically. The aims were to account for the renewal of Italian filmmaking from 1988, the New Italian cinema, and understand the conditions behind this renewal. The thesis identifies in the historical theme and in the recurrence of features from Italian cinema history elements of coherence with previous cinema production. The first consideration that emerges is that a triangulation between a new generation of filmmakers, their audience and recent history shaped the recovery of Italian cinema from 1988. A second consideration is that no discussion of Italian cinema can be separated from a discussion of that which it represents: Italian society and politics. This representation has not only addressed questions of identity for a cohort of spectators, but on occasions has captured the attention of the international audience. Thus the thesis follows a methodologic approach that positions texts in relation to certain traditions in Italian filmmaking and to the context by taking into consideration also industrial factors and social and historical changes. By drawing upon a range of disciplines, from political history to socio-psychological studies, the thesis has focussed on representation of history and memory in two periods of Italian film history: the first and the last decade of twentieth century. The concern has been not so much to interpret the films, but to understand the processes that made the films and how spectarors have applied their knowledge structures to make meaning of the films. Thus the thesis abstains from ascribing implicit meanings to films, but acknowledges how films project cultural contingencies. This is beacause film is shaped by production conditions and cultural and historical circumstances that make the film intelligible. As Bordwell stated in Making Meaning, "One can do other things with films besides 'reading' them" (1989, p. xiii). Within this framework, the thesis proposes a project that understands history films with the norms that govern Italian filmic output, those norms that regulate conditions of production and consumption and the relation between films from various traditions.

Creative Labor in Cinema and Media Industries

Introduction The rapidly burgeoning popularity of cinema at the beginning of the 20th century favored industrialized modes of creativity organized around large production studios that could churn out a steady stream of narrative feature films. By the mid-1910s, a handful of Hollywood studios became leaders in the production, distribution, and exhibition of popular commercial movies. In order to serve incessant demand for new titles, the studios relied on a set of conventions that allowed them to regularize production and realize workplace efficiencies. This entailed a socialized mode of creativity that would later be adopted by radio and television broadcasters. It would also become a model for cinema and media production around the world, both for commercial and state-supported institutions. Even today the core tenets of industrialized creativity prevail in most large media enterprises. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, media industries began to change radically, driven by forces of neoliberalism, corporate conglomeration, globalization, and technological innovation. Today, screen media are created both by large-scale production units and by networked ensembles of talent and skilled labor. Moreover, digital media production may take place in small shops or via the collective labor of media users or fans who have attracted attention due to their hyphenated status as both producers and users of media (i.e., ���prosumers���). Studies of screen media labor fall into five conceptual and methodological categories: historical studies of labor relations, ethnographically inspired investigations of workplace dynamics, critical analyses of the spatial and social organization of labor, and normative assessments of industrialized creativity.

Literatura hispanorromance primigenia : la glosa conoajutorio del Codex Aemilianensis 60

Resumen: Puesto que D��maso Alonso calific�� la Glosa 89 (conoajutorio...), folio 72r del C��dice Emilianense 60, como ���vagido��� de una lengua espa��ola, reconoci�� su naturaleza de plegaria, y afirm�� que se trataba de un texto que ���casi tiene ya estructura literaria���, el prop��sito de esta ponencia es demostrar que, considerados los aspectos filol��gico, ling����stico, ret��rico, literario y doctrinal, este texto no solo excede el car��cter de glosa y de expresi��n formular, sino que es una obra literaria perfecta en forma y en sentido.

���Y vino a consentir, aunque no por su voluntad que tuviese sus ayuntamientos libidinosos con ella��� : sobre los raptos femeninos ejecutados por animales en la literatura espa��ola

Resumen: Son numerosas las fuentes literarias que dan cuenta de los raptos de doncellas llevados a cabo por animales, de cuya uni��n se desprenden a su vez los nacimientos monstruosos de ni��os que reciben cualidades de su padre-animal, tanto f��sicamente como en su car��cter, aunque en ocasiones lleguen a conservar en gran parte su apariencia antropom��rfica. Historias de este tipo se propagan durante los siglos xv y xvi en libros de miscel��neas y casos extra��os, pero contin��an a��n vivos en los siglos posteriores, cuando adquieren nuevas formas y variantes a trav��s del folklore, la narrativa y la l��rica popular. Analizaremos particularmente los raptos ejecutados por el oso y el simio, dos animales en los que el hombre del Medioevo vio especialmente la lujuria.

Dilemas del para��so : viaje, utop��a ymundanidad en la literatura ��rabe

Resumen: La utop��a y el relato de viaje conforman dos narrativas complementarias que describen mundos desconocidos, pero largamente anhelados. No obstante, en el contexto medieval, no podemos interpretar el concepto de utop��a en el sentido pol��tico propio de la Modernidad, moriano, del t��rmino, sino como un proceso de construcci��n de expectativas que, a partir de un mismo modelo formal que se mantendr�� a lo largo del tiempo en todas las manifestaciones de un pa��s o sociedad ideal, tiende a ubicar en una lejan��a inaccesible pero narrable la satisfacci��n de las necesidades de un presente dif��cil. Este es el caso de la Abundantia, la m��s antigua forma de utop��a, vinculada al reino de Saturno y a sus m��ltiples versiones medievales: la Cuca��a, el pa��s de Jauja, el Dorado. Presente bajo diferentes formas en pr��cticamente todas las literaturas europeas occidentales, tambi��n la literatura ��rabe medieval har�� un uso particular de la utop��a y del relato de viaje, en donde incorporar�� su propia y espec��fica visi��n religiosa y cultural. Nos proponemos entonces describir el modelo formal propio de la literatura ut��pica y la modalidad que adquiri�� el relato ut��pico de la Abundantia en el Islam, en particular en la leyenda de la Ciudad de Cobre, del ge��grafo andalus�� Abu Hamid al-Garnati, y su posterior desarrollo en Las mil y una noches.

La leyenda art��rica en la literatura alemana : el Parzival de Wolfram von Eschenbach

Integran este n��mero de la revista ponencias presentadas en Studia Hispanica Medievalia VIII: Actas de las IX Jornadas Internacionales de Literatura Espa��ola Medieval, 2008, y de Homenaje al Quinto Centenario de Amadis de Gaula.

Hermano de hombre soy : Entrevista al P. Juan Carlos Scannone S.I. sobre la mediaci��n de la filosof��a en el di��logo entre literatura y teolog��a

Tres miembros del Seminario Interdisciplinario Permanente de Literatura, Est��tica y Teolog��a entrevistaron a Juan Carlos Scannone en b��squeda de una conversaci��n que abra nuevas perspectivas. Los temas principales fueron: el inicio de Scannone en el di��logo entre literatura y teolog��a, la formaci��n human��stica de los jesuitas, los precursores en la Argentina, la mediaci��n simb��lica, los aportes de Paul Ricoeur, el m��todo interdisciplinario y la mediaci��n filos��fica, la novela latinoamericana.