New cinema history and the computational turn

This paper outlines how the digitisation of both the film industry and contemporary research practices bear on the work of the new cinema historian. How might the opportunities presented by an unprecedented proliferation of data for example, also challenge the unspoken assumptions and ordinary practices of conventional film studies research? And how might the 'computational turn' present opportunities (and challenges) for a revisionist cinema history at the intersection of qualitative historiographies (focussed on the social experience of the cinema) and quantitative research approaches such as data mining, empirical analysis and digital visualisations?

Untitled : live cinema performance

Over the last 30 years Melbourne-based film-maker, writer and academic Dirk de Bruyn has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films and videos, continuing to maintain a no-budget, independent, self-funded focus for much of his work. De Bruyns distinctive style entails cut-up collages that draw on animation, found footage and fragments of dialogue - dyeing, painting, incising and stencilling the film strip. Live De Bruyn’s anarchic multi projection performances can involve performance, freeform vocal workouts and De Bruyn, ‘bent over and mouthing into a microphone like a demented seagull, totally involved in the relentlessly unravelling collage of home-processed footage’.Penny Webb. Ian Helliwell provided a live electronic soundtrack.

Cinema of Australia and New Zealand

From The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906 to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Australia and New Zealand have made a unique impact on international cinema. This book celebrates the commercially successful narrative feature films produced by these film cultures as well as key documentaries, shorts and independent films. This coverage also invokes issues involving national identity, race, history and the ability of two small film cultures to survive the economic and cultural threat from Hollywood. Chapters on well-known films, and directors, such as The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir, 1982), The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993), Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001) and Rabbit Proof Fence (Philip Noyce, 2002) are included with less celebrated, but equally important, films and filmmakers such as Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955), They're a Weird Mob (Michael Powell, 1966), Vigil (Vincent Ward, 1984) and The Goddess of 1967 (Clara Law, 2000)

What is a cinema? Death, closure and the database

This chapter explores the possible ontological questions and epistemological propositions that arise from detailed empirical research into cinema closures. Repeated pronouncements of the ‘Death of Cinema’ in the wake of technological, social and industrial change serve to reinforce the coincidence of ‘death’ with a type of ‘closure’. The evocation of a ‘crisis’ in the cinema is ordinarily articulated within the terms of specific cultural concerns around transience and transformation in the social experience of the cinema. However, rather than adding another chapter to the apocalyptic historiography of the cinema this paper proposes instead the constitutive importance of ‘closure’ as a critical tool for rethinking our defining assumptions about cinema(s). Specifically, the chapter will demonstrate how the conceptual granularity entailed in the development of a detailed database of venue openings and closings (the Cinema and Audiences in Australia Project database) can in turn lead to a fundamental reconsideration of the ontology of the cinema itself.