The Killing of Angel Street

Synopsis and review of the Australian feature film The Killing of Angel Street, directed by Donald Crombie.

Knowing

Directed by Alex Proyas, the Knowing is an action-packed science-fiction disaster movie. A well-known Australian director working in Hollywood, Proyas has developed an international reputation for stylised fantasy and science-fiction movies, including the neo-gothic movie The Crow (1994), the complex science-fiction film Dark City (1998), and the adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi classic I, Robot (2004) which earned almost US$350 million theatrically worldwide. Knowing was produced for US$50 million and relies heavily upon special effects (including a visually impressive sequence of the world being destroyed) and high-octane action sequences (including a notable plane crash). Knowing’s cast included Australian actors, Rose Byrne and Ben Mendelsohn, and American actor Nicolas Cage. While Knowing received typically poor critical reviews, the movie performed well at the box-office earning over US$183 million worldwide.

A Few Best Men

Like most of Stephan Elliott’s movies, A Few Best Men is difficult to discuss without focusing on the director himself. A wedding-gone-wrong comedy, A Few Best Men is Elliott’s first Australian feature film in seventeen years. After directing the low-budget crime-thriller Frauds (1993), Elliott achieved worldwide success as writer-director of the Oscar-winning road movie Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). A quirky and visually striking film about two drag-queens and a transsexual’s journey across the harsh Australian outback in a bus named Priscilla, the movie earned over US$70 million at the international box-office and became an instant Australian classic. Elliott’s career, however, self-destructed soon after...

'It's Africa. It's Arizona. It's Antarctica. It's Afghanistan. Actually, it's Alberta' : Marketing locations to film producers

This chapter begins by outlining the dynamics of contemporary international film production and the inherent tension between ‘design interest’ and ‘location interest’. A history of the promotion of particular places as filmmaking locations (including Hollywood) is presented, prior to the establishment of the first film commissions. The creation of international associations and their role in professionalization, norm setting and the standardization of offerings and activities, is then described. The chapter concludes with a discussion of commissions’ work, the emergent discourse of ‘film friendliness,’ and the differences between location marketing and other kinds of destination marketing.

Undead yakuza: The Japanese zombie movie, cultural resonance and generic conventions

The zombie has long been regarded as a “fundamentally American creation” (Bishop 2010) and a western monster representing the fears and anxieties of Western society. Since the renaissance of the zombie movie in the early 2000s, a subsequent surge in international production has seen the release of movies from Norway, Cuba, Pakistan and Thailand to name a few. Although Japanese zombie movies have been far more visible for Western cult audiences than in mainstream markets, Japanese cinema has emerged as one of the more prolific producers of zombie films outside of Anglophone or Western European countries in recent years. Films such as Helldriver (2010), Zombie TV (2013), Versus (2000), Tokyo Zombie (2005), Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) and anime television series High School of the Dead (2010) have generated varying degrees of popularity and critical attention internationally. At first glance Japanese zombie films, with musical zombie interludes, undead yakuza henchmen and revenge-seeking yūrei zombies, appear fundamentally different to their Western counterparts. Yet, on closer examination, the Japanese zombie movie could be regarded as a hybrid and intertextual generic form drawing on syntactic conventions at the core of a universal zombie sub-genre established by Western filmmaking traditions, while also distilling culturally specific tropes unique to various Japanese horror cinema sub-genres. Most importantly, the Japanese zombie film extracts, emphasises and revises particular conventions and motifs common within Western zombie films that are particularly relevant to Japanese audiences. This chapter investigates the cultural resonance of key generic motifs identifiable in the Japanese zombie film. It establishes a production context and the influence of Japanese horror cinema on style and thematic concerns. It then examines the function of prominent narrative conventions, namely: the source, outbreak and spread of infection; mutation and the representation of the monster; and the inclusion of supernatural and religious motifs.

Workers are doing it for themselves? Local labor solidarity in precarious times

Historically, organized labor has played a fundamental role in guaranteeing basic rights and privileges for screen media workers and defending union and guild members (however unevenly) from egregious abuses of power. Yet, despite the recent turn to labor in media and cultural studies, organized labor today has received only scant attention, even less so in locations outside Hollywood. This presentation thus intervenes in two significant ways: first, it acknowledges the ongoing global ‘undoing’ of organized labor as a consequence of footloose production and conglomeration within the screen industries, and second, it examines a case example of worker solidarity and political praxis taking shape outside formal labor institutions in response to those structural shifts. Accordingly, it links an empirical study of individual agency to broader debates associated with the spatial dynamics of screen media production, including local capacity, regional competition, and precariousness. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with local film and television workers in Glasgow, Scotland, I consider the political alliance among three nascent labor organizations in the city: one for below-the-line crew, one for facility operators, and (oddly enough) one for producers. Collectively, the groups share a desire to transform Glasgow into a global production hub, following the infrastructure developments in nearby cities like Belfast, Prague, and Budapest. They furthermore frame their objectives in political terms: establishing global scale is considered a necessary maneuver to improve local working conditions like workplace safety, income disparity, skills training, and job access. Ultimately, I argue these groups are a product of an inadequate union structure and outdated policy vision for the screen sector , once-supportive institutions currently out of sync with the global realities of media production. Furthermore, the groups’ advocacy efforts reveal the extent to which workers themselves (in additional to capital) can seek “spatial fixes” to suture their prospects to specific political and economic goals. Of course, such activities manifest under conditions outside of the workers’ control but nevertheless point to an important tension within capitalist social relations, namely that the agency to reshape the spatial relationships in their own lives recasts the geography of labor in terms that aren’t inherent or exclusive to the interests of global capital.

Ten canoes : engaging difference

In a reading of the Rolf de Heer film Ten Canoes this article explores the pervasive, contemporary challenge of culture difference and its representation. Focusing on notions of sacredness, as one node of extreme difference, the article argues that older formulations of sacredness which bifurcated spirit and flesh are now being replaced by more holistic understandings. As western film audiences engage with representations of difference in Indigenous cultures, a set of questions are raised: what is the nature of real dialogue between different cultures? Can such dialogues move beyond mute recording, or silent respect, or automatic celebration? Can they enter a new space of dialectical relationship in which different cultural perspectives can be fully investigated, without making the other culture a static, or oversimplified or iconic abstraction?

Glassimations

Glassimations, an exhibition of contemporary Australian artworks that bridge the materials of glass and animation to produce works with qualities that are unique to these two mediums and yet create a dialogue between them. The exhibition includes the work of a variety of artists. Lee Whitmore paints on glass to achieve an animated image that metamorphs with its own unique movement; Tom Moore animates his blown glass creations into their own world; Deirdre Feeney animates onto her glass architectural forms to produce places of light that condense time and are full of intangible narrative; Mark Eliott and Jack McGrath collaborate to bring their understanding and skills of glass and animation together, creating works that are founded in the production processes of both materials; and Lienors Torre and Alastair Boell collaborate to create animated films that become objects of glass and furniture, able to occupy real spaces in our domestic lives.

Looking for meaning: the found object in animation

This paper will focus upon the use of found objects in stop-motion animation. It will survey a number of found-object animated films, exploring how the viewer might closely identify with such objects in motion, as well as attributing to them multiple meanings. This analysis will be furthered through the consideration of an object-orientated phenomenological perspective, referencing Graham Harman and Martin Heidegger. It will also consider how the cinema studies concept of star studies might be applied to the use of found objects in animation as a means of detecting additional layers of meaning.

Mapping the ill disciplined? Spatial analyses and historical change in the post-war film industry

As part of a broad disciplinary shift, from a focus on measuring the value and meaning of cultural artefacts to understanding the import of cultural flows, humanities researchers are increasingly turning to other disciplines and disciplinary practices to inform their research. For film scholars, rather than providing a reading of specific media texts and their qualities there is an increasing focus on the contextual events that shape and formulate cinema practice. This chapter is an example of how cross-disciplinary relationships, for example between Cinema Studies, Geospatial Science, Statistics and the Creative Arts can uncover new research questions and test methodologies across uncharted disciplinary terrain. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on some of the key assumptions around collaborative research, through its reorganization of academic spaces and “sites” of knowledge.

Γεννημένος Δύο Φορές: η Dionysos Films και η Δημιουργία ενός Ελληνικού Κινηματογραφικού Κυκλώματος στην Αυστραλία

Από τα τέλη της δεκαετίας του ’40 μέχρι τα τέλη της δεκαετίας του ’70, το κέντρο και τα περίχωρα της Μελβούρνης στέγασαν ένα δυναμικό ελληνικό κινηματογραφικό κύκλωμα τριάντα περίπου διαφορετικών αιθουσών, οι οποίες λειτούργησαν υπό την εποπτεία ενός μικρού αριθμού καθετοποιημένων επιχειρήσεων προβολής/διανομής. Η Dionysos Films ήταν ανάμεσα στις πρώτες ελληνικές εταιρείες προβολής/διανομής που ιδρύθηκαν στην Αυστραλία και που από το 1949 ως το 1956 έδρασε χωρίς σημαντικό ανταγωνισμό, διαμορφώνοντας το πλαίσιο για ένα ελληνικό κινηματογραφικό κύκλωμα της διασποράς που εκτεινόταν από την επαρχιακή και μητροπολιτική Αυστραλία ως τη Νέα Ζηλανδία. Το παρόν άρθρο αναμετρά τη σκιά που έριξε η Dionysos Films (και ο χαρισματικός της ιδιοκτήτης Stathis Raftopoulos) στην ιστορία των κινηματογραφικών εμπειριών των Ελλήνων των Αντιπόδων καθώς και τις επιπτώσεις που έχει αυτή η ανεξερεύνητη πτυχή της αυστραλιανής, αλλά και της ελληνικής κινηματογραφικής ιστορίας, στον τρόπο που αντιλαμβανόμαστε τις εθνικές κινηματογραφίες των δύο χωρών.